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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 10, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
“How to Comfort Someone Who is Suffering” Lessons from the recent “Lunch with Meg” study of the book of Job from the Hebrew Bible.
Chalice Lighting
We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.
Call to Worship
Thich Nhat HanhWater flows from high in the mountains.
Water runs deep in the Earth.
Miraculously, water comes to us,
and sustains all life.Water and Sun
green these plants.When the rain of compassion falls,
even a desert becomes an
immense, green ocean.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Meditation Reading
EARTH TEACH ME
From the Ute Indians of North AmericaEarth teach me stillness
as the grasses are stilled with light.Earth teach me suffering
as old stones suffer with memory.Earth teach me caring
as parents who secure their young.Earth teach me courage
as the tree which stands all alone.Earth teach me limitation
as the ant which crawls on the ground.Earth teach me freedom
as the eagle which soars in the skyEarth teach me resignation
as the leaves which die in the fall.Earth teach me regeneration
as the seed which rises in the spring.Earth teach me to forget myself
as melted snow forgets its life.Earth teach me to remember kindness
as dry fields weep with rain.
Sermon
HOW TO COMFORT SOMEONE WHO IS SUFFERING
I’m going to talk about being present with someone who is suffering, and we’re going to talk about the sufferings of Job, from the oldest book in the Hebrew Scriptures, and we’re going to talk a little about how the way Christians have read the book of Job shapes their thinking about Jesus’ suffering, and how all of that has shaped the way people around the world talk to those who are suffering. So that’s the map for today. Job to Jesus to how to comfort (and how NOT to comfort) people who are suffering.
Let me start by reminding you of the plot of this book, which is, as I said, the oldest one, and it deals with the oldest question of humanity: why do people suffer bad things?
The opening scene is in the heavenly realms, where Satan strolls in to where God is watching his good man Job. Job is the richest man in the East, he has ten sons and daughters, sheep, cattle, health and regular family parties. “Look at that man,” says God. “He loves me and blesses me.”
“Well, of course he does,” says Satan, (whose name translates to “The Accuser,” like the prosecutor in a trial. “He’s got everything! Just take all that goodness away and he won’t love you so much.” So God does that. All the children killed, all the crops ruined, the cattle stolen, and his health gone. All the way gone.
Then for the next 30 chapters, Job wrestles, struggles, strives with God over this completely undeserved suffering. Three or four of his friends come to comfort him. For the first week, they sit in respectful silence while Job cries out to God that he is a good man, and he doesn’t deserve any of this. That is a good way to be a comforter. To sit with someone in respectful silence, not defining their suffering for them, not comparing their suffering to others ( Hey, it could be worse,) not trying to explain it or minimize it.
Then they start talking. They say all the things that people say to folks who are in pain and loss.
“No one’s really good, you probably did something you’re being punished for.” “Maybe you are good, but maybe your children did bad things.”
“Maybe you are being tested, to see if your faith in God is strong enough.” “Life is like a school, and there are lessons we must learn.”
They skipped the one I’ve heard, which is “I wonder why you wanted to attract this kind of suffering into your life?”
They did not talk of past lives and karma, which is how some people deal with suffering.
You may have heard the phrase “the patience of Job,” but he wasn’t that patient. He yelled at God, questioned God, defended himself and demanded an in-person answer to his question of why this was happening to him when he was such a good person.
For thirty some chapters the argument rages, as the comforters insist he must know he deserves this in some way and he holds his ground. They suggest that his very self-defense and protestations of righteousness are themselves sinful, and that his questioning and anger at God are sinful too. The words of Job’s comforters could be said from any Jewish or Christian pulpit in the world. Their poetry is beautiful. Then, in chapter 39, God comes and says to the comforters “Who are you who obscure my plans with words without knowledge?…… where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand, who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know….” The voice goes on to say things like “are you friends with the water-spurting whale? Do you know how to open the storehouses of the snow?
God lays out credentials as the creator of all things, but he doesn’t answer Job’s question. Job gets ten new children, and his cattle are replaced. He gets his health back. But there is never any admission that what happened to him was the result of God trying to prove that he could take all Job’s good things away and Job wouldn’t abandon God. Which he did not. He yelled and demanded, but he never turned his back. God doesn’t look that good in this old book. Its message should be that yelling and demanding answers is a faithful act, and that no one has the answer to why bad things happen. We’re. All. Wrong.
People can’t live with that, though, so they talk about Job’s patient suffering. Christians talk the same way about Jesus, who really was killed by the military and religious leaders of an empire, but it’s a lot better for the empires of this world to say he was killed by his father, who needed blood in order to forgive sins. This makes the violence an intimate violence instead of state violence. They say Jesus went willingly to be tortured and killed because it was God’s will. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, says Jesus was God’s answer to Job, along the lines of “I made you suffer for no good reason, so here, I’ll come suffer too. You were righteous, I’m righteous, and we both suffer.” This is not widely taught.
What is widely taught is that God has a reason, and that we should suffer whatever we suffer with patience and humility. This translates, unfortunately, to intimate violence within families being given an almost religious meaning. Suffer patiently and God will reward you. You will be like Job and Jesus. What is widely taught in Christianity around the world is that the father did violence to his child to pay for your badness. Submission to the violence, obedience to the situation is seen as love, is held up as virtue. Fathers have their reasons.
“What happens when violent realities are transubstantiated into spiritual teachings? “You’ve heard it or said it yourself. A mother loses her son to suicide. In an effort to comfort her you say, ‘God has a purpose in this. He sends pain to make us strong. You may not feel it now, but you will learn to give thanks for this experience, because through it, God will strengthen your faith.’ “These words take the grieving mother away from the reality of her lost child. Tragedy is renamed a spiritual trial, designed by God for the mother’s edification. God becomes the sender of torture, who injures us then comforts us — a perverse love.”
Rita Nakashima Brock, Proverbs of Ashes
And in personalizing this violence, the role of the state and its violence is smoothed out and hidden, where, if it were help up, Christianity might have always taught that resisting the violence of the state was an act of faith and love for the world and its people.
How do we comfort those who suffer? Presence. That’s the biggest thing. Be there. Do something useful if they need it done. Listen to them talk if they want to. Don’t explain their suffering, or ask them what they are learning from this lesson, or compare it to something that happened to you. Everyone is living their own life, and even if the exact same thing happened to you, their experience of it will be different from yours.
Further notes
From its language, the oldest book in the Canon. The story of an epic battle, not between God and Satan, but a battle of a person within themselves, theologically, wanting to love God and yet haven’t gotten attacked at all as he expected God to act.
C.S. Lewis puts his wages on a God who holds goodness and pain in a paradox. The Problem of Pain demonstrates a more distant, less emotional reaction to humanity’s situation, while A Grief Observed reads like a psalm of lament from within pain itself. The two texts compliment one another by identifying parts of our struggle, the intellectual and physical difficulty life will bring, and how pain can bend us toward a loving God if we let it.
The Problem
From the loss of his mother at a young age to the untimely death of his wife Joy, Lewis experienced pain as God’s megaphone, as he says, to rouse a deaf world. Pain leads us somewhere – to something. That something is a life of faith. Just as there is importance placed in a strong rope when you’re dangling from a precipice, faith is the only way to pull ourselves out from a life of desperation, a life of anxiety and need, a life of doubt and insecurity. But how can faith be present if we don’t realize we need something beyond our own person? How do we believe unless we recognize how frail our efforts have become to maintain everything just so?
Lewis says that we must understand our fallenness. He interprets the fall of humanity not only as an opportunity for evil to thrive, but also the choice to ignore the purpose of pain. Christianity creates the problem of pain because it provides hope for righteousness and love. Without the revelation that God loves us, the painful world would make sense. Pain would have no cause. Let’s face it: it’s much easier to dismiss God or to regard him only as an airman regards his parachute, as Lewis says, there only if he needs it but he hopes he never does. When we run headlong into God, Lewis contends that pain is demanded. Why? “How impossible it is to enact the surrender of the self by doing what we like,” he says. The truth is that at the heart of God’s love is a suffering Messiah and followers who take up crosses and follow in like fashion.
“If I knew any way of escape I would crawl through sewers to find it,” Lewis writes. “I am not arguing that pain is not painful. Pain hurts. That is what the word means. I am only trying to show that the old Christian doctrine of being made “perfect through suffering” is not incredible. To prove it palatable is beyond my design.”
PROVERBS OF ASHES
I counsel some of the religious kids, and the more attached they are to traditional ideas about Jesus, the more likely they are to think of their abuse as ‘good’ for them, as a trial designed for a reason, as pain that makes them like Jesus. They are often in denial about the amount of pain they live with. Violence denies presence and suffocates spirit. Violence robs us of knowledge of life and its intrinsic value; it steals our awareness of beauty, of complexity, of our bodies. Violence ignores vulnerability, dependence and interdependence. A person who acts violently disregards self and other as distinct, obliterating the spaces in which spirit breathes. We can resist and redress violence by acting for justice and by being present: present to one another, present to beauty, present to the fire at the heart of things, the spirit that gives breath to life.
We show how theological claims about Jesus’ death have become proverbs of ashes. We turn our faces toward a different theology.
“Pat,” I said, “the only way you could have helped Anola more is if the whole Christian tradition taught something other than self-sacrificing love. If it didn’t preach that to be like Jesus we have to give up our lives in faithful obedience to the will of God.”
“This is how I feel about the church. I love the church. It’s my home and has been my family’s home for generations. And I love the liturgy in all its beauty. At the same time, I feel something is dreadfully wrong. When I preside at the Eucharist, am I not reenacting images and ideas that tell people God wants them to sacrifice their lives? Am I right to do this? Does this give them life? Now when I pray in the church before the congregation arrives, I ask God to forgive me for performing the Eucharistic rite.”
P. 21 went to my priest twenty years ago. I’ve been trying to follow his advice. The priest said I should rejoice in my sufferings because they bring me closer to Jesus. He said, ‘Jesus suffered because he loved us.’ He said, ‘If you love Jesus, accept the beatings and bear them gladly, as Jesus bore the cross.’ I’ve tried, but I’m not sure anymore. My husband is turning on the kids now. Tell me, is what the priest told me true?” Lucia’s deep black eyes searched my hazel ones. I wanted to look away, but couldn’t. I wanted to speak, but my mouth wouldn’t work. It felt stuffed with cotton. I couldn’t get the words to form. I was a liberal Christian. I didn’t believe God demanded obedience or that Jesus’ death on the cross brought about our salvation. I hadn’t forgotten Anola Reed, though I thought of my theology as far from hers. But just that past Sunday I had preached a sermon on the willingness of love to suffer. I preached that Jesus’ life revealed the nature of love and that love would save us. I’d said that love bears all things. Never breaks relationship. Keeps ties of connection to others even when they hurt you. Places the needs of the other before concern for the self. In the stillness of that moment, I could see in Lucia’s eyes that she knew the answer to her question, just as I did. If I answered Lucia’s question truthfully, I would have to rethink my theology. More than that, I would have to face choices I was making in my own life. After a long pause, I found my voice. “It isn’t true,” I said to her. “God does not want you to accept being beaten by your husband. God wants you to have your life, not to give it up. God wants you to protect your life and your children’s lives.”
I could see that when theology presents Jesus’ death as God’s sacrifice of his beloved child for the sake of the world, it teaches that the highest love is sacrifice. To make sacrifice or to be sacrificed is virtuous and redemptive. Do we really believe that God is appeased by cruelty, and wants nothing more than our obedience? It becomes imperative that we ask this question when we examine how theology sanctions human cruelty. “If God is imagined as a fatherly torturer, earthly parents are also justified, perhaps even required, to teach through violence. Children are instructed to understand their submission to pain as a form of love. Behind closed doors, in our own community, spouses and children are battered by abusers who justify their actions as necessary, loving discipline. ‘I only hit her because I love her.’ ‘I’m doing this for your own good.’ The child or the spouse who believes that obedience is what God wants may put up with physical or sexual abuse in an effort to be a good Christian. “Theology that defines virtue as obedience to God suppresses the virtue of revolt. A woman being battered by her husband will be counseled to be obedient, as Jesus was to God. After all, Eve brought sin into the world by her disobedience. A good woman submits to her husband as he submits to God.
“When Jesus’ crucifixion serves as a metaphor for spiritual processes of transformation, or a mystical illumination of God’s abiding presence, violence is justified as sacred. In this mode, the infliction of pain can be re-inscribed as a holy action. Violence can be justified as a disciplining of the spirit.
But Nelle took a different tack. She spoke about the power of listening. She said there is a quality of listening that is possible among a circle of human beings, who by their attentiveness to one another create a space in which each person is able to give voice to the truth of her life.
I was haunted by Sylvia’s conviction that God was letting her be hurt, the passivity and resignation it elicited from her. I heard such ideas from youth struggling with the violence in their lives, pain inflicted by the deliberate cruelty of their parents or others they loved. Believing in the benevolent protection of a powerful God, they interpreted violence as divine intent, pain for their own good. And the Christian tradition reinforced this impulse by upholding Jesus as a son who was willing to undergo horrible violence out of love for his father, in obedience to his father’s will.
When the Christian tradition represents Jesus’ death as foreordained by God, as necessary to the divine plan for salvation, and as obediently accepted by Jesus the Son out of love for God the Father, God is made into a child abuser or a bystander to violence against his own child. The seal of abuse is placed on their relationship when they are made into a unity of being. If the two are one, Jesus can be selfless, can give himself totally to God, a willing lamb to slaughter. I thought of this system as cosmic child abuse.
Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer are called at certain moments to comfort people who are enduring some trauma.
Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
Many of us don’t know how to react in such situations, but others do. In the first place, they just show up. They provide a ministry of presence. Next, they don’t compare. The sensitive person understands that each person’s ordeal is unique and should not be compared to anyone else’s. Next, they do the practical things–making lunch, dusting the room, washing the towels. Finally, they don’t try to minimize what is going on. They don’t attempt to reassure with false, saccharine sentiments. They don’t say that the pain is all for the best. They don’t search for silver linings. They do what wise souls do in the presence of tragedy and trauma. They practice a passive activism. They don’t bustle about trying to solve something that cannot be solved. The sensitive person grants the sufferer the dignity of her own process. She lets the sufferer define the meaning of what is going on. She just sits simply through the nights of pain and darkness, being practical, human, simple, and direct.
David Brooks, The Road to Character Tags: comfort, sensitive, sensitivity
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