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.

The Trinity? Easy Peasy.

Maybe he said it, maybe not, but President Kennedy gets credit for it on coffee cups sold at the JFK library:

“There are three things that are real, God, human folly, and laughter; the first two things are beyond our comprehension, so we must do what we can with the third.”

It’s an above average thought for your morning coffee. It also works for Trinity Sunday.

God the incomprehensible.
Folly the impenetrable.
Laughter the consoler.

Trinity Sunday, this year observed on June 7, was devised by the church fathers (I use the patriarchal term advisedly) as a counterpoint to Pentecost Sunday, when the Holy Spirit gets top billing. It’s our liturgical opportunity to think of God in Three Persons:

God the Creator.
Jesus the Redeemer.
Holy Spirit the Advocate.

The doctrine of the Trinity is a basic component of Christianity. A church has to be “Trinitarian” to qualify for membership in the National and World Councils of Churches, and the notion goes back to the fourth century.

The Nicene Creed, which sprung up in the east around 325 A.D., put it like this:

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, of things visible and invisible.And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the begotten of God the Father, the Only-begotten, that is of the essence of the Father. God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten and not made; of the very same nature of the Father, by Whom all things came into being, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible. Who for us humanity and for our salvation came down from heaven, was incarnate, was made human, was born perfectly of the holy virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit …. We believe in the Holy Spirit, in the uncreated and the perfect; Who spoke through the Law, prophets, and Gospels; Who came down upon the Jordan, preached through the apostles, and lived in the saints.

The notion recurs in the Apostle’s Creed around 390 A.D.:

I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit … I believe in the Holy Spirit.

The creedal language is metrical and beautiful. It makes you feel good to repeat it.

But understand it? Please. When was the last time you had to explain the Trinity to someone?

We’ve heard the sermons. The Trinity is the way we describe the three basic components of our relationship to God: creator, redeemer, advocate.

For 17 centuries, preachers have been devising ways to explain the Trinity to simple-minded heathens. St. Patrick, with no snakes to drive out of Ireland in the fifth century, is said to have used the three-leafed shamrock to explain the Trinity to locals. If so, he didn’t write about it, nor did anyone else until about 1726, so the legend appears to be as false as the analogy is weak.

If shamrocks don’t work, there is the classic cliché about the various roles we play in life. For example, I am a father, I am a son, I am a spouse – three different roles that call for three distinct presentations. Yet these roles do not require a trifurcation into three distinct Persons. The analogy doesn’t really help us understand the nature of the Holy Trinity.  God in three persons? Why not one God with three personalities? That might work if all three personalities were spirit, but one is flesh. That factor tempts one to haiku (which tend to be more fun too write than to read):

Can corporeal
blend incorporeally
as one in the same?

That’s where the concept becomes a conundrum, and because there are no instruments with which to take God’s true measure, the enigma deepens.

I was blessed, growing up, with three excellent pastors who succeeded one another in the United Church of Morrisville, N.Y. None of them held me accountable for comprehending the Trinity.

That was fortunate because I’ve never been able to fully figure out God or even ask an intelligent question that might bring me closer to an understanding.

I must have been 11 or 12 when I first wrestled with the concept of infinity. I put the question to my mother: “When did God begin?”

I’m sure Mom narrowed her eyes and squinted at me. She always squinted, in part because she loved questions like that and because by 1957 she was legally blind.

“Why don‘t we ask Mr. Irwin?” she suggested, referring to our pastor, Jack Irwin, whose intellect Mom respected.

Jack was an extraordinary pastor in what I once regarded as an ordinary hamlet in Central New York. During his pastorate in Morrisville he was preparing for his doctorate in philosophy at Syracuse University, so he probably thought of God in Kantian or Kierkegaardian terms, seasoned with occasional Nietzschean aphorisms.

But all he said to me, when I was 11, was, “God always is. There has never been a time when God wasn’t, and there never will be.”

That is one of two full sentences I can remember from 1957 (the other being a headline from My Weekly Reader that was almost as un-packable as the concept of the Trinity: “Welcome to the International Geophysical Year!”) so it clearly had an impact on my youthful brain.

As I said, Mother thought Jack was an intellectual marvel, which he was, but Dad often said Jack’s sermons went over his head. From my point of view in junior high and early high school, Jack was a matchless communicator. The Youth Fellowship highlight of every year was Halloween when we’d prop desiccated corn shocks in the corners of the Grange Hall, turn out the lights, and sit on the floor in the dark to listen to Jack’s scary tales. In a quiet Philadelphia-accented voice, Jack would combine menacing elements of urban legends with his own chilling adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe themes and scare the bejeezus out of us. His stories, which I am sure he made up as he went along, were amplified with spine-tingling details that placed horrific images in our heads for the rest of our lives.  The three-dimensional zombies of modern cinema do not compare with Jack’s terrifying stories – which, incidentally, were an effective though atypical evangelical tool. Youth Fellowship became an essential place to be for the cooler Morrisville teens.

Back then it didn’t occur to me to wonder where Jack got all those frightening Halloween images. Then in 2002, he published a memoir about his World War II experiences (Another River, Another Town, a Teen Age Tank Gunner Comes of Age in Combat – 1945) that included sobering tales of combat and his eyewitness accounts of the liberation of the Nordhausen Concentration Camp. No doubt his accounts of horror in the old Grange hall paled in comparison to the horror in his head.

One of Jack Irwin’s hobbies was astronomy and Morrisville, with its northern exposure and dark winter nights, was ideal for telescopic stargazing.

One Sunday night, Jack showed the Youth Fellowship slides of planets, galaxies and nebulae he watched through his lenses. We watched transfixed as he showed us Saturn, 794 million miles from earth … the sun, 93 million miles from earth … Alpha Centauri, the closest star, 4.365 light years from earth … and galaxies so far away it would take a beam of earth light millions of years to reach it.

When the show was over and the lights were turned on, Jack leaned back in his chair and looked into our blinking eyes, one by one.

“How many of you,” he asked without drama, “have a concept of God that is as big as outer space?”

We answered with silence. Thanks to Jack, God the Creator suddenly seemed bigger to us than the white-bearded patriarch in the Michelangelo painting. In fact, God the Creator was suddenly beyond our intellectual grasp.

And that’s only one Person of the Trinity! What about the Second Person?

He was in the beginning with God,” writes John. “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. (John 1:2-3).

Here we are talking about Jesus. And the fact that Jesus was human just like us makes John’s observation as inexplicable as the God of unfathomable light years.

A lot of us find it hard to focus on the humdrum humanity of Jesus because it seems disrespectful. It’s like when Pope Paul VI had prostate surgery in 1967. The surgeons were loath to discuss the details, which might have included references to pontifical testicles and anuses, and – God and Onan forbid – might have led to hints that male masturbation could be a useful prophylactic against prostrate problems. That is far too human for comfort.

And if it’s hard to think of the pope as human, how much more forbidding is the humanity of Jesus? Imagine one sweltering Palestinian day you walk from Jericho to Jerusalem with Jesus. The sweat trickles down your cheeks. You and Jesus drink deeply at each waterhole on the journey, belching loudly as the cooling liquid soothes your gullets. And soon you and Jesus are stepping behind cedar trees to hoist your skirts and relieve yourselves. When you sit in the shade of an olive tree to rest, your robe sticks wetly to your back. Pungent underarm odor is rife, and it’s not only you; it’s radiating from Jesus, too.

If this seems a little sacrilegious, keep in mind that these are inescapable essentials of the human condition – and human is the modus operandi of the Incarnation.

Even so it’s not easy to sit next to stinky Jesus and think of him as the Second Person of the Holy Trinity.

John F. Kennedy was correct when he said God – like human folly – is beyond our comprehension. When you try to figure it all out, perhaps the best analgesic is to simply laugh. It is simply beyond the capacity of our human brains to grasp the nature of the creator of universes, or to comprehend the infinite love with which God assumed mere human flesh as a device for human atonement. Thinking God’s thoughts is simply beyond us.

Thank God, then (so to speak), for the Third Person of the Trinity – the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that relieves us of the burden of trying to figure it all out.

“The Spirit of God is like our breath,” said Henri Nouwen. “God’s spirit is more intimate to us than we are to ourselves. We might not often be aware of it, but without it we cannot live a ‘spiritual life.’”

The Holy Spirit does not vest us with answers or give us special insights into the mind of God. Yet it is the Person of the Trinity that dwells within us so intimately that it connects us intimately with God the Creator and God the Redeemer.

“It is the Holy Spirit of God who prays in us,” Nouwen writes, “who offers us the gifts of love, forgiveness, kindness, goodness, gentleness, peace and joy. It is the Holy Spirit who offers us the life that death cannot destroy.”

Just how the Creator God did it is not for us to know. And just how our brother Jesus, who shares all our glands and bunions, was present at Creation is not for us to understand.

But the Holy Spirit who dwells within each of us is the perfect connector that binds our hearts and souls (and occasionally our minds) with the Triune God.

And perceiving that, as Brother Thomas Merton said, does not require intensive brain power.

It simply requires us to be silent until, in the intimacy of our solitude, the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit will write its wonders on our hearts.