October 11 Proper 23
Diversity is a word that’s been drained of nearly everything interesting it ever held for me. And I’ve decided that L.L. Bean may be to blame.
Inside each of the 6 or 7 L.L. Bean catalogues we get each week is a diverse collection of people. There are people of different ethnicities, people of different skin color and different hair texture. But one day it suddenly hit me. All these people are wearing L.L. Bean clothing. And their clothing is all roughly the same size.
And not only are they all wearing L.L. Bean clothing, pitching L.L. Bean tents, and relaxing next to L.L. Bean canoes, they are also all wearing the same pleasant smile. The smile of a well adjusted, happy, middle-class American, an unpretentious lover of the outdoors who is as comfortable in his own skin as he is in his chinos, flannel shirt, and sturdy sensible shoes.
The word ‘diversity’ conjures up an L.L. Bean catalogue for me. It suggests the mildest and most inoffensive sorts of differences among people whose children are all perfectly content playing with a few seashells on their manicured lawn, and whose Golden Retrievers never shed or soil the carpets.
So one might wonder what would happen to us if on page 47 of the next L.L. Bean catalogue, rather than a pleasantly proportioned woman in plaid pajamas and a pair of Wicked Good slippers, we found the ancient Hebrew Job, sitting in ashes, finding a little relief from his suffering by scraping his arms with a shard from a broken pot?
It would be a little strange, wouldn’t it? There’s no sackcloth in the fall collection this year. But wouldn’t the diversity of the L.L. Bean catalogue go a little deeper if he were there?
Job seems almost as out of place here in church, don’t you think? And it’s not just his horrific appearance that’s unsettling, which was described in uncomfortable detail in last week’s reading. It’s Job’s faith that doesn’t seem quite what we’re taught to aspire to in polite middle-class Sunday Schools: “If I go forward, [God] is not there” Job moans, “or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.”
In the story of Job, a story explicitly told as the ultimate example of unshakable faith, one scene is of our hero saying, “I’m miserable, and I can’t see God anywhere.”
At the very least we see that the Bible’s no L.L. Bean catalogue. Not only are Job’s clothes filthy and unsightly. His faith matches them perfectly. It’s in shreds and ashes as well.
So why in the world might we tell a story like this one to generation after generation? I realize we’re not finished with this story yet. But we’re told over and over again throughout the book of Job that Job’s life was faithful through it all. So when we drop into a scene from that life, we get to see what faithfulness looks like. And one picture of faithfulness is of a suffering man whose world seems to have been emptied of God.
This may not seem like a terribly useful image. Christians are supposed to be telling good news, right? But maybe one of the things that the story of Job is meant to do for us is to diversify our religious friends. We need to hear from people out at the edges of human experience for our faith to be meaningful.
The word ‘religion’ is built on the same root as ‘ligament.’ It’s about binding things together. So perhaps what we’re meant to do at a very basic level when we read a story in the Bible like Job’s, is to let ourselves be bound to Job. We simply let ourselves call Job one of us and believe that in spite of all its bizarre details, his life might be relevant to ours, or at least that his life might do something to ours. We listen to him. We let our lives be bound up with his. We open ourselves to the possibility, even, that Job is what a faithful Christian life might look like sometimes. And see what happens.
Job’s friends usually aren’t remembered too kindly in this story. They’re the ones who supposedly give Job all the wrong advice, insisting that there must have been some grave sin Job was forgetting for all this hardship to come about.
But listen to how these three friends first appear in the book: “When they saw [Job] from a distance, they did not recognize him, and they raised their voices and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads. They sat with him on the ground for seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.”
When Job’s three friends saw him, they didn’t start to explain anything, they didn’t draw a lesson from anything, they didn’t say anything until they had simply wept and sat in silence with their friend for seven days. Might we be called to make the same response too at times? To simply step out of our L.L. Bean (or whatever catalogue you inhabit) life and sit with the story of a strange other person, believing that our religion may not work on us most profoundly by giving us rules to live by as it does by binding our lives to others?
There is a person around here who looks a lot like Job as I imagine him. His name is Darryl. Usually his clothes are badly soiled and torn. He parks his bike in the narthex and comes through our open doors several times a week to pray. Sunday mornings he’s at a church in North Little Rock closer to home, but he’s a baptized member here and rarely misses a Wednesday service.
Now I’m not in the habit of announcing from the pulpit what different parishioners give financially to the church. But Darryl strides right into my office several times a week and says, “Hey preacher, how you doin’? Is the secretary here? I want her to put this $3 in. This is my church, you know?”
Well, “Secretary” and I used to resist these gifts. Frankly, I wanted Darryl to buy himself a pair of pants. But he wouldn’t give in. So we let him give us his money. Carol Lou writes his name on an envelope and seals it up. This makes Darryl happy. I should add that his gifts to the church total in the hundreds of dollars so far this year.
Darryl’s experiences in this life have been pretty different from mine. I don’t know the particulars of his home or his childhood. But I can see that he looks different. He smells different. He thinks differently. He spends his days differently. He prays differently. He spends his money differently. And it’s been his sheer persistence that has kept me from ignoring him, wondering what his life could possibly have to do with mine and keeping a safer distance.
“This is my church,” Darryl says. And he’s right. And I’m changed a little every time he tells me. Every time he walks in with three more dollars to give away. I suppose Darryl’s changed a little by the exchange too.
Christian faith demands that we care for the poor and the downtrodden. But the story of Job draws us towards an even deeper truth about the ways of God in this world. Because Job is never presented as someone who needs our help. He’s held up as a great exemplar of the faith, a man of God we’re told. So all we’re really asked to do is let Job walk in on our lives. Strange old Job, his body covered with ashes and sores, wondering if God is anywhere to be found in this world. Are we willing to let our religion bind our lives up with his? Are we willing to let this strange, brooding Hebrew stride into our midst and say, “This is my church”?
You see, Jesus taught that the economy of grace is different. “Many who are first will be last, and the last will be first,” we just heard him say. Things are upside down and backwards in the economy of grace. We think that those who have something, give to those who need something in this world. And then we meet Job, and everything turns around. We meet Job and see that there is no telling what kind of life God might use to change us, to bring a little grace into our lives.
It happens all the time, in all kinds of places. Like yesterday, when the client leaving one of my wife’s counseling groups suddenly stopped, looked at her, and said, “You’re one of us, aren’t you?” And she saw he was right. And they were both a little changed. Graces comes to us this way all the time, doesn’t it? If only we’re given eyes to see it.
So what if Christians came to be known not as those people who think they know how to fix the world, but as those people who believe that we’re changed as our lives are bound together with others. Maybe even people who believe that faithfulness sometimes looks like hopelessness, that wealth sometimes looks like poverty, that the fullest of lives can look empty.
For if we really believed such things, imagine what sorts of lives we might let ours be bound up with. Imagine how we would look at one another and at the rest of our world. Imagine how we might be changed a little by everyone who simply says, “This is my church.” Amen.