Pasadena Presbyterian Church Sermon Text
October 26, 2003

"The Twin Mysteries of Suffering and Beatitude"
Preached by The Rev. Dr. Barbara Anderson

Scripture:  Job 42:1-6, 10-17

In the coming weeks, California will inaugurate a new governor.  Although Arnold Schwarzenegger is both an excellent businessman and a strong personality, I believe one of the most important reasons people voted for him in the recall election is because of what he embodies to many: a poor immigrant who came to this country with nothing, and is now living the American dream come true. 

We who struggle with high unemployment, outrageous Workers Compensation laws, inadequate public education and health care, and crumbling freeways want the restoration of that dream for California, the great land of promise and plenty.  We have struggled through more than enough trouble and turmoil.  We are ready for the Hollywood ending, right now, please, in which everything finally turns out well.

But life is more nuanced than Hollywood endings. Real life is what we encounter in the Book of Job and in the smokey air we're breathing today.  Bad things happen to good people all the time.  Life is not always fair.  There is no dependable equation of good deeds always resulting in good effects.  Tragedies strike good and bad people alike.  Living a good life and trying to do what is right is no guarantee that good things will always happen to you.

The fires that are at this moment burning houses in San Bernardino, La Verne, the Simi Valley, and Lake Arrowhead are not distinguishing between generous and greedy people, compassionate people and nasty ones.  The fires are not God's punishment for any one family or another, one person or another.  Fires happen.  Tragedy happens.  And then firefighters, neighbors, and communities rally to limit the damage, to care for the wounded and the homeless, to comfort the grieving, to rebuild hope and life once again.

Bad things happen to good people.   Speaking directly to one of the tragedies in this church family this morning, I want to be clear that Ashley Gallaher did nothing whatsoever to cause her death in that tragic automobile accident this week.  Nor did God cause that accident to punish anyone else.  Nor did God cause that accident because God needed that wonderful 15-year-old girl in heaven more than her family and friends need her here.  They need her here. 

As William Sloane Coffin said in a sermon many years ago following the death of his son in an automobile accident, God's heart broke when that accident happened.  (1)  And if God were to have eyes like ours, then surely they wept torrents of tears when Ashley breathed her last, and they are weeping now for all of her family and friends, and for all of us in the next circle beyond who are now touched by her life and death.  Now it's up to us to be God's hands and hearts of love and compassion for those upon whom grief sits so heavily this morning.

Innocent suffering happens to millions of people every day.  We want to think that if we conduct ourselves with integrity, compassion, fairness, honesty and faith, we ourselves will be spared.  Life can feel too uncertain and chaotic when we allow the ambiguity, unfairness and unpredictability of life to enter our consciousness.  But then events happen in which it seems that the rug under our feet has been pulled out, or a loved one's life has been turned upside down.  And the questions push to the surface.

The Book of Job speaks to the questions of suffering and beatitude.  It stands in the tradition of arguing with a God who is big enough, compassionate enough, strong enough and real enough to handle humanity's rage at injustice, oppression and suffering.

Job is a good man who is sailing along with life just perfect and then, in a terrible set of circumstances, is struck down, loses everything and sinks into total misery.  His children die, he loses all his enormous wealth, he becomes so miserably ill that he prays to die, and his friends heap insult on injury by telling him these tragedies are God's punishment for sins Job is not acknowledging.   

For more than 30 long chapters, Job cries out to God.  "Why did this happen to me?  What did I ever do to deserve such heartache and pain?"  People speak of the patience of Job, but I think they've not really read the story.  Job was not patient.  He was angry with his friends and with God.  His patience was that no matter how angry he was with God, he still never gave up on God.

"Through much of the book," says Martin Copenhaver, "Job demands an explanation for his suffering.  It takes a long time, but finally God appears from the whirlwind and swats away all of Job's questions with a booming and tempestuous survey of divine majesty.  Job asks for justice and gets a dissertation on who made the crocodile. 

"When Job is finally allowed to respond, he offers words of contrition: 'I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know .... I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see you; therefore I ... repent in dust and ashes.'

"In many ways, his words are an appropriate conclusion to all that has gone before Everyone is put in place.  God is exalted; Job is humbled.  The painful questions that have been raised throughout the book are given no easy answer.  Even here at the end, any attempt to explain the mysteries of God's purposes is scrupulously avoided.  Such an ending would seem to be true to life, making this book a realistic portrayal of the experiences of those who suffer."(2)

But then comes, continues Copenhaver, "an epilogue in which God restores the fortunes of Job, giving him twice as much as he had before.  Job's family returns, offering gifts of sympathy and money.  Job has 10 more children and lives to see his great-grandchildren.  It's not hard to see why many believe the epilogue comes from a different source and was simply tacked on.  After the bold cadences of the poetry that has gone before, the epilogue is told in prose and it seems, prosaic.  It is the happily-ever-after ending of a fairy tale.

"Though we like a story to have a happy ending, we tend to be suspicious when it does.  Maybe that's the case here, too.  After all that has happened to Job the financial ruin, the death of his children, the pain of disease, all those agonizing and unanswered questions the epilogue seems as jarring as a conventional Hollywood happy ending would at the conclusion of King Lear." (2)

I would argue, however, that these paragraphs are not a sappy Hollywood ending.  They are a profound and powerful statement of reality and truth for people of faith as we live in the tension between the twin mysteries of undeserved suffering and undeserved beatitude.

The epilogue does not say that God restored Job's fortunes and relationship in response to Job's words of repentance and humility.  Instead, God's reasons for giving things to Job are a unexplained as the reasons they were taken away.  God does not explain suffering, but God does not explain beatitude (that is, blessings) either.  They are twin mysteries.  The sources of each are hidden from our view, beyond our understanding. 

If, at the beginning of the story, Job had demanded to know why he had so much, God could have responded with the same dissertation on the crocodile.  It is difficult to imagine Job pressing such questions in the midst of prosperity and happiness; after all, we tend to accept the good that happens to us as a matter of course.  It is only in the epilogue after we have demanded to know, with Job, the reasons for suffering that it occurs to us to question beatitude or to grant that it too is cloaked in divine mystery.

From Job's final speech we learn of his hard-won repentance and humility before the majesty of God, but only from the epilogue do we learn how that new posture is actually lived out.  The epilogue tells us that Job reunites with his wife, has many children, and revives his cattle business.  Those simple facts imply much more than a conventional happy ending.

In J.B., Archibald MacLeish's play about Job, two characters stand apart from the drama and comment on it.  Near the end of the play, the sardonic Nickles asks what happens to Job in the end, and Mr. Zuss tells him that Job gets his wife back. 

Nickles says:  "Wife back! Balls!  He wouldn't touch her.  He wouldn't take her with a glove! After all that filth and blood and fury to begin again?  After life like his to take the seed up of a sad creation, planting the hopeful world again?  He can't ... he won't ... he wouldn't touch her!"

And Zuss replies: "He does though." (3)

As Martin Copenhaver writes, "After all that Job has been through, the happy ending to this story begins to look more like an extraordinary act of faith.  For Job to resume his life as it was before is to risk losing it all again.  To have twice as much as before is to double the risk.  To embrace his wife is to embrace life, in spite of potential suffering and unanswered questions.  To have many children and no answers or assurance can be, in itself, a profound expression of humility and trust." (2)

When we look closely, we realize that the Epilogue in Job is not a saccharin ending after all.

Job and his wife's having 10 more children never replaced the three who died, just as they never do.  That grief always remains in a parent's heart.  But Job did not stay angry forever.  He re-engaged in life and love.  But I am certain that as he held those generations on his lap, he was even more aware than before, of how precious life is. 

Job's being twice as wealthy as he was before lost everything did not erase the painful scars of such ruin.  It made him more aware that we take none of this with us into the next life, and that none of us earned the good fortune into which we were born by anything we did to merit it. 

Job's being restored to health did not eliminate the memories of being in so much anguish and despair that his greatest hope was to die before the next breath.  Restored health makes you grateful life, for the sun that shines and the rain that falls.  It resets your priorities and makes you want to give your life away to others who are in need.

Last week, as our son, Ken and I traveled the East Coast last week, we stood in Washington, D.C. among monuments to this nation's righteousness and sinfulness, greatness and tragedy, suffering and beatitude: memorials built to remember Jefferson, Lincoln, Washington, F.D.R., the Vietnam and Korean Wars.

In New York City, we walked city blocks where people had run in terror on 9/11, and we looked into the vast empty air where thousands of people had died as the World Trade Center collapsed.  We were moved both by the tragedy of innocent suffering and by the rebuilding of lives so obviously going on around us.

And in Boston, we remembered those who came to this land for religious freedom, hoping to create a new Jerusalem that would be a city on a hill for the world.  Much as we have failed that vision, we have also, in fits and starts, lived up to it in such ways that we continue to be a beacon of hope to millions of people. 

Most moving for me, however, was the crisp fall evening when I sat in the cloistered gardens at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.  As I sat in prayer, I felt the presence of the theological greats of the last century who taught there - Reinhold Neibuhr and Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Harry Emerson Fosdick - as well as the presence of friends and colleagues who have been part of that great institution through the decades.

It is hard to say that the world is better or worse than it was when they were at Union.  But the witness of their faith sustains my belief that in the twin mysteries of suffering and beatitude, we not so much understand God, as we find God, and in so doing, we find the mystery and meaning of our own life. 

Life is not simple: either suffering or beatitude, joy or sorrow, good or evil, black or white.  Life is nuanced, unpredictable, and filled with mystery.  Our faith therefore, is that which carries us through.  It lifts our eyes beyond the moment to the horizon, where we see the cross.  Then we look more closely and our eyes focus on the innocent one who suffered and died. As we keep our focus on him, the twin mysteries of suffering and beatitude move us forward as if on a river of faith until we are not at the foot of the cross, but before an empty tomb.  There, at the tomb on Easter, we meet the Risen Lord. 

"I want a Hollywood ending," we say.  But instead, the Resurrected Lord puts out his hands and invites us to touch his wounds, which still remain.  "There is no Hollywood ending," he says.  "There is only the mystery of love that weaves its way through all the other mysteries of the universe.  Take up your cross, and live the mystery with me."  Amen.

FOOTNOTES:

(1) Dr. William Sloan Coffin Jr. "Sermon from Riverside," 23 January 1983. Preached at Riverside Church, New York City.

(2) Martin B. Copenhaver, The Christian Century, Oct. 12,1994

(3) J. B. by Archibald MacLeish, published 1958

(c) Copyright 2003 by Barbara A. Anderson.  All rights reserved.  Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution.