Valley of the Sigh

Job 23:1-17

August 20, 2023 • Mount Pleasant UMC

Dave Eggers was twenty-one years old when his father died from brain and lung cancer. Thirty-two days later, his mother died from stomach cancer and he was left to raise his eight-year-old brother by himself while at the same time trying to grieve and come to some sort of understanding about the sudden deaths of his parents. He had to grow up quickly, in ways he had not anticipated, and his future suddenly didn’t look anything like he thought it would. And though he channeled his loss into creating a nonprofit in California that helps troubled youth learn creative writing, he also is pretty committed to the belief that the world is a cold, hard place. The only way through, Eggers believes, is to be true to yourself and to laugh at lot at yourself and at others. It’s a rather cynical worldview, but it’s not an unusual one in the world we live in today (cf. Keuss, Living the Questions, pgs. 117-118).

This morning, we’re wrapping up this all too brief series on “Searching Questions” by talking about a topic that comes up a lot when you talk to people who are searching: suffering. The question you might get asked goes like this: “Where is God when bad things happen?” or “Who do bad things happen to good people?” And while these are questions that searching people ask all the time, these are not questions only they ask. We ask these things, too, only we tend to ask more quietly because we don’t want other people to hear us and think we are somehow losing our faith. I had a woman tell me one time that nothing bad had ever happened to her, but I knew it simply wasn’t true. If you are breathing, bad things are going to happen to you. You can be the most faithful person in the world and bad things are going to happen to you. We serve a savior who said these words: “In this world you will have trouble” (John 16:33). Not might have. Not could have. You will have trouble. It’s a foregone conclusion. We will spend time in a place we might call the Valley of the Sigh, the place where sorrow and sighing seem to be permanent residents (cf. Isaiah 51:11). At the end of time, we’re told, God will remove tears and mourning, crying and pain from creation, which indicates those things are pretty much a permanent part of the world until Jesus returns (cf. Revelation 21:4). So the deeper question for us this morning is this: what do we do when we end up in that valley? That’s what people around us, searchers, want to know. They are watching you and me to see if faith makes any difference in how we walk through the valley of the sigh.

Now, I’ve known some near-saints in my life, some people who embody faithfulness, but probably none of them were as saintly as Job. The Bible tells his story in the book that bears his name, but actually the story is told in three chapters: 1, 2 and 42. The rest of the book is an epic poem that is really a debate on what God is like. The story starts out in the land of Uz, with a man who was “blameless and upright” (1:1). And because he loved God so much, he becomes the target of a wager between God and Satan. Lucky guy, huh? Satan accuses God of protecting Job, so God allows Satan to test him by taking away all of his family, and his home, and his livelihood. And when that doesn’t get the results Satan wants, God goes further and gives Satan permission to give Job a bad disease. The only thing Satan cannot do is kill Job (2:6). And you want to know the worst part of this as far as I’m concerned? Job has no idea why any of this is happening. We, the readers, do, but Job is never told. He never gets a glimpse behind the curtain of heaven, and he never gets an explanation from God.

A lot of times people talk about “the patience of Job” or they say that this book, the story, is about patience. But when you actually read the book, you’ll realize that patient is the last thing Job is. He wants what he wants and he wants it right now. So what does he want? Well, throughout the book, we get this dialogue between Job and four of his so-called friends. I say “so called” because they aren’t really very friendly toward Job. They spend most of their time trying to get him to admit that he’s done something wrong, that he has sinned, and that’s why all of this bad stuff is happening to him. Job loudly and repeatedly protests that he is innocent, but his friends aren’t buying it. And right near the middle of this dialogue, we come to the chapter we read this morning. In the middle of his pain, surrounded by these lame excuses for friends, Job tells us what he wants. He says his complaint is “bitter” because he has not received the one thing he keeps asking for. He wants an audience with God. He wants God to show up. And not sometime in the future. He wants God to show up right here and right now. In the midst of his pain and his suffering, Job feels like God has gone far away. He feels abandoned. That, even more than the physical suffering, is what has led him to the valley of the sigh.

When we say “God showed up,” we usually mean we had a really good worship service, or that we got goosebumps from the music, or that we had some sort of insight when we read the Bible that day. In our Christian culture, we are very often focused on having some sort of feeling, a sense that God is near. If we have the feeling, God is close. If we don’t have the feeling, God must be far away—so we say. That’s all well and good—but that’s not even close to what Job is looking for. That’s not what the Hebrew Scriptures in particular mean when they talk about about God showing up. When the Hebrew Bible talks about God’s presence, it means that God is doing something. God is present when he is acting on behalf of the person who asked.

So you may remember when Jesus is on the cross, he prays the words of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Now, there are many reasons, I believe, Jesus prays that psalm, and I actually think he probably prayed the whole psalm through at least in his heart and his head, but we get fixated on the “forsaken” part. And we wonder how God the Father could forsake or abandon Jesus the Son because we think that God somehow went away. Like the Father can’t be found. When we talk about someone “forsaking” us, it’s because they are no longer around, but that’s not what the psalmist meant and it’s not what Jesus meant. God the Father was there. God the Father was suffering along with Jesus the Son. God was a Father who saw his Son be brutalized by his creation—how could he not suffer? We do not worship a God who is unmoved by the pain in his creation; we worship a God who feels just like we do. He feels it all. No, what Jesus’ prayer means is not that the Father was absent but that he was doing nothing to stop the crucifixion. “God’s forsaking Jesus consisted in that refusal to act…Once, God acted in response to Jesus’ prayer. Now, God does not do so” (Goldingay, Job for Everyone, pg. 115). And that’s what Job is experiencing in the midst of his pain and his struggle. He knows God is there. But he doesn’t understand why God isn’t acting, why God isn’t bringing resolution to his pain.

When you and I suffer, when we go through the valley of the sigh, times of physical or emotional pain or times of loss, how do we respond? With the patience we imagine Job has? With complaining like he actually does? Do we pray for the pain to end in whatever way it can or do we ask and wait for God to show up? I don’t know how you respond, but I can tell you how I respond. And if you’re waiting for a holy answer from a super-spiritual pastor, you’re going to be very disappointed in a few moments because I’ve had two really dark experiences that come to mind. The first one was after my first heart surgery when, after about three weeks, I still felt horribly sick. Nothing seemed to be better. I was doing all the things, all the exercises, and nothing helped. I was spending my days at home alone, and at that point we were living out in the country so there was literally no one around. I can still see the place I was in the family room when I collapsed on the couch and told God to just take me home now. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. It turned out my problem was a conflict of medications and when they discovered that, I felt better almost immediately. But in the suffering, I didn’t have a sense of God’s presence. I felt abandoned and I loudly complained about it.

The other time that comes to mind is a very difficult time in ministry that I went through several years ago, a time when I felt abandoned. People I thought I could trust had proven that wasn’t true, and though I prayed a lot (prayers mainly asking God to change the circumstances, to take it all away), it felt like my prayers were not going any further than the ceiling and bouncing back. Why was God not listening? Why did God not care? So I did the only thing I knew to do: I dug in my heels and worked even harder. I was going to prove myself, to God, to the church and to myself. Maybe, the thinking went, if I work harder and do more things, then God will pay attention to my prayers and turn things around. We think that, don’t we? When suffering comes, when hard times arrive, it becomes all about “me, me, me.” Part of the so-called American Dream is that everything should always be improving, always getting better, and that if we have difficulties, if we suffer, it must be our fault. Job’s friends would have fit right into this culture because that’s what they believed. The American Dream tells us we should never hurt, and sadly that idea and that teaching has infiltrated the church. There’s a whole strain of theology that says when Jesus comes into your life you will never hurt and never suffer again and if you do, it’s because you’ve sinned or you’re not trying hard enough. Friends, that’s not Biblical theology. That’s American theology, but it’s not Biblical theology. It’s not Christian theology. Remember what I said a few moments ago? Jesus said you will have trouble. He also said, “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first…If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also…They will treat you this way because of my name” (John 15:18-21). And Jesus is the ultimate example of that. No one lived a better life than Jesus, and yet he suffered the ultimate indignity, excruciating pain, the worst death. If he suffered, we should expect to also. Ultimately, in my own situation, a kind superintendent sat down with me and talked sense into me.

So Job says he goes every direction—east, west, north and south—and he cannot find God (23:8-9). He goes east, which to the Hebrews meant going forward. The place where the sun rises represented where things begin. But God is not there. And he goes west, the place where things end. God is not there. So he looks north, which was considered the place where God’s cabinet meeting took place, the place where decisions were made. It should be a good place to find God, but God is not there either. And then he turns south, toward Mount Sinai, the ultimate representation of God’s presence, the place where Moses met with God and gave him the Ten Commandments, where God met with the prophet Elijah at his time of deepest desperation. If God is anywhere, he’s surely at Mount Sinai. But no. God is not there, either. Forward, backward, right, left—God is not there. No wonder Job feels abandoned (cf. Goldingay 117).

And yet, God’s absence does not shake Job’s ultimate faith. How many people have we known who face a hardship, a time of suffering, a difficulty and conclude that God doesn’t love them, that God has forgotten about them, or even that God doesn’t exist? Not Job. Listen again to how he responds to God’s inaction: “But…” Always an important word, a potentially life-changing word. “But,” Job says, “he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold” (23:10). Not “I might survive” or “I sure hope I make it through this.” Job’s faith and trust in God is as strong as the day before this whole thing began. “I will come forth as gold.” I will make it through and I will be even better than I was before because God doesn’t waste a thing. He uses absolutely everything, including our suffering, to shape us into the people wants us to be. As one scholar put it, “Job did not think God was testing him as a means to purge away his sinful dross. It was rather to prove he was pure gold” (Smick, “Job,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 4, pg. 959). This is what those who are searching are looking for—a certainty in the midst of pain that even this will not be wasted, even this will not break us, even this will make us like gold. Where is God when bad things happen? He is right there, using everything in our lives to make us gold.

So how do we get from the valley of the sigh, the valley where everything seems hopeless, to becoming gold? How do make the journey from cynicism to certainty, the kind of certainty Job has? I want to suggest four things this morning, four signposts for our journey, four ways we can also help our searching and struggling friends to walk through this valley. First of all and this is what we’ve kind of been focusing on so far this morning, we have to accept the reality of heartbreak. It will come. And it might come again even after it’s over. But here’s what you need to know: just because difficult times come and heartbreak happens doesn’t mean God is done with you. If you read to the end of Job’s story, you will see that God does show up, in his own time, and while he never directly answers Job’s questions or addresses Job’s concerns, he does remind Job of his presence, his power and his care for Job. In the two situations in my own life I mentioned, and a whole lot of others I could bore you with, I learned the same thing. Even when it felt like the heartbreak and the struggle would overwhelm me, God was not done with me yet. Heartbreak will come, but it does not mean that God is done with you or that God has forgotten you.

And that leads to the second thing we can and should do in the valley of the sigh: we seek out whatever God has for us to do. From the beginning, in creation, we were “created for work that provides purpose for others and for God” (Keuss, Live the Questions, pg. 125). We’re called to be workers who respond to the pain around us. So when suffering comes, we can keep working, keep doing what God has called us to do. I think of Mother (now Saint) Teresa, whose journals were published after her death against her wishes. But those journals revealed a woman who, for many years, struggled with the overwhelming silence of God. She felt like no matter how she prayed, she couldn’t get through to God. And yet in the midst of the struggle, she kept doing what she was called to do, kept serving the poor of Calcutta, kept loving Jesus even when it seemed he was silent. “What type of work is pleasing to God? Am I doing what God wants me to do?” (Keuss 125).

Third, we embrace our limp. The first time I went to the country of Jordan, we got a chance to stop and stand by the shores of the Jabbok River. And on one level, it was just like standing by any other small stream; to call it a river, at least at the place we were standing, was a vast overstatement. But it was somewhere along the shores of this river that one of the patriarchs of Israel, Jacob, found himself wrestling with God in the middle of the night. And when the wrestling match was over, Jacob was forever changed. His hip is wrenched, and he walks with a limp the rest of his life (cf. Genesis 32:22-32). He never forgets his struggle, and neither do we. No matter what the nature of the struggle is that we go through, we never forget it and we can never go back to the way we were before. And we should not. Rather than pretending that everything is okay, that we’re just as good as before, what if we embrace our limp and allow God to use our pain?

One of the names for God, one that’s well known, is El Shaddai. It’s the name used in verse 16 of our passage today, translated in this text as “Almighty.” That’s how it’s often translated, but the root word actually means “destroyer and maker.” Perhaps that verse should read this way: “God has made my heart faint; the Destroyer and Maker has terrified me” (23:16, my translation). “To encounter God is to be destroyed in part: it is to lose part or all of ourselves so we can be remade” (Keuss 128). So when we resist or try to hide our limp, we’re resisting and ignoring what God is doing and has done in our lives. Remember: God never wastes anything. We are, to use a phrase from Catholic author Henri Nouwen, “wounded healers.”

And that causes us to move to the fourth piece of living in the valley of the sigh: we welcome humility. Basically, this means that we stop fighting against God. Like Job, we welcome what God has for us and we recognize that whatever he has for us is ultimately good. That’s the meaning behind Paul’s famous instruction: “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him…” (Romans 8:28). Paul doesn’t say everything is good, but that God brings good out of everything. Job puts it this way: “He does whatever he pleases. He carries out his decree against me, and many such plans he still has in store” (23:13-14). At this point in the book, Job has made quite a journey already, from complaint to—not really acceptance as we think of it, which might be better described as resignation, giving up—but Job has moved to humility, to accepting that whatever comes from the hand of God will be good for him, will make him more the man God wants him to be. He knows that his end will not be destruction because God has “many such plans” yet for him.

You could say that Job has decided to give up his own map of the valley he is in and trust God to lead him. We tend to clutch to our maps pretty tightly, even if the maps are virtual. Soon after we had moved here, we had a pump go out at our house and I was given a name and an address of a place that could fix it. So I put the address in the GPS and headed out to find the location. I followed the directions, even though it seemed like I was going the wrong way, but I knew I was really in trouble when the GPS told me to get out of my car and walk through a woods to the destination. Yeah, even GPS can be wrong. What I needed to do was to ask someone I knew and trust their direction—and their direction was to call Steve Morlan, who came over and fixed us right up. Haven’t had any problems with that pump since!

Tod Bolsinger uses the story of Lewis and Clark to describe the place we find ourselves in today. Lewis and Clark set out to explore the western part of what is now the United States, and they had based all of their plans on the assumption that once they crossed the western mountains, there would be a navigable river and an easy passage through to the Pacific Ocean. When they crested they mountains, they could not have been more disappointed and they could not have been more wrong. The map they had in their heads did not match reality. They had to trust a guide outside of themselves to be able to accomplish their mission (cf. Canoeing the Mountains, pgs. 24-27). Their guide was Sacajawea, but ours is the creator of the universe. When we find ourselves in a difficult place, humility tells us that a lot of times—maybe most of the time—we have to give up our maps, the strategies we think will work, and trust a guide who is outside of ourselves. Job does that, and trusts that his guide has “many such plans”—good plans—still laid out for Job’s life, plans that will bring him through as gold.

Accept the reality of heartbreak. Seek out whatever God has for us. Embrace our limp. And welcome humility. To be human means we are going to spend some time in the valley of the sigh. But, by God’s grace, mercy and strength, we can live through those times and, as Job says, come out on the other side “as gold” (23:10). A searching world needs to know that. Our own strength will not get us through the valley of the sigh. Instead, we can turn to one who says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).

This morning, as we go to prayer, I want to invite you especially if you are in the valley today to come forward and kneel for prayer. There are people who would love to pray with you and for you this morning, if you will let them. I don’t promise solutions just because you come forward, but I can promise you a savior who will give you rest. Let’s pray.