Oh Job, Poor Job, Abba Took All Your Camels And I'm Feelin' So Low

If you have a tendency toward depression, you should avoid country music and the Book of Job.

It’s hard to tell which genre is more depressing. You may remember the song “Busted,” written and sung by John Conlee and soulfully covered by Ray Charles:

Got a cow that's gone dry
Hen that won't lay
A big stack of bills get bigger each day
The county gonna haul my belongings away
I'm busted.

The fields are all bare
The cotton won't grow
Me and my family's gotta pack up and go
Where I'll make a living
Lord only knows
I'm busted

Job was also busted, big time. His circumstances were so bad it’s almost comforting to remember he didn’t really exist. A man named Job is briefly mentioned in Ezekiel 14:14, but he’s not the same woebegone guy.

Job’s story is a metaphorical poem, sometimes prose, sometimes lyrical, written by Anonymous between the seventh and fourth centuries BCE.

It’s an early exploration of the irksome question, why do bad things happen to good people? Job’s situation is so much worse that the poor man who sings “Busted” because Job fell from such a precipitous height. His ten children, seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, five hundred donkeys, and mucho servants, were taken from him in a single stroke.

It takes a supreme effort of imagination to understand, first, what he could possibly do with three thousand camels and, second, how he felt when he was cast so low.

My first writing job was to research and write a small book on the fifty-year history of the American Baptist layman’s organization.

One of the early leaders of that group was William Travers Jerome Jr., a prosperous lawyer, financier, and District Attorney of New York.

What I found most interesting about Jerome was that he was the first cousin of Jenny Jerome, Winston Churchill’s mother, and first cousin once removed of Winston himself. According to Jerome’s widow, he once asked Jenny if he should call her Aunt Jenny or Cousin Jenny. She replied, “Better just call me Jenny. It will make you seem older and me younger.”

Jerome was highly favored by his relationship to the Churchills. He was invited aboard a battleship when Winston was First Lord if the Admiralty, visited Churchill when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and engaged in a steady correspondence with his cousin.

Naturally the Baptist laymen admired Jerome as a great leader but he suddenly disappeared from Baptist and public life in the 1930s.

I wrote to his son, William Travers Jerome III, to ask what had happened.

“Under other circumstances than the dismal thirties,” he replied, “I am sure his ability as a thinker, talker, and as a humanitarian, might have pushed him into a prominent role in politics. In any event, I know he valued his early church affiliation with the Baptists most highly.”

The reference to the “dismal thirties” was cryptic. I later learned through non-Baptist sources that Jerome, like thousands of his fellow blue bloods, was financially ruined by the Crash of 1929. The New York Times reported he died of pneumonia in his New York townhouse on February 13, 1934. The same cause of death is listed in Wikipedia and other biographies.

In point of fact, as I learned through those same non-Baptist sources, William Travers Jerome, Jr., put a bullet through his head that bleak February day.

He had fallen from a great height and – despite his Christian faith – could not detect God’s love or imagine his life improving. The Lord gave, and the Lord took away. But William Travers Jerome Jr. could not bring himself to bless the name of the Lord.

Jerome’s story was repeated over and over again in the dismal thirties. So many ruined millionaires leaped from the upper windows of skyscrapers that they became a recurring theme in New Yorker cartoons.

How terrible it must have been for Jerome – rich in money, rich in the esteem of voters who raised him to the top law office in New York, rich in the approval of his fellow Christians who saw him as a man of stalwart faith, only to lose it all in one fell swoop.

It’s true-life stories like these that boggle our minds when we realize how much worse it got for Job. Over the next four Sundays we will suffer vicariously with him as his metaphor darkens.

We will suffer even as we ask the eternal questions: why does God allow evil? Why does God seem to stand aside as good people suffer?

Kathryn Schifferdecker, professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary in Saint Paul, Minn., adds another eternal question:

Do we love God for what we get out of the relationship, or do we love God for who God is?

One of the plagues of our media-saturated age are televangelists who preach a prosperity gospel. The more we love God, the more God will reward us with money, power, possessions, prestige.

I must wonder if that was the source of William Travers Jerome’s faith. Was that why he became a vigorous church leader, because he felt his prosperity was a quid pro quo from God? And when his prosperity disappeared, did his God disappear as well?

One of the basic lessons of our faith – especially for us Lutherans – is that God does not reward us for being good or punish us for being bad. That would be an illogical arrangement because all of us are both good and bad. As Luther put it, we are all simultaneously saints and sinners. No one has developed an algorithm to determine how much blessing and how much punishment we would be due.

Job did not waste time trying to figure out why God was taking everything away from him. The one thing that helped him make sense of his situation was that he never forgot that all he had was from God and, when it was gone, God was still there.

And for Job, despite what he suffered, it was enough that God was still there.

Seven centuries before Christ, Job was presented to us as an example of true faith.

The Gospel lesson that accompanies the first chapter of Job ties it into a neat metaphorical bow:

Jesus told the apostles, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.’”

It was Job’s faith that sustained him.

And it is the faith God awards us through God’s grace that will sustain us in all the joys and travails of our lives.