18th Sunday after Pentecost
Job 1:1-5, 2:1-10
Look Up!
By Leslie Kennard
Job. We are all pretty familiar with Job. At least, I thought I was. But as I studied this morning’s scripture, I
realized I had envisioned a one dimensional man. A stoic man whose life is filled with
suffering and who suffers silently and with great patience. But Job is more–much more–than this. Job is a whole, fully alive human being. He can dance like a flame and cry like a
baby. He’s been in love, and there are
certainly people he would just as soon not have to deal with. He has a hobby and a temper. He has a lot of opinions. And, of course, he is a man of immense
faith. But Job’s faith–which is included
in the Hebrew wisdom literature as an example of what our own faith
could be–Job’s faith only connects with us when we connect with
Job as someone very like ourselves.
We
don’t have any information on his youth. We are introduced to Job early in his
life as a married man. We are told he
has 10 children. Oy vey!! Can you
imagine 10 children?! When his first
child was born, the camera was always winking and blinking. Job and his wife took pictures as if there
were going to be a world wide film shortage starting tomorrow. (They didn’t have digital in those
days....)When the second child was born, you could see him in each of the
family shots taken at dinner on Passover.
By the time the third one came, the camera was lost somewhere, but who
has time for pictures with three toddlers running around? And remember, Pampers and formula hadn’t been
invented yet.
When
someone handed Job his first son, brand new and pink with a mop of black hair,
swaddled into a tight little bundle, tears came into his eyes; gently, ever so
tenderly, he laid his big man’s hand on the tiny newborn head, and said the
first words he would say to each of his children at birth:
“The Lord
bless you and keep you;
The Lord
make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you;
The
Lord lift up his countenance upon
you, and give you peace.” (Numbers 6:24-26)
We know that blessing–those words
are part of our sacrament of baptism.
As
a new father, Job took very seriously the commandment of God from Deuteronomy
(6:4 ff):
“...You shall love the lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and
with all your might,” (We know these words, too–They are the Great
Commandment.) But here is the rest of the verse from Deuteronomy, and Job took
these words as seriously as the Great Commandment. “And these words...shall be
upon your heart, and you shall teach them diligently to your children, talking
about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and
when you rise.” Even before the first baby came along, Job was planning how he
would bring life to God’s commandment. So right from the beginning, he read to
the babies from their illustrated Bible.
There were no i-pods or DVDs or cell phones, so Job’s stories from the
Bible were entertainment that the children eagerly awaited. How cool is that? How could we tell the Bible stories so our
children and grandchildren would climb up into our laps, eager to hear about
God?
Job
told them how “God had made the world and trees and rivers and stars and
mountains and birds and clouds and sunlight and raspberries and wilderness”
(Holberg, p.184). As soon as they
learned to talk, the children chimed in excitedly with their own lists of
things God had created: camels and sand, smooth cool mud for mud-pies, stuffed
animals to take to bed (Mom helped God make those), and pretty winter
cloaks.
He
told them about Adam and Eve, living in the beautiful Garden of Eden, and how
they couldn’t resist the succulent, juicy promise of the forbidden fruit, and
the harsh and difficult consequences of their disobedience (The Bible was the
first version of Aesop’s fables, providing entertaining morality tales for all
ages....)
Job
told the children about Daniel in the lions’ den, with the hungry beasts
growling and drooling over the young man who they thought would be their next
meal. And he told them about Daniel’s faith that God would save him.
Job
told the children about David, the smallest of the boys in his family, and the
one whose judgment was so bad, the family sent him off to care for the
sheep. But David had learned a thing or
two out there in the wilderness, what with nothing to do too pass the hours but
carve slingshots and shoot bits of gravel at the sheep. (One day, David got up in the morning and
noticed one of the sheep was missing.
What do you suppose he did?
Nothing. He went in and had
breakfast. When the mighty giant,
Goliath, held history in his hand, little pee-wee scatterbrained David
announced with his high squeaky voice, “The Lord
who delivered me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear will
deliver me from the hand of this Philistine” (1 Sam.
Job
had another story about brothers teasing brothers–you can imagine that with 7
boys, Job would be worn out from dealing with the arguing and bickering and
teasing and noise. So he told them the
story about Joseph whose brothers teased him and laughed at him and who dug a
pit in the desert and threw Joseph in to die.
And how Joseph ended up being sent to
Job
told the children about baby Moses, set adrift in the Nile River in a basket,
adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter (Ex. 2:1-10), how Moses grew up and killed an
Egyptian and had to flee for his life, and.... Well, the story about Moses was
an epic that took many evenings to read.
But
Job did more for his children than tell stories. Job ensured that all of life was steeped in
scripture. There were morning prayers when the sun rose; prayers of
thanksgiving over each meal (all the food was carefully selected and prepared
according the laws the Lord had
given them), and prayers of thanksgiving over birthdays, of course; and bedtime
prayers with the children kneeling, hands folded and eyes closed. (Being
children, they peeked, and when Dad wasn’t looking they’d elbow each other.)
Before
dinner, Job would read some scripture, and there would be lively discussion
during the meal. And on rainy days when boredom set in, the whole family sang
songs. They knew hundreds and hundreds
of songs: holy songs, funny songs, happy songs, prayerful songs. The children loved the -Psalms that had wild
dancing in them--they got to shake the tambourine and pound the drums. The
younger children didn’t always get the words right, so the songs were often
accompanied by gales of laughter at their honest but funny mistakes. I think
Job probably wrote the original versions of the Veggie Tales.
One
of Job’s favorite songs was the lullaby he sang every night. When the oil lamps were out and the children
were quietly tucked in their beds, he’d take a breath and in that special voice
fathers have when they sing lullabies to their children, he’d sing
All praise to Thee, my God, this
night
For all the blessings of the light.
Keep me, of keep me, King of Kings
Beneath thine own almighty wings.
One
day passed into the next, one week, one month, one year. And another. And
another. The children grew bigger, and
they all passed through their teenage years relatively uneventfully. (There was
the night that Ishy took the camel out into the desert for a drag race with
some of his friends. And the time Melanie got hold of some pork from a passing
gentile. And those were the years when Brian’s temper was totally out of
control. But nothing serious. Just the
normal teenage things.) They all grew
into fine young adults. Job was proud of all of them and each of them, and he
gave thanks to God every day for each of them.
Of
course, over the years, Job had been working hard, and had accumulated a tremendous
estate of thousands and thousands of acres, thousands of servants, and, most
important, 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, 50 female donkeys
(which means lots more donkeys on the way). He was, according to the Bible,
“The greatest of all the people in the east.”
Every day, Job gave thanks for God’s generosity in blessing him so
extravagantly.
All
those Bible stories Job had read to the children included the many banquets and
celebrations, and it goes without saying that Job knew how to throw a
party. The children would invite family
and friends to their homes and eat and drink and dance for days, taking time
out to rest and catch up with one another and share the news from
After
all those years of reading and singing Psalms and setting aside specific times
for prayer, Job found that even when the children were grown and gone, his devotions
had given a rhythm and depth to his life. Without even thinking about it, he
woke up each morning and praised God for the new day; gave thanks for his ever
increasing list of blessings at each meal, sang hymns and Psalms to keep
himself company as he went about his work.
And each evening, he read the Bible stories to his wife and daughters,
and at bedtime he still sang the old, old lullaby.
By
the time of our passage this morning, we discover that what is important is not
that Job had succeeded in writing God’s words on the hearts of his children,
but that by building his life around teaching his children to love God
with all their hearts and souls and might, he had engraved God’s words more and
more deeply in his own.
One
day, out of the clear blue, a huge hoard of outlaw nomads from
If
it weren’t for bad news, there wouldn’t be any news at all. But the bad news isn’t over yet. Job only has his wife, his health, and his
faith. What’s left to lose? Satan afflicted him with “loathsome sores”–
puss-filled boils, painful, smelly, ugly. There goes his health. His wife can’t
bear her husband’s grief on top of her own, not to mention that she had been
married to a strong handsome hardworking rich hottie, and now she’s married to a
weak, penniless, ugly, smelly beggar.
She’s thinking they would both be better off if he were dead. (Job 2:9)
But
Job has spent his life inscribing his heart with God’s commandment to “Love the
Lord your God with all your heart
and with all your soul and with all your might.” We should not be surprised that as he slumps
in the ashes of his life, he is faithful to the God who lives in his heart, and
says, “Naked came I from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return;” (He
thinks he is about to die!), “The Lord
gave and the Lord has taken away;
blessed be the name of the Lord.
Can
you imagine faith like that? When
everything good turns to dust, when everything he treasured--all those baby
pictures, and the adults the children grew up to be; that really cool camel he
got 12 years ago; their dream house; all the blessings he was giving thanks for
at breakfast: Gone. His first reaction
is to bless the name of the Lord.
Imagine having faith like Job’s!
All those days and weeks and years of loving God, little things
actually–thank you for the sun, or the rain, for my Bible, for my children, for food; a favorite hymn sung
in the shower; an extra offering just ‘cause, and now when the chips are down,
Job’s relationship with God is rock solid.
I
can see him sitting there in the ashes, weak from loss and grief and illness,
as the sun sets on the worst day in his life, and he’s singing that lullaby
again:
All
praise to Thee, my God, this night
For all the blessings of the light.
Keep me, of keep me, King of Kings
Beneath thine own almighty wings
Would that each of us could love God with a
love so strong. Something to think
about. AMEN