The book of Job is a threat to every preacher, to every theologian, to every person who has ever taught a Sunday school class.  The book of Job is a threat to anyone who has ever tried to explain who God is; what God does; or why things happen in the world.
 
 We are given the story of this prosperous, healthy, happy, and deeply faithful man named Job.  Everything is going great for Job until God and Satan make this little wager.  Satan challenges God, claiming that the only reason Job is faithful is because God has blessed him with a wonderful life.  God accepts the challenge, Satan goes to work, and the mayhem ensues.  Job's children are killed, his wealth is destroyed, his body is laid to waste by illness.  Job still continues to struggle to be faithful.
 
In the midst of his suffering he is visited by his three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar.  The well meaning trio arrive to bring comfort to their friend.  Unfortunately their comfort comes in the form of religious platitudes.  They seek to justify the suffering.  "You must have done something wrong to receive this fate.  It's God will."  Out of their mouths tumble every theological explanation of the day, none of which bring any peace or comfort to poor, blameless Job.

 Job challenges their answers and their theology.  Their pretty little paper thin theories are easily torn by the winds of human suffering.  Job's condescending friends do nothing to quench his thirst for an explanation to his condition.  Job continues to question why and his friends continue to babble.  This debate rages for chapter after chapter until we reach chapter thirty-eight.
 
 Then the scene of our four men in conversation is dwarfed as the camera zooms back to show us a much larger picture and the booming voice of God Almighty silences all human utterance.  God has heard Job's insistent questioning and the time for response has come.  It is God now who will ask the questions and we will see if Job can reply. "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? ...Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place...Have the gates of death been revealed to you...Can you bind the chain of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion...Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty?"

 I do not know whether or not this speech invented the rhetorical question but it certainly uses the tool to its fullest.  God's response to Job does not seek to answer his question regarding human suffering nor support the arguments of his friends.  God will offer no explanations, and any attempt to explain God will fall far short of reality.  Job's three friends look like silly little children making up stories to explain what is beyond their comprehension.  But before we distance ourselves too much from Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, we must remember that in essence what they are doing is merely quoting the sermons they have heard and the affirmations of faith they have spoken in worship.  The very same sermons and affirmations that Job used to state his beliefs in God before he fell into a state of suffering.

 God's holy, powerful, and overwhelming presence in their midst takes their theological beliefs and systems of thought, which they assumed were written in the stone of everlasting reality, and shakes them like an etch a sketch leaving a blank page where there once was a whole list of certainties and definitions.  Quite a scary thought for those of us who make our living by teaching the words that were on that page.

 In this respect God and Job are engaging in the same task.  They are both dismissing and rebelling against theological platitudes.  Job challenges our neat systems of belief with the question that rings out across the centuries, "If God is all-powerful, and all-loving why are humans forced to suffer in this life?"  The question for which there is no good answer when you are looking into the eyes of someone in pain.  And God rebels against our attempts to systematize and categorize the actions of the creator of the universe into some sort of machine with set outcomes.

 But God does not stop at shaking the etch a sketch clean of our answers, God even wipes away Job's questions.  Disturbing.  Very disturbing when Job is desperate for answers.  Now it is not that God ignores Job's questions.  Job is not faced with silence, wondering whether God even notices his plight.  But God's overwhelming presence, the presence of the Holy will not, cannot, be quantified in a way that will provide us with manageable answers.

 It is as if we are seeking to complete a recipe of understanding.  And we have some of the ingredients but we need a cup of the divine to complete the mix.  In all good faith we turn to God, cup in hand.  But God's presence not only fills up the cup but pours over the sides and onto the floor filling up the whole room until we find ourselves treading in the depths of the divine.  All thoughts of completing our recipe of understanding are irrelevant.
 
 The book of Job brings us word of the unbridgeable gap between our limited existence and the divine's limitless existence.  Thomas Wolfe once wrote that "The most tragic, sublime, and beautiful expression of loneliness which I have ever read is the book of Job."  I love the quote but I always wonder to whose loneliness he is referring. Certainly Job is in a place of loneliness, surrounded by friends who do not begin to understand what he is going through.  Our suffering can often draw us together with people who love and care for us, but on another level it is can be quite isolating.  Others may support us, empathize, sympathize, even suffer themselves from watching us suffer. But it is we alone who live the pain of our suffering, it is ours when we wake in the middle of the night, the fear it brings, the doubts it raises. And as it did for Job, suffering also can distance us from God who at times can appear to be absent when we are seeking answers for why.

 But there is a sense of loneliness in God as well in the book of Job.  The divine's powerful speech of rhetorical questions challenges Job's ability to understand anything in sight of God's vastness.  I wonder if God laments that we human creatures, created in the image of the divine, cannot grasp God's fullness, cannot comprehend the depth of God's majesty, cannot be companions on any real level.  How it must be for God to love so much and always be misunderstood.  Perhaps I have wandered a bit too far down the metaphysical path but in the end the book of Job leaves us not solely with an account of human suffering, but with a description of the challenges of our relationship with God.

 So what are we left to think?  What are we left to do?  Any thought of what to think leaves me with a blank etch a sketch.  As far as what to do, listen to these words of Rabbi Robert Gordis, "The...ultimate message is clear.  Not only Ignoramus, 'we do not know,' but Ignorabimus, 'we may never know.'  But the poet goes further.  He calls upon us Gaudeamus, 'let us rejoice,' in the beauty of the world, though its pattern is only partially revealed to us.  It is enough to know that the dark mystery encloses and in part discloses a bright and shining miracle."

 It is quite appropriate that the book of Job is followed by the book of Psalms in the Bible.  Perhaps the only response to the mystery of our God is indeed Gaudeamus, let us rejoice, let us lift our voices in praise to the one who is beyond mere words. For whatever reason we may call upon the presence of God, elation, depression, or a longing for comprehension, we cannot expect to receive simple answers to our questions or quick solutions for our problems.  But we just might be touched by the Holy, we might catch a glimpse of the unseen glory, we might be forever changed by our contact with the one whose vastness is beyond measure, whose presence is beyond place, whose duration is beyond time, whose existence is the essence of all being.  I cannot say that I understand it but I can say let our cups runneth over and let us lift our voices in praise.

Amen. <