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The Fourth Church Pulpit

REASONS OFTHEHEART

November 6, 1994 _

.. John M, Buchanan —

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A LIGHT IN THE CITY

126 East Chestnut St. Chicago, IL 60611- 2094

Phone: 312.787.4570- + --
John M. Buchanan, Pastor

Scripture: Mark 12:38-44, Job 28:12-28
“My soul thirsts for God, ...”
.- Psalm 42:2 (NRSV) --

Do you know the story of Job? It’s about a good and upright man, who loses everything,
will not deny his yearning for God, and stubbor

which seems to deny the very notion of God?

who argues with God, who
nly holds onto his trust in God in the midst of the very situation

It is one of the most magnificent short'stories im all of literature, and because of the subject and the situation, one _

of the most relevant and familiar in every age, ‘as close to:1is'as the events-ofthis or any week for that matter.

Blameless and upright, the father of ten children, owner of an extensive estate; substantial, solid, secure, Job is.
His children love one another and regularly gather in one another's homes to eat and drink together. On top of it all,
Job is faithful; in a winsome parental gesture, performs religious duties, makes sacrifices, pays tithes, attends worship

on behalf of his sons and daughters who are too busy partying, having babies, living. Job was, the author of this story
says, “the greatest man in the East.”

And then one day Job’s life unravels. The way the storyteller frames it, God and Satan are having a debate about

the peculiar phenomenon of human faithfulness, the propensity human beings have to believe in God, to trust God.-
“Consider my servant Job," God says. “There's no one on earth like him.” “Big deal,” Satan replies. “Who wouldn't |
believe in and trust God with all those beautiful children and those sheep and camels and oxen, and a dutiful,

beautiful wife. Big deal. You've blessed him. He trusts you. Take it away, all of it, and then see how much he
believes and trusts.” .-

Thus the poem'unfolds. One day, as his sons and daughters are eating together, in the eldest brother's house,

word comes to job that all his livestock and the servants who were tending them have been killed. And then, another

~ messenger appears to tell him that a great wind struck the house where his children were eating together, it fell on
them, and theyarealldeade — °

“Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I shall return ... the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away,
blessed be the name ofthe Lord,” Job says.- 8° be Se

Round one goes to God. ‘Satan persists.
Satan. Job breaks out in loathsome sores, t
impurity, uncleanliness and sin. People
is eloquent: covered with ugly scabs, sc
heap, his wife turns on him:

“Afflict him personally." God declines. “You do it to him,” God tells
he most humiliating thing that can happen, a sign in that culture of

with loathsome sores are not allowed to associate with anyone. The picture ___
ratching himself with a piece of broken glass, sitting utterly alone on an ash.
“Do'you persist in yotir {ntegrity?. Curse God and die.” Still Job does not give up on God.

Three friends come té Commiserate.’ The
circumstances. But first they do what
tear their robes, throw dirt on their he
without speaking a word.

y say the kinds of things you and I say to one another in similar
good friends must do, namely simply be there with their friend. They weep,
ads and then sit with him. For seven days and seven nights they sit with him

Their compassionate presence is what

rage. He doesn't curse God, but he does c
in which I was born.”

Job needs in order to start expressing his grief and anger and despair and
urse the day he was born. “Why did I not die at birth? ... let the day perish

The friends try to help. They repeat their culture's conventional wisdom: everything happens for a reason.
Suffering is meted out by Gad to punish evil. So the theological resolution to this predicament is for Job to confess
_ whatever it is he has done to offend God, seek forgiveness and everything will be all right. All three say it to him.
“Admit your guilt.” Job hangs on. “I am innocent. I have done nothing to deserve this.” ree

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He argues with his well-meaning

friends. And finally takes his case to God, demanding to know why this
injustice has happened.

Our text this morning is'a poetic interlude in the story on the topic of wisdom and the human heart. “Where is
~ wisdom?” Where, that is to say, is the answer? Is there a human thought that makes any sense at all of the mystery,

the moral enigma, of human suffering? Not where you expect it, the poet suggests. Not in the traditional sources of
wisdom and security. “God knows ... the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

suffering is punishment for your sins. God does not say I sent y

even admit that it was alla setup, a bet God had going with Satan. What God says essentially is, “I am God and you
are not.” And what Job says is essentially, “That's all I need to know.”

The answer to the question of suffering j
story, something happens at the end that
are restored, including daughters and sons; no
old age and everybody lived happily ever after.

The story of Job is not the Bi

blical answer to the question of human suffering, although it is sometimes pressed
into that service. mo

It is certainly not about stoical|

stoic nor patient. He gets angry, d
Us ...

y accepting whatever fate hands us, the traditional patience of Job. Job was neither
epressed. He insistently brings his case to God, argues, demands. He sounds like

And it is not about God's arbitrariness, choosin

g a good man to afflict in order to win a wager with Satan. This is
r10t history. It is poetry, fiction which uses litera

Ty creativity to tell a truth that does not submit easily to the telling.

What the story of Job is about finally, I believe, is the m
yearning, longing for God, human belief and i

whole business. “Curse God and die,” Job’s wife advises. But Job hane

that there is enormous theological significance to the human side of the God busi
for God, the lament over the absence of G

what he calls a “testable, physi

book a lot, found it almost convincing and in the last sentence summarized my point by saying, “The author is
straining to find a rationale for the one thing he, and all of us, want so desperately to believe.”

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FT

We are a Generation of Seekers, Wade Clark Roof, a sociolo
Generation of Seekers. Seekers — not joiners, or believers or

in which modem ct tice wag ‘supposed to make religion and God irrelevant, a century in

“that we can’t do it — can't nonchalantly accept a world without
God." [Professing the Faith, Pp. 22, 24, 25, 130, 132}

ark Twain's death in a New York newspaper while Twain was
mmediately cabled the newspaper: “Reports of my death are

] , made with complete intellectual confidence for most of the past
century, culminating in a famous Time Magazine cover in the 60s, appear to be greatly exaggerated. Even more
intriguing is that human interest in the topic, human longing

for God, has not in any way diminished. if anything,
we seem to need, or be in touch with that basic human need, more than ever,

of Quiet, p. 34]

Watch that, the theologians are saying: pay attention to the instinct for God, the need for God, the yearning for
God which you experience, Your yearning for God is the activity and presence of God in your life. “Thou hast made
Us restless until we rest in thee” Augustine confessed. Pay attention when your experience of deep, powerful human
love leads almost automatically into a greater sphere of divine love. Pay attention when your own experience of
exultation and passion and ecstasy takes you out of yourself. There is something of the mystery of God in that.

Pay attention when music penetrates your perimeters and touches your heart, when the beauty of an anthem ora

symphony, a Beethoven string quartet, or the D minor fugue on organ, cause you literally to catch your breath and sit
up straight and strain to be in touch with the creator of all beauty.

And sometimes, always in fact, the question of God is presented at the extremity of life called tragedy or suffering
or death. It is not only the li

iterary framework for the story of Job, it is an experience everyone of us knows sooner or
later. In fact our first and primary, and in a sense permanent crisis of faith, happens when our childhood

assumptions are taken away. Those childlike assumptions sound like this for most of us. “The world is a safe place.
ill always be secure, My parents are perfect, My parents’ love for each other is
_xong. My parents will never die." One by one those assumptions are assaulted by life, gradually, almost

imperceptibly, and sometimes they are ripped away violently and always, always they leave an emptiness and
longing and yearning which we experience as long as we live.

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Tim O’Brien is a fine writer whose books about Viet Nam are regarded as among the best to be written. He was
recently on the front page of all the reviews for In the

Lake of the Woods. In a 1990 book, The Things They Carried,
O’Brien combines fact with good fiction writing to explore the experiences of his platoon before, during and after the
war. It is net a pleasant book but itis a great book. There’s a lot of untimely dying; young men, not really knowing
_J they are fighting or who, die not in classic battles but accidentally: land mines and snipers and traps. O'Brien
never directy asks Job's question but, of cour

se, brilliantly presents it by describing situations in which it is a
question burning in any normal human heart. Why is this happening? What sense is there in this?

Near the 2nd, the author starts referring to Linda, his first love in chil
with a story about war in Viet Nam. Their first and onl
wore a pectiar stocking cap. He recalls it vividly,
class. Others teased her about her funny cap. Fina

dhood. It’s not apparent what she has to do
y date was a movie, with his parents, in fourth grade. Linda
every detail. When school began she wore the cap again, during
lly one day the class bully walked by her desk and pulled it off.

“Linda didn’t move. Even naw when I thin
She wasn't bald. Not quite. Not completel
2 row of black stitches. ...

k back on it, I see the glossy whiteness of her scalp.
y. There were some tufts of hair ... a large band aid,

“The whole time Linda stared straight ahead, her eyes locked on the blackboard. Later she cried
Zor a while. The teacher helped her put the cap back on." _

Four months later, Linda died. And thirty
swamps of Viet Nam, O’Brien remembers eve
and the questions we ponder all our lives.

-five years later, reflecting on the horror and death of his friends in the
ry vivid detail of his first experience of the mystery of human existence

What the story of Job suggests is that the questions themselves are among the best evidence we have that there is a
God and thet our own

n yearning and longing is a reliable experience of God's presence and activity; indeed of God's
love and care.

_. When Martin Marty found himself walking through the valley of the shadow of death, he turned to the Psalms and
discovered that more than half the Psalter deals wi

th the human experience of God's absence, God’s silence — the
winter of the spirit, Marty called it.

The Book's title is A Cry of Absence, and Marty talks honestly about experiences we understand
“when the divine is distant, the sacred is remote, when God is silent ...” There are times when

honest people cannot “move easily with the rhythms of Country and Western Christianity with
its foot-stomping style ... its summery spirituality.” [p. 5]

Marty finds in the Psalter the assurance ‘that there are “mysteries too deep for thinking out
successfully, too hard for easy response.” {p. 163] .
But every now and then we find ourselves unaccountabl
into the loving presence of God which he calls the “Sacred
paragraph that sounds like a personal experience:

y moved away from the icy acidness of our suffering and
Courts.” It happens unexpectedly, Marty confesses in a

“An organist practicing on a Saturday afternoon in an empty church will evoke memories of
childhood church-going back when a naive faith welcomed the Presence. Now, a generation
having passed, the one who quietly listens to that organ may learn to suspend disbelief and find
a possibility that the empty church could be part of the Sacred Courts.” {p. 163]

“My soul thirsts for God, ...” the Psalmist declared.
“When shall I come and behold the face of God?

My tears have been my food day and night, ...”
(Psalm 42:23)

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intense discourses, when he is arguing with one of his friends, Job says the most amazing thing: “I know that my
, in the fullness of time, came among us. That coming, that life, is not an

, is not an answer to our question, but a presence — in every valley of the
shadow, a promise of love that will not abandon us, the power of an amazing grace that surrounds us every day of our

lives: the good days and the not-so-good days, the days when children are born and the days when dear ones die.
What Jesus the Christ means — in Marty's words — is that God does not cause or allow suffering. “God participates

in the life of the people and suffers at their side, thus meriting trust.” {p. 163] Job was right: our redeemer lives. His
name is Jesus. ‘

Your deepest need and mine, the deepest yearning of our hearts is for God. Trust the yearning. Live it. Express it.
“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing,” Pascal said.

And an ancient poet, a man who knew the human heart, and the heart of God:

“As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.” [Psalm 42:1}

O God of mystery, we are here because we long for you:Fhank-you for our yearning. Thank you for creating us to
be restless until we rest in you: thank you for our homesickness tha
moments, in whatever valley we walk, in high and spirited mome

in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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