Job Part 2-Job's Lament- Rev. Wendy McCormick- Oct 13, 2024.
Rev Wendy McCormick
October 13, 2024
Job – verses from chapters 23, 30 and 31
In a short article in the “Wellness” section of the New York Times this week, Jancee Dunn wrote “One Thing Never to Say to a Grieving Friend.” If you have ever been that person experiencing grief, you could probably write the article. And you know that there are so many unhelpful things people say. It might be hard to pick the one thing not to say. Still, according, to Dunn, the #1 thing not to say is “everything happens for a reason.” Don’t say it. Even if you believe it. Don’t say it.
Dunn quotes David Kessler, the author of several books on grief, who says grief needs to be witnessed, not deflected. “And if I say to you, ‘everything happens for a reason,’ I am missing your pain.”
In the intervening 20 chapters of Job from where we left off last Sunday to where we picked up today, much of the story is taken up by Job’s friends. Let’s just say they never read an article on what not to say -- to a grieving friend. They pile unhelpful comment upon unhelpful comment and chapter after chapter never seem to stop talking. Pro tip: when you are caring for a grieving friend, the less you say the better. Jancee Dunn says pets are the most comforting friends of all. Guess why.
Job’s friends are big believers in everything happens for a reason. Big believers that God rewards the good and punishes the evil, that we all get what we deserve at the hands of a universe and a God that makes sense, that is based on logic that we humans can understand. You will recall that the premise of the Job story, a “let’s suppose” story, is that Job is blameless, that he loves and fears God, that he is righteous and upstanding and has done nothing whatever to deserve the unspeakable loss and suffering that have befallen him.
Still, Job’s friends represent our human need to make sense of things, to fit the pain into a logic model, a paradigm, a worldview, that we can live with. So their comments to their suffering friend might best be summarized as, “everything happens for a reason, so there must be a reason you are suffering this way. In other words, you must have done something to deserve this – think harder.”
When you are the one suffering at depths you didn’t even know you had, you may go down that path with the misguided if well-meaning friends, cataloguing every misdeed and false step of your entire life, sifting through the details for a reason. Or you may just wish they would go away. Professor Joanne Cacciatore says we say things like that because we are uncomfortable with other people’s pain. Still, she counsels the grieving person to push back with something simple like, “thank you for sharing but that is not my truth.” I guess that’s more polite than, “please stop talking.”
In the small town where we lived when I was small there was a doctor who had emigrated from India. He and his wife lost their only child, a daughter, killed in a car wreck when she was in college. The whole town turned out for the visitation to share their condolences with this family, a line snaking out of the funeral home and down the street. And to each and every person who came, the good doctor put his finger to his lips. “Thank you for coming,” he said. “Please don’t say anything.”
After some 20 chapters of being on the receiving end of all the things people say, Job finally breaks. We have learned to speak colloquially of “the patience of Job,” describing what we read last week how he does not curse God or otherwise sin, even as his suffering and loss pile up and multiply.
But in today’s reading that famous patience has broken. We hear Job angry, defending himself, and calling on God for a face-to-face meeting, for a trial, certain he will be vindicated. And we hear Job giving voice to his pain and suffering from the depths of his soul.
This is a real and truthful response, a genuine human response to pain and loss.
“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord,” was good for a season, for a moment. It carried him through the days of the funeral, so to speak. But in the long stretch of weeks and months that followed, as his pain cycled and deepened, eventually he cried out from the depths.
We feel uncomfortable around such strong emotion, even our own. So we try to push it down and push it away with aphorisms and explanations like ‘everything happens for a reason.’ And the irresistible urge to look on the bright side. When my sister with 3 small children received throngs of people on the death of her husband, the bright side crowd said things like, “you’re still young and pretty – you can get married again.”
Scholar, author and popular podcaster Kate Bowler, in some ways a modern-day Job, has made it her life’s work to take on this look-on-the-bright-side crowd, what she calls the cult of positivity and perfectionism.
At the age of 35, months into her dream job on the faculty of Duke Divinity School, married to her high school sweetheart and mom to a toddler, Bowler was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. She had had to fight for the diagnosis after months of being sent home from doctors’ offices and emergency rooms with nothing more than antacid for her unspeakable abdominal pain and her insistence that something was very, very wrong.
A story like this is always really sad. But in this particular case, it is happening to someone who is a scholar of the prosperity gospel and what she sees as all its secular manifestations in books and seminars and self-help programs that all proclaim if we follow steps 1-5, push away negative thinking and painful emotion, we can achieve that perfectly “blessed” life. Bowler’s first book is called “Everything happens for a reason and other lies I’ve loved.” Her second book is called “No cure for being human.”
In that book she tells of dragging herself, i-v pole and all, from her hospital bed to the hospital gift shop where she discovers racks of books, Christian and secular, promoting these ideas that by our good works, our faithfulness to God, and/or our positive, upwardly focused lives, we can draw prosperity, health, goodness, and a happy life to ourselves.
“I see now,” Bowler writes, “that it was probably alarming for the teenager working at the gift shop to see a patient in a blue gown wheel her own IV into the store, mutter loudly at a carousel of books, and begin to pull titles off the shelf. Not one by one. But dozen by dozen.”
She asks to see the manager who gingerly asks, ‘Can I help you ma’am?’
“‘Yes! Thank you. I need you to know that these books are not suitable to be sold in a hospital.’ I point to the pile of Christian bestsellers I’ve made on the floor, books that I had carefully studied and documented in a comprehensive history of the movement known as the prosperity gospel. I spent ten years interviewing celebrity authors and pulling apart their promises for divine happiness and healing.”
In this entertaining and very honest writing style, Bowler continues to describe the encounter with the hospital gift shop manager. “You can’t sell this in a hospital,” she says. “You can’t sell this to me.”
Bowler goes through the stack of books: “This book tells me to claim my healing using Bible verses. This one tells me that if I can unleash my positive thoughts I can get rid of negativity in my life.”
. . . . There are books on how to let go of the past, how to live in the present, how to claim a brighter future.”
The stunned gift shop manager asks Bowler what she recommends instead. Uncertain where to even start, Bowler concludes: “Just let me point out the books that actively blame people for causing their own disease.”
Perhaps that’s when Kate Bowler started writing books herself, books that tell the honest truth about suffering and pain. Which are part of human life.
Bowler has unleashed a movement and has a huge following among people longing to be able to be honest about what they are experiencing and to be able to express what they are actually feeling.
And that’s where Job is today, expressing what suffering people feel --- rage against the promises that life and faith are just and make sense, that good is rewarded and evil is punished, that everything happens for a reason.
“I would lay my case before God,” he says. “and fill my mouth with arguments. I would learn what he would answer me and understand what he would say to me . . . . He would give heed to me. There an upright person could reason with him, and I should be acquitted forever by my judge.”
Surely in a just universe there is explanation, and Job wants his day in court.
“If I have walked with falsehood and my foot has hurried to deceit,” he continues, “let me be weighed in a just balance, and let God know my integrity!”
“Oh, that I had one to hear me! . . . . Let the Almighty”
Confident of his integrity, Job rages against the injustice, demanding that God open the divine ledger and show how his unspeakable suffering is deserved.
A friend of mine died last summer at the age of 59 after a three year battle with a rare cancer. She tried everything, all kinds of treatments, everything. Near the end of the journey, this woman, a lifelong Christian said to her oldest child, “I just don’t understand what I did wrong.”
Different from Job’s rage and demand for a trial, my friend spoke from a place of sadness and defeat and feeling abandoned by God.
But both represent that “everything happens for a reason” theology and the cultural pressure to think positively, to make our lives wonderful by our beliefs and actions, to draw blessings to ourselves. Everyone else seems to be doing it – just look at social media – why can’t I? Why didn’t it work for me? What did I do wrong?
When we are able to admit that it just doesn’t work that way, when we are able to stop saying that to one another and simply sit quietly with one another in our pain, we can allow the space for something deeply faithful and very biblical but that doesn’t get much attention.
It’s called lament.
Lament. It’s a faith word. A biblical word. One-third of the psalms, by the count of many scholars, are psalms of lament. Like the famous one Jesus spoke from the cross – “my god, my god, why have you forsaken me?” There is quite a bit of lament in the Bible. Probably because there is a lot of pain and suffering that goes along with being human. But because it makes us uncomfortable, we don’t go there. As Professor Walter Brueggemann has pointed out, we skip over biblical lamentation because we have bought into the idea that the church should be the happy place. Instead, he says, the church should be the honest place.
When I googled lament to get a simple definition to share today, google also produced two popular search questions: “is it a sin to lament?” And “is it Christian to lament?” This is how strong and deep our teaching that it’s not ok to feel bad.
But I also found these explanations for believers: “A lament is a prayer expressing sorrow, pain, or confusion. Lament should be the chief way Christians process grief in God's presence. Because many Christians have grown up in churches which always look on the bright side, lament can be jarring.”
And “scripture offers that God understands our doubt and welcomes our laments of pain. These emotions and questions come from a real part of our souls. To deny them can potentially cause spiritual harm and will hinder our relationship with God.”
We have both an emotional need and a faith need, a spiritual need, to express our pain and sorrow, to lament. And so in a few minutes we will join with Job, Job who says “the night racks my bones, and the pain that gnaws me takes no rest.” Job who says, “My inward parts are in turmoil, and are never still; days of affliction come to meet me. I go about in sunless gloom.”
Perhaps your lament today is from a personal experience of grief and loss. Or perhaps your lament is on behalf of someone else, someone dear to you who is suffering.
Perhaps your lament arises from the unspeakable destruction caused in recent days by natural disasters, hurricanes and tornadoes and record-breaking rainfall and flooding. Perhaps you lament the loss of civility and honest, truthful debate in the public sphere and despair at the spread of deliberate disinformation. Perhaps you lament the decline in a Christian faith that feels familiar in favor of one that promotes disrespect and intolerance. Perhaps you lament the endless war in the Middle East with no signs of a way forward, of hostages released or a ceasefire.
The point is lament is holy. Whether in private prayer or in a communal setting like this one. When we lament together, we remind one another that there is no shame in laying our sorrow and anger and despair before our God.
And maybe the next time you encounter a friend or neighbor who is suffering, you will be the one person in their world who offers to sit with them and listen, without saying anything more than “Thank you for telling me what it’s like. I’m so sorry.”
May it be so.
