Sure Could Use A Little Good News - October 8, 2006

Job 1:1, 2: 1-10

Churppie the canary never saw it coming. One second he was peacefully perched in his cage, whistling a song, the next second he was sucked in, washed up, and blown over. His problem began when his owner decided to clean hi cage with the vacuum. She stuck the nozzle in to suck up the seeds and feathers at the bottom of the cage when the nearby telephone rang. Instinctively she turned to pick it up. She had barely said hello when ~swoosh~ Churppie got sucked in. She gasped, let the phone drop, and switched off the vacuum cleaner.

With her heart in her mouth, she unzipped the bag. There was Churppie, alive but stunned, covered with heavy gray dust. She grabbed him and ran to the bathtub, turned on the faucet full blast, and held Churppie under a torrent of ice-cold water, power washing him clean. Then it dawned on her that Churppie was soaking wet and shivering. So she did what any compassionate pet owner would do—she grabbed the hair dryer and blasted him with hot air.

Did Churppie survive? Yes, but Churppie doesn’t sing so much anymore. He just sits there and stares a lot.

By the time we meet Job in our text for today, he has met that canary’s fate. By chapter 2 of a 42 chapter saga, this upright, blameless man, who was wealthy, healthy and pious, has lost 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, 500 donkeys, all of his servants, and all of his ten children. He is left with only his wife, and we see in today’s passage that she is not much of a bargain. And we are only in chapter 2.

The text of Job in many respects resembles a morality play. I’m sure you all know at least some of what happens in this story—Job is a pretty famous book. The problem with Job is not that Job is so hard to understand—it is that Job is so easily misunderstood.

The Reader’s digest version is this: A wealthy man loses all he has when Satan tries to bargain with God to see if Job will curse God when trouble befalls him. The wife encourages Job to throw in the towel, Job’s three friends come for a visit and see all that has happened to him and offer their own advice. Job pleads with God to provide him with answers to the question “Why Me?”, another character Elihu gets in on the conversation, and God has the last word. In the end, Job ends up with twice what he had before, and we don’t know if his wife learned her lesson or not, but Job lives a long full life.

Our particular story today centers on the second tragedy to befall Job personally—an infestation of sores all over his body “from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.” A very visible , outward affliction. It is important to notice that in the life and times of the ancient near east, the outward condition of one’s skin was considered to be a reflection of one’s inward relationship with God. It is no coincidence that the story teller places the affliction in a place that would be noticed in public: those seeing Job and his condition would come to their own conclusions about what had happened to Job, the upright pious one. The same is true for us today. When we see folks on the street for whom living literally in the elements has had an outward effect on their physical appearances, there are conclusions we can too easily jump to about what has transpired in their lives.

Job’s wife, horrified though she might have been about her husband’s appearance, does not expect Job to just put up with his condition, and live out a miserable existence. She advises Job to just give up entirely and die a miserable death. The wife’s declaration hinges on the word integrity. Job’s integrity is the fulcrum on which this passage balances. In a way, the wife points out the dual nature of integrity. If Job’s integrity is based on conformity to religious norms and customs of the day, if his piety—inward and outward—is at the center of his being, he must do the conforming thing, and bless God, and, put up with this affliction, and commit an act of deceit. If, on the other hand, Job’s integrity is built on honesty, he must curse God and violate social integrity. In modern day vernacular the wife is telling Job ”Well, you can sit there and scratch at your sores, and pretend you don't mind it. Everybody will probably still look up to you, although they will wonder what you did to get yourself into this mess. Or you can get mad and ask God exactly what is going on here, which may result in your meeting God earlier than you had planned. The choice is yours.”

Job’s reply violates not only the wife’s dichotomy of choices, but says more about Job than anything we have learned about him so far. Hear this again, ” Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not the bad?”

For most of us, receiving the good from God is pretty easy most of the time. In fact, it is so easy, we often go through our lives thinking that the good life is our default setting, if you will. Oh sure, we are grateful to God for the good things that we have and we come to worship on Sunday morning and we show God our gratitude, and we try to live lives that justify our blessedness, so as to not waste God’s efforts. In a greater context, we who live in this country tend to even think that we live in a nation that God has particularly blessed over others. Sometimes it is difficult to know where the line between patriotism and hubris is blurred.

Lets talk about the other side of the spectrum. What about those for whom suffering is the default setting? We probably all know someone like this—someone who despite their best efforts, despite trying to live as good a life as possible cannot catch a break. Someone whose life is sucked in, washed up, blown over repeatedly by illness, unemployment, loss, depression. This kind of life is like a vortex you can get stuck in, where the same tragedies happen over and over again. First the donkeys, then the sheep, then the camels…until its all pretty much gone. How are we able to accept some good when all we have is bad?

“It’s a crummy week to be a child.” I was writing that in my journal by Tuesday. Between school shootings, car accidents, accidental drowning in the Mississippi River, the ever-increasing body count in the middle east, and the news that a Congressman has been using his power to lure minors into inappropriate relationships, I didn’t want to turn on the television or open up a newspaper by Tuesday. This was one of those weeks when one is tempted to think, “What? Is God in the tub or something?”

In the wealthiest nation on earth, that place where I see people asking for God’s special blessing on bumper stickers all over town, it seems we cannot even protect our own children. The constant barrage of bad news wears us down, like consistent dripping of water can wear a hole in a boulder.

We sure could use a little good news. Do you remember this song from the early 80s?

There's a local paper rolled up in a rubber band
One more sad story's one more than I can stand
Just once how I'd like to see the headline say
"Not much to print today, can't find nothin' bad to say", because

Nobody robbed a liquor store on the lower part of town
Nobody OD'ed, nobody burned a single buildin' down
Nobody fired a shot in anger, nobody had to die in vain
We sure could use a little good news today

I'll come home this evenin'
I'll bet that the news will be the same
Somebody takes a hostage, somebody steals a plane
How I wanna hear the anchor man talk about a county fair
And how we cleaned up the air, how everybody learned to care
Whoa, tell me

Nobody was assassinated in the whole Third World today
And in the streets of Ireland, all the children had to do was play
And everybody loves everybody in the good old USA
We sure could use a little good news today

Some of those lyrics sound a little naïve in the 21st century, don’t they? We don’t scan the newspapers for robbed liquor stores, or single shots fired in anger. A single hostage taken hardly merits a blip on our screen of consciousness anymore, does it? It seems that unless a thing is particularly bloody, extremely violent, or scandalously salacious, it won’t even make the front page.

How many of you heard this story this week:

“Amish residents of rural Lancaster County, Pa., have started a charity fund to help not only the victims' families – but also the mass-murderer's widow and children, reports the New York Times today. The killer, Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, committed suicide at the end of Monday's attack, in which he shot 10 girls. Five of them, aged 7 to 13, died.

Dwight Lefever, a spokesman for the Roberts family, said an Amish neighbor comforted the killer's family and extended forgiveness to them after the shooting, the Associated Press reports.”

I tell you, that story took my breath away. It changed my perspective on the whole week. This extraordinary in-breaking of mercy and grace, this two paragraph story, did not make the national headlines, and I didn’t see it, stuck on page three as it was, because I was avoiding the newspaper.

Brothers and sister in Christ, we don’t live under a cloud of newspaper headlines. If we are willing to change our perspective—just a little bit—we can be able to see that we live under a single shining ray of glorious Good News.

The word “patience” is one that is associated most frequently with Job, as in “The patience of Job”. That is very odd, because the word “patience” or a Hebrew equivalent does not appear anywhere in this entire 42-chapter book. We don’t have any idea if Job was patient while his whole world was destroyed. What we know is that Job was tenacious, and persistent, and understood that there is good, and there is bad in every life. Job had something to cling to, even when everything else was gone. Job understood that glorious inbreaking of good news, that mercy and grace of God’s love can never be overshadowed—not even when tragedy strikes. And that, beloved, is good news indeed.

Thanks be to God!