THE DAYS IT RAINED

The Reverend Seth Ethan Carey

February 8, 2009

First Congregational Church, Glen Ellyn, Illinois UCC

www.firstconge.org

630-469-3096

Introduction to the Scripture:

At last we come to the notorious Book of Job, a work that unflinchingly explores the phenomenon of human suffering. For those not familiar with this text, I’ll give you a brief introduction.

Job is an upright man, blameless in the sight of God. God has blessed him with good health, financial security, and a large family―but along comes a mischievous angel named Satan, who convinces God to take part in a diabolical experiment. Satan believes that Job is only so devout because God has blessed him with so much. Take away everything he holds dear, he argues, and Job will not be so pious.

God obliges, and Job’s comfortable life is destroyed within a span of hours. Job’s so-called friends blame him for his own misfortune, but he maintains his innocence. For his own part, Job believes that God has a personal vendetta against him. That’s an easy thing to believe, when everything you’ve ever cared about has been taken away.

Scripture: Job 16:1-12

Then Job answered: ‘I have heard many such things; miserable comforters are you all. Have windy words no limit? Or what provokes you that you keep on talking? I also could talk as you do, if you were in my place; I could join words together against you, and shake my head at you. I could encourage you with my mouth, and the solace of my lips would assuage your pain.

‘If I speak, my pain is not assuaged, and if I forbear, how much of it leaves me? Surely now God has worn me out; he has made desolate all my company. And he has shriveled me up, which is a witness against me; my leanness has risen up against me, and it testifies to my face. He has torn me in his wrath, and hated me; he has gnashed his teeth at me; my adversary sharpens his eyes against me. They have gaped at me with their mouths; they have struck me insolently on the cheek; they mass themselves together against me. God gives me up to the ungodly, and casts me into the hands of the wicked. I was at ease, and he broke me in two; he seized me by the neck and dashed me to pieces; he set me up as his target.

Sermon:

The commander of the Chinese air squadron howled with laughter as he launched a barrage of missiles. His flying warships stalked the Israeli opposition like shadows, like dogs hungry for meat. Israel’s forces crumbled under the barrage of artillery, and the wreckage of its air division fell like rain. General Malachi burst into tears, and I couldn’t calm him down. He was, after all, only three years old.

A few years ago I worked a brief stint at a preschool on the Yale Divinity School campus. The children who attended were primarily the sons and daughters of exchange students from all over the globe, so most of them didn’t speak a word of English. Still, the little boys in my charge managed to communicate well enough with each other by employing the universal language of destruction.

Every day at the preschool was the same. Between story time and snacks and the obligatory nap, the little girls would draw sweet little pictures of kittens and bunny rabbits eating ice cream, or something equally adorable. The boys, on the other hand, would tip over a large box of Lego blocks and commence the construction of airborne war-machines. Once completed, they would pick these up and hurl them into one another as hard as they could. The child with the weaker airship—usually poor little Malachi—would cry his little heart out as the work of his hands exploded into a hundred pieces of plastic.

Sometimes when this happened, the director of the preschool would come over and scold them. “We don’t play violent games,” she would tell them. “We don’t build weapons.” “That’s right,” I would tell the children sternly, even though I had personally aided in their construction. The only way I could get Malachi to stop crying was to help him rebuild his ravaged vessel. So the war carried on, an endless repetition of ignominious defeat for the little general. He was happy to play, so long as he got to watch things get smashed into pieces.

Deep down, on some instinctual level, little boys like to break things. In some especially immature males, this tendency will continue into adolescence and early adulthood. When I played in a heavy metal band in high school, for instance, we would dedicate fifteen minutes of every band practice to throwing something of little or no value off of our drummer’s porch and watching it explode in the driveway, leaving the pavement littered with debris. As it turns out it was actually his neighbor’s driveway, which proved to be a point of no small controversy.

Still, breaking old busted PC monitors or VCR’s is relatively harmless—especially when compared to the lives that are broken every day by tragic circumstances. Who is to blame for that? Who is to blame for the hurricane that levels cities, or the cancer that consumes our loved ones? Some say it’s just hard luck. Others blame divine wrath, and living malice wrought by the left hand of God.

***

Job is just such a man; he has just had the worst day of his life. His children have all been killed in a series of freak accidents. All of his wealth has been either stolen or destroyed. He has developed a serious skin condition that has twisted his body into a grotesque caricature of its former self. All Job has left is an unsympathetic shrew of a wife who tells him to “curse God, and die.”

In the midst of his torment, Job comes to believe that God has singled him out and targeted him for destruction. Job’s friends—“miserable comforters,” as he describes them—insist that he must have done something to deserve his punishment, that he must have committed some grave evil to make God angry. These men represent an antiquated worldview—that bad things never happen to good people. They believe in a God who blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked for their transgressions. Job believes in something much worse—a God that has broken him for no reason at all.

I once experienced something uncannily similar to what we find in the Book of Job. I’m ashamed to say that I was not the victim, but rather the torturer. Back in the eighties, my brother and I had a computer program called “Little Computer People.” Essentially, this was a program that placed a little virtual person in your care. This digital man had a house to wander around in, and it was up to me to make sure his cabinets were stocked with food, his pet dog was cared for, his bed was made, and his overall well-being attended to.

His name was Leonard. Dear God, Leonard, what have I done?

The whole thing was my brother’s idea. He appeared next to me one afternoon as I sat at the keyboard and he mused aloud, “I wonder what would happen if you took away his food.” I objected, but with all the slick persuasion of the Devil, he convinced me to take stop feeding him, just to see what would happen. Leonard had a little typewriter in his attic that he sometimes used to write me friendly notes, and after two days without food he composed a letter of concerned inquiry regarding his food supply. I ignored it. After another two or three days Leonard took ill. He turned green, and spent most of the day in bed. He would crawl out of bed on occasion and slink up to the attic to write more letters, which became increasingly desperate in their tone.

Why are you doing this? He would ask me. Why are you making me suffer? Why do you despise me so?

I couldn’t take it anymore. In spite of my brother’s insistence that I continue the experiment, I stocked his cabinets and cleaned his house, hoping to restore Leonard to health; but by then it was already too late. Leonard was too weak to get out of bed, even to feed himself.

He never recovered. And I’ve never forgiven myself for it.

***

But while I was to blame for Leonard’s tragic downfall, that doesn’t mean God is to blame for the hardships that befall us. Last week in Florida a family’s house burned to the ground while they were attending a Sunday morning church service. By the time they returned home, the blaze had consumed their home to its foundations and put one firefighter in critical condition. The father of that family simply told the press, “God works in mysterious ways.”

So while you’re in church worshipping God, God burns down your house. Yes, I suppose you could call that “mysterious,” but I think that’s being a little too charitable. I for one would call it sadistic, except that I don’t for one second believe that it was God who burned down that house. The fire marshal’s report states that the coils in the central heating unit overheated and caught fire, and that sounds like a more plausible explanation to me. I can’t prove that God isn’t guilty of arson, but I find it hard to believe.

In fact, I can’t believe any of the awful things that people attribute to the will of God—fires and floods, terminal illnesses, war, even genocide committed by other humans. It’s as though we worshipped some mythical storm-god, a mad raging deity who rains down lighting and sorrow on the innocent and washes our tears in torrents of his own merciless rain. In his own darkest hours, the theologian C.S. Lewis once wondered if we all aren’t like rats in the experiment of a mad scientist, every one of us destined for vivisection.

When there’s no one else to blame, we turn to God, as though God were a small boy who breaks things just for the fun of it. Job and his companions argue about why God has set out to ruin him, but they are in perfect agreement about who caused the damage. “I was at ease,” Job tells us, “and God broke me in two.”

***

Job and his companions are convinced that God is responsible for his misery. But the author of the Book of Job has a very different opinion.

At the end of the story, God appears before Job in a mighty whirlwind, reminiscent of ancient storm-gods. It almost seems as though God is mocking the very notion. Anyone who thinks that God is responsible for the proverbial storms that descend on us all at one time or another should listen carefully to what God says to Job in Chapter 38:

“Who has cut a channel for the torrents of rain, and a way for the thunderbolt, to bring rain on a land where no one lives, on the desert, which is empty of human life, to satisfy the waste and desolate land, and to make the ground put forth grass?”

God does send the rain. But it is not a rain of fire, or a hail of destruction. It is the rain that quenches the thirst of the wasteland and brings forth new life, sending forth grass where once there was nothing but scorched earth.

***

Soaked to the bone, three small children ran through the downpour, their parents trailing close behind. The blare of an air raid siren filled the dark sky, echoing ominously across the plains. Once they had seen the diabolic twister touch ground a few miles to the west—raging like an angry god—they had abandoned the trailer that they called home and headed for the church that stood just down the road. They never attended, but this seemed like a good time to start.

The church was mostly empty when they arrived, save for a few people who were there on business. I’m guessing it was a Congregational Church, since even a tornado didn’t stop them from holding a meeting; but it’s a good thing they were there. As it turns out, the people gathered were a group of Stephen Ministers.

For those of you who may not know, Stephen Ministers are faithful lay members of the church who are thoroughly trained to provide a ministry of presence to those who are going through a difficult time. It is a wonderful ministry that allows a large church like ours to give our members the care they need without making unrealistic demands of the clergy. Stephen Ministers care for people who suffer from a wide range of troubles, including grief, job loss, economic hardship, divorce, and other difficult situations. Stephen ministers meet confidentially with their care receivers once a week to listen to that person as they share their struggles, to pray with them, and to offer them compassionate support in the midst of their storm. Unlike Job’s friends, they will not judge you or blame you for your troubles.

I am pleased to say that as of today, our church will be reinstating its own Stephen Ministry, as we commission our first class of Stephen Ministers in over ten years. It is through disciples such as these that God acts in the world, sending rain to nourish the deserts within us, that hope might yet bloom.

When the refugees from that tornado found sanctuary in the nearby church, the Stephen Ministers gathered there rushed to their aid. They found warm, dry blankets for them. Some of them took the children aside and found toys for them, while others sat with the parents and listened as they talked about their fear and worry for their home, still vulnerable to the storm.

When life deals us a bad hand of cards and we find ourselves suffering like Job, it can seem as though all the world’s oceans are raining down on our heads—drowning us, leaving us to live out our days under their terrible weight. But when someone who cares about you is there to listen, to pray for you, to stand by you come what may, you might remember the days it rained as the time that God blessed you with a tornado of grace.

Amen.