God’s Deep Current
Let me let you into a secret. I’m not sure what I should preach today. Most weeks a preacher can enter a pulpit having a good sense of what bit of God it is that they’re going to share that day. Communicating the goodness, or the challenge, or the compassion of God, with the prayerful hope that for someone, or perhaps all of us, what is said will fit like a key in the lock and change something within.
Faith can be like that. We can sometimes have a toolbox mindset for God, and see in our church or our faith a system for sorting the various themes of life into an ordered and useful form. And for much of the time, that is fine: it works. But this is one of those weeks where our readings might not let that happen.
This is one of those weeks which begins to get us to say — from the heart— what it is that we are here for in this church at all.
It’s theme holds no prisoners, and unfortunately the topic is one without easy answers.
It’s the one topic preachers cower to enter the pulpit with. It’s the topic of suffering. Or perhaps more specifically, trusting God despite suffering.
The issue is outlined for us by Jesus’ friends in the boat. They witness the enormous power of the waves on the lake threatening to destroy them all.
Some of us may have visited the Holy Land and seen the Sea of Galilee for ourselves, and I’m told that strong winds do indeed whip it up into a most dangerous stretch of water at times, and most unexpectedly. Yet those disciples also experienced the power of God to still these waves. And more subtly, the power of God to let them go through all that experience.
But the issue is perhaps made most real to our own experiences by the story of Job in the Old Testament which, as a work of fiction, and it is a work of fiction, deals head on with the struggles of where our loving God is when suffering strikes. We join it today, right at the end where God, after being terribly silent for chapter after chapter of Job’s pitiful situation, finally comes through.
It’s worth reading the story sometime, because it is so raw, direct, and comparable with some of our own experiences.
Job is presented to us as an upright, godly man, with many many great qualities: he does good works, keeps wrong at bay, and loves God very deeply. And then the story goes on to tell how many troubles and disasters overtake him, and his friends are convinced that these have happened because Job must have gone wrong somewhere. And we’ve all thought that haven’t we— ‘This must be happening to me because I’ve mucked up somewhere.’
We’ve all been there. But Job is convinced he’s done no wrong.
‘This isn’t happening out of sin,” he says,
“there’s more here,
and I know that God knows what’s going on,
and I want to know why God has let it happen!”
This story then, is about someone clinging on to God with all his faith, using the biggest question of them all, made with the fewest letters: WHY?
I’m sure that many of us will, from time to time, know something of the feelings that Job goes through. There are many struggles we face, some small, some terribly big, too big. And the question ‘Why?’ is one we long to have answered.
Job has lost his health, and his own children, all his home and belongings.
even his business, and his place in the community. Not one thing of his life was left untouched! He went through stuff that would seriously question whether God was a loving God at all. Even his wife said he should just give up!
And yet he holds onto his faith, just(!), to ask the one question of God:
Why, when he had tried to be as godly as possible
and trusted in Him, why should all this happen to him?
A number of years ago I read about the experience of a Catholic priest who had spent an hour in prayer sitting upon Trafalgar Square's empty fourth plinth. During his hour on the plinth, a passer-by yelled:
“Where was your God at Auswitz,
or during the Boxing Day Tsunami?”
And the priest’s reply was poignant: “Dying,” he said, “Drowning.”
[Church Times 9th Oct 2009]
The are no easy answers to the questions that Job, and we ourselves must ask of life sometimes. And although Job’s story asks the questions, it doesn’t pretend to be able to answer them. Instead Job’s story tries to remind us— a little bit like the disciples’ experience of Jesus in the boat— that God, who is always with us in all our situations and loves us to the core, even when it seems to us she isn’t present at all, isn’t a simplistic, fair-weather God.
Instead she is a relating God, and as the Catholic priest was trying to make clear to the passer’s-by in London: her relationships are meant to grow through all our times, good and troubled alike.
Job kept his relationship with God going, in the thick of his suffering with his one and only question: Why!
Some of us gathered here have been in moments like those. Perhaps we’re there when we hear of some of the terrible disasters that happen throughout the world. Or perhaps we’re in the midst of something for ourselves, right now. And I feel, Job has something to offer to us for those times to help us cling on in faith to God. Job is determined to get through with God, to hold on and stay devoted.
He never turns away from God;
he never denies the depth of his despair either.
The two things come together in the word Why!!!
Job’s story asks us to hold on tight in our relationships with God, with all our real feelings brought just as they are, that we might continue to place our lives in his hands.
I wonder if you’ve seen those TV wildlife programmes set in the Arctic.
If you have, you’ve probably seen those clips of icebergs floating in the water. It always seems to me, that some of the smaller ones always seem to be drifting in a different direction to the larger ones. And I discovered one day that this was because the smaller ones tend to get scattered and driven by the wind as it blows over the water. But the larger ones are guided by something set deep down in the water: the ocean’s current that overcomes the breeze.undefined
Job, with his constant searching question, was like one who in the scattering breeze, sought the deep guiding current of God. Invisible, imperceptible, but definitely there.
Questions like Why, are like gears to the engine of our faith. They keep it turning, looking, not giving up. And I hope that, in the way life can be as unpredictable as the waves on the sea, if we were to keep holding on to God in all our questions, and uncertainties, we would find that he truly is the author of something much deeper than we can perceive.
Those questions we hold might not have a satisfactory answer in this life. Maybe not in the next either. All we can know is: for the tapestry of the story of God and his deeply deeply loved family, those darker threads, whilst not having been chosen by God, will be placed into the finished picture by God in such a way that they have a place that honours and marks what it meant to be the holder of those dark skeins that you had to hold.
Know that there is the deeper current moving us through the good and bad, towards God himself.