April 2, 2006: Surrender to Love
Job 42:1-6; Psalm 17

Eileen Parfrey  - Springwater Presbyterian Church

Everyone says I've promised a "happy ending" to our Lenten journey with Job. If only we can make it. That all depends on what "happy" means to you. The end of Job's story has God giving everything back to Job in doubles, so rich even his new daughters inherit. But just try comforting a bereaved parent with the words, "You'll get another child, a better one." What was wrong with the one you had? If "happy ending" means replacement children and fabulous wealth, then yeah, it's a happy ending. But I don't think even Job bought that. What's "happy" for Job is what we find in today's text.

How did we get here? Job's "happy ending" arrives in three stages. In the first, Job admits that God has plans and that those plans are being carried out, whether he is aware of them or not. He hears this directly from the planner, speaking from a whirlwind. The second stage is when Job discovers there is more to reality than meets his eyes. Finally, the light bulb goes on over Job's head. "Wait a minute! I'm talking with God! And I'm not dead!" That's a happy ending. That's joy! But it leaves him with a limp.

Job loses everything, but his wound is inflicted as he tries to reconcile the contradiction between knowing his own innocence and everyone else's explanation that people suffer because they deserve it. It's a dead-end explanation, this doctrine of retribution, because it locks God into a strictly justice-based interaction with humans. Job knows he's at the end of that line because his suffering has no apparent cause. Logic decrees that, if you haven't done anything deserve this, it's who you are that calls for punishment.

Man, that's a dead end.

After God's first speech, Job rolls over in sheer resignation. "God gets to because God can; I don't." But God counters that passivity in the next speech. Justice has the final say when it's connected to no-strings-attached love. Strict justice doesn't have the final say, even about God. The love of God has the final say. Job is therefore free, not to deny his suffering, not to deny justice, not to deny God, but to open himself to the suffering of others. Simply and only because Job has a contemplative, prayerful, intimate relationship with God. Because Job is bowled over by the mystery of God's love, he can see beyond himself. In other words, the most effective hunger action comes from people who know and love hungry people, who love those persons because they themselves experience God's love toward. These are people who know deeply that there is nothing they can do to earn God's love. Because they know themselves to be already loved.

The happy ending is that Job is finally free from his old understanding of God-stern, burly, remote, just waiting to catch him doing something bad in order to blast him. Job can finally say that there are things beyond his grasp. He can appreciate the mystery of God. Some translations render Job saying he retracts what he'd said, that he repents. The NRSV says, "I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes." The Message comes a little closer to the meaning of the Hebrew when it has Job say, "I'm sorry-forgive me. I'll never do that again, I promise!" Job repents, not what he had to say, but the way he said it-his whining and complaining, imprisoning God in retribution theology. Locking God into justice without mercy.

This week I was contacted by an old, dear friend. We stay in touch, but pretty sporadically. He's a guy that, if we were in Wisconsin, we'd say he was "rode hard and put away wet." Even from the start, life was not gentle for Cisco. Youngest children will understand when I say that Cisco thought the whole family picked on him. But for him it was extreme. Both parents beat him regularly and everyone else was mean. Maybe it was his slow development or his dyslexia that made him an easy target. He grew up feeling unloved, but for some inexplicable reason, he is willing to do anything for his family. He's the one everyone goes to for loans that never get paid back. He's the one they crash with when their spouses or parents throw them out. If they need a truck they use his-and bring it back empty. They eat his food when things are thin at home. Cisco is so loyal that the second generation how now moved in to take advantage of him.

Unfortunately, after a period of financial success in his younger years, Cisco has fallen on hard times. When he had money, Cisco was all about getting and having and stuff. His second wife has taken up with the family pattern, sucking him dry of resources, moving him from one end of the country to another pursuing yet one more golden opportunity, that only leaves him more defeated and more broke.

Cisco wasn't looking for a handout, but you could see he was barely getting by. All he owned was in his broken-down truck-empty in the back, and with few enough things there was still plenty of room for the dog. We'd stayed in touch enough that Cisco wanted to check in with me, to let me know he'd taken a different, more spiritual path. He looked happy. Scrawny, scraggly, underfed, but at peace and really happy. Like his namesake, Francis of Assisi, he was sick, poor, rejected by his family. And in love with God. As we talked, Cisco admitted he still helped his family whenever they asked, but it was for a different reason. Before, he always hoped they would love him, would accept him, might even help him. Now, he helps without any hope of return. He used to be bitter, angry, resentful of how they used him and took advantage. He doesn't feel that anymore. He has finally figured out that Jesus gave without hope of return, simply because he could, and there were those who needed help. He gives because he loves Jesus. Not because he has so much and the other so little. Because he loves Jesus and there isn't much difference in his mind between Jesus and the ones asking for help.

What happened to Cisco is called "transformation." Like Job, he changed his mind, but changed it in such a profound way that his deepest knowing, his perception of his experience, the way he makes choices, it all changed. Richard Rohr says that "Transformation more often happens not when something new begins but when something old falls apart." That's Job's story. That's Cisco's story. Most of us would do just about anything to keep our lives from falling apart. Job had the courage to recognize the contradiction between what his friends were telling him and what his gut was telling him about his life. Instead of holding tighter, controlling his life and details more, Job surrendered to love and experienced transformation.

There is such a thing as the idolatry of security. When we try to nail everything down and control it, that's when it slips through our fingers. The call to Christian discipleship is not to deny oneself something, what we so often think Lent is about. Give up chocolate. Give up movies. Give up meat. The call to discipleship is to deny self. Not reject self. Not self-hatred, but a denial of our grasping self in order to liberate a greater one, the self God created us to be. The one in God's image and likeness. That's transformation. That's salvation. GK Chesterton said that Christianity has not been "tried and found wanting," but it has been seen as difficult and not tried. We're only asked to try. We aren't asked to succeed. That belongs to God.