"Finding God"
Job 1:1, 2:1-10
Rev. Julie Richardson Brown
October 7, 8, 2006

I had the honor of leading a group of 25 high school youth on a trip to Washington, DC and New York City in June of this year. The trip is sponsored by the Christian Church in Kentucky and is designed to help young people think about what it means to be a person of faith in this world we live in. The experience includes an afternoon spent at the Holocaust Museum. It takes several hours to experience the museum in its entirety; it is a gut-wrenching, often life-changing experience. The horrors of the Holocaust are real and vivid and undeniable within the walls of the museum. We did our best to prepare the students for what they would see and hear and feel, even asking them to watch the movie Schindler's List or read about the Holocaust before going on the trip. Still, there isn't much that can prepare you for seeing the faces of men, women and children whose lives were brutally and senselessly cut so very short. I've led this trip twice, and both times we've had to do something rather mindless--like go the National Zoo!--after our time at the museum.

Several hours after this past summer's afternoon at the Holocaust museum, I was walking along a street in DC's Adams-Morgan district, leading the group to dinner at a local Mexican place. We'd just been to the zoo and were bemoaning the fact that the pandas weren't out while we were there! I felt a tug on my arm and turned around to see that one of the girls on the trip had caught up with me. "Julie," she said, "I have a question." I slowed my pace, turned to look at her and said, "Sure Emily, what's up?" In her hands, Emily held a copy of Night--Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel's vivid account of his time in Nazi concentration camps. She'd picked it up earlier that day at the museum gift shop. She held the book up to me and with a look of deep agony and confusion said, "How did this happen? Help me understand!"

Our text today comes from the book of Job, an Old Testament story telling of a man who had everything he could possibly want or need--and lost all of it and more. Over the course of the book, Job loses his health, his land, his crops, his livestock--and perhaps most disturbingly, his children. Job is described as an upright, faithful man--one who loves God and his family and is incredibly loyal in his devotion to both. Blameless, he's called. And yet upon him rains some of the worst that life can mete out. The tale of Job (and many biblical scholars agree that it is a folktale of some sort as the literature of other ancient cultures contains a similar story) plays out like a drama--it is full of intricate poetry and dialogue and a vivid cast of characters. Shakespeare would be proud! More importantly, it is a text that has long been used as a sort of theological jumping off point for Christians for discussions about theodicy--or, how it is that we reconcile the tremendous evil present in this world with the presence of a loving God.

Our text today is just the beginning of Job's troubles, setting the stage for all that is to come, and I have to tell you, there are things about it that trouble me a great deal. First, Job's goodness is mentioned again, almost as if it needs to be proven, as if there should be a direct link between how good we are and how well our lives go. I've known too many wonderful people who have endured terrible things to believe that there is some sort of heavenly scoreboard keeping track of what we give and get in life.

Second, God and the character called Satan make a bet in this text--about Job! Take a look at the text again if you want, but the conversation between God and Satan in this text is a wager about what Job will do if confronted with tragedy. God trusts Job, is sure that Job will remain faithful no matter what. Satan seems to think that Job is only faithful because of his lot in life--that Job's got so many good things going on that he can't help but live a life pleasing to God. "Fine," God finally says to Satan, "test him--but spare his life." Now, let me interject here and say that when we talk about Satan in the book of Job, we aren't talking about the demon Satan, the evil presence that Satan is in the New Testament. We are talking about a character commonly called "the Adversary"--a heavenly appointed prosecutor of sorts, assigned to find evidence against God's people--hence the "roaming to and fro about the earth!" The Adversary is a character in a celestial courtroom where God is judge; he's the prosecuting attorney, and right now his job is to mount up evidence that Job is not as faithful as God might think.

The third thing that troubles me about this text is that God makes no explanation to Job about what's happening--in fact, for much of the rest of the story, God remains silent.

Quite a lot for ten little verses isn't it? It is almost enough to make one sympathize with Job's wife's position--to curse God, even it means death. And, I'm sure you can see how it sets up questions like the one my young friend Emily asked in DC, or the one I got just last week, "Julie," this young man said to me, "why does such bad stuff happen if God is supposed to be so loving?"

Part of me wants to answer those questions with discussions about the things I believe to be true about God and humanity-discussions about God having created us humans with free will, or about God having created an earth with its own weather patterns. I welcome those discussions, but the truth is, I'm not sure it would do any good, largely because I don't think asking why bad things happen to good people is the right question (though I do recommend that you read Rabbi Harold Kushner's book by that title!).

The fact is very bad things happen to very good people every day. And if you haven't learned that from your own life, just read this week's news reports from the Amish community of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. I am confident that no one in that community did anything to warrant the brutal murder of five of their daughters. Ask the men and women and children suffering in refugee camps outside Darfur why they are dying, and I don't think you will hear them say anything that could possibly deserve such complete misery. For that matter, ask your friend battling HIV, or your neighbor who has lost a husband or wife, or ask the child in the West End born into drug addiction and poverty by no fault of her own why they suffer--and again, I doubt you'll hear a reason such pain can or should be justified. Bad things happen every day to good people--such is the reality that we live in.

While Elie Weisel was at Auschwitz, he witnessed the hanging of a Jewish child--a little boy. As the boy's body hung in the air, Weisel heard a voice behind him whisper, "Where is God now?" That is question to be asked--not why or how, but WHERE--where is our loving God in the midst of Nickel Mines? In the midst of Darfur? In hospital rooms and violent city streets? Where is it that we can find God in the suffering of this world we live in?

I want to share with you a few voices and stories that have helped me understand how to find God in such times and places:

When Alex Coffin's car ran off a bridge and sunk into Boston Harbor, his father, the late and very great theologian William Sloan Coffin, preached his son's funeral at Riverside Church in New York City. With a broken heart, Coffin was able to say, "My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God's heart was the first of all our hearts to break."

Several years ago, comedian Bill Cosby's only son, Ennis Cosby, was murdered in cold blood. A reporter asked Mr. Cosby what he thought God had to do with Ennis's death. Mr. Cosby replied, "I think that when Ennis died, God's tears were the first to fall."

And when Elie Weisel heard the voice behind him ask where God was, Weisel heard within himself this response, "Where is [God]? Here [God] is--[God] is hanging here on this gallows...."

On September 11, 2001, a classmate at Lexington Theological Seminar told me this: she said that as a child, she had a Jewish girlfriend whose grandmother was a survivor of the Holocaust. The grandmother would tell the stories of the Holocaust, and people around her would try to make sense of how she could hold on to such deep faith given what had happened to her. Her answer was something like this, that our God, the God of Abraham and Sarah, Ruth and King David, never promised that life would be easy or free from struggle. But that God did promise presence.

Just two weeks before I finished my freshman year of college, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. Her treatment included major surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation--a sort of triple whammy. There isn't much that I remember about that summer--it all sort of went by in a fog for mom, my dad, my sister and me. What I do remember is my friend Larry taking me to dinner at the Waffle House in Athens, GA to get me away from the hospital, and my friends Charles and Sandra who made sure I had gas money for the commute between our house and the hospital, and my mom's friend from church who ordered pizza for my sister and me while Dad spent the night at the hospital. These special people became for us the presence of God at work in our lives, giving us solace, granting us hope in a time when all around us was scary and unsure. When I give thanks that my mother is alive and well, I include these men and women in my thanksgiving.

That's why I can join my voice with Reverend Coffin's, with Mr. Cosby's and Mr. Weisel's, with a Jewish grandmother, and say to you that in creating us to be in relationship with one another, God extended to us the gift of presence. We can believe that. We can believe it when all else fails, when everything around us threatens to undo us. We can believe that in our darkest hours, God is to be found-whether in the strength of family and friends or as we fall to our knees in prayer, God will come to us. That is what it means to have faith, friends, to believe against all odds that this God we worship is real and loving and cares about every single one of us, in every single moment of our lives.

Thanks be to God!