My preaching professor in seminary taught us all something
that was profoundly anti-Biblical. We
were to preach the good news in every sermon. That message was not only
anti-Biblical, it cut across the grain of the very real ministry needed in
local churches. For there were people on their last leg in the
communities I served, life partners I held hands with as their spouses died, or
untold tragedies as classmates had to mourn the death of friends killed in a
car crash, parents who had to mourn the death of children lost much too
young.
I think the promise of getting to heaven falls short in such
situations, and it is my belief that the most profound way God loves us in such
times is to be present, hold our hand, and give full throat to our complaint
and lament. Indeed, many of the Psalms are Psalms of complaint and
lament.
Jesus railed from the cross, the opening line of Psalm 22, “My
God, my God, why have you forgotten me?” My favorite psalm, Psalm
42, is also a psalm of lament or complaint “My tears have been my food day and
night as my enemies ask me, ‘Where is your God?’”
Then there are the prophets like Moses and Elijah and Jeremiah
who have had their fill with the people and complain to God, “Where are YOU? I have had my fill of these people and I
think it would better that you just kill me now rather than spend another day
listening to the blind optimism, their prayer for a miracle rather than any
effort to struggle, and their whining day after day without faithfulness.”
Indeed. For the good news never promises without
threatening. The good news never begins without ending
something. The good news never gives gifts without assessing harsh
costs.[1]
If
God is God, and not some pretender, God is not afraid of the reality in any
situation, not afraid to hear our real complaint and lament, our cries and
screams against pain and injustice. The
initial cry of most Biblical prophets on behalf of their people is, “How long,
oh God, how long? How long in this bitter slavery and
abuse? How long in this imperial exile? We have waited,
in justice and truth for you. We are ready, O God. Where
are you? How long?”
I
believe my preaching professor was just cooperating with a culture that was
telling us not to be too negative, to see what power there is in positive
thinking, and reminding us of the very real prospect that people do not line up
in the pews if we somehow do not make Sunday brighter than all the other days
of the week. When people in the pews are asking us to recharge their
batteries, do we dare tell them the truth? (Hands in a balancing
motion.)
We
are told again and again that if we just think more positively, consume and
spend more voraciously, and believe more optimistically in some foggy notion of
what is America, the economy will improve and the nation will be able to turn
itself around.
We are in the month of pink when so many of us share how deeply
breast cancer has touched our lives or the life of someone we
love. In her 2009 book, Bright-sided: How the
Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America, author,
activist, and cancer survivor, Barbara Ehrenreich details how she was told over
and over again that the only way she would recover from her breast cancer was
through cheerfulness and a sunny disposition. People would tell her
that her cancer was a gift, that positive thinkers were the most likely to end
up on the other side of cancer. All that shiny optimism just ticked her
off. She wrote, “[t]here is a vast difference between positive thinking
and existential courage.” Ehrenreich believes this “power of
positivity” movement is strongly advocated for in evangelical Christianity as a
way to make the individual responsible, cancer is all about your personal disposition, and “to move our
attention away from the larger economic, political, and social forces behind
poverty, unemployment, disease, sickness, and health care.”[2]
Americans see themselves and others see them as a relentlessly
positive people. But though positive, we are not necessarily
happy. In 2009, Ehrenreich reported, we ranked twenty-third in happiness
and even lower in well-being indicators. Yet we were the nation that consumed
two-thirds of the antidepressants in the world, antidepressants being the most
commonly prescribed medication. We just need to be more positive
about it. We make tons of money for Lilly Pharmaceuticals which then
supports all that great spirituality and NPR programming. That’s
good? Right?
I want to make it abundantly clear that I strongly believe in
mental health advocacy and often the need for antidepressants to make life
richer, fuller, and sometimes just tolerable for some. I just wonder if our need for persistent
optimism doesn’t have us dreading what a part of our being knows to be the
reality.
It is to remember that the ancestors of our democracy were honed
and shaped in Congregational churches where they struggled with diverse voices
at town hall meetings, were immediately considered traitors to the crown, and
many of them lost their lives, families, and fortunes in the struggle for a new
nation. Though the outlook and outcome were bleak, they struggled
anyway.[3]
A hope against hope emerges when we get real to enter into the
struggle, however small, to speak to the larger forces at work. We
find our meaning in solidarity. We stand shoulder to shoulder to say
that we may not be optimists. But we are romantics about what
the world might be. As God is . . . tearfully hoping that we might
see our destinies bound together with earth and sky, soil and breath.
And it is not so much that we win or ever carry the day as we
learn that we are stronger, more resilient, worthy of the challenge that is
before us. When the Berrigan brothers took hammers to B-52 bombers
as a way of shaping swords into implements of cultivation and harvest, they had
no hope that they would fashion weapons of war into plowshares. Or when
they poured blood onto draft papers, they knew they would not stop the war
machine. But they hoped against hope their work would help remove the
romanticism around the implements of war and death, lift the veil to reveal the
suffering and misery. Drones used that
we recently romanticized as righteous strikes against terrorists actually kill
unarmed civilians, a longtime worker for a U.S. aid group, and seven children.[4]
And the outrage . . . the
complaint and lament . . . was almost nonexistent.
Job is a story. As Job portrays this interesting bartering
back and forth between God and Satan, the Adversary, though it may trouble us
to think of God in this way, we need to remember that the author is trying to
convey what it feels like under the weight of such incredible suffering. The author is using exaggeration and broad
references so that we might all identify with Job to an extent. When we have lost home, health, and family, it might only seem natural to turn to the
heavens and ask if this is some cosmic drama?
Why . . . I can even imagine God
and Satan bargaining with my life in the midst of such pain.
We must remember that Job
does not so much represent a person as a people. Job is a representative for a people, a
nation that walks in integrity and wonders aloud where God was when the wind
blew, the house caved in, and the plague came. Where is God when we suffer?
We talk about the “patience
of Job” in the midst of such suffering.
Job was anything but patient. He was downright impatient with God, his
friends, and his suffering life on earth. He complained and lamented to God but
never, ever linked his suffering to God’s unjust punishment. He bitterly asked why. He wanted God to show up and offer some kind
of explanation. Make it make sense,
God. And for that, God says that Job has
spoken correctly. His “friends”. . . who
assume that Job’s tragedies are because of something Job has done to deserve
it, these “friends” are sent away by God because they have spoken incorrectly
about God.
What Peruvian author, theologian,
and Dominic priest, Gustavo Gutiérrez relates is that Job is about our proper
response to human suffering. The friends
of Job start out on the ash heap in solidarity with Job but then it gets to be
too much. They are tired of all the
negativity! Rather than talking to God
on Job’s behalf, they grow angry at the way Job challenges God. They leave the ash heap to point fingers at
Job in blame for his suffering. And Gutiérrez
believes we are all called to the ash heap to hold hands with those who suffer
and show our solidarity, to even join in complaint and lament.
God shows up to ask Job
where he was when God was in the midst of suffering and labor pains to give
birth to creation and provide the necessary order and limits to the chaos of
the created order. In turn, Job recognizes
that his suffering is what it means to be not only human but divine as we try
to bring something new and loving into the world. It is life.
You may have seen that in
Texas a school administrator coached teachers that if they had books about the
tragedy and suffering found in the Jewish Holocaust to make sure they had books
that offered opposing views. To me, I think that single reference helps me to
make sense of so much of the pandemic in our country. We would like to erase the unjust suffering
we see around us because it makes us uncomfortable, disquieted, and perhaps
makes us unwilling to join hands with those who unjustly suffer. People of faith are often characterized as
simpletons, always looking at the bright side, joining hands and singing “Nearer
my God to thee” as the world is lit on fire. In contrast, I think the book of
Job asks for a deeper wisdom that helps us to know that the deeper tragedies,
the pains and losses, the hurts and bruises of life are not to be painted over
with bright yellow paint. Rather, if our
relationship with God is a relationship, Scripture gives us permission to yell
and scream at God and ask, “Where are you?
How long? Why have you brought
this to me, to us?” We may never really
get an answer but we may have an experience of God’s presence as we struggle
through.
During my time in high school, the faithful public school teachers of Metamora Township High School had us watch the movie "Night and Fog." I had to watch this gut-wrenching movie no less than four different times. It was a horrendous film that showed what the Allies found when they came upon the concentration camps. Thin bodies stacked grotesquely in piles, soap and other items made out of human remains, the claw marks on walls of gas changers. Each time I tried to reason with my teachers, letting them know I had seen it before, that it made me uncomfortable and sick to my stomach. My teachers pressed. And my simple faith was shaken.
No real answer was
forthcoming. But I know now the
faithfulness of those teachers sharpened and honed my faith and wisdom. For I learned that God surely suffers. And those few times in my life when I have
shown myself to be faithful, I am on the ash heap holding God’s hand as God
holds the hand of others. I want you to
know this. You have to know this. So that when you go through tragedy and
suffering, the death of a loved one or a disease that might ravage you or someone
you love, you know that it is not punishment from God. And that the tradition is big and wide for
you to complain and lament and ask God repeatedly even when it feels like God
is not showing up.
As your pastor, I want that
depth of soul for you so that when some softness comes, where you might feel a
hand joining yours on the ash heap, you will know. You will know. And so that we all might find ways,
especially in this pandemic, to reach out our hands because it is not only the
human thing to do. It is divine thing to
do. It is truly divine. Amen.
[1] Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination-40th Anniversary
Edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018), p. 84
[2] Patricia Cohen, “Author’s Personal Forecast: Not
Always so Sunny but Pleasantly Skeptical,” New York Times, October
9, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/books/10ehrenreich.html.
[3] Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless
Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2009), pp. 6, 13.
[4] Matthieu Aikins, Christoph
Koettl, Evan Hill and Eric Schmitt “Times Investigation: In U.S. Drone Strike,
Evidence Suggests No ISIS Bomb,” New York Times, October 16, 2021.
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