Is God the Answer?

Sermon by James W. Crawford

February 16, 1997, The First Sunday in Lent

From Job 38

Not long ago a fellow traveler on the "T" seemed engrossed in a little book entitled, "God is the Answer." I did not have a chance to look over her shoulder to get a grip on the contents, but I brooded about that title, and got to wondering, "So what questions was this Green Line companion asking?" And indeed, I began to speculate: God the Answer? The answer to what? I heard a person on a recent radio interview indicate God was the answer to her stupendous weight reduction from 300 to 180 pounds. Another affirmed God answered his prayers, and through the lottery, made him a millionaire. Those of us who watched the Superbowl heard any number of gifted 340-pound linemen and fleet defensemen from Green Bay, one of them a minister himself, who clobbered the Patriot offense, attribute their victory to Jesus, their NFL championship an answer to their prayers.

How about you? How about me? I suspect some of us stumble into church from time to time in pursuit of answers to certain questions. What does my life mean? What am I called to do? Does anything really matter any more? Is there life after birth? Does the church--does God--provide an answer?

I want to think about this question for a few moments with you this morning. We are going to look at it in the context of the Old Testament Book of Job--one of the most profound meditations on the presence, the power, the reality of God and the ground of our human existence ever composed. And as we look at how Job's author, Job's poet, Job's relentless searcher for a Divine answer plunges into his task and finally receives his response, we may discover the Biblical faith offers a somewhat disconcerting perspective on this oft asked question, "Is God the Answer?"

I

So here is Job. He seeks answers from God. Remember? Job feels sorry for himself. In a terrible series of afflictions his life turns from contented and successful to total collapse and ultimate tragedy. He loses his vast properties to an invading enemy. His possessions fall into the hands of savage marauders. A violent typhoon engulfs a party his children attend, swoops them up, and kills them all. And if this is not enough, Job finds himself assaulted: he discovers himself afflicted with "loathsome sores from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head." His spirit is crushed, his self respect shredded, his reputation mocked, his soul battered. Job's wife, in a fit of contempt, challenges the tenacious defense of his own innocence: "Do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse God and die!"

Sitting on a garbage heap, scraping scabs with a pot shard, defeated and  destroyed, outraged and furious at God, Job rues the day he was born, curses it, wishes he had never seen daylight. One translation puts an expletive in his mouth: "God damn the day of my birth!" Job vehemently asks of his creator: "Why ruin me like this? Why not kill me altogether? What terrible thing have I done that I deserve to live? Better to be a rotting corpse than a half dead pauper. What hope that I should care about life?"

Throughout this intense and "in-your-face" diatribe, Job cries for an answer from God. He begs for a reply. He threatens to sue God for testimony. He angrily repudiates friends who accuse him of bringing this catastrophe on himself. He prays for some kind of response to his shattered humanity, an explanation for what he perceives to be a brutal rejection by a God he loyally serves. Through everything he never denies God, but in his impatience and anger condemns, denounces, reproaches, accuses, impeaches, decries the Divinity allowing him to fester in this condition. "Why this mess?" he begs. "Will you answer me? Won't you respond?" he pleads.

II

Well, Job receives his reply. Job hears from the God he implores. But he gets no answers. The response itself sounds more like an another assault. A voice from the whirlwind delivers question upon shattering question: "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 foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements--surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk. . .  Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or bind the cords of Orion?. . . Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you establish their rule on the earth?  Declare to me if you have knowledge. . . " And so on it goes, with Job's appeals thrown in his face and God asking the questions.

I wonder, could a hint to what our God is like be revealed in this most astounding encounter? Could the clues to answers we hope to pry from God be revealed in this thunderous revelation to Job? For what do we see here?  What do we hear in this remarkable dialogue? A profound reversal of procedure: God asks the questions; we give--we live--the answers.

Look at the Bible. Leaf through the pages of Genesis: "Adam. Where are you?"

Hear God's challenge to Moses, entangled with a nation mired in slavery: "Will you lead my people?"

Remember the prophet Isaiah, confused about vocation, awe-struck in the temple: "Who will go? Whom shall I send?"

And the New Testament carries on. Jesus comes as question mark. Do you recall that young religious scholar tossing out a question to our Lord, "What must I do to gain true fulfillment?" Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, asking finally, "Which of these proved neighbor?"

Our Lord's questions tumble in upon us: "Will you work in my vineyard? Will you come to my banquet? Where do your loyalties lie? Will you dine with me today? Will you stay awake while I pray?" In Jesus we confront one who comes among us with questions, puzzling, disturbing, reorienting, questions.

You see, friends, we discover in the Biblical faith--in Job and in Jesus-- we discover someone else sets the terms for our relationship. We work, we think, we act, we pray, we worship within conditions someone else sets for us.

Look at it this way. The role of questioner is the role of initiator. The question sets the conditions for the answer either by direct suggestion or subtle implication. "Ask the wrong questions, you'll get the wrong answers," goes the old saw. If we, by our questions set the conditions for God's activity, the answer will be no larger than the question. And even more poignantly, we may not recognize the answer when it comes. "Who will save us?" we ask. "Where lies the meaning of this chaos? Why does this always happen to me? Why so many near misses in my life? Why this loneliness? Why this heartbreak? This injustice, this tragedy this failure?  Who will save me? Who will answer?"

"Gird up your loins, stand with courage and I will question you!"

III

You see, what we discover at the heart of Job--at the heart of our faith--is a God we cannot finally grasp. No word, no creed, no confession, no symbol, no sermon, no hymn, no presence, no book, no vision can, this side of heaven, capture all of God. We can see this conviction born out in the design and decoration of meetinghouses and sanctuaries representing our Congregational heritage. Those of us who gather this morning here in this room worship amid an ironic circumstance. You see, our Congregational forebears so feared the temptation to turn icons and statues into substitutes for the vast, unfathomable, question-framing God, that in a wild rampage of arson and destruction they destroyed those statues and icons in l7th century English and Scottish Catholic churches. They did away with vestments, clerical hierarchies, liturgical accessories. They shattered statues, melted down religious icons, burned churches in a wild orgy of desecration. Why?  Well to put these iconoclastic activities in their best light--and it is hard to do so--they did it so the fullness, the depth, the mystery, the vastness, the otherness, the God beyond God would not be limited by human efforts to describe or depict the Divine depths. That is the history behind the classic white clapboard New England meetinghouse.

The question looms, why then this room? Surely not your venerable New England, clear-windowed, white-walled, bare pew meetinghouse. Just the opposite. This room would have been burned by those first Congregationalists: its windows smashed, its hundreds of symbols axed and splintered. But I love this room. I never get tired of it. Why? Because in its contrasting way it sheds its own light, its own vista on the vast otherness and mystery of the living God. The window behind me, for instance, announcing the incarnation of the immutable, indescribable ground of the universe concentrating himself--no herself--no itself--in human flesh, Jesus of Nazareth: the mystery taking on a human face; the human face reflecting the mystery.

Or the window up here on your far right illustrating the parable of the Prodigal Son. It is really a window on a God whom Jesus called, "Abba, Father," a God whose love is so vast that windows can barely illuminate it. Parables can only point to it. Words to describe it as I use now seem pusillanimous and futile. March around this room and see symbols of a reality beyond and breaking in on us: over here miracle windows envisioning a world promised by the love conquering all that divides and wounds us. Back there prophets with visions calling us to a promised future of peace with justice. And over here, the evangelists assembling words--words--with power to transform us. And in this chancel here, a Bible with words just cradling Christ; and here a choir and instrument confirming George Herbert's conviction that "his time spent in prayer and cathedral music elevated his soul and was his heaven upon earth."

O my friends, the depths of the mystery of God reach beneath, around, above--how can we say it--except perhaps through approaches to paradox and polarity, contradiction and contrast. What can we say? Harmonious; chaotic. Immanent; transcendent. Present; hidden. Suffering; comforting.  Mother; Father. Advocate; antagonist. Friend; enemy. Light; darkness.  Pain; healer. Out there; in here. We find ourselves encountered by Otherness surpassing everything we can know or imagine. We cannot in any way with our poor, muddling, limited, fragile, self centered, frail humanity, we cannot in any way scour the reaches of the One who goes beyond our every plunge into the deep but yet who we discover as immanent, lodging in our souls, our hearts our minds making us more than just blobs of protoplasm on the epidermis of God's good earth. We cannot encompass this mystery. We cannot embrace God because to do so means what we embrace is not God. The God we search for, from whom we desire answers, encounters us with a different agenda: invitations, proddings, beckonings, questions reshaping our lives and our destiny.

IV

One final note: this questioning God, this Outsider-Insider; this challenger  we encounter in Job persists in a quest for us. God's search abides.

The search comes as question mark in the realm of social justice. The questions come to us as famine in the Sahel, as genocide in Rwanda. The divine questions prod us about racial justice in America, as fairness in school financing, as prisons without hope. The divine questions haunt as the differently-abled, the gay and lesbian, the immigrant, the Jew, the woman, affirm the full humanity endowed by our Creator and ground of our existence.

We find ourselves questioned in realm of human community. Vexed by those with no fixed address, women beaten, children broken, pleas from amid the sobs of loneliness, the yearnings to be touched, the hunger for encouragement, the grasping for friendship. Are you available? Do you care? Can you meet me there?

And yes, the Divine questioner comes to us through the hassles, the sorrows, the small victories in our own lives. Someone you love is dying? Can you hope against hope? A child of yours, drifted off into his or her own world; communication garbled, frustrated, ended. Are you sticking with her? An ambition is stymied, a dream postponed, love deflected, frozen, spurned.  Will you hang on--and hang in?

God seeks us, questions us, yes, and perplexes us profoundly as we move through the surprises, the boredom, the contingencies, the stupidities, the routines, the reversals and revelations of our lives. Have we the resources for triumph? The question behind the questions to Job: Can we, amid chaos and silence, trust in the love at the heart of it all?

Some of you here this morning will be familiar with Dag Hammarskjold. Hammarskjold, a Swede, served as Secretary General of the United Nations during the years of turbulent decolonialization in the fifties and early sixties. His was a difficult and strenuous task often laced with failure. He died in a mysterious plane wreck as he sought to resolve the violence and trauma of war in the Belgian Congo in 1961--the consequences of which we see this very morning as convulsions threaten to tear apart again the old Belgian Congo we now call Zaire. Two weeks before he died in that crash, Hammarskjold penned a prayer in his spiritual diary--"Road Markings" he called it--throwing himself, almost as Job does, into the everlasting arms of the ineffable God. The prayer could be any of ours as we let go and trust the One who grounds and loves us:

 Have mercy
 Upon us.
 Upon our efforts,
 That we
 Before you,
 In love and in faith,
 Righteousness and humility
 May follow thee,
 With self denial, steadfastness and courage,
 And meet thee
 In the silence.

 Give us
 A pure heart
 That we may see Thee,
 A humble heart
 That we may hear Thee,
 A heart of love
 That we may serve Thee
 A heart of faith
 That we may live Thee.
 Thou

 Whom I do not know
 But whose I am.

 Thou
 Whom I do not comprehend
 But who hast dedicated me
 To my fate,
 Thou - .