Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Final Words

Job 42:1-6
February 22, 2012 (Ash Wednesday) • Portage First UMC
Very often, we save the best for last. Go to a concert, and the band or the orchestra will carefully plan the song list so that the event climaxes with the best song they have to offer. Watch a fireworks display and see how everyone anticipates the grand finale, when everything seems to cut loose. Or even think about dinner around your table. You eat the good food (the stuff that’s presumably good for you), and then you have dessert—you save the best for last. Sometimes that’s even true in our lives. People often pay attention to the final words spoken by loved ones, because sometimes those words sum up the entirety of that person’s life. Sometimes humorous, sometimes profound—final words say a lot about the person who speaks them. For instance, George Bernard Shaw, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, ended his life with the words, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” When Henry David Thoreau was asked near the end of his life if he wanted to make his peace with God, Thoreau said, “I did not know we have ever quarreled.” Leonardo da Vinci, who made the world a more beautiful place through his works of art, said on his deathbed, “I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.” Mother Teresa, who died in 1997, kept repeating the words, “Jesus, I love you” as she died. And John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, died after reminding his loved ones, “The best of all is, God is with us.” Final words can say a lot about a person’s life and what was important to them. Our true character comes out at the end. Sometimes we save the best for last.
There is a man in the Bible, in the Old Testament, whose name was Job. He lived, roughly, around the time of Abraham, in the land of Uz (a place whose location no one can identify for certain today). Job, we are told, was “blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil” (1:1). His family was large, and so was his fortune. However, in a part of the story Job never learns about and we don’t quite understand, Satan makes a bet with God. In fact, he does it twice. The first time, Satan tells God that Job only worships God because he’s blessed and has all this good stuff, so God lets Satan take it all away, only restricting Satan from actually doing harm to Job himself. And Job loses everything—his flocks and herds, his crops, his servants, and even his children. In one fell swoop, Job goes from being a wealthy man to being a pauper. And yet, he says, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised” (1:21). So Satan goes back to God and claims Job is only still worshipping God because he lost nothing personal. If God would allow Satan to hurt Job himself, Satan says, Job would curse God. And so God permits Satan to afflict (but not kill) Job, and Job gets painful sores all over his body. We’re not sure what disease he has exactly; some think it’s boils or leprosy or even elephantiasis (like the “Elephant Man” suffered from) (McKenna, Communicator’s Commentary: Job, pg. 45). The disease isn’t really important; Job’s reaction is. His wife tells him to “curse God and die,” and yet Job tells her that’s foolish. “Shall we accept good from God and not trouble?” (2:9-10).
Often we hear Job’s name associated with patience. Even James (5:11), in the New Testament, talks about Job’s “perseverance” (the word literally means “endurance” or “steadfastness”). Job, James says, waited for what God was going to do in his life. And in the beginning, Job does seem rather patient. His response to his wife and his refusal to curse God in the face of difficulty would be a a good model for any person of faith. But when you actually read his story, when you get past the first couple of chapters, when you watch Job as he suffers longer and longer—he’s really not all that patient. He has friends who come and sit with him. For seven days, they sit in silence, and honestly, they do their best ministry when they just sit with him, without saying a word. We usually want to fill the silence with talking, and very often that leads us to saying dumb and insensitive things to people who are hurting. The best thing we can do is to just sit with people, be with people who are hurting. Be there, help if needed, but otherwise, refuse to give advice. Your “wisdom” is not what is needed in those times, and it’s the so-called “wisdom” of Job’s friends that begin to push his buttons. They tell him obviously he did something sinful to deserve this. Or someone sinned and he’s being punished. Surely, they say, Job can’t be as righteous as he thinks he is. And Job, more than a bit frustrated, begins to demand an audience with God: “Oh, that I had someone to hear me! I sign now my defense—let the Almighty answer me; let my accuser put his indictment in writing” (31:35). He complains to God: “I cry out to you, God, but you do not answer; I stand up, but you merely look at me” (30:20). He remembers better days: “Oh, for the days when I was in my prime, when God’s intimate friendship blessed my house” (29:4). Haven’t we all from time to time been where Job is? When something goes wrong, when life doesn’t seem to work out the way we want it to or the way we think it should, when we feel like we’re suffering for no good reason, we too want God to show up and make sense of it. “God, you’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do!” We understand Job’s reaction, because it’s ours, too. Job wants God to explain himself. He wants to know why this has happened to him. He wants God to show up.
And God does show up. At the beginning of chapter 38, God breaks into the conversation and says (in a voice I imagine being somewhat like James Earl Jones), “Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me” (38:2-3). And for the next four chapters, God takes Job, literally, on a whirlwind tour of creation. At each stop along the way, God asks Job, “Can you do this? Can you create this? When you can explain all of this, then I will answer you.” That’s where we came into the story tonight as we read in Job 42. God stopped once before to let Job answer, at the beginning of chapter 40, but now God is done talking. It’s Job’s turn. He’s had his audience with God, and God has even given him the chance to have the final word. What will Job say? How do you respond when God shows up?
Job has been asking “why” all along the way. But there’s a change at this point. You notice he’s no longer asking why he’s suffering. He’s no longer asking why all of this happened. Job’s question has changed from “why” to “who.” Job is asking a much more important question now, because he’s realized that when a person puts their suffering, their disasters, their losses in perspective, in the light of eternity, all those things become much smaller than we think they are. That’s not to say our suffering is unimportant, or that God didn’t care Job was hurting. God cared very much, and the final chapter in the book is a story of healing and hope. God cares about our suffering, as well. But the movement Job makes is from “why” to “who,” from a focus on himself to a focus on the God who made him, who knows and cares about his suffering, and who is closer than he could ever imagine. “I know,” Job finally says, “that you can do all things…Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know” (42:2-3). This is Job’s confession—his admission that he has relied too long on his own strength, on his own righteousness, even on his own knowledge. His pride was nearly his downfall; his humility and repentance will be the seed of his restoration (cf. McKenna 309-311).
And so Job’s final words, at least in this encounter with God and in the book that bears his name, are these: “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (42:5-6). I knew about you, God. I’d been to church and Sunday School and heard all the stories. I had perfect attendance at Bible School and I even went on a mission trip. I knew all about you, but I didn’t know you. Now my perspective has changed. Now I can see you for who you really are because I’ve been in your presence. I’ve opened myself to more of who you are. I’ve moved from “why” to “who.” And because of that change in perspective, Job’s response is to “despise” himself and “repent” in dust and ashes. Two very important words there. The word translated “despise” doesn’t mean to hate yourself or to beat yourself up, to think you’re worth nothing. The original Hebrew word has an overtone of “melt away” or “refuse.” I get the sense that it’s describing a person who realizes they are not more important than others, they are not the center of the universe, and they refuse to be one who demands everyone pay attention to them. It’s someone who realizes they are part of a community and will refuse to demand special treatment. With Job’s success before, he very well may have been a bit arrogant, considering himself a bit “above others.” But now, Job is a different person. He’s found the heart Jesus was talking about when he said, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). Jesus, too, isn’t saying we put ourselves down; it’s that we seek to serve rather than to be served (cf. Mark 10:45), to see ourselves in the right perspective. That was how Jesus lived his life, and Paul tells us we should have the same attitude as Jesus “who, being in very nature God…made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant” (Philippians 2:5-7). Job is a different person after this encounter with God, someone who seeks the welfare of others rather than just his own.
The other response Job makes is just as critical—he repents. The word “repent” means to turn around, to go a different direction. It’s not just being sorry for what you’ve done. Repentance also isn’t necessarily a matter of listing all our sins and going through them one-by-one. Martin Luther, the great reformer, nearly drove himself crazy trying to do that. He was always afraid he would forget something and that if he didn’t name it, God wouldn’t forgive him of it, whatever “it” was. Sometimes we think the same way, but the good news of the Gospel is that Jesus has already paid the price on the cross for all our sin. All that’s required of us is to come, to say we’re sorry for what we’ve done, and to ask for his strength to be able to head a different direction in our lives. Repentance is a choice to live differently. So the two actions, the two movements (despising and repenting, to use Job’s language) are tied together. It’s a change of life, the beginning of a new life, new hope for all. “I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (42:6).
That’s an appropriate image of prayer for this night, for Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent. Lent is a movement, just like Job’s, from “why” to “who,” and this Lenten season, we’re going to deal with some final words—the final words of Jesus from the cross. As Jesus faced his own time of great suffering, he shouted out seven things, seven “words” that have come down through history to you and me, seven last things that continue to make an impact in our lives. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” “Today, you will be with me in paradise.” “Behold your son…behold your mother.” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” “I thirst.” “It is finished.” “Into your hands I commit my spirit.” It’s a movement from “why” to “who,” and my prayer is that we will, throughout these next forty days, make that same movement, to a place of faith where we depend less on our own reasoning and abilities (the “why” place) to depending more fully on Jesus’ love and grace (the “who” place). Because when we arrive at Easter, we will be confronted with a radical new beginning, something we have no control over and cannot duplicate. If we’re going to fully experience Easter, we have to move from “why” to “who.” Unless we know the “who,” the one who is above it all, we cannot begin to understand or accept the power of the resurrection.
So tonight, we begin this Lenten season in dust and ashes, in an attitude of servanthood and repentance. Ashes have long been a sign of mortality—“ashes to ashes and dust to dust” we say at the graveside. Tonight, ashes will serve as a reminder that we are mortal, and that we have a need for repentance. As you receive the ashes tonight, you’ll hear the words, “Repent and believe the Gospel.” Those aren’t just formulaic words. That’s the hope we have for each of us tonight as you receive those ashes in the sign of the cross. The ashes then become a sign of the hope we have in Jesus Christ. Tonight, as we receive these ashes, may it remind us that God is bigger than our “why”s, God is big enough to handle our questions, and God is the creator who ultimately is out for our good. As we head into this season of Lent, may these ashes remind us of our deep need of a savior who is bigger than us. And may we have the same hope that consumed Job: “I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God” (Job 19:25-26). Amen.

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