The Trial of God

The Trial of God: Sermon by Loren D. Crow, Ph.D., given at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Eugene, Oregon on the tenth of November, 2019.

Lessons:

Job 19:23-27a
Psalm 17:1-9
2 Thes 2:1-5, 13-17
Luke 20:27-38



The book of Job is a literary masterpiece. It has inspired plays, movies, novels, music, and plastic arts. Alfred Lord Tennyson called Job “the greatest poem of ancient and modern times.” William Blake did a whole series of engravings on scenes from the book of Job. There are musical settings by the likes of Orlando de Lassus, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Joni Mitchell. H. G. Wells and Elie Wiesel both wrote adaptations of it. Even the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, who is not usually known for his love of biblical themes, wrote a novel called Job: A Comedy of Justice.

What gives the book of Job such broad appeal is its stark treatment of two claims that seem on the surface to be irreconcilable with one another: (1) that there is a just God who rules the world and upholds it, and (2) that human beings suffer, often so horribly that even the most heartless person would try to help, and yet God seems to do nothing. The genre of literature that specializes in wrestling with this paradox is called theodicy, and Job is certainly among the finest examples of it anywhere.

The first scene begins with God and Satan making a wager. God is bragging a bit on Job’s excellent character, but Satan argues that the only reason Job is good is because God blesses him for it. It’s true that God has been blessing Job with abundant wealth and happiness, but God thinks Job would still be a good man even if all that dried up. So they make the bet, and the scene shifts to earth. Immediately Job’s fortunes change. His children are all killed, one after another; his wealth evaporates; and he himself is stricken with an agonizing illness. As blow after devastating blow falls, Job remains steadfastly good — the narrator says, “in all this he did not sin with his lips.”

After a while, the scene shifts and Job sits outcast on the trash heap outside of town. Three friends, named Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, come to visit him in his grief. They sit with him in silent mourning for seven days, and then Job speaks. His soliloquy reveals the depth of his suffering. Job wishes he’d never been born, that death would have taken him before life ever started. He longs for the sweet oblivion of death. His friends hear this and realize that Job’s speech calls God’s sovereignty into question. It is God, after all, who decides who shall be born; it is God who decides who shall die, and when. In their view speech like that is blasphemous and must never be allowed.

There follows an extended dialogue between Job and each of his friends, and if you read them (which I urge you to do) you find that each one makes excellent points. There doesn’t seem to be a clear “right side” or “wrong side” in this argument. The drama is trying to grapple with the tension between belief in a God of justice and love and the obvious unfairness of Job’s situation. Job’s friends believe it’s important to salvage God’s sovereignty at the expense of Job’s integrity; Job thinks otherwise. The scholar Norman Habel observes that the failure of Job’s friends is not that they are theologically incorrect, but that they lack compassion.

What people then tended to do, just as they still do today, was to gloss over the dissonance between the two contradictory claims I laid out at the beginning. Most often, what we do is blame the victim, which is what Job’s friends did: Well Job, if you’re suffering, you must have done something to deserve it. To that, Job denies that he has done any wrong. I’m innocent, he says, and I don’t deserve this mistreatment at God’s hands! They retort that no one is truly innocent, especially compared with God; how dare Job claim that he is right and God is wrong! And that’s the beginning of an increasingly acrimonious argument that lasts for much of the rest of the book. It’s a case of three against one; Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar are well educated, prosperous, and smug (hashtag #blessed). They just want to see Job restored to favor and their world no longer problematic. All Job needs to do is repent his sin; surely, God will bring him back to blessing. But Job is having none of it. He knows he doesn’t deserve this, and he refuses to pretend otherwise.

It’s in this dialogue that Job says what we read this morning. He’s got no hope for his own lifetime, so he wants to write his accusation in a scroll, to chisel it into stone, and take his lawsuit to the throne of God. He is confident that if he can just get a hearing before the Divine Judge, he will be vindicated against the spurious accusations of these three “miserable comforters.” The redeemer who Job says is alive is God’s own self. Job’s hope is that God would come, read the written case, and render a judgment that would vindicate Job’s innocence and put the world back in order, not by changing Job’s specific plight but by changing God’s apparent policy, which allows the wicked to flourish while the righteous suffer, and allows those who sit comfortably in their armchairs to blame the worlds ills on the very people who experience those ills most harshly.

It’s a gutsy thing for Job to say, in the face of what everyone around thinks is a mountain of damning evidence, that he is right and God and everyone else are wrong. “Gutsy” probably isn’t even forceful enough. This Job has some hutzpah! But let’s not be too quick to dismiss the arguments of his friends, because what they say isn’t wrong so much as it is self-congratulatory. The reason we shouldn’t write them off too quickly is that we’ll fail to see how their arguments are also our arguments. How often do we hear that homelessness or AIDS or poverty “probably” come from the deficiencies of the people who are experiencing it — they’re using drugs, being sexually promiscuous, taking out loans they can’t repay, and so on? What about the humanitarian crisis in the Middle East? Well, “those people” have always been at war with each other, haven’t they? Lung cancer? Well they should’ve stopped smoking! I’m not saying those arguments don’t have elements of truth to them; they do. But it’s too easy to say these things when you’re not the one involved. And theologically, blaming suffering on human failures alone lets God off the hook too easily. God stands accused. Job helps us face the charges squarely.

If you know the ending of the story, then you remember that God eventually makes an appearance, with blistering majesty and awesome power, and answers Job’s complaint. The answer given by God when he comes on stage is that Job and his friends are too puny, too short-lived, and too lacking in vision to understand the big picture. Which is obviously true, when you consider it. But somehow that answer still fails to satisfy, when the depth of Job’s pain is portrayed with such poetic power. You may also remember that God shockingly tells Job’s friends that they need to ask Job to pray for them. Seems they “have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.” Job spoke the truth about God, and his three friends did not! Job does pray for them, their friendship is restored, and the world is put back into order. Finally Job is made even richer, and is given an even better family, than he had at the beginning. His new daughters are particularly beautiful.

And yet, Job’s silence rings out in that parody of happiness at the end of the book, as if to remind us that God’s answer solves the problem like an aspirin cures an open sore. And in fact, the book never really lets God off the hook: Job’s new family at the end of the book is as much a reminder of what he has lost as it is a consolation. The question, Why does the powerful, just, good God allow the world to be so full of sorrow, isn’t resolved at the end of the book, and really it still isn’t resolved today. When the new atheists say they wouldn’t worship any god who would make a world like this one, that stings because there’s truth in it.

There’s a poem that I often quote in this connection, by the Polish-American Jewish poet Aaron Zeitlin:

Praise me, says God, and I will know that you love me.
Curse me, says God, and I will know that you love me.
Praise me or curse me
And I will know that you love me. 

Sing out my graces, says God,
Raise your fist against me and revile, says God.
Sing out graces or revile,
Reviling is also a kind of praise, says God. 

But if you sit fenced off in your apathy, says God,
If you sit entrenched in: "I don't give a hang," says God,
If you look at the stars and yawn,
If you see suffering and don't cry out,
If you don't praise and you don't revile,
Then I created you in vain, says God.

If you’re shocked to hear me say such things, if they sound a little irreligious to you, I’m sorry; I really don’t mean to come across as crass or irreverent. And it’s true that this sermon isn’t going to end with a clear-cut application — which I feel is OK since that’s what the book of Job does. But I invite you to consider that the story of innocent suffering is not just Job’s story, it’s Jesus’ story as well, and that story also includes a moment when Jesus says “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The crucifixion story, like the book of Job, does not exonerate God. Quite the opposite! Jesus accepts the judgment and its punishment, and gives His life. He does not blame the world’s pain on the devil or on other people, but embraces it and makes it part of God’s Life. In doing that He shows what Job also knew, that in the very midst of despair and unutterable pain, God is there too. It is not the end. A just, loving God; an unjust, often bitter world that is God’s creation. Two apparently contradictory truths are reconciled at the cross, not by vindicating the one at the expense of the other, but by facing and embracing both. What that means for for me I’m only beginning to understand; what it means for you I can’t pretend to say. But wrestle with the question, and with God, and with the world, and with the truth. That’s where you’ll meet the real God, and that’s how the real God will meet with you.

"Paper" - a Native American reflection on white society

From the cantata "We Have Spoken" by Clyde Thompson, native American poetry set to beautiful music.

Loren Crow, bass soloist

Soundcloud of the performance

Paper

This is the way of white people:
They put great store in writing,
Always there is a paper.

Whenever white people come together there is writing.
When we go to buy some sugar or tea we see the white trader writing.
Even the white doctor, as he sits beside his patient, is writing on a paper, writing on a piece of paper.

The indian needs no writing. Words that are true sink deep into his heart and there remain.
We are puzzled what purpose all this writing serves.

Incarcerated People Are Not Vermin

Sermon for 4 August 2019 at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Eugene, Oregon

Scripture Readings: Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23; Psalm 49:1-12; Colossians 3:1-11; Luke 12:13-21

I am part of Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon a group of churches cooperating together to seek, among other things, justice in our criminal justice system. As part of this effort I was asked to help put together a “Criminal Justice Sabbath” which would try to raise awareness and gain support at the congregational level. I’ve been involved in various kinds of jail ministry for about seven years, so I’m grateful for this chance to reflect on that experience.

To begin, I want to make sure you noticed the reading from Ecclesiastes. Wow! That right there is what we call a hard truth. If there’s one thing almost all of us want, it’s safety. Freedom from the worry that our life might be gone in an instant (though of course it can). Freedom from realizing, as the writer of Ecclesiastes did, that goodness and wickedness receive little in the way of observable, fair reward and punishment. Oh, we have powerful myths by which we distance ourselves from these realities, such as the myth that we deserve what we have, or the myth that there are dangerous people who will take away what is rightfully ours, or the myth that we have the moral right to take away some people’s freedom if doing so will protect our lives and property.

None of those myths is false from our perspective; they keep the world spinning along pretty much as we’ve always known it. But there’s an underside that we rarely allow ourselves to see which comes from the fact that life and wealth aren’t nearly as stable as our myths tell us. And the human cost of maintaining these illusions is incredibly high. The United States incarcerates more people by far than any other nation. Our life of apparently peaceful serenity comes at a high cost, and the burden of that cost falls disproportionally on the poor. It’s their stories that I want you to hear today, to put a human face on persons whom we persistently think of as monsters or vermin.

These stories are composites, because all of them are people who might be known to you — your neighbor, your fellow parishioner, your college friend. I met a man in jail a few months ago, I’ll call him Bob, who stumbled down the rabbit hole to find his home and cars confiscated by police, his job lost, his wife and children estranged and living in another state, and he himself facing several charges that would take months to sort out while he was kept in county lockup. He didn’t have the money to pay for an ankle bracelet. A year ago he had a good construction job and a family home and a normal relationship with his neighbors. Then things fell apart and, like the Bible’s Job character, he lost everything that mattered to him.

Bob had been a soldier in Afghanistan and had a pretty bad case of PTSD, which translated into heavy alcohol use and a dangerous temper. On the night of his arrest he had been in a bar fight; then he had driven home, still in his agitated state, and was arrested on a DUI. I don’t remember all the charges that were brought against him (there’s never just one charge; always its a bunch of charges, to pressure people into plea bargains), but he was being held at county lockup awaiting trial, which took longer than it should because of the backlog in the courts. Bob’s story has a happy ending of sorts, because his veteran status gave him access to a new alcohol and PTSD treatment program. He has lost everything but his life, but he will at least be able to start over. It’s more than some get.

I met another man, whom I’ll call Darryl. Darryl is a 37-year-old black man who had been in lockups of one kind or another almost all his adult life. His parents had been drug addicts and so he was a ward of the foster care system as far back as he could remember. In his teenage years he started selling drugs and his winsome personality made him pretty successful at it. He didn’t use the drugs himself much; they were a source of income. Darryl keeps trying to “go straight” when he gets out of jail. But do you know how hard it is for someone on probation to get and keep a job? Darryl was in jail this time, not for selling drugs, but for a “parole violation.” His boss had scheduled him to work on the day he was supposed to go meet with his parole officer, and neither the officer nor his boss was willing to change their expectation, so he missed the parole officer meeting in order to keep the job. He was arrested and put in jail, just for seven days, but it was enough to get him fired. His last words to me are haunting: “I’m just so tired,” he said, with tears streaming down his face. “Tired of being in jail, tired of being out of jail, tired of being homeless. I just want to die.”

There was another man — I’ll call him Stephen — whose family had cut off all contact with him because of his erratic behavior. I could see why. In the four or five times I met him Stephen told me no fewer than three separate conspiracy stories that involved occult groups killing infants, powerful people involved in the sex slave industry, the CIA and the Mossad coming after him personally because he had worked for both and knew dangerous secrets of theirs. And there were lots of other names and places that I wasn’t able to see how they fit together or how they connected into any of the main narratives. I’m not a psychologist, but I was able to recognize signs of paranoia thoroughgoing enough that he belonged in a hospital, not a jail. But it took six months before finally he was remanded by the court to the state hospital for treatment.

I’m not telling any women’s stories because our chaplaincy corps has a policy — a wise one, I think — of having women visit women and men visit men. But there are also many women in Lane County Jail, and their stories are not too different from the ones I’ve told.

I’m telling you about these people because I want you to realize that the human beings we lock away in our jails are not animals. We would probably treat them better if they were animals. No, they are our brothers and sons, daughters and spouses and neighbors. I’m also telling you about these people because they are not very different from you and me and the people we love. I’ve known so many who are in jail because of circumstances beyond their control. Those of us who are comparatively wealthy and well educated, who have good networks of people who can help us, would be able to weather problems that the poor are unable to cope with. The English Protestant martyr John Bradford, who was imprisoned and killed in the time of Mary Tudor, said, on seeing a fellow prisoner killed, “There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford.” Once you become aware of how easy it is to get into legal jeopardy, once you realize that your ability to survive depends on your money and social standing, you can’t ever think of those who get caught in the system as less worthy than yourself.

It is the powerful who design and run criminal justice systems everywhere. The wealthy can bend the laws or even break them outright, because they can afford to pay bail and fines and hire the best attorneys. The HBO comedian and commentator John Oliver, in his episode entitled “Municipal Violations” (#31), examines things like traffic tickets, which almost everyone gets and about which no one really feels guilty. Even something as small as a jaywalking ticket can lead the poor into a situation where they’re forced to pay many times what a wealthy person has to pay, and may even have to spend time in jail. People adopt an attitude of moral superiority toward the incarcerated poor, while the reality is that they simply have fewer resources to draw on when they get into trouble.

Criminal justice reform is a political hot topic, and I don’t have enough knowledge to make specific recommendations on the public policy. But there are things we can do right now to improve the lives of people in jail. The main thing is to become involved at some level, and opportunities abound. Become a pen pal. Volunteer as a religious or educational worker. Support with your money and your time programs that help reintegrate convicted persons back into society. Hire them if you can. Get involved politically and work for criminal justice reform. The really crucial thing, though, is for us to change our attitudes about incarcerated persons, to stop thinking of them as vermin and honor their humanity. We owe it to one another, in obedience to our baptismal vows, to seek and serve Christ in them.