Sermon Title: “Skin For Skin!”
Jennifer is 10 years old, lying in a hospital bed, her body stuck through
with needles and catheters, and the room itself…it is filled with family and
nurses and friends of the family, and a few clergypersons, one in
particular that had never, never gone through something like this with
anyone he had ever pastored. This visit to the hospital for Jennifer had
been just one of many she had experienced in the last year—about 15
months earlier, she had mysteriously gotten sick, and was eventually
hospitalized, and was then diagnosed with a bacteria that was destroying
her liver, and there seemed to be no way to fight it, to beat back the
microbe within her that was eating away at her young life. She needed a
liver transplant—a liver from another child about her age, and the
miracle of it was that she didn’t have to wait too long, and they found one
and the operation was successful and everything seemed back to
normal, as much as “normal” can happen in those kinds of situations.
The in-between time, the time between the diagnosis and the operation
had often found that blond, 10 year-old girl, weeping in to her young
mother’s chest, scared, and sometimes begging her mother not to let yet
another needle poke or prod her—and yet she was also amazingly calm,
amazingly brave through all of it, it was a witness that children know more
and can handle more than we ever give them credit for.
But now we found ourselves here again, in another hospital room, after
another operation, after the supposed success of the liver transplant,
with the nurses and the family and the friends and the clergy, knowing
now for sure that indeed the transplant had failed and that there was
nothing we could, any of us—after 15 months of hell for this little girl, her
young parents, the family, the friends, and even people like me, who had
been invited, in some weird way, into their lives for this devastating time.
Finally, the decision was made to turn off her life-support, and within
hours, signs of her life started slowly drifting away. During the last few
hours of Jennifer’s life, her mother crawled into her hospital bed and just
held her, whispering into her ears, trying to gently give her permission to
go if she needed to, that she and the family would be all right—words
that no mother should ever have to say to her young child. Finally, the
numbers on the monitors went to zero and her life on this earth, on this
side of eternity, ended. The rest of us who were left, in the waiting
rooms, in the hospital room, in homes of family and friends, the survivors
of such a moment, we were sent fumbling into the night, trying to lay
down the million questions we had about “why” this had happened,
because in moments like this, as we all know, there are funerals to plan,
people to call, the mundane things done by loved ones that must be
attended to when we humans give way to death. In those moments, as
well, we also try to package it, to put it together, to try to fit some
meaning onto what seems so random and meaningless—“clearly,” we
say almost automatically, “God had some purpose in all this, some
reason for this to happen, maybe to teach us something—and at least
she is now in a better place, and now, we must lean more heavily on the
Lord of both life and death,” people say to each other.
Still, trying to stuff all the questions and pain and even anger of it all into
some neat emotional box, so that we don’t have to confront each of
these things doesn’t come easily for a lot of folks—especially when the
questions and the seeming injustice of it all is so real, so obvious. Some
of you know that I lost my father a few years ago, but his death had a
logical cause—if you spend 40 years smoking, there is a good chance
that you are going to get some sort of cancer—and he did. It doesn’t
make the pain and loss any easier, but you’re not left with the haunting
question of “why?” You know why—actions have consequences, both
good and bad, and one of the bad consequences of smoking is a much
higher risk of cancer. But that experience is quite different from than
seeing a 10 year old girl dying of liver failure—I mean, if there was a
definition of innocence, it was her. This was not fair—if life is truly the
result of action and reaction, cause and effect, if it is rooted in the idea
of the Golden Rule, “do unto others as you have done unto you,” then
what could she have done to deserve this or her parents done to
deserve this?!? And, of course, they hadn’t done anything—and yet life
had dealt Jennifer one unfair blow after another. Even if God had not
caused this to happen, why did God allow this to happen—what in the
world could God be thinking, to allow this to happen? What does it mean
to live in a world where God would allow such a thing to happen? And, if
God has the power to stop such meaningless pain, such unjust pain, why
doesn’t God chose to do so, especially if God asks us humans to do our
best to stop the evil within us and among us in this world, to minimize the
pain we find so often inflicted in this world?
This past week has been an incredibly traumatic one for our nation,
especially with the whole scandal around former Representative Mark
Foley, and, perhaps, the willingness of some to exchange the safety of
youth for sake of avoiding a scandal. And yet what has most moved me
to tears in the last couple of days are these school shootings we’ve
witnessed in the past weeks, and which eventually culminated in the
killings of the Amish school girls in Pennsylvania—it reminded me again
of Jennifer—children, the most vulnerable among us, the ones who
Jesus calls beside himself and tells us to be like them and to welcome
them into our lives, children once again unjustly paying the price for the
shadows within us adults, and within the larger world. These kinds of
haunting, difficult questions about life and death, suffering and guilt and
innocence, all of these kinds of questions actually get dealt with in the
Bible, or at the very least, they are struggled with. The book of Job is
one of those books in the Bible that does this work of struggle with the
big questions and we find the first 2 chapters of the book of Job setting
up the story and beginning to tell the tale, to tell of this honorable man
who lived in the land of Uz, and whose reputation for goodness and
faithfulness had even reached the heavens, had even reached the ears
of God. Not only was he was a good guy, but he was very wealthy, and
in the ancient world, goodness and wealth were associated with each
other—after all, clearly, the heavens must be in your favor because you’
ve got a lot of stuff, and if you had a large family, which was also valued,
you were clearly a recipient of some sort of divine favor.
In the first two chapters the story is set-up: one day God is bragging on
Job to the heavenly court, and, of course, the really interesting thing
here is that Satan is present in that court, in that gathering of heavenly
beings. It’s almost as if Satan has some sort of official duty in this
gathering and it seems to be that of an accuser, or some sort of master
spy, who challenges the motives and actions of people whom he checks
out here on earth below. I mean, most of us consider Satan as the
ultimate outsider to heaven, but here, in this book that was probably one
of the earliest books of the Bible to be written, Job is seen simply as part
of God’s court, a tool of God’s in order to test people. Well, the story
goes that God’s bragging about Job got to Satan, who basically
challenges this idea that Job is good because he is actually a good guy—
Satan thinks that Job’s a good guy because God has so clearly
rewarded his goodness. And so he proposes a plan to God, to test Job
by inflicting hardship on him, to see whether or not he will turn on God,
or become unfaithful with his words—“if you take away the good stuff, will
he remain a good man, a faithful man?” Satan seems to be asking. And
so God allows this to happen, and Job becomes a pawn in a battle of
wills between God and God’s apparent servant Satan—will Job curse
God if his own life becomes cursed? And so it happens: Satan takes
care of business, so to speak, robbing Job of his many children and his
wealth, leaving poor Job destitute and increasingly alone.
And yet Job does not curse God for this seeming moment of divine
abandonment, and God praises him again to the heavenly court, but
Satan, Satan has been held back, unable to get at Job’s body, and so
Satan says to God, “Skin for skin!” People will go to many limits but
when you touch their bodies, when you get at the core of them, when
you threaten their life, then you will see their real marrow, their real
souls, and you will see how deeply their spiritual allegiances go. “Let me
get at his body,” Satan challenges God, “and we will see how faithful
your servant Job really is!” And so it goes, and the testing becomes
deeper and more traumatic—poor Job, stuck in a war that is not his own,
a pawn in a debate between God and Satan!
And yet Job remains a man of integrity and faithfulness, and in verse 10
of chapter 2, he says to his wife, who wants him to break his silence and
curse God: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of the God, and not
receive the bad?” In all this, Job did not sin with his lips.” He didn’t utter
a word of complaint against God, even when his wife encouraged it, and
his attitude seem to be that if you are in relationship with God, you’ve got
to accept the good with the bad—and this was one of those bad
moments. Later, Job will speak, and the bulk of the book is the
conversation between Job and his friends, who argue with him, saying
that he must have done something wrong for all these bad things to
happen, for surely God would never visit this kind of disaster upon an
innocent man. This accusation just breaks Job’s spirit, and he fires back
at his friends, defending himself, declaring himself innocent—he did
nothing to deserve all of this!
In the end, the book has God vindicating Job, God defending Job, in a
dramatic moment during the last few chapters, where God tells off Job’s
friend, and yet, there is also a moment where Job is taken to task for
seemingly putting God on trial for the unjustness of the situation. In
answer, God simply points out to Job all that the divine hands have
created everything in creation, and God asks Job whether he too has
created like God has created. It is a moment where God seems to say to
Job, “I am God, your creator, I have done more than you can ever dream
of doing, I am not you and my ways are not yours.” It’s almost as if God
is simply pointing out the stark difference between God and humans,
setting a clear boundary between the Creator and the creation, and
reminding the creation of the One who has created it. It is a reminder to
Job that he is not God, though Job is not admonished for questioning
God, so much as he is reminded WHO he is talking to.
It’s an odd, odd moment, really, because, at least from the story, Job
never gets a reason for the ordeal he went through—God doesn’t tell
him that he was a pawn in a battle of wills between God and Satan. He
doesn’t get an answer to why he suffered, or why any man, woman, or
child suffers. The only person who really gets a question answered is
God, actually, who finds out that we humans can endure so much and
still remain faithful, even in the midst of our bitter disappointment with
God and the universe. And no, I don’t think God necessarily brings
suffering into our lives to test us, as this story seems to imply—the reality
is that this is an ancient talk of particular man, under some very peculiar
and particular circumstances, and it is not meant as some of
explanations about why we humans suffer—let’s face it: most of us are
not the center of a test of wills between God and Satan. Actually, the
book of Job does the opposite: it disturbs all of our explanation for why
suffering happens—it says that bad stuff can happen to good people
and it has nothing to do with our guilt or innocence.
The words at the end of Job, where Job is reminded by God about who
he is and what relationship he has to the Creator, that God is the
Creator and Job is the creation, it seems to be simply a reminder who we
are and who God is. And I don’t think this reminder is not meant to
intimidate us into never asking questions about why bad things happen
to good people—it is simply a reminder that we can know what we know
and we cannot know what we cannot know, about God or the reasons for
things, or anything else that the heavens have decided to keep secret..
For some people, the question of goodness of God and the apparent
contradiction of having evil that still runs rampant in the world is enough
to push them forever from faith. And to be honest, events like little
Jennifer’s death and what happened to the Amish girls can push all of us
into a place where we question the goodness and justice of God. The
question before us is this: is the answer Job gets from God enough?
Does God simply reminding us of who we are and who God is, is that
enough for us to live with, enough for us to choose to trust God? All that
Job ever gets in the end is a simple reminder of who he is speaking to,
and then Job submits to a power that he cannot understand, who does
not give him an answer, simply because this Power is his Creator, and he
is the creation of this Great Power.
For me, God’s answer to Job is enough. Not because I am simply a
dupe, or have some extra faith, or whatever—it is enough knowing who I
am in relationship with, a relationship with this the One who has created
me, and it is enough knowing what I can expect from God, and what I
cannot expect from God, which is the reasons or the lack of reasons,
even, behind the events of my life and the lives of others that seem so
unfair or unjust. It was enough for Job to voice his concern and even his
outrage, and it was enough for Job, in the end, to be declared innocent—
Job was given no reason for what had happened to him—only we
readers know the reason in Job’s case—he was simply told that his guilt
or innocence had nothing to do with what had befallen him. The other
part of it, for me, is that God’s faithfulness has shown through in those
moments in my life when it all seemed so unfair, and even in those
moments, God remained faithful. Crucifixion may happen but so does
resurrection—they are forever twins of the stark reality of our lives. God
took the shadows that formed a time in my life and used them later in
that same life to bring about more life, more resurrection, more wisdom.
It is not that we are not crucified—it’s just that, that reality is that
crucifixion is not all there is…resurrection will come because it is the
other side of crucifixion. You know, one of the things about the Gospel
and the coming of Jesus is that it is not the story of God making
everything “alright,” of God righting all the wrongs in this world, and God
equalizing and making everything just and good—we know that that’s
true because of our actual lived experience in this world: everything isn’t
just and good since Christ was here two thousand years ago. The
Gospel is the story of how God took the cross, this sign of monstrous evil
and brutality in the ancient world, and turned that cross into a sign of
hope: it is a story of how life can come out of tomb, it is a story of
crucifixion AND resurrection. For me, the sadness of Jennifer’s death,
the resurrection from that time is still in the works; it is certainly a
resurrection that is still in the works for her family, for the people that
loved her, and for the people that cared for her, but I think it will happen,
or I hope it will happen—and hope is what I am left with, what many of us
are just left with. Trusting the One who gives me no explanation, and
who offers no defense of his action or her in-action—trusting this One
who reminds me of who am I and who God is and who reminds me of
what I can know and what I cannot know—it is what I am left with, and,
though it may or may not be enough for you, I know it is enough for me.
Crucifixion, it will come, but the end of the story, the end of every story,
on this side of eternity or the other side of eternity, the end of the story is
always, always resurrection. Amen.
