The book of Job tells a folktale about a man who was chosen to be tested for his faith. We know very little about Job, other than his homeland, his name and his faithful character. There are no details that place Job in a particular historical context. Unlike most of the other stories of the Bible, there's no effort to even indicate that Job was an Israelite. All we really know about Job is that he "was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil." The book of Job also describes the heavenly courts of God. In the story, heaven is described like a royal court, with attendants and advisors assisting God in rendering judgments about various matters. Elsewhere in the Bible, the heavenly court was usually described as an anonymous group. Rarely was any one character of God's court distinguished by a title or a function. In Hebrew, they were simply called the "sons of God," these heavenly attendants. But in the story of Job, one of these sons of God is distinguished from the others. This character was simply called "the accuser" or in Hebrew "the satan." The accuser's job was to bring before God those who were disloyal to God. The accuser was sort of like the prosecuting attorney whose job is to protect the interests of the state. The accuser's job was to protect the interests of God, by charging those who were disobedient to God. If the accuser successfully made his case, God would punish the disloyal and disobedient. So the accuser brought before God the case of Job. But with Job, the accuser brought a hypothetical case of disloyalty. "If you were to stop showering your servant Job with blessings," the accuser argued, "Job would curse you to your face! If you were to take away all his possessions and to take from him even his good health, Job's faith would be revealed as hollow and without substance." And so, the story goes, God granted the accuser permission to test this hypothesis. God placed faith in Job by presenting him to be tested harshly. The heavenly accuser stripped Job of all his wealth and possessions. He caused Job's children to be killed and his friends to abandon him. And in the end, he inflicted Job with loathsome sores. Job's wife came to him to ask, "Are you still holding on to your precious integrity?" And she advised him to "curse God and die." It was also her household which was destroyed, her children who were slaughtered. Give up, she advised him simply. God has abandoned us, so there's nothing left for us to be faithful to in return. But instead of following her in her spiral of despair, Job observed quietly, passively, that there’s no faith that thanks God for the good, yet turns away from God in the face of the bad. Job didn't curse God. The accuser failed to prove his case against Job. Job didn't sin against God with his lips, the story tells us. But what was in Job's heart? What ache did he feel? What blame did he assign to God in his heart, if not by his words, we don't know. But with his lips, he remained faithful. He passed the accuser's test.

Faith isn't an inoculation against tragedy. Faith in God doesn't prevent loss or grief. There's no depth of religiosity or spirituality and can serve as an antidote to the bad stuff that happens in life outside of our control. Some of the bad stuff is in our control. Some of the bad stuff that we suffer in life comes as a direct result of bad choices taking us down a path that leads to suffering. Some choices logically result in harm to ourselves and others. We can be reckless and thoughtless, and usually we pay a price for our poor choices. But the book of Job presents us with a whole different category of suffering. It's not the suffering that we bring upon ourselves that's hard to understand. We may not always like it, but it's understandable when we cause ourselves harm. But the suffering that's hardest to make sense of is the suffering that's undeserved. The pain that's hardest to redeem is that pain that afflicts those who didn't bring it upon themselves. Rabbi Kushner framed the question as, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" That question assumes that those who are good should prosper, and that bad things should only happen to bad people. But faith doesn't prevent bad stuff from happening. The same fate falls on the righteous and the wicked alike, as it says elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures. One of Rabbi Kushner's conclusions is that bad things happen to good people because bad things happen to everyone. It's part of the human condition, part of the chaos that still creeps through the world. Whenever a tornado touches down and causes destruction, you can count on the news showing some well-meaning survivor who says, "God was watching out for me today." Of course the implication is that God must not have been watching out for those folks who didn't survive. But there are tragedies that people suffer that aren't the result of faith or lack of faith. They simply happen, because storms and earthquakes and random human violence are part of this world as they always have been. There's no moral implication of a tornado. There's no divine will in a hurricane or a virus. They happen to us all regardless of how faithful we are. I worked with a teenage boy once who's parents announced that they were getting a divorce just a few days before they sent him off with me to a mission camp in the Appalachian mountains. Our first day at this mission camp, the camp director told us all how wonderful it was to be together with all these young Christians. She explained that if we just put our minds to it, we could solve any problem, with such faithful young people. She stated that if we just prayed hard enough, we could overcome any obstacle. If our faith was strong enough, she argued, we could make anything happen. I ached for this teenage boy in my group who’d been devastated just a few days earlier to learn that his family was breaking up. He prayed that it wouldn't happen. He asked God to help his parents reconcile. But they broke up anyway. And he suffered as a result. He didn’t suffer because he failed to pray hard enough, or because he wasn't faithful enough to God, or because he somehow deserved this pain that he was experiencing. It was outside of his control, and no depth of faith would change that. Prayer isn't a magic incantation that gives us control over things that are truly outside our control. Our faith doesn't provide us a get-out-of-jail-free card that exempts us from pain and suffering. Faith doesn't inoculate us from tragedy.

And just the same, tragedy is no proof for or against the love of God. I know a woman who explains the bad things that happen to others as God's punishment for their sins. AIDS, she says, is God's punishment for the sins of those who suffer from the disease. God allows some people to suffer, she assumes, because somewhere in their thoughts or deeds they must have offended God. But her own sufferings and trials she accepts as if she were Job. She assumes that her sufferings simply prove that God believes her faith is firm enough to stand up to the test. Illnesses in her family she accepts as a refining fire that sharpens her faith. Her suffering, she thinks, is a blessing in disguise. The tragedies of others serve to punish them for their sins, but her own trials are evidence of God's immense faith that she'll be up to the challenges of Satan who is afflicting her. I've pointed out to this woman that she can't have it both ways. If bad stuff is God's wrathful punishment for sin, then the bad stuff in her own life can't be so easily dismissed as divine blessings in disguise. If her sufferings are really God's hidden blessings, then the sufferings of others logically can't be summed up as God's discipline for disobedience. In fact, I think neither is the case. Tragedy does not prove God's love or God's wrath. Those tragedies which are truly outside of our control are evidence only that the world doesn't conform to our desire of how things should be. Tragedy reveals more about the world and our place in it, than it says about God. Faith has a role to play, but it's not in redeeming suffering or assigning responsibility to God for things that are simply random. Faith can help us through the assurance that the bad stuff cannot separate us from the God who loves us. There’s no suffering that we face alone, because God is present with us in our suffering. There's no loss that we grieve that God doesn't feel along side of us, like a loving parent whose heart breaks to see a child in pain. God does not make our troubles, or make our troubles disappear. But God loves us fiercely, no matter what troubles we face, no matter how close we feel to being followed up in despair. God loves us and holds us and gives us strength to face what comes.

We’ll talk about Job again in the next weeks few weeks. After Job was faced with his wife’s despair, he then was visited by friends who each had their own opinions about why Job was suffering and what he should do about it. And in the end, Job finally spoke directly with God to make sense of all that he’d suffered. In the end, in the good times and the bad times, in joy or suffering, we face none of it alone. God is with us. Thanks be to God. Amen.