Living Through Despair

At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, there is an aluminum and Plexiglas signboard that is typically in front of churches to announce the sermon title for Sunday. It is by the elevator on the second floor. I read recently about someone who saw it and thought the museum was also the meeting site for a congregation. On the top, the sign said, “Evenings at 7 in the Parish Hall.” It listed these activities:
Monday                 Alcoholics Anonymous
Tuesday                 Abused Spouses
Wednesday            Eating Disorders
Thursday                Say No to Drugs
Friday                    Teen Suicide Watch
Saturday                 Soup Kitchen
“Wow, this congregation is really active in community issues!” she thought. Then she read the bottom of the sign: “Sunday Sermon 9 a.m. ‘America’s Joyful Future.’” It took her a moment to realize this was a piece of art, full of irony—like a preacher wearing a happy-face shirt when surrounded by people whose faces try not to show how much pain they are in.
Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann writes that religious practitioners often “become the good-humor men and women, for who among us does not want to rush in and smooth things out, to reassure, to cover the grief? In a hospital room we want to be cheery, and in a broken marriage we want to imagine it will be all right. We bring the lewd promise of immortality everywhere, which is not a promise but only a denial of what history brings and what we are indeed experiencing.” Such false cheeriness denies the reality of suffering and death around us and makes us numb.
Last month, I took my last Sunday of holiday time for this year and being creatures of habits and habitats that we like, we went to Quebec City for the weekend. We traveled by train which offers Chris a chance to knit and me to read and both of us to doze off. And it was both of us who were awakened when the train applied the brakes and came to a sudden stop shortly after we left Cornwall. Someone had been struck on the tracks. It appears the circumstances of someone’s life had brought her to the point where ending life in such a dramatic and violent fashion appeared to be a better choice than continuing that life.
We do not often talk in such terms in the church. Pastors are given advice by their professors, “Preach your beliefs and not your doubts.” “People come to church to be lifted up, not pressed down.” Yet we are also urged to preach “the whole counsel of God,” and Job is a part of the canon of Scripture, that which has been understood for centuries to be the Word of God to God’s people, where God’s will and purposes are revealed. Something is struggling to be communicated through the words of Job. A voice is begging to be heard. As difficult as it might be, we ought to listen, and I hope I can be our guide in doing that today.
It seems to me the first word to be heard from God in our text is that human suffering, unexplained and seemingly random, is a reality in this part of our human journey. It is important for us to acknowledge that. On that sunny and for us, lovely day in October, when Via Train #52 came to a sudden stop, an announcement from the Service Manager—they are not called conductors anymore—advised that while there was no danger to any of the passengers, the train had been involved in a serious incident and that we were waiting for authorities to arrive to investigate.
It’s fascinating to me how conversations then proceed. If I remember, Chris and I first simply exchanged glances that said we knew what that meant. I am a little ashamed to admit the first thing out of my mouth was to suggest there was no chance we were going to make our connection to the train in Montreal on which we were supposed to ride to Quebec. Then I helped bring a little calm to a Chinese couple in front of us who wondered if arrangements would be made to help those of us going on to Quebec. The next thing to happen, if I am remembering the sequence correctly, is that conversations either stopped or got very quiet. There was a point at which the ventilation system turned off briefly. There was hardly a sound to be heard. I wondered if most of us were caught up in our thoughts. I know I was, wondering what sort of desperation brings a person to such a decision. I confess with gratitude, it is not a desperation that I have ever known.
That would be true of most of us, I suspect. One of the results of such blessing in our lives is that we conclude those who experience such despair are just not trying hard enough or they are failing to look on the bright side. It’s sort of like the thing many of us do—and I count myself guilty—when trying to communicate with someone who doesn’t understand English, we raise our voices, or even shout, as if to say, if you listened more intently you would get it.
In this text, we are confronted as the faithful by the Word of God, which in telling us the story as it does gives credibility and affirmation to Job. This person has every right, says the text, to bare his soul and let his heart cry out.
As he cries out, it appears to me Job does something very particular. I admit this is a guess, I could be quite wrong, or I could just be reading into Job’s words something of my own desire to keep my existence under my control. You may remember reading in chapter one about Job’s family that his sons used to go and hold feasts in one another’s houses in turn; and they would send and invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them (Job 1:4). One preacher suggested these parties that were held in turn were, perhaps, birthday parties. If this is true, then this was a family that came together each in their turn to celebrate the anniversaries of each one’s birth.
It may also be, of course, these were religious festivals. But whatever is the case, we are told in chapter one these events were not haphazard. There was an order to them. On the fifteenth of this month, it was son #1. On the second of the next month it was son #6. The youngest son, who was the first in the family to have a laptop computer, put together a calendar every year featuring casual photos of individuals and the whole brood together along with a reminder of the celebration days for that year. Everyone appreciated the order and predictability of their lives.
I find it interesting, then, that when Job breaks his silence it is to say, “Let the day perish in which I was born, and the night that said, ‘A man-child is conceived.’” In other words, as Job tries to cope with the enormity of his losses and the despair that weighs down his soul, it seems to me that part of the grief he is dealing with concerns his loss of control. It is as if he is saying, “I no longer have my life figured out. The dates in my Blackberry are useless to me now. Whether my portfolio is headed up or down is irrelevant. I thought I had life figured out and it’s all come crashing down around my head.”
His despair threatens to consume him. He curses the day of his birth. Then he asks why he did not die as a newborn. Then he asks God why it is that he is still alive even after the disasters that have befallen him. “Why is light given to one in misery, and life to the bitter in soul, who long for death, but it does not come, and dig for it more than for hidden treasures; who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad when they find the grave?”
What do you say to a person in the depths of such despair? I’m not sure you say anything. To state the obvious Job was not aware of the prologue to this story—the heavenly council at which the adversary was looking for a way to test Job’s integrity. All Job knew were the losses he had suffered, both family and financial and that as chapter two ends he is sitting on the town ash heap using a piece of broken pottery to scrape the painful sores afflicting his body from head to toe.
Job does not look like the person he once was. When his friends arrive to bring him consolation and comfort, from a distance they did not recognize him. The story tells us these friends sat with Job for seven days and waited for him to break the silence. And then I believe we are intended to conclude, they made a mistake. They correctly waited for Job to break the silence; they wrongly concluded that once Job had spoken, he was hoping that they too would have something to say.
Next Sunday we are going to look in more detail at the conversation between Job and these friends, but I believe part of the message to us at the beginning of the book is to clearly see even those who think they are helping can offer harm, and those who think they are offering the comfort of heaven are doing little more than adding to the sense of despair. Listen to the first friend.
“If one ventures a word with you, will you be offended? But who can keep from speaking?
 See, you have instructed many; you have strengthened the weak hands.
Your words have supported those who were stumbling, and you have made firm the feeble knees.
But now it has come to you, and you are impatient; it touches you, and you are dismayed.
Is not your fear of God your confidence, and the integrity of your ways your hope?
Think now, who that was innocent ever perished?”
Doesn’t that one phrase tell just about everything you need to know and make you want to run as fast as you can in the opposite direction? Who can keep from speaking? In other words, thank you Job for breaking the silence, because I’ve got a sermon just itching to be told and you need to hear it. When someone is gripped with a despair that most of us cannot understand, I believe one of the first things they need are friends who will not abandon them and friends who will know enough to shut up and just listen to the hurt.
I always hesitate to paint all of you with the brush of my inclinations and failings, but I think many of us do wish for that sort of world where all is under control, neat, tidy, and on schedule. But that world doesn’t exist. The world that does exist is where suffering happens, where hurt appears to be beyond healing. Yet that is the world in which we find God at work. God is in charge. We need to find a way to believe it and to bring comfort to those who for now cannot believe.

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