Broken Vessel

Job 2:7-13

May 2, 2021 • Mount Pleasant UMC

Has anyone, in the last year, wanted to shout out to God, “What in the world are you doing? Are you even paying attention down here? The world is a mess and it seems like you aren’t doing anything?” If no one else will admit it, I will, because I’ve felt that way many times. A virus out of control, racial tensions and injustices, an election that divided this country like never before, violence in unexpected places—and, as I said at the beginning of the year, 2021 has felt more like an extension of 2020 rather than a new year. Every morning, I pray, “Lord, heal our land,” but he hasn’t. Not yet. But I keep praying because that’s the promise, right? We’re told that the “good life” means God should make everything simple, easy, pain-free. That’s the life many of us thought we were getting when we began to follow Jesus. We’re told by all the so-called experts that when we pray for God’s favor, when we expect God’s blessings, we should expect an end to pain and a route around suffering. I heard part of a sermon on the radio this week that promised just that. But, as we’ve discovered in the last few weeks—actually, in the last year (at least)—that is not the way the world works. It’s not the way God designed life or faith.

This morning, we’re continuing our series called “Finding Favor,” during which we’ve been looking at several stories in the Bible of people and situations where God shows his favor—but not in the way we expect it. Joseph found favor in a prison cell. Moses found favor in the midst of a family conflict. Jesus taught about trusting a good God even when things are hard. And this morning we go to the ash heap, where we find a “blameless and upright” man who is suffering the loss of his family, the loss of his wealth and the loss of his health. How in the world can he be an example of finding God’s favor?

Some believe the story of Job may be one of the most ancient stories in the Bible. When it was written down is anyone’s guess, but the setting of the story seems very ancient, maybe even taking place about the same time as the early chapters of Genesis (Smick, “Job,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 4, pgs. 850-853). It’s often said that the book of Job is about the problem of pain, and in a sense it is. There is a lot of pain found in this book, but if you come to Job looking for answers to why righteous people suffer, you’re going to go away from it disappointed. The book provides absolutely no answers to the classic question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” As far as we know, Job never gets any answers this side of eternity. He simply suffers. He loses everything and yet he is determined to remain faithful to the God who has been good to him all his life. We read just a small portion of his story this morning, but in case you don’t know the whole story, let’s put it in context.

There are two parts to the context here. First, the earthly context: Job is a good man. No, it’s more than that. He is “blameless and upright” (1:1). One translation says he was “a man of complete integrity” (CSB), all of which means he tries to live as best he can the way God wants him to. He does the right thing and is considered “blessed” by God. From an earthly point of view, one evidence of his blessing is his large family: seven sons and three daughters (and one tired wife). He also has a large estate, and since his kids regularly had parties, Job’s habit every day was to offer a sacrifice to God “just in case they sinned” (1:4-5). Now, debating the merits of that practice will take us away from our main purpose this morning, so let’s move on to what happens to Job. On one awful day, he loses everything. Raiders steal his oxen and donkeys and kill some of his servants. Fire destroys his sheep and kills more servants. Thieves come in and steal his camels—and kill more servants. And then the worst happens: a wind destroys the house where his kids are, killing them all (1:13-19). Job is broken, but he says (maybe with gritted teeth), “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised” (1:21). Then, Job himself gets sick (2:7-8). It’s not clear what disease Job contracts, but that’s not the point of the story anyway (cf. Smick 885). We don’t need to know what it was; we just need to know it’s bad enough to make him leave his house and settle in to the city dump. And it’s bad enough that his wife advises him to “curse God and die” (2:9). Just a few days before, Job was on top of the world. Now he’s in the dump, sitting in ashes, scraping his body with broken pottery. His autobiography at this point could have been titled, “From Success to Scrapes: My Life in the Dump.” Or something like that. That’s the earthly context.

But there’s another context Job does not see or know. As the readers, we know that Job’s troubles are a result of a sort of “bet” between God and Satan. Satan accuses God of protecting Job, and he says the only reason Job worships and serves God is because of that protection. Remove the protection, Satan says, and Job will curse God. So God allows Satan to test Job, but at first he is now allowed to cause any harm to Job himself. When that doesn’t get the desired result, Satan comes back before God and says, “A man will give all he has for his own life.” But if you let me harm him directly, he will “curse you to your face” (2:4-5). So God allows it, and still Job does not waver in his faith. That’s the heavenly context; there’s more than we can see happening here. And there’s more than we can see happening in our lives as well.

Let’s go back to our definition of favor, the one we started with a few weeks ago. Favor is God’s “supernatural intervention to bring a blessing into your life” (Jones, Finding Favor, pg. 14). And, as I’ve reminded you all along, God does want to bless you and me. God is not trying to withhold his blessing from us, but his biggest blessing, the most important blessing he wants to pour out on us is to make us more like Jesus, to make us more like him. Said bluntly: he wants to shape us into people who are fit to live forever. And that’s a big part of what is happening here in the book of Job. The reason God allows this time of sickness and suffering is because he can use it to make Job more like himself. Now, on the surface, that doesn’t make sense. Job is already described as “blameless and upright,” but how often have you and I known people—or maybe been those people—who can do everything right without having our heart shaped? Our outward actions can be so right while our inward person is far from being who God wants us to be. Job’s sickness is meant to shape him, to mold him, to make him into the person God desires him to be. And so was mine.

In my first appointment, my main ministry was to the youth of the church. However, as part of my larger pastoral responsibilities, I also did hospital visitation. Tuesday and Wednesday were my days. At that point in my life, it was not something I enjoyed, so I tended to hurry through it. Being a large church, we usually had several in the hospital at any given time, so I would pat myself on the back when I was able to get in and out in a relatively short amount of time. Walk in, chit chat for a moment, offer a prayer and move on to the next person. And everyone compliments you on that in a big church because you’re “so busy.” And then I got sick. I ended up in the hospital myself for a couple of days with an infection in my lungs, and in that time I learned how lonely the hospital is and how long the days are when you have nothing to do but lay in that bed. This was before smartphones and iPads. I didn’t even have a laptop. There was one television for the two people sharing the room; yes, this was the dark ages. Anyway, one of the things I learned in that time is how very important a visitor is. Honestly, you’re even thankful to see the doctor come in the room! And those couple of days changed me and the way I did ministry. Now, let’s be clear: God didn’t give me the infection, but he used those days to shape me, mold me, and make me a better pastor, a better person honestly. Sometimes the blessing God wants to give us comes in the form of a sickness.

Job does what we usually do. When he finds himself with this difficult illness, with this unexplainable suffering, he tries to explain it. And so there’s this long back-and-forth dialogue between Job and his friends that takes up most of the book. One author says the book of Job is “a compelling two-chapter introduction and a poignant four-chapter conclusion sandwiched around thirty-five of the most insufferably boring chapters written in the Bible” (Jones 92). But here’s how I sum up those thirty-five chapters: Job wants God. In the midst of his suffering and his pain and his sickness, he just wants God to be with him. His friends want to give him answers, his wife wants him to curse God and die, but Job wants an audience with the Almighty. Granted, at first, he wants to explain to God why he doesn’t deserve this suffering; wouldn’t we all like to do that? But when God does show up, Job has to admit he doesn’t know as much as he thinks he knows. Maybe God knows better. Maybe God, who made the universe, can even use sickness and pain to bless us. Here’s the thing: when we avoid pain, when we pursue a life that is free from struggle, we risk missing God. We don’t get to choose the way God blesses us, and pain allows us to not only know about God but also to encounter him (cf. Jones 98-99). Job does not get answers, but Job gets God. Which do you want—answers or God?

God is known in the pain. Now, before you throw me out as a heretic, let’s fast forward several centuries to this rabbi named Jesus. Most of us like to think about the Jesus who sat on the hillside and told nice stories. Or we think about the Jesus who healed the lepers and raised the dead. We prefer the Jesus who takes children on his knee and sits at the well by women who are shunned by their town. We like Jesus as liberator, storyteller, friend, companion—and he all of those things and will be all of them to us. But what we need first and most is Jesus the redeemer. Where do we find that Jesus? On the cross. He’s suffering in one of the worst ways imaginable. He went there willingly, out of obedience to the Father (cf. Philippians 2:8). Now, we can get all worked up about the why’s and the wherefore’s, and people will debate the theology of the cross until Jesus returns. I don’t even pretend to understand it all, how Jesus dying on the cross 2,000 years ago can save me from my sin today. (And anyone who tells you they have it all figured out is lying to you.) I don’t understand how he saves me; I’m just glad he can, and he has, and he does. And I know that God understands my pain because Jesus suffered the pain of the cross. When God wanted to bless the world, when God wanted to show favor to the whole wide world, he did it through his son on the cross. He blessed us through suffering and pain. Jesus was a broken vessel through which the world has been forever changed.

In the midst of pain, in the midst of suffering, we want answers. Job certainly did. Even Jesus did; on the cross, he asked, “Why?” as in “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). Jesus knew why, of course, but that didn’t make the pain any easier to endure, because the resolution of the pain, the end of the sickness, is not found in answers. The blessing is found in an encounter with God, and that only comes as we stop talking and sit in silence.

Job had three friends who came to visit him. The text says they met together and “agreed” to go “sympathize with him and comfort him” (2:11). This means they met together, talked the situation over, and decided that Job needed their presence. And what they do next is amazing, powerful and important. They go and they sit with him in silence. These probably dignified men, pillars in their communities—they go to the dump, the garbage and dung heap, and they join in the “ultimate humiliation” by sitting with Job (McKenna, Communicator’s Commentary: Job, pg. 47). This is how you grieve in Job’s time; you sit with the one in pain and you don’t talk. In fact, to say anything before the one in pain speaks was considered extremely bad taste (Smick 887). So they sit in silence, watching as Job scrapes himself with broken pottery, and they wait. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the World War 2 theologian and martyr, once said, “Where God tears great gaps we should not try to fill them with human words” (qtd. in Jones 94). We could learn from them. Friends, let me say this as clearly and as kindly as I can: when someone you know is in pain, is suffering, the very best thing you can do is shut up. They don’t need answers. They don’t want answers. What they need is two-fold. They need your presence. And they need God’s presence. You know it to be true; when you are in pain, do you need someone to explain to you why you are in pain? Do you need someone to tell you what you supposedly did wrong? Or would it be better for that someone to simply be with you and help you connect with the Creator of the universe? Answers aren't going to ease Job’s suffering. Only God can do that.

One of the most well-known hymn writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was Fanny Crosby. She was blinded when she was six weeks old, something she always blamed on the doctors who treated an inflammation of her eyes at that age though more recent speculation is that it might have been a congenital state. Either way, Crosby didn’t let her blindness slow her down, nor did she give into bitterness of self-pity. Although she looked forward to being able to see in eternity, while she was here she developed a tremendous memory and learned to play the piano. She wrote over 9,000 hymns and poems, all in her head, and chose to live in the Bowery district of New York City so she could reach out to those most in need. She never asked for more than minimal payment for her hymns, and continued to work, write and travel until she was past ninety. Crosby regretted the loss of her sight, but she learned that it’s only through a broken vessel that the light can truly shine. Crosby’s only desire in her life was that her songs might be used to “save a million souls,” and over the many years her songs have reached so many more than that. I doubt we’ll fully know until eternity how many lives the blind woman from New York touched, even in her brokenness. You see, the light only can get through the cracks, the broken places. That was true in Fanny Crosby’s life—and it’s true in ours (cf. Janzen, Songs for Renewal, pg. 121).

If experiencing God’s favor is him giving us a blessing (as our definition says it is), we have to acknowledge, if we’re going to be truly Biblical Christians, that sometimes—maybe even often—his richest blessings come through struggle, through pain, even through sickness. I wish it weren’t so, but I can’t deny the word from the Scripture that says it is. Listen to how Paul describes it when he was writing to the Romans. This first part, by the way, was one of John Wesley’s favorite verses. Listen to what Paul says: “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.” Did you hear that? The only way to glory, Paul says, is if we first share in suffering with Jesus. We can’t share in Jesus’ glory if we don’t share in his sufferings, and that’s not just feeling sad from time to time. This world will break us, hurt us, leave us gasping for breath sometimes. Jesus said the world will hate us because it hated him first (cf. John 15:18). It will break us. But listen to what Paul says next: “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (Romans 8:16-18). What awaits us, the blessings and favor God will give us, is so much more glorious than what we go through here. And only broken vessels will see it.

I have a collection of chalices at my home. I know, you’re jealous. But whenever I go somewhere, I am looking for chalices. I have one from Haiti, graciously given to me by Deb Williams. I have one from Israel that is hand carved from Bethlehem olive wood. I have a silver one that Paula Smith bought for me the first time I went to Jerusalem. The ones I have are made from all sorts of material and every time I move, I worry about them arriving safely. The first one I received, however, has a unique place in my heart. It was given to me by the congregation we served while in seminary, but I can’t use it anymore, at least not to serve communion. And not just because of COVID. No, one time when I was using it, the glue holding the top part fell off and it shattered on the floor. I can’t tell you how upset I was, how mad at myself I was. But I gathered up the pieces and took them home, and for a while they just sat there. Then I got some glue and began to put the pieces back together. As you can guess, I didn’t find all the pieces; there are still little holes and places where, if I were to fill it up with grape juice, it would leak out. But I keep this chalice for a couple of reasons. For one, it was my first one. And two, it reminds me of the message of communion. Broken bread, broken grapes, broken chalice, broken people. Jesus came because of the brokenness of the world, the brokenness of our lives. He came to put it back together and to bring hope in the midst of it. Because the light—and the grape juice—only gets into a broken vessel because of the cracks. Let’s pray and prepare our hearts for holy communion.