Loving God, we come before you today and are aware of both the blessings and the suffering that are part of life in this world.  Help us to know the comfort and power of your presence at all times, and grant us the gifts of faith and peace, through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

    There is this scene in the first chapter of Job where the heavenly beings come to present themselves before God, and the satan (ha-satan), the accuser, is also there.  It is kind of like a heavenly council meeting, or perhaps a gathering of the angels.  God sees the satan there (the accuser), and starts bragging to him about Job.  “Have you [seen] my servant Job,” God says?  “There is no one like him on earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil” (Job 1:8).  And Satan says, “What do you expect?  You bless everything he does and have given him many possessions.  Why wouldn’t he worship you and bless you?  However, I’ll bet that if you were to take away all that he has, he would ‘curse you to your face’” (Job 1:11).  And God says, “No.  I don’t think so,” and takes the bet.

    I have to ask, does this sound like the God that you know?...  Does God do little experiments with people just to see if they will remain faithful?  Would God inflict suffering for no reason just to prove a point?...  This does not sound like the God I believe in, or like the God who has been revealed through Jesus Christ!  So how are we to understand what is going on in the book of Job?

    To begin with, it is important to understand that Job is far more like a parable than it is like any historical account.  It begins, “There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job” (1:1).  Nobody knows exactly where the land of Uz was, and no historical details are given that help us with time or place.  It reminds us of some other beginnings, like “there was once a father with two sons,” or “a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho.”

    It is a story that is told in order to raise and discuss some very important questions.  Some of these questions go something like this: Why do bad things happen to good people?  How do we respond when we encounter apparently senseless suffering?  Does God operate a reward and punishment system where good behaviour is rewarded and bad behaviour is punished?  Is tragedy always a punishment for sin?  And finally, do we love and revere God because of what we get out of the deal, or do we love and revere God because of who God is?

    This last question is actually asked by the accuser as he thinks about Job.  He is convinced that Job worships God because of the blessings that he receives.  He is also convinced that Job will curse God as soon as tragedy strikes.  However, there are two marvelous quotes from Job that we find in chapters 1 and 2.  “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21).  Job also asks in chapter 2, “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” (v. 10).  There is great wisdom in both of these verses!

    It seems painfully easy to forget that God is the source of all that we have and all that we are.  Were God to take away the breath of life, that would be it.  We would be done.  What Job is recognizing in these statements of faith is that all that we have belongs to God, and God has every right to take it back at any time.  However, we tend to get all twisted into a knot over ownership and view what we have as ours, and then we get mad at God over our losses.

    Actually, today is a good opportunity to ask ourselves the question as to why we worship God.  Do we revere God because of what we’re going to get out of the deal, or do we revere God because of who God is?  Do we worship God only when things are going well, or also during times of tragedy and loss?  Do we worship God only when we need something from God, or also when things are going well?

    I should clarify here that I’m not just talking about going to church, although that is an important part of worshiping God.  However, worshiping God also involves how we live our lives and how we make our decisions and what we do from day to day in order to grow in our relationship with God.  As well, if we’re going to talk about worshiping God because of who God is, it involves a recognition of how God has acted in love to create us and to redeem us and to make us holy through Jesus Christ.  As 1 John puts it, “We love because he first loved us” (4:19).

    1 John is also the letter that proclaims that “God is love” (4:16), and if you’re thinking that this seems to be a far cry from the way that God is portrayed in Job, you are quite right.  What we will discover over the next few weeks is that chapters 1 and 2 of Job are basically a set-up for the meditation on suffering that will follow.  Most of the book is a long conversation that involves Job and his three friends and God.  Some of it is profound poetry, and the book as a whole raises more questions than it answers.

    In ancient times, there was a common belief that if you were wealthy and had lots of children, it was because God was rewarding you for your faithfulness.  People also believed that if you were suffering, God was punishing you for your sins.  This belief was still evident in the first century when people brought a blind man to Jesus and asked him who had sinned, the man or his parents (Jn. 9)?  Jesus challenged this belief with his answer that this blindness was not a punishment for sin, and the book of Job also challenges this belief.

    Thus, the first part of Job is not a portrayal of what God is actually like, but sets the scene for the senseless and inexplicable suffering that follows.  At the same time, we are presented with an example of faith and righteousness that has a lot to teach us.  “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”  This is a relationship with God that is not based on what Job might get out of it, but a deep, abiding faith that recognizes that all things belong to God.

    May we, too, experience the gift of such deep, abiding faith, even as we now know that Jesus has entered into our suffering and walks with us both in good times and in bad.  Thanks be to God!  Amen.

Pentecost 7 (NL summer)                            Job 1:1-22
July 3, 2016
St. Luke’s Zion Lutheran Church
Pastor Lynne Hutchison

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