SWEET DREAMS AND FLYING MACHINES
Rev. Dr. Kathy Fuson Hurt
FBC, October 11, 2009
Readings: Job 23:1-9, 16-17 and The Broken Tablets by Rodger Kamenetz
She had it all: the perfect body shape and size plus amazing balance and coordination that gave her the promise of a golden future in gymnastics competition. Then a moment of carelessness, turning to laugh at a friend’s joke as she started across the street, not seeing the car coming her way, the driver not having time to stop as she emerged from between parked cars. Everything gone, in an instant, leaving her with a broken body and broken dreams.
They had it all: the perfect idea that could translate into the sort of must-have gadget that would bring in millions of dollars in sales, making them not only rich but poised to grow the company beyond their wildest dreams. Then a moment of greed, reaching too far to bring in one more backer and one more market and one more product and the opportunity vanished as another company surged ahead of them with patents and copyrights and investors. Everything gone, in an instant, leaving them with a broken invention and broken plans.
He had it all: the perfect family and home and children and land, the perfect life of fruitfulness and meaning, of good work and restoring leisure, of blessing and esteem. Then a moment of—who knows what, exactly, happened in that moment?—a moment when everything turned and collapsed, his home destroyed, his children dead, his land devastated, his standing in the community undermined. Everything gone, in an instant, leaving him with a broken life and broken faith.
Small wonder that the book of Job was the last to be voted into the canon, the collection of books that now makes up our set of scriptures. Who would find inspiring such a dreadful story of loss and destruction? Yes, we know such stories exist, of the person who has everything and in an instant loses everything, of the good person who suffers inexplicably bad things. But why put such a story into the Bible—unless an explanation is to be given that can make the story less terrifying, less despairing? And the book of Job does nothing of the sort: it does not explain, it does not tie up loose ends, it does not make suffering make sense, it does not provide comfort in our darkest hours, it does not answer the agonizing questions we, like Job, fling at God when everything flies apart. So if Job has nothing to offer but one more depressing story of loss without meaning, why include it in the scriptures?
And yet Job did make it into the Bible, tucked into the middle of the Old Testament, the book most preachers avoid whenever possible except when we haul it out to set Job up as a model of dignity under pressure, exhorting everyone to learn “the patience of Job.”
Which is nothing more than a great load of crap. Anyone who reads the book of Job, even part of the book, discovers quickly that Job was neither patient nor dignified nor inspiring under pressure. He uttered no words of wisdom to comfort us when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Instead, Job deals with his suffering like just about anyone of us would: he swears, he makes his friends feel useless and sends them away mad that he will not accept their comfort, he criticizes his wife, he spends great amounts of time bitching and moaning and feeling sorry for himself (not without reason, but still not the great model of patience we hear so much about). And most notable of all, Job yells at God: in chapter after chapter, in anguished poetry and howls of pain, Job keeps insisting that the disasters he has suffered are unfair, too much to bear, and deserve an explanation from the God he has trusted and served all his life. If ever there was a person who should have been spared misfortune, it is Job. Think of someone you know, perhaps even yourself, someone who has lived an impeccable life of service and goodness, who is kind to children and animals, patient when others get frustrated, slow to anger and quick to forgive, generous with time and money—and then think of that person experiencing the worst hardship imaginable, maybe losing a job, losing loved ones to cancer, having a house burn down, contracting a painful chronic disease that leaves them unable to function. This is the situation of Job.
Perhaps church tradition wanted to portray Job as patient and long-suffering in order to keep intact a familiar church portrayal of God as acting in a predictable and sensible fashion: like parents who reward good behavior and punish unwanted behavior, the church has usually resorted to envisioning God similarly, as a God who rewards goodness and punishes evil, who especially blesses us with all sorts of fine things when we are good, and lets us fall into dark places to teach us lessons when we have strayed from goodness. This view of how the universe works, of how God works, is so perfect, so easy to understand and deal with—and it is this view of the universe and God that Job explodes into bits. The passage read today is Job’s response to yet another effort on the part of his friends to get him to deal with this understandable view of God, to accept the obvious explanation for his suffering, namely that he has screwed up somewhere, to admit that and be open to the lesson God is teaching through suffering. And Job, hard-headed Job, impatient Job, keeps rejecting his friends’ argument. He has done nothing wrong, he does not need any lessons from God; instead, Job insists that God has some explaining to do, to justify why God is refusing to act as God is supposed to act, why God has made the incredible decision to inflict suffering on someone good.
Now if we stayed with the lectionary, the cycle of proposed scripture readings for each Sunday, in a couple of weeks we would get the requisite happy ending to this awful story, when Job’s home and lands and new family are restored to him and his unhelpful friends are sent packing. Job does get an explanation from God, sort of, that sheds just a bit of light, only a bit, onto the mystery of suffering. But for now we are left hanging with these few verses from the middle of the book of Job, where no resolution is in sight. Job is sitting in a pile of ashes, angry and complaining, feeling abandoned by everyone, especially God.
Which is usually how anyone of us is left when suffering strikes: no easy resolution comes, we wear out our well-intentioned friends with out complaints, God remains silent, and the only option in front of us is to simply keep trudging along, emotionally and spiritually sitting with Job in the ashpile while continuing to function as best we can. Too often, however, at this point in a journey through suffering, a kind of abdication comes in the form of “accepting” the pain as God’s will, and “accepting” that the pain, because it is God’s will, must be well-intentioned. While this may be a stance the Christian tradition, with its insistence on a particular vision of God as always loving, seems to sanction, Jewish tradition goes in a very different direction, urging us to keep challenging God much as Job does, to not remain silent. While the translation read today has the passage concluding with Job sinking into darkness and giving up, another, perhaps more faithful translation, concludes with Job not sinking into darkness but pushing back at it: not “if only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face,” but “yet I am not silenced by the darkness, by the thick darkness that covers my face” (Job 23:17, NIV). Giving up, or pushing back and refusing to give up, refusing to let God off the hook, refusing to settle for an easy, pious explanation, refusing to let the darkness win: we have a choice of which Job we prefer, just as we have a choice of how we face the darkness that everyone of us does face.
Jewish midrash, the tradition of commenting on scripture, includes an intriguing story that is not part of our usual reading of the golden calf episode. You may remember the story from the book of Exodus: Moses has been away on the mountain receiving the law, the Ten Commandments, directly from God, and in his absence the Israelites grew so anxious that they needed a substitute, some way of containing the anxiety. So they constructed an idol, a golden calf, and began to worship it. Moses walks into this blasphemous scene, and is so angry by the Israelites’ actions that he smashes the stone tablets that had been written on by God.
Jewish commentary steps into the story at this point with an explanation of what happened to the smashed tablets. Though smashed, they were still considered holy, the product of God’s own divine hand. Something holy, however broken it might be, should not simply be discarded on a trash heap. So the midrash envisions the repentant Israelites, perhaps even assisted by a now calmed down Moses, gathering up the shards of the broken tablets and putting them in a safe place. After Moses had received a second set of tablets from God, the new tablets were placed into the ark of the covenant for travel through the desert and into the promised land—and alongside the shiny new tablets were scattered the broken bits from the first tablets. Both sets of tablets were eventually placed in the temple in Jerusalem. The new tablets contained the core teachings of Jewish law, considered holy, to be kept for all time. As for the broken pieces of the first tablets—those, too, became holy.
In a spiritual journey, we are likely to find many of our initial conclusions about God, about faith, about community, shattered when we run head-on into the often harsh experiences of life and the real world. Job learned that his easy life of blessing was built on understandings of God that were too simplistic to stand up under fire. But the experience of suffering, of breaking, is not simply pain without meaning, not simply disillusionment. The broken pieces, as Job will learn in later chapters, are part of the imperfection that is woven into all of creation. God is not simply light and goodness, but includes darkness as well. And that darkness has its own light, its own meaning.
Those of you who are of a certain age will recognize the phrase that is the title of this sermon as coming from a song by James Taylor, in which he laments the experience of having “sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground.” None of us makes it through life unscathed, however skillfully we maneuver, how well our parents raised us, however smart we may be, however much money we have earned and put away into investments, however faithful we may be in church attendance, in beliefs, in right living. None of us makes it through unscathed. Author Annie Dillard once counted all the instances she saw of life’s batterings in animals: missing tails, missing fur or feathers, missing limbs, missing eyes. None of us makes it through life unscathed.
Yet the broken pieces, the broken dreams, the broken ideals, the broken parts of our lives, are not merely instances of failure or of abandonment by God, nor of punishment by God for wrongdoing. That brokenness is holy. We gather it up, we gather ourselves up as best we can, and resume the journey—not to leave the brokenness behind, but to carry it with us into the promised land as symbols of learning and hope. As Jewish tradition affirms, as Christian tradition affirms, as many spiritual traditions affirm, where there is brokenness there is also the possibility of redemption.
