Embracing the tragic sense of life (A sermon from Job 23:1-9, 16-17, and Hebrews 4:12-16)
Until we face some something that challenges our beliefs and assumptions, we tend to accept and believe what we have been taught, what was handed down to us in the process of being socialized into society by family, friends, peers, teachers, and the people we admire and are drawn to in our culture. Job believed what most everyone else believed in his culture, namely, that God was responsible for the good and bad that happened to people on earth. So after the first series of catastrophes where he loses family and fortune he says, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” When Job is afflicted with painful soars all over his body and when his wife questions his loyalty to a God who would do this to him, he says, “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” He is still locked in to this view of God. When Job’s friends first hear of his troubles the tex...