Reading: 1-2 Healing in a Broken World

 I have been a pastor since 1978. Over the years I have held a number of pastoral positions in the United States and, alongside the pastoral work I did, I also found myself called on to care for people in various crisis situations. It was in these special moments where God needed someone to put the skin on his love and be there with the people in need.

The calling of God's people to be present in the lives of those who are hurting in our broken world is what chaplaincy is all about. During this course we will be examining the role of one of the servants of the Lord as we confront the effects of evil as it tries to destroy faith in God and trust in the loving faithfulness of our covenant God who has promised to never leave us nor forsake us.  I am glad you are along for the journey of examining this vital role in ministry.

First of all, some thoughts which arise out of an understanding of the book of Job.

The Bible speaks to our human situation. One thing which we can always count on is that when confronted with evil and its desire to destroy us, the Bible will have something to say about it. I think a good place to begin is with the biblical book of Job.

As the book opens, we find that we are given a picture of a man who is upright in all his dealings with God and with others. He is a righteous man. He is faithful to God. And he has caught the attention of the one who is called Satan - for many of us the word in the Hebrew has come to simply be a name for an evil spirit - Satan. But the name is also one which should often be translated so that we would get the proper idea of who he is. He is not just another personage in the spiritual realm. No, his name when translated is Adversary. So the way we would read this in Job is that the angels came to present themselves to God and the Adversary was there among them. What follows is a very difficult thing - God wagers that the Adversary cannot get Job to renounce his faith. And it is no small wager that god makes. He allows the Adversary to deprive Job of all his goods and even his family. Even his wife encourages him to forsake God in the midst of his misery.

But in all this Job does not waver from trusting God, the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away, Blessed be the name of the Lord. The text goes on to tell us, in all this Job did not sin nor did he charge God with wrong.

So then the Adversary says, well, Job is still serving you God because he himself has not been touched. So God gives the Adversary a little more rope and he afflicts Job with terrible sores. And Job goes into a deep depression as he sits on an ash heap and waits for his affliction to end.

What follows in the text is a long series of speeches from Job and his friends who come to comfort him. Each one in turn gives Job a perspective on suffering. As we listen in we discover that the problem of suffering and its obvious implications in Job's life is a very difficult thing to try to solve. The friends give lots of advice to Job.

One of the earliest summaries of the Christian faith that I was taught as a boy was the Compendium of the Christian religion. Early in that document we find the following:

 Q. 13. Will God suffer such disobedience and corruption to go unpunished?

 A. By no means: but in his just judgment will punish them, both in time and eternity, as it is written: Cursed is every one that continues not in all things, which are written in the book of the law, to do them.

As I recall, that question and answer were carefully explained by the pastors who were my teachers to mean that God was going to get me for every little thing I ever did that was sinful. Now it may be my own memories which have made that into a fearful thing, but I recall the teaching of that very clearly from when I was about 8 or 9 years old.

As we turn to the book of Job, we discover that a significant portion of the book can be summarized as follows

 In the first speech, Job curses the day that he was born, insisting that life under the conditions that he must bear is not worthwhile. Because he is conscious of no wrongdoing, he sees no justice in the way he must suffer. To this speech, Eliphaz replies that righteous people do not suffer; only the wicked are tormented in this fashion. For Job to declare himself innocent is to charge Yahweh with injustice; that a man should be more just than God is unreasonable. Eliphaz argues that in God's sight, no human being is righteous. All humans have sinned, and any suffering they must endure is a just punishment for their transgressions. Bildad adds his support to what Eliphaz says by insisting that God does not pervert justice; neither does he ever act unrighteously. Zophar goes even further in his accusations against Job: Job is not being punished as much as he deserves, for Yahweh is both a just and a merciful God, and mercy always means treating a person better than that person deserves.

(retrieved from http://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/o/old-testament-of-the-bible/summary-and-analysis/job )

So the speeches of Job's friends all call on him to confess his sinfulness before God and accept his suffering as a result of the sin which is common to us all as human beings. In fact, Job should be thanking god that things were not worse than they were at this point. When I recall what I was taught as a youngster and I compare it to what Job's friends had to say, I get the feeling that Job's friends were theologically right in what they are saying. And yet, and yet, by the end of the book Job is called upon by God to offer sacrifices for these friends of his because of how they had spoken of God and his relationship to humanity.

Job makes his defense and says that he would really like to take God to court and put him on trial because Job believes he has been treated most unfairly by a God who is supposed to be, if anything at all, fair. And he comes to the point of saying, in what we call chapter 19, I know that my redeemer lives and that in the end he shall stand upon the earth, and even though my flesh be destroyed, yet in the end I, in my flesh, shall see God.

When we come to the end of the Book of Job, we discover that no answer has actually been given to the problem of human suffering. Why do bad things happen to people? Is it just the adversary trying to destroy us? Or what?

While I am not going to try to answer that, I am going to set out on this course which will try to give you, my students, the ability to deal with people in the depths of suffering.  And this is where I want to begin--Never, never should we give the name Adversary to God. It is Satan who is the adversary. God is not our adversary. As we help people, we need to gently, ever so gently help them to see that God is a companion of those who suffer. God himself is a suffering God. When we see Jesus crying out on the cross, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It is not just a fake thing. It is real. It is God with us, Immanuel, suffering with us and for us. While we will never be able to understand this, still we discover that God is with us on the ash heap of our lives, when pain and suffering invade our own lives.

The Adversary, the Apostle John tells us in Revelation 20:2  And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and binds him with chains in the bottomless abyss.  Again, if we would translate Satan we would see the following: And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent - which refers back to Genesis 3 - who is the devil and the adversary, and bind him and throws him into the abyss.

God is not our adversary. When we find ourselves in the midst of suffering, we can and do cry out to God for justice in our situations. But God wants us to know that he is with us in our suffering. He is not far off, unconcerned, unaffected by our suffering.

In our role as chaplains in this suffering world, we do well to keep that biblical perspective in mind. Immanuel is true for us in our suffering as much as it is in the times of great rejoicing. We can, with the psalmist, cry out to God to seek his comfort and his grace in our misery. God never tells us to ignore our misery. We do not, like the Buddhist, try to learn to deny our desires and so to rise above suffering. No we know that God has made us in his own image and he wants us to deeply desire him as Psalm 42 puts it,

1As a deer pants for flowing streams,
so pants my soul for you, O God.
2My soul thirsts for God,
for the living God.

In the role of chaplain, we will be there to be the presence of God for the thirsty soul. We will delve more deeply into this in the following modules.