This is a jarring passage, to say the least.  It’s unsettling and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being unsettled given the state of our world, humanity, our lives, the lives of those we love the most.

Not long ago I talked about an answer to the question “How are you doing?” which I found honest.  “Living between sorrow and joy.”  If you can’t relate to that truth then one day you will.  This passage led me to consider another answer which might be equally true and equally universal.  “Living between hope and despair.”  It may be our own or that of those around us.  From chapters 4 through to 31, Job will be in conversation with his 3 friends, and we may describe him as living between hope and despair.  No matter where we are on the joy/sorrow or hope/despair continuum, I found that thinking about a particular question helped me while I was sitting with this chapter and all of Job’s cursing the day he was born and the night of his conception and asking why.  Here it is with a nod to George Benson and Whitney Houston:

What is the greatest gift of all?  Keep this question in mind as we go.  We need help so let’s ask God for it.

They say silence is golden.  Last week we talked about sitting in silence.  Silence in the face of suffering is often a really good thing.  “They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word, for they saw that his suffering was very great.” (2:13)

Of course, as another wisdom book tells us, there is a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.  We’re about to get into the speaking part of the book of Job.  Three speech cycles between Job and his friends that go from chapter 3 to chapter 27.  Starting with this cry of despair from Job that must be answered, as Eliphaz will say as he starts to speak in chapter 4, “Who can keep from speaking?”

This is an answer to the cry of a grieving heart.  Sometimes we hardly know what we’re saying in grief.  He can’t be gone.  She can’t be gone.  It doesn’t seem real.  We cry out impossibilities.  We cry them out or we hold them inside ourselves.   How can it be?  I just saw her this morning.  Questions that are impossible to answer.  Impossibilities that we long for.  If I could only speak to them one more time. 

If things are bad enough, death would be preferable to this suffering.  If things are bad enough, life or death, it hardly even seems to matter. 

If things are bad enough – I wish I had never been born.  These are not just words that are fired off by an angry teenager as in “I wish you had never had me!”  Although those words can come at a time of life in which we first start to learn about suffering and loss. These are something else.  Remember what’s happened to Job.  His possessions destroyed by wind and fire or stolen.  His children are gone.  The normal course of things destroyed.  He has been thrown. 

Here in chapter three, Job speaks in a soliloquy.  He’s not talking to his friends.  He’s not talking to God directly.  Job is not cursing God, so the question of will he or won’t he curse God remains open.  This soliloquy is a prelude and impetus for the conversation that is about to happen between Job and his friends. This conversation is not going to answer questions of “Why suffering?”   The speeches are going to pose some responses to suffering, and it will be up to us to judge what is good and right and fitting and proper response.  Over everything stands the question with which we began and with which we continue.  We are invited to answer the question with our lives – “Is God worthy of our worship/love/adoration/trust/devotion no matter our circumstances?”  As Job’s wife put it in the middle of so much intense grief – “Do you still persist in your integrity?”  Do we?

Job’s first response is a cry of despair.  Events have gone against the natural order of things – and it’s never in the natural order of things for a child to predecease his or her parent is it?  Job is suffering physically.  He is in spiritual and physical anguish.  If Hamlet’s question is “To be or not to be?” Job’s question goes deeper even that that “To have been or to never have been?” 

Let the day perish in which I was born, and the night that said “A man-child is conceived.”  Let that day be darkness!  May God above not seek it, or light shine on it… Let it not rejoice among the days of the year….

Let that day be darkness.  Let the day I was born be darkness!   This is serious.  We rejoice to mark the day we're born, and you’ll be happy to hear that there is a good theological foundation for this.  There are theological reasons for celebrating birthdays.  They are a celebration of light and life.  Someone has described the day of one’s birth like this – “…that day through which, as through an umbilical cord one receives all the goodness of creation and of its creator, that day the remembrance and celebration of which renews one’s participation in the positive powers of the world order and its divine orderer...” And I thought it was just about cake and presents and your favourite meal and so on!  It’s about celebrating your participation in the world through our God who so wondrously reigns over all!

In his despair, Job is turning away from the created order.  We can’t read these first few verses of chapter 3 without thinking of the first few verses of Genesis 1.  God spoke and said let there be light and there was light and God saw that it was good. Job speaks and longs for darkness.  Let the stars of its dawn be dark; let it hope for light, but have none.

This is not just Job being melodramatic.  He may be a larger-than-life figure but we are still talking about life.  This is Job being real.   This is Job being searingly honest.  Job is famously known as patient but here we see him bitter and broken.  God can handle our bitterness and brokenness and we should be able to handle each other’s bitterness and brokenness.  The Bible recognizes anguish and we needn’t be shocked by it and try to hide it.  All of us have been, are or will be acquainted with sorrow and anguish.  Reading for these weeks in Job, I came across the story of a woman Kelly Lemon Vizcaino.  Kelly was in a car wreck at 12.  It happened during a family road trip when her brother fell asleep at the wheel.  In an interview, she is asked if, during her recovery, she ever wished she were dead.  This is her answer:

“As I look back years ago, it is sad to say there was a time in my life that I prayed out to the Lord to take my life.  I remember it vividly because it was immediately after my thirteen-hour nerve transplant in September of 2000.  I woke up in more excruciating pain than I had ever experienced at the young age of twelve.  My legs were burning, since they removed the long nerve that runs underneath your knee to your ankle, in both legs… Then my neck was in so much pain, since they took out nerve from the spinal cord, causing my left arm to go numb for four months, and the nerve graft was threaded through my chest and into my armpit.  At the time it was the most pain I had ever experienced, and on top of that, I had horrible phantom pains due to the trauma and stress of surgery.  I remember lying down in the hospital bed, crying in pain, and praying, ‘Lord, why did you save my life in the car accident so that you would allow me to suffer to such a great degree?  Lord, please take me home to be with you.  Please allow me to sleep and wake up in your presence.’”  She goes on – “Over time some of the pain subsided.  The Lord gave me peace in my heart and assurance that he had plans for me.  I heard the Lord saying, ‘I didn’t miraculously save you from that accident, only to take you home a couple of months later.  I want to use this trial, and I want to use you… but you need to trust me.’”  So I began trying to think of life on a day-to-day basis, trying to seek him for the strength to endure.”

Job is enduring and he doesn’t remain in solitary despair.  He has not retreated into himself, even in his despair.  Even here Job is looking for something beyond himself.  We said last week that the question Job’s wife asks leads to a deeper search within Job (and within each of us when the possibility of rejecting God is put before us).  In going on, in persisting, and in asking the question “Why?” Job is being taken beyond himself.  The questions are dire – “Why did I not die at birth, come forth from the womb and expire? Why were there knees to receive me, or breasts for me to suck?”  “Or why was I not buried like a stillborn child, like an infant that never sees the light?” but they are a reflection of the questions people have in the depths of pain and despair.  They’re also a reflection of the good that Job has known in his life.  I have known knees to receive me and breasts at which I was nourished.  I have known light and life.

In asking the question, Job is asking whether a new integrity, a new uprightness may be found.  It is one thing to trust in a God from whom we have received only good things.  Parents to love and care for us.  Health.  Unbroken relationships.  It is another thing to trust in God when we are questioning why things are happening.  Job’s response here at first is a total turning away from God and a trust in God’s created order.  This always remains a possibility and this is why we are encouraged to dwell on the question which we are saying is the basis of this book – is God worthy of our love and our trust no matter what circumstances we are in?

Someone has said there are different levels of consciousness we have.  The first is one that doesn’t really require a lot of thought or critical reflection.  One in which we’re busy with a task at work, or if we’re at ease, aware of the sounds of birds chirping or children playing or the feel of sunlight on our face.  The second is when we become aware of an absence of something.  Everyone else has left the room. The sounds of children have stopped.  Clouds have blocked out the sun. We have lost something.

And often you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone, as experience has borne out.

The question is always how do we live in that?  The story of Job suggests a third level of consciousness, which is that of imagination.   The consciousness that asks “What might be?”  The consciousness of faith.  The assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.  The consciousness that asks “What might be?” rooted and grounded in the truth that the unknown god has been made known to us in the person of Christ Jesus.

I asked the question at the beginning of this sermon – “What is the greatest gift of all?”  What is the greatest gift of all, the gift that underlies all other gifts?  What is the greatest gift of all if not life?  What is life?  We remember those words from John.  “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.”  The most precious Word of Life.  What is life lived the way in which God created us to live it?  We remember those words of Jesus in John as he prayed to his Father above – “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”

Perhaps a good “Why?” question we might ask of God is “Why did you give me this gift of life?”

Job is going to start hearing from and replying to his friends in the next section.  We’re going to come back to it in two weeks and continue on.  Job is enduring and his faith has been stirred up, which is perhaps another answer we should strive for when asked how we’re doing.  I’m living between the joys and the sorrows.  I’m living between hope and despair.  But my faith is being stirred up!  This stirring is going to lead Job to places like this:

“Oh, that you would hide me in Sheol, that you would conceal me until your wrath is past, that you would appoint me a set time and remember me…For then you would not number my steps, you would not keep watch over my sin, my transgression would be sealed up in a bag, and you would cover my iniquity.”  14:12, 16-17

“Even now, in fact my witness is in heaven, and he that vouches for me is on high.” 16:19

“O that my words were written down!  O that they were inscribed in a book!  O that with an iron pen and lead they were engraved on a rock forever!  For I know that my Redeemer lives and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side...” 19:23-27a

Job’s words were written down and they’re a gift thousands of years later..  A Redeemer would come to seal transgressions in a bag – in a shroud in fact.  Even now our witness is in heaven and vouches for us from on high – the royal throne room.  We who are in Christ can say with assurance that our Redeemer lives and that at the last he will stand upon the earth and that at the last we shall see God in new bodies.

“Why were we given the gift of life?”  That we might each day take up the invitation to follow the one who is life and light.  May God help us to endure and persist in this great faith, no matter our circumstances.  May these things be true for all of us.

Amen