Oct 7th 2018 The suffering of innocents Job 1-2

Today we celebrate Thanksgiving. It’s harvest time. We have pickled and preserved, harvested the garden and prepared ourselves for the colder weather. It’s a time when we typically sit around the dining room table and count all our blessings. Life is good. Life is generous. This is also World Wide Communion Sunday, a day when we recognize that the ties that bind our local church community together, also stretch across continents and cultures. We are part of a world-wide family based on the teachings of Jesus. Jesus presents us with the image of our creator as a generous and loving God , a God who seeks a personal relationship with each and every one of us. Yes God is good and many of us have much to be thankful for.

Yet lest we get too carried away by this image, let us remember that side by side good fortune and pleasant living conditions, some of us live quiet lives of desperation and misery. Through no fault of their own many people know disease, violence and suffering. Life is more precarious than we like to think. Yes life is good and life is generous but not for all of us all the time. So we have to ask “where is our loving God in the midst of suffering?’ Faced with these seeming contradictions some of us just give up on the notion of God . It all seems too complicated to figure out. And besides we have busy, busy lives.

That was probably the situation I found myself in in my young adult life. During those carefree and easy days, I drifted away from religion all together. It wasn’t really a conscious decision. I did not become an atheist. I simply lost interest. What did it matter to have a belief in God ? I was much too busy getting ahead in life. Then my first child was born. Amongst the other events of that birth, I had a spiritual experience. And I became a believer! I was blown away by the miracle of such perfection and such fragility. The love I had in my heart was beyond my wildest dreams. And I could not, could not take credit for this little new person in my arms. Suddenly faith was not about intellectual beliefs but about a lived experience of the miraculous.

When I examine my faith today, I would have to say that my children have been my greatest teachers, both confirming for me the existence of a creator and also testing my faith to its limits. When my son was 5 years old he was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes. As chronic diseases go diabetes lets you off pretty easy. You can lead a fairly active life and can expect to live to old age, if you are careful. Nevertheless this diagnosis changed our family’s life in a dramatic way. Together with my son, we both learned about the unfairness of life. For the first time I started to question deeply the meaning of life, the nature of God and why there was so much innocent suffering in the world.

That is the theme for the whole of the book of Job. For the next 4 weeks we will be taking an in-depth look at this story and the big questions it asks. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why believe in a God all together when innocent suffering exists. These are questions that challenge our assumptions about the nature of God , our purpose here on earth and how, if at all, God interacts with us. The book of Job opens with the ‘once upon a time’ beginnings of a fairy tale. “There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job.” This is not meant to be a factual account of a particular man, but rather the universal story of a good person who, through no fault of his own, falls on hard times. The author first presents us with a debate that is going on between God and an accuser, named Satan, who suggests that people believe in God only because they have already been blessed with good fortune. Here is the question they are debating. Do we believe in a loving God because life has been good to us? Would we have faith in this loving God in the absence of good fortune?

Many Christians today believe in what is called Prosperity theology. It is a belief that financial blessing and physical well-being are always the will of God and that if humans have faith in God, enough faith, then God will deliver security and prosperity. Today’s scripture puts this belief to the test. According to God, Job is an upright man, blameless and without fault. He is a very wealthy man, with a large family. He is also a man of faith. Yes, but would he remain faithful to God if he lost everything? The experiment begins. Job does lose everything: first his wealth and then his family, and lastly his good health. At the end of today’s reading Job’s wife cannot bear to watch him suffering so and yet still hold on to his faith in the fairness of God. : “Why don’t you just curse God and then die?” she asks.

How can there be a loving God in the face of innocent suffering? It’s as pertinent a question now as it was at the time the book of Job was written. Across the globe, through no fault of their own, children grow up surrounded by drugs and violence, children are kidnapped, children are trafficked into the child sex trade, children starve, children become deathly ill, and children die. How can there be a loving God in the face of such innocent suffering? Where is the fairness in that? Jobs friends have an answer to this vexing question, at least in Job’s case. When the supposedly innocent Job suffers blow after blow, until he finally finds himself sitting in a heap of ashes , picking at his sores with a broken piece of pottery, his friends come round . In each their turn they accuse him of some hidden sin. “What have you done? You must have done something! Look deeper” they say. Behind this question is a particular view of the nature of God.

God rewards the righteous. God punishes the sinful. Is that how God works in your minds? That is the question I would like you to take home with you today. When calamity strikes us many of us ask, almost instinctively “what have I done to deserve this?” Yet do we really think that the loving God Jesus teaches us about actually buys our loyalty through a process of reward and punishment? Next week we will see how Job answers these questions. In the coming week, as we take note of the particular stories of misery we become aware of, I ask you to invite God into your personal reflections on the suffering of innocents. Amen.