So where is God when you need Him?

A talk given at Clementswood Baptist Church on Sunday 11 October 2015

If you’re one of those Christians who never has a doubt; has never wondered why their prayers just seem to hit the ceiling and bounce back; if your faith never feels challenged or you have a swift and spiritual solution to all of life’s brickbats, then today’s sermon is not for you.  Please just sit quietly – maybe read a few more chapters in your Bible.  Or you might pray quietly for the poor doubters, the strugglers with their faith or (as I usually call them) the ordinary Christians just like me.  I promise I won’t keep you for very long before we go for our tea and cake.

Why are we dipping in to Job this morning?

Well unless I am invited to speak on other topics or passages I usually preach from the lectionary:  the collection of Bible readings offered Sunday by Sunday. It means that many, many churches around the world will today be thinking about Job (if, that is, their preachers have not chosen the alternate passages in Mark 10 or Hebrews 4.) I fancy that most preachers will have ducked this passage – I cannot remember preaching on it before nor hearing another sermon.

The story of Job is one of the oldest we find in our Bibles. Job is a good guy who God allows to be tested to see how long he will go on trusting in in God, in spite of financial loss, the sudden death of loved ones, physical and emotional pain and finally depression. And, as if that wasn’t enough, Job has some so-called friends who turn up with the kind of cheery, uplifting spiritual comfort that makes you grit your teeth and reach for good, heavy, cast-iron skillet to whack them with.  Chapter 23 begins as a response by Job to advice from one of these friends.

This morning, I would like to draw our attention to 3 things.

1.      Oh if only

The hymn that we sung just now has an interesting verse 2: “From the fears that long have bound us, free our hearts to faith and praise.”

Job complains that while he suffers God is nowhere to be found, seen or heard. One of the complementary readings in the lectionary for today is in Psalm 22, which begins:

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
    Why are you so far from saving me,
    so far from my cries of anguish?
  My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
    by night, but I find no rest."

These words, of course, have a particular resonance for us when we remember the crucifixion. 

If only things were different!   If only I didn’t have to struggle with the challenges I face.  With the pain or the loneliness or the lack of money or the bleakness. If only God was here. 

Note that Job has not lost faith in God (v6-7).

Have you had the experience of wondering where God has got to?  I have, many times.  It does not mean a loss of faith but a missing of the sense of God present with you. We pray and we try to do all the right things (as Job says he does here).  But if only God might show up now and again…

2.  Then, secondly, Job’s gloom continues in v8-12 as he says:

“But if I go to the east, he is not there;
    if I go to the west, I do not find him.
9 When he is at work in the north, I do not see him;
    when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him.

The poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, wrote this line in one of his poems:  “I greet Him the days I meet Him and bless when I understand.”  It suggests that we only might only encounter God from time to time.  From time to time we may catch a distant glimpse of God in passing as we go about our daily lives.  Hopkins was a priest so he understood the journey of faith.  And he wrote those words in a poem about a terrible tragedy:  the death by drowning of some Christians when their boat sank in a snowstorm in the North Sea. In other words, the kind of situation where we might hope that God would show up.

Yet, once again, Job tempers the felt reality of his troubles with a bold declaration of faith in the God who he cannot see or hear [v10]

But he knows the way that I take;
    when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold.

This man takes some comfort in knowing that, even though he cannot discern the presence of God, he is convinced that God is watching over him:  all-seeing and all-knowing.

Sometimes, when God feel at arm’s length or even further away – we too can carry on, trusting that we are known and loved by the ever-watchful God.

Verses 11 and 12 tend to suggest that Job is rather keen on protesting his uprightness of living, as something therefore deserving of God’s love in return.  We see this quite often in the OT – a righteous life undertaken as a contract with God.  I live your way; you bless me with material possessions and keep the bad guys off my back.  Some Christians believe this today, though I find that this view is somewhat adjusted by the teaching and example of Jesus in the NT.

Yet we may still draw comfort from some of the great promises of the Bible. When dark times strike us and God seems distant, we lean on what God has said to people in the past as a sign that He is faithful despite the circumstances.

3.  Finally, we come to the heart of the matter – a theme that we find repeated again and again in the story of Job [v13]:

“But he stands alone, and who can oppose him?
    He does whatever he pleases.

Which does not mean that God is capricious or arbitrary.  It is simply that when we try to condense God, His motives and actions in to something that we can readily grasp or understand or even manage, our arms are too short, our eyes are too weak to see and our mind and understanding are too small to comprehend. That’s why Job says:

“That is why I am terrified before him”

This speaks not of cringing fearfully before a dictator or monster but that, suddenly, we glimpse that God is immeasurably bigger, higher and deeper than the simple, cardboard figure that we so often try and reduce him to be. We can say with the singer songwriter, Paul Simon:

“And God only knows and God makes His plans; the information is unavailable to the mortal man.”

At the end of this chapter, we are reminded again that the life that we love is so often clouded with darkness.  We are in the dark.  We are in the dark about why bad things happen to good people. We are in the dark why God just seems to clear-off and leave us on our own to face life’s challenges.  Life has its share of shadows and there are times when the shadows lengthen into thick darkness.

By the very end of Job’s story he is left simply having to let God be God. He says:

           “I know that you can do all things;

    no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
3 You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’
    Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
    things too wonderful for me to know.

4 “You said, ‘Listen now, and I will speak;
    I will question you,
    and you shall answer me.’
5 My ears had heard of you
    but now my eyes have seen you.
6 Therefore I humble myself
    and repent in dust and ashes.”

Here at Clementswood you live among neighbours who use the phrase “Insha’Allah” many times a day – the Muslim Arabic for ‘if God’s wills it.’  A meek acceptance that whatever happens is God’s will. Fate, if you like.

Well that isn’t the message of the story of Job. God doesn’t send misfortunes. God doesn’t cause cancer or arthritis, although (and I say this reverently) I do think that He might let on why He doesn’t step in more often to prevent bad things happening.

In this broken world, there is much pain as well as some joy. Not everyone gets to live happily ever after. It is not helped when Christians fixate on permanent ‘bliss.’  Sometimes it is right to ask why or, with a sigh, exclaim “If only.”

We may blunder around seeking answers or trying to impress God with the quality of our upright living.

Perhaps we are sometimes left silent with nothing to answer to the enormity of God.

Are you struggling with the absence of God this morning?  You know He is there but it would be super if He gave you just a hint that that He was around.

Have you tried so hard to live a ‘good’ life? You are not one of life’s major rule-breakers. Yet, instead of being rewarded, you seem to have been deserted?

Well the message for you today is one that countless saints of God have experienced these things.  It is often part of the journey of faith. To you I say this. There is a God of love. Job believed it; I believe it and you can believe it. I do not know why sometimes He is not more apparent.  But the story of Job – thousands of years old – resonates with us and comforts us today. For us, the journey of faith is one of acting even though we do not see; continuing faithfully when all human emotion tells us to pack it in. We trust in the God of Job. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  The God of Moses.  Every one of these giants of faith faced, like us, the apparent absence of God. And yet they carried on trusting that one day, like Job, their distant hearing about God would be replaced once again by clarity and presence. 

Unlike all of these, of course, we have benefit of knowing of Jesus Christ.  As His followers, we have the edge on poor Job.  His relationship with God was based on rightful living alone – keeping the rules and then expecting God to keep His side of the bargain.  That way never works.  It cannot work.  And that is why Christ died.

In Christ, we are invited simply to follow, with trust, though we may not see the path ahead at all clearly. Because He has been through the darkness for us and is with us there all through it. 

An open letter to a friend

People have asked me about you in the last fortnight, mentioning that your name doesn’t crop up in conversation as it used to. But it’s hard to explain what has happened.

When we met a while back, after something of a gap, it was a meeting born not of business but of friendship. I wanted to find out how you were. This was not so surprising, I guess, as we enjoy many shared experiences, values and hopes.  The difference in age – which might have been significant when we were younger – is negligible now.  Unexpectedly (for me at least), from that reunion arose an opportunity for us to collaborate in a dream that mattered to us both and I am grateful for this.

Well, we stole some horses, as they say.  We hustled a little.  Perhaps we changed a few minds, where minds were open to the possibility of change, though (Goodness knows!) few are. From time to time we got to ask why the emperor was so scantily-clad. We dared to speak a little truth to minor ‘Power.’

It was fun!  And if our stumbling efforts may have occasionally served a higher purpose, the fun was no less important. But what has become of the friendship which was our first aim?  And how quickly we drop off someone’s priority list for returned calls.

There are too few good friends in the world. As I have blogged before friendship, once affirmed, is too precious to allow simply to wither through neglect.

Last of the summer reading

Just back from a quiet(ish) week away in Norfolk with some easy day-visits to historic sites, local beer and plenty of time to catch up with reading. I thought I’d share the highlights of my late summer reading with you.

At the suggestion of my good friend, Chris Winfield, I read What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael Sandel. I am glad I did, although it made for several audible sighs of incredulity.

A professor at Harvard University, Sandel analyses the impact of the free market on our lives. He builds up an impressive series of examples to suggest that unregulated markets inevitably tend to turn as much as possible into commodities. This leads to a kind of corruption which destroys some of the key values that makes us most human.  Here are described so many choices that money can buy, potentially rendering the democratic process, health, life and death and the most intimate of human activities subject to who pays the most. For the most extreme of free-marketeers, this is not only an acceptable situation but a desirable one.

This book appeals because of its anecdotal approach. The reader stands amazed at the kind of things which it is possible to buy and left with questions about how much of innate human value is being corrupted, seemingly without challenge. A worrying, persuasive and necessary read. 

The second of my top of this summer’s reading list is The Establishment: And how they get away with it by Owen Jones.  

The premise is this: our democracy is a façade behind which there is a powerful but unaccountable network of people who control and steer society to meet their ends. They hold the power and receive most of the rewards.  We journey with Jones through global boardrooms, Westminster, public schools, the news moguls and the City.  The author contends that there are well developed links between all these interests – The Establishment – that represent a clear and present danger to our democracy.  Indeed they use democracy as a shield to conceal their activities.

This is another highly accessible book, despite its length (it would have been just as persuasive at half the number of pages).  One of my early questions was to ask myself if this was going to end up as an entertaining set of conspiracy theories. But those who like to see conspiracies everywhere always overstate their case. Jones is a skillful writer who sets out his stall and then leaves the reader to join the dots: an approach which, in this case, successfully engages the reader.

This is another sobering read.  For myself, I found that there were simply too many instances highlighted by the author to dismiss as coincidence. I am not a fully-paid up convert to his convictions about the Establishment as he portrays it.  There are some rather old and threadbare arguments from the bogeyman collection of the Left brought out yet again.  But it seems to me that there is enough of a case to require some answers.

I also read Owen Jones’ Chavs: the demonization of the working class.  Once again, it makes some telling and worthy points but it could have done this much more succinctly. 

The living is easy?

In the last couple of weeks, we have had the usual mix of weather that goes to make up an English summer. Some days have seen blazing hot sunshine. On others, a whole lot of rain has fallen in a single day.
 
Wimbledon is now past for another year and the Ashes won back from some kind of scratch team from the southern hemisphere.

Days are full of the familiar summer scents of newly-mown grass and barbecue smoke. The jingle of the ice-cream van is heard on every street corner and which of us cannot remember the excitement we felt as school children in those long, lazy days of summer? In summertime, the living really does seem easy.

Yet, day by day, I meet people who – despite the glorious summer sunshine – face real pressures in their lives. Illness, bereavement, relationship issues, rises in the cost of living, sanctions and the bedroom tax. For those in jobs, there are long hours and ever-increasing demands by their employers.

If we carry a picture in our minds that the life that God invites us to lead is only made up of sunshine and roses, the chances are that our faith will be dented by hard times. Yet Jesus warned his followers that they should expect troubles; they should not think that they are protected from all the hardships of life. The bible asks (and then answers!) an interesting question:

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship….No! In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”  

The writer goes on to say that in all creation there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God found in Jesus. Because of him, we can know that God loves us. Knowing this, we can face – with renewed hope - all that life may throw at us.

So, whether right now the sun is shining for you or the days seem dark, live today in the knowledge that God loves you. That before anyone had first thought of you or spoken your name, you were loved and always will be. 

And, if you get the chance, reach out and show that kind of love and acceptance to someone who is facing darker days.

Anyone for S&M?

The letter arrived on Thursday morning last week.  It was from Scottish Widows plc.

As I am neither Scottish, female or bereaved, you may wonder why. 

Well my pension savings are held by Scottish Widows plc.  They had written to inform me that Scottish Widows plc, along with Scottish Widows Unit Funds Limited and Scottish Widows Annuities Limited would be simplifying their business by transferring all their assets to Clerical Medical Investment Group Limited.

When this is done, they propose to change the name of Clerical Medical investment Group Limited to (wait for it…..) Scottish Widows Limited.

Twenty years ago, I worked on a large capital library building and refurbishment programme.  One of the options we had for fitting out new libraries with shelving was to buy them from a specialist firm called Terrapin Reska Ltd.  Well the years have flown by.  Imagine my surprise when investigating shelving again recently I found that Terrapin Reska Ltd had become (wait for it…) Reska Terrapin Ltd.  But it didn’t stop there.  No sir. A mere transposition of names wasn’t enough.  Now the firm seems to operate as Reska Products Ltd. Do we dare ask what became of the terrapin?

Here's another one. Monty Python’s production company is named Python (Monty) Pictures Ltd.

So here’s a thought for a Monday lunchtime in the silly season. What if Marks & Spencer became Spencer & Marks?  Shortening that to S&M might do wonders for sales among their target market of the beige-clad, free-range elderly.