Get Me Your Manager!

Sermon Title: “Get me your manager!”

Rev. Roberta Howey 

Sunday, October 13, 2024

Why bring this reading to Thanksgiving Sunday? Aside from Stephen’s introduction to Job, why should we spend time on a weekend to extend gratitude, listening to one man complain about things beyond anyone’s control? This is what I want to bring here. I want us to hold both visions- one of people counting blessings, and one of a man who, as we learned last week, lost everything. He did nothing wrong, that was emphasized throughout part one. He simply loved his God and his family and did his best. But for reasons and machinations beyond his control, he lost it all.

Job the story is simply weird. It is not written like the other Hebrew texts with a guide on how to follow God’s rules. Nor is it like Proverbs or Psalms with clearly human hands writing to and about God. It is a story, the author (probably an Israelite but not confirmed), probably had experienced the exile of the Israelites from Babylon in 6th C BCE. This is not Aesop’s fables with a moral at the end. This is an ancient Greek tragedy written through the lens of ancient, exiled Jews who know of suffering and lament. It is a story that tries to make sense out of senseless tragedy. That is simply human.

I come from a long line of retail workers. My parents met at Sears, where they also founded lifelong friendships with others, including my godmother. Both my grandmothers worked in customer service, including one who, you guessed it, worked at Sears for decades. Whether in department stores, or small hardware stores, even at the restaurant I earned my first paycheque, customer service-oriented work has been embedded into my veins.

To deal with customers is to understand that while the vast majority of people are reasonable and sensible and polite, there will also be a small portion of folks who simply need to rage. It is rarely about me as a person. It is often about things well beyond my own control, and certainly above the minimum wage I was making. It took years to build up a thick skin that bounces those complaints off of me. They aren’t personal. I am simply the face representing the company or even the universe at large. This is true for both the shocking number of customers who thought I could control the price of their daiquiris, and the timing of the sunset. Now interning at the hospital, the anger is the same, but it is for tragedies that frankly I have more time and empathy for. 

Job’s friends, who have sat with him for a week in silent mourning, finally ask him. “So, what did you do? What did you do to anger God this much? Can you repent?” This is the wrong question. What follows is several chapters of Job arguing with his friends about what he must have done, how he should repent, and what this must mean. The section we have today is Job declaring he can’t argue with his friends anymore. He needs to take this higher up. He wants, he needs, to speak to the Boss.

I have often encountered the idea that Job is ever patient, ever meek and mild, and he takes each punch on the chin with dignity because God is Good and therefore Job needs to be patient. The last two thirds of the story show us a Job who is anything but meek and patient. He is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

What is at the heart of Job’s rage isn’t the suffering. It isn’t the mistreatment by his friends even, who are struggling to find reason amidst the unreasonable. It is that throughout all of this God has been silent. God has never told Job why this is happening, even as we the reader know God has explicitly allowed Satan to destroy his life. This is simply unfair. Job wants to know that he has complained to someone that hears it and feels it and knows it to be true.

Back in the hospital, I worked with a patient many months ago. She was flourishing, she had her life ahead of her. Then in an instant, she is now paralyzed and unable to walk. The doctors don’t know what her prognosis is, but she has physio and accommodations and family and friends. I sat with her, and we had a long talk.

Finally, she mumbles something. I am sorry, Ethel, I didn’t quite catch that?

“I said I want to punch God. Just once. I want to yell to God that I am mad and punch God in the face so God knows that I am so furious I can’t think straight.”

She looks at me with a mixture of defiance and of guilt. Daring me to tell her what her family has been saying for months- just keep praying, just keep a positive attitude, just don’t get angry but keep happy that you have your life and your home and your job. And guilt that for the first time in her life, she said out loud how angry she is with God. She continues. “It isn’t fair. I am a good person. I vote and am nice to my neighbours. I don’t litter. I have never cheated or hurt anyone. But I am never going to walk again, and no one can really tell me why.”

The punishment doesn’t fit the crime. For Job and his friends, for this patient among many others in my work, for many of us here and across the world, which is at the centre. Job lays out this scene as him demanding his day in court. To want to be able to see God here and now, lay out his burdens and ask what he do deserve any of this. There must have been something, because if there wasn’t then it means that anyone, for any reason, could have bad things befall them. And that is a terrifying thought. No, he wants to take it right to the boss, to demand an answer.

Ethel, my patient, had every right to be mad. It may not have been anyone’s fault that she can’t walk, not even God’s. But that anger is an instinctive feeling of injustice, that this is wrong and needs to be corrected. That feeling is something God knows all too well. Whether it is when the Hebrew slaves of Egypt suffered tyranny, or all of the wars and genocides that occurred then and still occur today. The God of Job is the God who wept when Jesus was crucified and buried. Job’s God is the God that sits with the dying patient, with the houseless, with the refugee, and says “you are my child, and you do not suffer alone.” This is the same God that sits with all of us, when we celebrate our blessings and mourn our sorrows, and says that we are just doing our best and that is all we can do.

Thanksgiving, this weekend, is a weekend for us to also think of our blessings. To say thanks for the wheat and the grape, for the fish and the farmer. To say we are thankful for family and friends and health or the weather. I want to add one more blessing. I want to say thank you to God for being a God that is big enough, immense, and omnipresent enough, to hold our anger. To not hold it against us when we demand an accounting and to demand to speak to the manager, or even when we want to take a swing at God. I am grateful to God that is able to hold all of our blessings and suffering close. We may not get our day in court. But we won’t ever be left alone.

Amen.