The story of Job would make a great stage production. If you’ve ever seen or read Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting For Godot” you know that Godot never shows up.  It’s an absurdist kind of view of life that Becket presents.  The two main characters, Vladimir and Estragon just keep on waiting.  Nothing matters.  There is no purpose to anything.

Not so here.  In the book of Job, God shows up.  The way we feel about God is going to determine the way we feel about the way that God shows up here.  George Bernard Shaw said this – “If I complain that I am suffering unjustly, it is no answer to say, ‘Can you make a hippopotamus?’”  (Some people think the reference to the Behemoth in ch 40 is about a hippo) This passage has been interpreted in as many ways as people see God.  We may come to this passage and find it a little disappointing.  We were expecting answers to certain questions about suffering!  We come to it confessionally.  We come to it, in other words, bringing what we believe about God.  Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zappfe describes God’s appearance and words like this: “(Job) finds himself confronted with a ruler of grotesque primitiveness, a cosmic cave-dweller, a braggart and blusterer… What is new for Job is not God’s greatness in quantifiable terms; that he knew fully in advance… What is new is the qualitative baseness.”

To which I would say this: The God revealed in scripture, the God revealed in the person of Christ, the God revealed in the person of the Holy Spirit – God With Us – is neither a braggart nor a blusterer nor base.  Of this I am sure.

Two things of which we can be sure – one is that God’s speaking will not support “conventional wisdom” – we’ve already seen that in the speeches of Job’s friends and Elihu.  The second is that when all is said and done, we will have a place to stand.

Where do we stand as we read God’s words?  “Where do we stand?”  is really the existential question of our lives.  On what or whom do we stand?  For the follower of Christ – “Do you still persist in your love and adoration and attention and praise and trust in God, no matter what is going on?”

On what or whom do we stand?  What we believe will colour how we see chapters 38 to 41 of Job’s story.  But we still need a place to stand.  Let’s ask for God’s help as we seek a place to stand together.

I have always been a fan of and often a customer of Italian barbers.  I have appreciated the wisdom and advice I’ve picked up from a very young age listening in barber shops.  Some years ago my barber was Joe, near where I worked at Bay and Wellesley.  On one visit Joe was gone but his partner was taking care of things.  I found out from Joe’s partner that Joe’s wife, who had been living at Villa Colombo nursing home, had died.  The next visit Joe was back.  “Joe I was so sorry to hear about your wife,” I told him.  His reply was “What are you going to do? You keep going.”  I nodded mutely.  At the time I took this as a manifestation of a kind of stoicism that goes back to Roman times.  One must control one’s response to situations in life with courage and temperance. This is what I like to think about in barber shops.  I’ve since come to think that this kind of question is an actual question.  What are you going to do?  What are you doing to do in the face of loss?  What are you going to do in the face of the loss of a spouse – known as the hardest loss one can endure?

We’ve spoken from the beginning of this series about the power of rhetorical questions.  Questions that can lead us into a deeper understanding of God, ourselves, the world.  We’ve said that the question that has underlined the whole story is “Is God worthy of our love and adoration and praise and trust no matter what our circumstances?”  To expect God to answer questions about why the innocent suffer or where the justice is in innocent suffering is to do the text a disservice.  It’s also, I believe, to do God a disservice.

It doesn’t mean we don’t have questions or doubts.  Of course not.  Often we think we come to church or a person of faith or a religious professional to have our questions answered.  Equally and possibly more important are the questions that are asked of us.  It’s a famous rabbinical teaching technique.  Jesus did it all the time.  The teacher does not so much give you the answers as ask the right questions so that you may answer them.

What we have here is God asking Job questions.  I do not read this as God bragging or asking questions that Job will find impossible to answer.  “Where were you when I…” not in the sense that we might say to someone “If you think you could have done a better job than be my guest!”  I don’t believe that Jesus asked his followers “Are you able to drink the cup that I am going to drink?” in order to brag and show off and say “Hey I’m the Son of God! I’m the only one who can do this!  Do you think you can stand in for me or something?  Outta my way!”

I don’t think Jesus was asking that to brag and I don’t think God is bragging here.  God is asking questions in order to bring Job and us to a deeper understanding of three questions – Who are you?  Where were you?  Are you able?

The thing about this situation that Job finds himself in here is the same about the situation that we tend to find ourselves in when we face suffering.  We find ourselves at the limit of our own abilities and know-how.  We find ourselves unable to extricate ourselves from a dire situation.  We go from sunshine to something else and God speaks to us.  God speaks to us in silence yes.  God spoke to Elijah not in the wind and not in the earthquake and not in the fire, but in the stillness.  Here God speaks from the storm.

This is what God does in the middle of the storm.  We are not left alone. God speaks.  The one on whom we have been waiting, speaks.

When sunny days become a whirlwind, it tends to focus things.  Matters tend to get distilled to their essence.  We’ve been talking about this since the beginning of June.  Getting to the essence of things.  When we are confronted with a whirlwind – our own finitude, our own mortality – it tends to take us to the essence of things.  I was in a dental office not long ago considering my own mortality (because this is what I like to do at the dentist).  They took me to another room to do a 3D scan of my whole mouth/jaw area.  When the scan was over and I was back in the dental chair, the screen on my left showed the image along with a skull in the upper right-hand corner.  I thought it was my own skull!  I thought “Well isn’t that way to be confronted by your own mortality.”  I turned out it was a generic skull in the end anyway, but the point was made.

There’s a story I want to share which shows the kind of thing I’m talking about.  It’s long but I think worthwhile.  It’s from a book called The Inward Morning by a US philosopher called Henry Bugbee.  Nice summertime story:  “It was in the summertime, at a summer resort, along the North Fork of the Trinity River in California, on a day, like so many summer days of bright sun streaming through the tops of pines.  Most of the length and breadth of that long, smooth, flowing pool lay translucently exposed to the bouldered bottom.  Children played on the sandy shores or splashed along the fringes of the pool.  The air was of ambient fragrance of pines, reassuring warmth and stillness, refreshing coolness of moving water…

There came a cry for help, seconded with a cry of fright, and I turned toward the tail of the pool just in time to see a young man desperately, failingly, clinging to a great log which had been chained as a boom across the lower end (to raise the water level in the pool).  No one could reach him in time. An enormous suction from under the log had a firm hold of the greater part of his body and drew him… under.  He bobbed to the surface of the first great wave of the rapid below, but there was no swimming or gaining the bottom to stay what seemed an impending execution on the rocks…some hundred yards down. But it chanced that the river was abnormally high, and as it carried this helpless man doomward it swept him just for a moment under the extremity of a willow which arched far out from the bank… With a wild clutch, the young man seized a gathering of the … branches and held.  Everything held… He had barely the strength and the breath to claw himself up the muddy slope onto firmament.

I had run across the log and arrived on the opposite side below the willow, where he now paused, panting and on all fours, unable to rise.  Slowly he raised his head and we looked into each other’s eyes. I lifted out both hands and helped him to his feet.  Not a word passed between us. As nearly as I can relive the matter, the compassion that I felt with this man gave way into awe and respect for what I witnessed in him.  He seemed absolutely clean.  In that steady gaze of his, I met reality point blank, filtered and distilled as the purity of a man.”

Meeting reality point blank.  Getting to the essence of everything.  No words passed between them. Is it any wonder that Job tells God here “I lay my hand on my mouth.” 40:4  He has gone back to silence in the face of the whirlwind.  The river you see doesn’t care about the morality of its actions.  The river has no time for moral philosophy. When you’re swept up in the river it is not the time for endless arguments about cause and effect and theodicy and how can a just God be righteous or why does this happen or that not happen or of us putting our own ideas about suffering and justice on God in our great wisdom.

It's time for questions and the questions are asked of us.

Questions like those that are laid out here.  Questions that are there to lead us into a deeper relationship with God.  Not belittling at all but affirming.  Who are you?  “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” asks God.  Who am I?  It’s the same question that Moses asked himself about himself when he met Yahweh at the bush that burned but was not consumed.  “Who am I that I should go to Pharoah and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”  It’s not just about modesty.  Who am I?  Who are you?  We’re talking about the essence here.  It’s the same question that the Psalmist asked in a broader sense – “What is humanity that you are mindful of them?”  God’s talk of creation points to the answer!  I am a creation of the living God who made me in His image! “ Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” asks God.  Not in the sense of “I didn’t see you doing this or helping me!' or 'Who do you think you are?' but in the sense of “Do we know the answer to this question?”  Where were you?  Where was I?  I was chosen by God “…in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love, destined for adoption as his child through Jesus Christ according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, that he freely bestowed upon us in the Beloved.” (Eph 1:4-6)

That’s who I am!  That’s where I was.  “Gird up your loins,” says God.  Get ready.  Get ready for action, for movement.  Get ready to give an answer.  Lace your boots up and get ready to stand like a man or woman or child who has been created by God.  Pray to God to help you to live into this identity because that is who we were created to be!  Let us remember who we are and let us remember who God is.  Let us sing praise to God just like the morning stars that sang together and the heavenly beings who shouted for joy. (38:7)  Let us join them in praising our loving God who is over all and through all and in all and who both restrains and sustains – “Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb – when I made the clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band., and prescribed bars for it, and set bars and doors and said ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped’.”  God made it, God restrains it and God sustains it.

Isn’t that wonderful?  I like to say I have a healthy respect for the power of the sea and I don’t even have any experience of it!  There are things more powerful than we are but not more powerful than God.  “My God is so big, so strong and so mighty, there’s nothing my God cannot do,” we sang as children.  It seems we are made to recognize powers beyond ours.  When we’re children it’s often our parents that we think of as invincible.  Life sadly disabuses us of that notion.  We have notions though, of care and justice and rightness because we are created in God’s image.  We are also created, of course, and it does not do to place our own preconceived notions of such things on God.  This is a call to trust.  To trust God who looks after the mountain goats and the deer as they have their fauns (and how does that even happen out there in the wild but you know God and you look after them) and to trust in God who looks after the wild donkey so far away from the tumult of the city (and how are those wild donkeys even ok?)  and gives it the steppe for a home and who…

Clothes the lilies of the field in splendour.  And who is aware even of the sparrow falling.

Are you willing to trust this creating, nurturing, sustaining God?  This God who came among us and talked about the lilies and the sparrows.  This God whose eye is on even the little sparrow and whose limits mean that injustice will not rule the day. This God who will one day make all things right in the justice of God. Are you able to trust this God?

This is our invitation.  The last question we’ll talk about this morning.  Are you able?  Are you able to trust in God who doesn’t provide easy answers and sometimes doesn’t provide any answer?  God has provided us with a willow branch to grasp onto.   A prophet once told of a shoot that would come from the stump of Jesse.  Not so much a branch but an arm with an open hand, held out to us, to which we could cling and that would cling to us and draw us up out of the torrent and onto solid ground.    A place to stand.  A foundation.

Christ Jesus.   A foundation who asks his followers who wonder about greatness and who will be considered great in his kingdom – “Are you able to drink the cup?”  Not in a way that suggests bragging or belittling, but an actual choice that is laid before us.

Are you able?  To drink this cup is to recognize that while suffering cannot be explained, we are led by a suffering Saviour who brings life even from death.  To recognize that the way of God, the way of greatness is the way of self-giving love.  Are you able to be led by such a Saviour?

Who are you?  A beloved child of God.  May God help us to recognize this and live into this.  Where were you?  Chosen by God from the foundations of the world to be holy and blameless not in ourselves, but before him in love, adopted as His children.  May God help us to accept our royal identity in Christ.  Are you able?   God grant that for each and every one of us, the answer might be a grateful and loving “Yes.”  May this be true for us all. Amen