Sermon for February 18, 2007
JOB AND
KOHELETH: TWO WAYS TO DEAL WITH SUFFERING by Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz |
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Scripture: Ecclesiastes 1:12-17 12 I, the Teacher, when king over Israel in Jerusalem, 13 applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven; it is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with. 14 I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind. 15 What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted. 16 I said to myself, "I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me; and my mind has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge." 17 And I applied my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a chasing after wind. Most of us think we know the story of Job but we may be surprised when we look closely. For instance, we think of the “patience of Job” instead of the term that the book of James uses, the “endurance of Job”. In truth, Job was not patient at all and was very impatient and upset with God and wanting passionately to get an audience with God so God could explain why all these bad things were happening to a good man! It is likely that the original story of some very bad things happening to a good man was used by a later editor to criticize the conventional thinking about good and evil. The conventional wisdom said, if people are good and faithful to God, only good things will happen to them, and if people are bad, then bad things will happen to them. And if bad things happen, it is because people deserve them. We echo that conventional wisdom unconsciously today when we say after a tragedy, “What have I done to deserve this?” The answer in both Job and Ecclesiastes is, there is evil and randomness in the world and bad things happen to all of us including good people. In fact, the author of Ecclesiastes gives us some alternative wisdom for how to deal with that. Job is a good man who is faithful to God. He has prospered; he has a big and happy family. Life is good. But then there is a conversation between God and the Satan—the Hebrew word means the accuser or the adversary. The adversary says that if God will let Job suffer misfortune and tragedy, then Job will not be faithful any more and will even curse God. God agrees to give this experiment a try. Now, think with me about this: what picture of God is this that lets experiments be performed on human beings that involve the deaths of family members to see if a person will break?? It is probably not your image of God or certainly the image that Jesus gives us of a compassionate father. If we see Job’s story as a story about why there is suffering and injustice in the world, we may get some new ideas. I think the editor of Job wants us to see the shallowness of the theology that says; only good things happen to good people and only bad things happen to bad people. You know the rest: Job’s thousands of head of livestock are wiped out, his sons and daughters and their families are killed by a tornado, Job comes down with a painful illness, but Job refuses to curse God. However, Job does want an audience with God so Job can argue with God about this and get God to explain why there is no justice in the world. But Job does not believe he has deserved any misfortune. Then there are Job’s three friends. We are fortunate we do not have friends like this. They know Job is a good and decent person, but they believe that if something bad happens to anyone, that the person has deserved it or earned that misfortune. So their approach for several chapters of the book is to help Job figure out what he has done so that he can confess and apologize to God. Job, to his credit and to the credit of his integrity and his character, refuses to accept their argument and refuses to believe he has earned or deserved misfortune and suffering. He finally gets his face to face meeting with God and even after God has chastised Job for daring to question God, Job seems to be happy that he has seen God and, in the end, God praises Job and criticizes Job’s friends. We will come back in a moment to what we can learn about character from Job’s story. The second person we look at today doesn’t even have a formal name. He is called the teacher or the preacher—the Hebrew word is Koheleth from the Hebrew word which means an assembly of people. The name we have, Ecclesiastes, is from the Greek equivalent for that word assembly or gathering of people. It is the word in the New Testament for church and the root word for our word “ecclesiastical”. Some people wonder how this book even got into the Bible. It contains so much “subversive wisdom”, a counter argument to the belief that only good things happen to good people. It is almost cynical and pessimistic—we will see some examples in a moment. The author is a wise and aged sage. He says he has done many things and had many successes and has seen much of life and most of life is—vapor, futility, vanity. And there is not enough justice and fairness in the world. This is a very short book in the Hebrew Bible—only 12 chapters, yet you will recognize a great many of the verses that you did not know came from this wise philosopher. The most famous one is from chapter 3: For everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven; a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted… You may not know those words from this book, you may know them if you are close to my age category, from the song by the Byrds called “Turn, Turn, Turn.” Let me offer you some other quotes from this rich resource—some you will recognize and others you will like even though they are new:
Now you may have found several quotes that you want to put on your desk or your bathroom mirror in this little book of philosophy. I have found those, and the one about giving your best to whatever is before you was one on my desk for many years in Hebrew. But the teacher has some darker observations as well: we are encouraged to eat and drink and enjoy ourselves in this life, Koheleth believes, because this is all there is! After this, he believes we all go to Sheol, the place of the dead, and we are just like the animals, he says with nothing better in store for us after this!! We are all from dust and we will return to dust. Here is an example that there is diversity in our Bible, and the picture here of life after death is very different from I Corinthians 15 where Paul talks about resurrection. You can read Ecclesiastes and decide the parts that apply to you and the parts that don’t. He has some other painful and dark observations that when you read them, you will wonder how they became scripture. I think it speaks well for those who put the Bible together that they found room for these insights as well as others. Despite the darkness of some of the teacher’s comments, I find him helpful in my spiritual journey. In summary, what do Job and Koheleth have to teach us about character? Job did endure. He consistently refused to curse God in the midst of his suffering and trial. He wanted an explanation from God and he totally rejected the simplemindedness of his friends. He continued to look to God, and the summary at the end of chapter one says, “In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing. He endured, he persisted, he argued, and in the end, when he had been in the presence of God, he was satisfied.” Koheleth tells us to pursue wisdom. It is important to pause and think and learn and reflect on the meaning of life. He is writing about 300 years before Jesus and in about the same time, in Greece just a bit over in the Mediterranean from Israel, there is another philosopher who said something similar” The unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates said that. Koheleth tells us more about character. Build relationships with other people. Don’t go through life as a loner. Two is better. Three is better. When you eat and drink and enjoy life do so with people you love, people you have taken time to build relationships of friendship and love. Ralph Fiennes is one of my favorite actors, and his performance in films like “The English Patient” and “The Constant Gardener” and “Schindler’s List” has been world class. He has been one to avoid all the glitz and hoopla that some film actors are attracted to. He was interviewed a few years ago about what is most important in his life of success in the movies and he was very down to earth just like some words from Koheleth. He said that what is important to him is being with friends over a meal and fellowship and sharing and enjoying life. That is what is so much more important than the glamour and the glitz because those things are vapor—they do not last. Koheleth says, don’t go through life with rose colored glasses. See the unfairness, the chance, the randomness of life. We would encourage each other to do something about that injustice, but his point is that life is complicated and we should not make judgments about a person’s character as Job’s friends do when something bad happens or when something good happens. He says, wealth or no wealth does not determine a good life. His wisdom was echoed in a piece four days ago in USA Today I have reproduced for you. It profiles two couples. One has been married 65 years, Fred and Renie Popper. She is in a nursing facility now after a stroke and has limited communication abilities. Her husband living ten minutes away comes every evening—rain, snow or sleet— to feed her dinner though he could easily leave that to the staff members. Sometimes, the article says, when he speaks to her about their life experiences, a beatific smile lights up her face. He says, “We have been married 65 years. I love her. I made a commitment.” The author talks about commitment when she tells the story of another couple in their early thirties, John and Jennifer Goldberg. They have been married just three or four years. He did not imagine marriage was possible because he has cystic fibrosis. They met, fell in love, they did marry and two months ago gave birth to a son—all this while husband John is waiting for a lung transplant to deal with his deadly disease. This couple finds happiness in ordinary things—being together, having dinner with friends, laughing at the antics of their baby, dreaming about the future. What is life about, Koheleth says—getting and striving and worrying about what we have? Or is it about enjoying each other each day? Eat and drink and love each other and find enjoyment in your work. And revere God and live by God’s instructions for life. There is life at its best, and, there is the foundation for character. |
