Guest Post, Stephen Price on Job

Georges de la Tour “Job and his Wife”

 

 

Stephen said his sermon was titled, The Man Who Sued God.

He writes this, “Studying the issue of human suffering and faith is a struggle for me. It demands looking at some very dark places in human experience and very dark places in the human heart. Out of that work this week has come a set of poems. They are stand-alones, but they are interconnected as well. I offer them to you below. And, by the way, I do not believe you can get to the second poem without walking through the first.”

 

If He Knows

If He knows every sparrow that falls
How come so many
Writhe in agony
Before death comes to claim them?
Why does the child
Who once ran to hug me
When I picked up his half siblings
Now
Transgendered
Stick a needle in her arm
And drift slowly away in the soft dusk
of the evening?

A doctor spends a lifetime
fighting disease
The diplomat seeking just piece
The minister combats hunger
and bigotry
Only to have their grandchildren
Starve,
ravaged by illness
in a nation ripped apart
by racial hatred.
The little ones
Who carried their hope and heart
Lie side by side in the bloody dust.

It is true that
So many of us, including me
Avoid the reality of how much of the evil
in the world
Can be laid at our doorstep;
Even much disease
is the result of choices we’ve made.
We leave lead
In Flint’s drinking water
and then bemoan
the individual child with cancer
“Where is God?” we cry,
“when an innocent child suffers”
We avoid the questions
Of corporate guilt and natural consequences
our sins of greed and short sightedness.
When a five year old
is raped
Repeatedly
By an uncle
In a house full of relatives,
Don’t blame God
Blame the grown ups who refused to see
what was right in front of them
and were deaf to the cries in the night

All of this is true
And more
But when we peel away
all the layers
For which we are responsible,
When we take responsibility
for having blown the world apart,
The randomness of who is hit
by the flying pieces
Still robs my sleep with it’s terror.
There is still
The question of innocent suffering
and an answer too big
maybe too terrible
to comprehend

Job Won His Case

Job won his lawsuit
Though it did not seem so
At the time
Though God responded
With unanswerable questions
And nothing
Not even a new family
Can make up for the ones lost
Job won
God walked out of the courtroom
And into flesh
Shared the dust and blood
of Palestine
Climbed on a cross
Died
God
Died
God
Tasted every bitter God damned tear
Job wept
Screamed beneath the lash
and spit blood throu tortured lips
Hanging there
Helpless
While the crowd walked by
shaking their heads like Job’s friends.
Then kicked open death’s
To end the final bondage.
God’s final answer to Job’s lawsuit
Begins, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.”