Being Uncomfortable Together
Pastor Anthony preaching on “Being Uncomfortable Together.” Scripture focus is Job 2: 11-13 and Job 42: 7-9. Preached on October 3, 2021.
This is the fourth sermon of a five-part series on: “Growing Healthy Christian Friendships & Relationships.”
Copyright 2021 by Rev. Anthony J. Tang and Desert Mission United Methodist Church.
What do we do when our loved ones are going through a crisis we can’t even begin to describe or understand?
Today, as we continue into the fourth part of this five-part series on Growing Healthy Christian Friendships and Relationships, we’ve looked at listening, how we respond to irreconcilable differences, and how we balance the relationship between creating together and growing independently. But there are times in all of our lives when our loved ones will face unimaginable difficulties and heartache. What do we do?
We’re going to explore that question today on the foundation that the person in crisis is the one who should take the lead, and that we should never assume to know or understand what someone else is going through.
For the person in crisis to take the lead, that means that if they don’t want us to do anything, then we don’t do it. And if the person in crisis tells us what they want us to do, then we can decide if we’re okay doing that. Because we love others as we love ourselves, we don’t do something we’re not comfortable doing. If we are comfortable doing what they’ve asked us to do, then we can do that. This is how we let a person in crisis take the lead.
Secondly, we never assume to know or understand what someone else is going through, nor that we understand them better than they do.
Admittedly, I have made this mistake so many times, so I hope you will learn from my errors. The way this plays out is that when I have said, “I know what you’re going through” or “I understand what you’re going through” it’s never true. And they will often respond by shutting down, walking away, or placating us “Oh, thank you; now it’s time for you to leave.”
Why is that? Because no matter what we have gone through or what we know, we will never truly understand what someone else is going through. It’s a phrase that pushes someone away because even if we are going through the same exact experience as they are at the same time, we are not the same person. We don’t have the same memories, experiences, values or culture. There are enough differences between people that the other person will be able to think to themselves, “No you don’t know, because you’re not me.”
But then frustratingly, that leaves us wondering, “Then what do we have left? What can we say or what can we do when our loved ones are going through the unimaginable?”
Our scripture for this morning comes from the Book of Job. It’s a part of the Wisdom tradition of our scriptures, right before Psalms and Proverbs. And if you know Psalms and Proverbs, then you know that these are books of poetry, wisdom, and sayings and Job falls in this same category. So the Book of Job gives to us a story; we could call it a parable. It’s a parable to help us to understand the nature of God.
If you’re not familiar with the story of the man named, Job, he is a good man. He is faithful, good, and blameless. He’s religious, faithful, and generous. He’s got a big family, many servants, and lots of wealth. And then he has a bad day. Which is the greatest understatement possible. Two different enemies attacked, killing servants and stealing all his wealth. Then fire rained down and destroyed the rest. Then, a strange weather event knocks down a building that killed all his children. Having lost everything, he is then stricken with loathsome soles that covered his entire body. Job takes a piece of broken pottery and uses it to scrape off all the dead skin from his body and then he sits down in those ashes to grieve.
It is as if so much of his life has been ripped away, and he weeps.
This is where we find Job in our scripture and his three friends have come to be with him. As they’re approaching, they see him from afar and he’s doing so badly that his friends can’t even recognize him. So they do as tradition calls, they rip their clothes, put ashes and dirt on their heads, and they weep out loud. Then, they sit with him for seven days not saying a word. What would that be like for us?
After the seven days, Job cries out to curse the day he was born. And when he finishes, his friends feel so compelled to respond to him, they (I would argue) just start making stuff up. They give their interpretations of what God is doing. They say to Job, that surely because he has undergone such terrible fortune that God is against him and that he must have done something wrong.
And if you know that terrible cliché, it comes from Job chapter 4 verse 8 that says, “You reap what you sow.” In other words, they participate in victim blaming: “this must be your fault” and “you should beg for God’s forgiveness”. Or, maybe God is so unhappy with sin in general from all people, Job’s friends argue, that maybe he’s just taking one for the team, receiving all the punishments of all people. They’re blaming Job for everything that’s gone wrong in his life, so they add more suffering onto him.
In our story, eventually, God speaks and lovingly confronts the limitations of Job’s knowledge and understanding with a beautiful reflection on the God’s presence in the vastness of the universe as well with that as so miniscule as the barbs on the tips of a bird’s feather. And why is God speaking of this? What God is trying to communicate here is that even in the farthest depths of the universe and the smallest wonders of creation, God is there. God is present. God has been there from the beginning and until after time ends, God is there with us.
Then, God confronts Job’s three friends, which is the second scripture we read this morning. If you reread that scripture, you will notice that God only confronts them on the words they say. They were wrong in their interpretations of God’s actions and their errors and judgments resulted in callousness. Especially because their interpretations applied motivations onto and judgements onto God that God had neither done nor claimed. Which means that their words were elevated from simply bad advice to spiritual abuse.
Does this mean that we can’t ever talk about God? Of course not. Any words that emphasize the foundational truth that “God is love” is pretty safe, like “God loves you” and “God would never intentionally cause you harm” and “It’s in moments like these that I feel God’s compassion and tears mixed with mine.” These are all fundamentally true because they are all built upon the truth that God is love. Venturing out past these requires being extra careful, though I’m not convinced that they’re necessary because the one really powerful action of good that Job’s friends did, which God never rebukes nor forsakes, is the blessing they bestowed upon Job by sitting with him in silence.
There are some people who will feel this to be a waste of time, but that’s only because it is an unlearned skill set in our culture and our culture has forgotten how loving this is, how difficult this is, and how necessary this is.
Sitting with someone in silence is loving because when people feel so much grief and helplessness, they often feel abandoned as well. They feel alone. Sitting with someone in their ashes affirms in each moment the truth, that we are not alone.
Sitting with someone in silence is difficult. In fact, it’s so difficult that many people will simply run away. They’re not actually running away from a person in need, and I don’t think it means that they’re a bad friend; they’re running away from—could I say—they’re running away from their own demons (however you interpret that word, which could mean many different things). However you interpret the word demons, demons will haunt us in grief and in silence and those who are good at sitting in silence are those who are not afraid of demons because they know that demons are powerless in the presence of the love of Christ.
Sitting with someone in silence is also necessary, because it is the combination of time and loving presence that returns us to Joy.
In our new Wednesday night class, called Restarting, the designers of the curriculum showed an example of how a parent helps a child to transition from distress back to joy. Granted, the reason the infant was upset in the video is because the parent tried to remove silverware from his hands. We know it wasn’t the end of the world, but his screaming and his frustration were real. And what the mom did in this example was to be glad that she was with him, she shared in his distress, and she stayed there connected with him until, on his own, when he was ready, he returned to joy, which he did. She was glad to be with him, she shared in his distress, and she stayed until he returned to joy. No words necessary. When we can do that for each other, we participate in a holy act of healing.
Perhaps you’re wondering, if this is so fundamentally important, why is it that we as Americans haven’t been practicing it? Actually, we have. We have practiced it for generations. But, I believe that because of the combination of globalization and the migratory nature of modern labor movement, we have lost community and lost the lessons passed down to us, from community elders.
In 2007, Ryan Gosling starred in a really odd movie called Lars and the Real Girl. Now, I am not going to give you the common descriptors of the movie because it really is odd and a bit off-putting. So, I’m going to say this: in my assessment, it’s a light-hearted drama about how a community and a church helps an innocent, loveable man who struggles with mental illness.
Even though many in the town don’t understand him, they do love him. So, instead of judging, criticizing, or arguing with him or his delusions, the church and the whole town go along with his story and give him time to work out his own solutions.
In one part of the movie, Lars is terrified because he’s in a crisis and with all of the challenges he has, no one knows how he’s going to be able to handle this crisis. In fact, neither his family nor the community knows what to do. But by this time, the community has been going along with his story for so long, it’s as if they got together and said, “Well, what would we do if it were anyone else in a crisis?”
This is what they did. In this scene a church member walks back to the living room to hand Lars his dinner. We see that there’s actually three different women from the church there, all crocheting or doing needle point in Lars’s family home.
Mrs. Gruner tells him that they sent his brother and sister-in-law to the movies.
Mrs. Gruner: They didn’t want to leave you two.
Lars: No, I’m glad that they… I’m glad they left. I feel terrible that all this is happening so close to my brother’s baby coming.
Mrs. Petersen: That’s how life is, Lars.
Mrs. Gruner: Everything at once.
Mrs. Schindler: We brought casseroles.
The script says at this point: “They sit in companionable silence. Mrs. Schindler hums to herself. Lars starts to eat, first picking, then building appetite.”
Lars: Um, is there something that I should be doing right now?
Mrs. Gruner: No, dear. You eat.
Mrs. Schindler: We came over to sit.
Mrs. Petersen: That’s what people do when tragedy strikes.
Mrs. Schindler: They come over and sit.
Lars: Okay.
These women of the church, they get it. They understand what it means to sit with someone in the ashes of their despair until they can return to joy. This is what is meant by being in solidarity with someone. This is what it means to be a blessing.
You know, the original meaning of the word, blessing, did not mean to give favor or to give reward, but blessing really means “to be with.” So when we say, “God bless you.” We are saying, “God be with you.”
And in the same way that we say “We love God and others because God first loved us,” we are able to say, “I can sit with others, because God first sits with me.”
The Christian singer, Natalie Grant, sings a song called, Held. In the song, she describes a gut-wrenchingly painful experience and then sings the response in the chorus (click here for lyrics):
This is what it means to be held,
How it feels when the sacred is torn from your life
And you survive
This is what it is to be loved and to know
That the promise was that when everything fell
We'd be held
You see, when we sit with our loved ones in the uncomfortable spaces, in the ashes of a crisis while neither running away, nor trying to fix them, we give witness to the truth of God’s love: God is with us and I am with you, and that’s enough.
