Sunday, October 21, 2012

"Surely You Know"



OLD TESTAMENT READING: JOB 38:1-7,34-41
1Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind: 2"Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? 3Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me.

4"Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. 5Who determined its measurements — surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? 6On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone 7when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?

34"Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, so that a flood of waters may cover you? 35Can you send forth lightnings, so that they may go and say to you, 'Here we are'? 36Who has put wisdom in the inward parts, or given understanding to the mind? 37Who has the wisdom to number the clouds? Or who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens, 38when the dust runs into a mass and the clods cling together?

39"Can you hunt the prey for the lion, or satisfy the appetite of the young lions, 40when they crouch in their dens, or lie in wait in their covert? 41Who provides for the raven its prey, when its young ones cry to God, and wander about for lack of food?"


SERMON: “Surely You Know”

We Americans are a humorous people.  After all, we’ve had Lucille Ball, Groucho Marx and Steve Martin, and few people are as amusing as Betty White in a tracksuit.  But there is one sort of humor that often escapes us: sarcasm.  It leaves us with a befuddled grin on our face as we try to decide whether or not we’re being insulted.  But for people of Northern Irish descent, sarcasm is second nature.  If it is a hobby for some of us here, there it is an Olympic sport.  

This is why I was completely perplexed in my first few months as a mission worker in Belfast.  Initially, people were actually quite nice, if a bit distant.  But, as I got to know my co-workers better, I noticed that they became more sarcastic. 

Questions were never answered with simple statements, but were instead followed by witty quips.  Just as I began to despair that I would never really connect with these Belfast folk, I looked at how they treated one another. 

I watched as children gave snarky, clever responses to their parents and then their parents did the very same back to them.  I heard people in love insult each other with glee.  I observed good friends bantering back and forth in lengthy conversations entirely saturated with sarcasm. 

Sarcasm is love there.  People being harder on me did not mean we were failing to connect, it actually meant the opposite.  Once I finally embraced that sarcasm, I insulted my way into several meaningful friendships that last to this day.

Sarcasm was not born in Northern Ireland, though it flourishes there.   Our scripture reading this morning indicates its roots are much older.  We have a very strong show of sarcasm in our Job text: not from Job, but from God!

“Sarcastic” is not a typical adjective we use to describe God, but after a close read of this text, we could.  Just imagine the possibilities: "Praise God from whom all sarcasm flows..."

God’s sarcastic answer first begins with Job’s question.  Job has spent a lot of time asking one question: “Why”.  He has suffered unjustly and knows that, despite his friends’ accusations, such suffering is not the result of his own error.  So, he assumes that his suffering is the result of God’s error. 

Hearing Job’s complaints, God does not directly answer Job’s question of “why”.  (Which is perhaps a good lesson to us when we try as mere humans to answer that question for God.)  God instead responds with loving Northern Irish sarcastic questions. 

Rapidly expanding Job’s scope of reality far beyond himself and his own troubles, God asks “Were you there when I laid the foundation of the earth? Who determined its measurements – surely you know?” 

The slightly-snarky question hits home: Job doesn’t know the measurements of the earth’s foundation, nor is he able to send forth lightning, to place wisdom in minds and clouds, to tilt the waterskins of heaven like a cosmic watering can to refresh the dusty ground.  He cannot provide food for the raven and lion cub and every single other creature that creeps and swims and flies. 

The sarcasm of God leaves Job speechless (for once).  I believe in our text this morning, it is used like Northern Irish sarcasm: intended to deepen relationship, not fracture it. 

God knows that Job is at the end of his rope with his friends, his life and even his Creator, and so God gives Job a longer rope, a broader vision of God’s work in the world.

Only such pointed, powerful questions could draw Job’s gaze beyond his own suffering and heartache to see the wisdom of God all around him: in an earth created in love when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy.  In the playfulness of lightning flashing in a dazzling game of Hide and Seek.  In every single creature being attentively cared for by God, from those with rumbling stomachs to each dry speck of dust, thirsty for rain.

The statement behind the sarcasm, and the promise behind the poetry of these words is clear:  Job, you are not God.  But I am.  Job, you cannot see beyond your own pain and suffering.  But I can.  Job, you cannot create or re-create yourself.  But I can.  Job, you cannot refill your soul with hope and your heart with peace.  But I can. 

At the core of our lives, in the depths of our beings, this is a phrase we must continually repeat to ourselves, “I am not God.  But God is.”  This means that God is infinitely bigger than the hurt, regret and guilt we carry around so stoically like a permanently attached rolling suitcase.  But this does not mean that because God is bigger, God is removed from our lives.  As Gerhard Von Rad said, “The consequence of this would simply be a resigned submission, a total theological agnosticism and the end of any positive relationship between [humanity] and God.”

No, God being God means that God created all—not just us humans—out of wisdom and love, out of the desire to sustain and not destroy life. 

If we doubt that God continues to sustain life here, today, as God did when light first broke through chaotic darkness, like Job, we need only look around us.  God’s wisdom sustains life in the twinkle of stars that echo that same ancient song of creation, in vibrant pink clouds promising a new beginning each new day, in the rush of birds through the air and the dance of squirrels through trees.  God’s wisdom sustains life in the human will to survive in Malala, a fourteen-year-old Pakistani girl slowly recovering after being shot because of her passion for girls’ education.

We may not know the dimensions of the earth’s foundations, and we may not know why life brings seasons of suffering and seasons of joy, and we may not know why God chooses to answer our deep-yearning with questions with yet more lovingly-sarcastic questions.

But that deep within us lies a wisdom that is far beyond us?
That in this wisdom is the strength to hope even when all hope seems lost?
That we are only a small part of a much larger picture of creation?
That just as the seasons are designed to change so are we?
That our Creator never stops sustaining life in us, even in the life to come? Surely we know these things.   Amen.