~JLETTING GOD BE GOD" BETHANY PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
JOB 38:1-T1 LAFAYETTE, INDIANA
MATTHEW 1122-6 FEBRUARY 10, 1974 JOHN M. BUCHANAN

The question is : Shall God cease to exist whenever he fails to live up
to our expectations of him? It's a very old question, asked from the
beginning of man's quest to know God. Asked because men have never been
very good at letting God be God. Philosophically, when we think about God,
we begin with ourselves - our ideas, concepts; our notions of what he
should be like and we proceed to construct a God who looks, sounds and acts
very mucii like a superlative human being. And then when something happens
that calls into question our carefully fabricated theology, when our self
made deity doesn't perform as we know he shoud, the whole structure
collapses.

Shall God cease to exist whenever he fails to live up to our expec-
tations? A very old question and avery contemporary question....I have
chosen two portions of Scripture this morning in which it is present: John
the Baptist, sitting in Herod's prison, sending messengers to Jesus to
ask "Are you the one?" And centuries before that, in a magnificent and
dramatic poem about a man by the name of Job.

It is set in the context of the courts of heaven. God is proud of
his man Job, a man of "blameless and upright life", a man of immense
wealth with a prosperous family. Satan, also present in God's court
challenges Job's faithfulness. In so many words he maintains that if Job
should lose everything he has he will surely sing a different tune. Thus
the debate is joined, the issue set. Now, Job is poetry, not biography.
And it does violence to the integrity of the writer as well as the point
of the poem to deduce that God actually toys with the welfare of his
children in order to win an argument.

The question is, "Can God remain in the heart of man, when he stops
living up to man's expectations." And.so-it begins. One day Job's life
comes crashing in. A series of messengers comes to Job with the news that

bandits have made off with all his oxen, asses, sheep and camels, and that

MLETTTUG GOD BE GOD" . | (2) | - FEBRUARY 10, 1974

every one of his servants had been slain. ‘A comfortable, affluent man
suddenly has absolutely nothing. And even as the last, messenger was
telling this terrible tale another appeared with word that-a violent wind
storm had flattened the house in which his seven sons and three daughters
were eating. All were dead. |

“And Job said, “Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I shall
return. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed by the name
of the Lord."

With that Job is afflicted again, this time with "loathsome sores"
from the top of his head to the soles‘of his feet: And wa see him finally,
totally humiliated, crushed, nothing left - not even his personal dignity -
sitting in a pile of ashes, scratching his sores.

Three wan come to Job and then a fourth. After mourning with him for
awhile, they attempt to help him explain why all this has happened.

But it doesn't work: nothing fits: the traditional answers are stale and
flat. God, in man's expectation, blesses the righteous and-punishes the
wicked. His friends imply that if Job searches his heart he will discover
that hidden inquity - that terrible evil - for which he has reaped his
reward. But Job knows better. He has done nothing wrong: He has done
nothing that might justify this total collapse of his life and everything
in it that had meaning.

The Well-meaning but irrelevant friends leave and his wife turns
on him. “Curse God and die" is her advice. And then, Job confronts his
creator: "Why? What are the charges against me? Let me answer them. What
could I have done to deserve this?" The man wants to argue with God.

Now, one of the most significant meanings in Job is precisely at
this point, although we ordinarily miss it. ‘Job never does follow his
wife's advice: he never does curse God and die: he mever doubts the exis-
tence of God which we must deduce was Satan's agenda in the first place.

Instead he hurls an angry prayer into’the sky: “What are the charges against

"EETTING GOD BE GOD (#3) FEBRUARY 19, 1974
me?"

The 38th chapter, soaring poetry, is the beginning of God's response
to his man's brave challenge...

"Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind. ‘Who is this that
darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man
I will question you, and you shall declare to me...

"Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if
you have understanding. ‘Who determined it's measurements? Surely you know..."

Relentlessly, almost mockingly, the questioning continues -

"Have you commanded this morning since you days began? And caused the
dawn to know its place? Have the gates of heaven been revealed to you?

Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare if you know all
this."

And the discourses of God end, strangely with Job saying: ".... I
have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me which
I did not know. I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my
eyes see thee."

That is to say: here, at the lowest ebb, desparate, alone, ruined,
chided by God himself for his arrogance in wanting only to know why it had
happened, Job finds his faith. Here, in the darkest valley - the reality
of God becomes a personal reality and no longer just an idea.

The story ends with Job's wife returned, his fortune restored, seven
more sons and three more daughters on the way. And they lived, apparently,
happily everafter.

That's the way a poem snould end. And yet the problems and questions
don't-end... And perhaps that is how it should be too. Perhaps every man
must stand ultimately where Job stood. Thomas John Carlisle observes that
Job is "....an uneasy book because it questions some of our taken-for-
granted: some of our pet ideas and pious hopes and simplistic explanations

for a world that can't help being difficult and mysterious. “ (Enquiry.
September -November ,1973)

“LETTING SOD BY GOD" . (4) FEBRUARY 10, 1974

One thing is certain: innocent people do suffer. The nearly universal
expectation of men is that a just and righteous God would not let it happen.
But it does. |

In the prologue to Archibald MacLeish's pultitzerprize winning play,
J.B.) based=on Job, God and Satan are setting the stage for the drama.
God says: "Oh, there's co playing Job"
Ysatan responds: "There must be thousands:
Millions and millions of mankind
Burned, Crushed, .broken, multilated
Slaughtered, and for what? For thinkina!
For walking around the world in the wrong
skin, the wrong-shaped noses, eyelids:
Sleeping the wrong night the wrong city -
London, Dresden, Hiroshima
There never could have been so many
Suffered more for less." )P.12)

Or, a little more immediately: I was talking with a Viet Nam veteran
not long ago about the church and he observed that over there it really
didn't make any difference. "The boys who were religious got it just like
anybody else, he said.

A just and loving God shouldn't allow innocent people to suffer.
"Why me, 0 Lord?" we cry with Job. "Why did it happen to me? What are the
charges against me?" Only for many the question is not really a question.
God ceases to exist when he doesn't live up to our expections. |

Now, let's leave Job behind for a moment and move to the Naw Testament
to John the Baptist, sitting in a dark, dank jail cell, his-world in pieces
around his feet. Great crowds of peqle had come out to the edge of the
dessert just months before to hear him speak. He told them about God's

righteousness and God's wrath. The Kingdom was at hand - the Messiah was

about to come, and what a day it would be! The oppressors of Israel would

"LETTING GOD BE GOD" (5) , FEBRUARY 10, 1974
be punished: the Messian would set God's people free. And when he saw Jesus,
John knew that he was the one.

But now; the herald, the witness - was in jail. The oppressors were
still around: John's expectations had not been met and he felt let-down
depressed. ot unlike Job. And so he sent messengers to Jesus to ask
"Are you the one, or shall we look for another."

It's the same issue, really: an issue that you and I have probably
already faced, but in any case, one day will. Because God doesn't always
measure up to our expectations.

Qne writer frames it like this: "We sometimes envision how our life
should turn out, or how God should make it turn out if he is really God.

But then something completely different happens. A job that suited us to
a "T" goes to someone else; the cure for a disease is denied us. In the
process we had secretly set up a chance for God to prove that he was the

director of our life. But he didn't take advantage of the opportunity."

(Helmut Thielicke, How to Believe Again, P. 183)

I ovwuld guess all of us have experienced that. Just when we could
feel a miracle coming on, a clear act of God on our behalf, something else
happened. And we wondered - “is He there? Does he really care? Does he
have anything to do with me?"

"Woe be it", Helmut Thielicke writes, "if God doesn't fit what. we have
expected of him - if he thus acts differently from what he ought to do.

Then we immediately threaten him by saying that we don't think he ST ee
P.18

Martin Walser, in a novef, Halftime, writes, ....my God is put together
out of distinct plans that I have made with myself" So it was with Job.
Who could question the benificense of God when the food is on the table,
money in the bank and the future rosy? Or in the words of J.B. to his wife
at Thanksgiving dinner...

"Not for a watch-tick, have I doubted

NIETTING SON BE GOD" Ce) FEBRUARY 10, 1974

God was on my side, was good to me.

Even young and poor I knew it.

People called it luck: it wasn't

.I never thought so from the first

Fine silver dollar to the last

Controlling interest in some company

I couldn't get - and got. It isn't

Luck. *)

So it waa with Jolin the Baptist, committed to his plans: sure that
tney were God's plans: sure that God would vindicate their rightness: sure
that God would snow his hand. But all John could see was Jesus of Nazareth
and in the.context of his exnectations that wasn't much.

And so he confronted Jesus directly, as Job had contronted God.
Carlisle writes:

"If nothing else, Job gives us courage to remonstrate with our creator,
the author of the world which often inflicts suffering upon us in a remark-
able variety of excrutiating ways. And our remonstrances need not be limited
to nolite pieties...They can be as boistrous and flagrant and monstrous
as we feel the situation demands. And this because - as Job so constantly
Tiiplies - there is someone to be addressed...." (Enquiry P.36)

That's the point - there is someone to be addressed: a God real enough
to get angry with: A God who is there in our darkest hour.

In James Bladwin's novel "Another Country, Refus, a young black who
had made a mess of nis life, wic had tong ago lost all belief in God and
man, commits suicide by jumping off a bridge in ‘lew York. One last thought
flashes through his mind: "you wretch" he says to his lost God, "yOu....
almighty wretch, am I not _— child too? for Tn coming to you."

Wrapped in a curse, with a clanced #isé, he reached out of his despair
and said "you" to God. There is someone there to be auavesked, And when

we think abcut it, it's not at all unlike Jesus himself, hanging on the

cross. iis pians in shambles - his life ebbing away, crying out, "lly God,
My God, Why have you forsaken me?”

God has set us in the world in which accidents happen. He has made us
vo be free in the world - which means that we are vulnerable to sickness,
Luffering, disappointment and death. He never promised that his people
vould have it any easier than other people. What he did promise was that
he would be there: that in the midst of whatever happens to us, he will be
our God, our father, to whom we can turn.

John asked Jesus, “Are you the one". And Jesus said, "Go and tell John
“mat you hear and see: the blind receive then sight and the lame walk,
jepers are cleansed ana the deaf hear..." Here in your life I am doing
sometning new.

God may not live up to our expectations. But the promise of Scripture -
‘22 promise of faith is that he is in life with us, available to us, close
to us in good times and in bad. It is a promise that needs to be discovered
presonally. It cannot be discussed academically. Job, sitting on the ash
heap - John-wattowtng in prison, didn't ask philosophic questions - they

threw themselves into the darkness and found that there was someone there.

Ts was enough = and is enough. AMEN

Onv father, give us the courage to trust when life tumbles in. Give us the
faith to know that you are with us - that you are: through Jesus Christ

our Lord. AMEN