Today’s readings seem to be the perfect complement to the Father’s Day weekend float trip followed by yesterday’s float on the Illinois River. When I moved here in March of 2010, two things I brought strapped to my SUV were a mountain bike and a kayak. I have traveled thousands of miles by small boat. I have rescued people and I know the terror of involuntary exit from a boat in heavy whitewater. I was on a commercial raft trip in Tennessee with a friend. We slid into an eight foot drop and I was unable to stay in the boat. I will never forget the image of the shadow of the raft going over my head as I remained trapped below the surface. To this day, God only knows how I got free. This was undoubtedly the kind of terror the disciples experienced in their small, wooden craft tossed about by fierce winds at night on the Sea of Galilee.

Whether the first century or the twenty first century, life seems to be ruled by chaos. Just about the time things seem to sail in a predictable course where your family, friends, health, and job all are going well, something happens to knock it off course: a dread disease, a layoff, a death, a relocation, a divorce, something. Chaos lurks under the surface, always ready to strike fear and bring about suffering.

Many world religions begin with the contemplation of human suffering. Buddhism was born from this contemplation. Judaism has the book of Job among others. Christians have the writings of Paul. We will return to the book of Job shortly, but first a cautionary note.

It is possible to chop the Bible into convenient proof-text pieces and then use those pieces to prove or disprove almost any point of view. This is the real danger of those “Bible camps” for kids where they go and bulk up on memorizing chunks of scripture. It makes the parents proud, but it takes the student or the seeker out of the process and replaces them with a robot that only knows the words of all those Bible chunks. As a result, the student or seeker is no longer capable of thinking for themselves. They have lost their God-given gift of human reason.

The proof-text approach looks at today’s reading in chapter 38 and treats it as a footnote to the previous teaching on how to live a faithful life. I could not disagree more with this conclusion. Behind this popular (and in my view, wrong-headed) interpretation of Job is the presumption that people suffer because they have sinned.

The best sermons do not spoon feed you answers. They leave you with questions to ponder.

An English priest said long ago that we are to “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” the Bible. To do this, you need to get some perspective. Let’s cruise up to 10,000 feet and take a look.

Did you know the over-arching story of the Bible starts in a garden and ends where? The Garden of Gethsemane, or perhaps the garden where the Jesus is laid in the tomb. Adam and Eve hear God’s footsteps in the garden at the beginning. At the tomb, Mary sees Jesus and thinks he is a gardener.

We could have started today’s service with a different blessing than the Trinity. We could have said, “Blessed be the name of the Lord,” which is taken out of the Book of Job just before today’s reading. Remember that Job has lost everything: his possessions and his family. Instead of cursing God for his predicament, Job shaves his head, tears his clothing, and says, “Naked I came out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Knowing that context, does it shift your understanding of what we are saying when we start our Sunday worship with that text?

Let’s think about today’s passage from 10,000 feet. First you need to think about what the writer’s goal is and the audience for whom the story was first written. Did you know that there are earlier versions of Job in three ancient languages predating this writing by more than a thousand years? These texts were found in Sumeria, Babylon, and Egypt. Some of the wording in the Hebrew Job is a word for word translation of parts of these earlier texts.

In every case, the over arching purpose of the writer was NOT to use it as a story about what God will do for us because of our faithfulness. Instead, these four stories of Job tell us about the nature of God. Each version attempts to address the question that is as old as humankind: Why do the righteous suffer? Or to use the title of a modern book written by Rabbi Harold Kushner, “Why do Bad Things Happen to Good People?”

Preaching easy answers to questions that have no answers is basically elevator music. It is intended to calm your fears while you are trapped inside a little box going up and down. How many of you intentionally listen to elevator music on your iPod or your car radio? Easy answers to the Bible may calm our fears in the short term, but in the end they have no substance and no lasting effect. Let’s look at this ending of Job again.

This passage could be told in a modern movie format. I can imagine David Attenborough giving the opening line and Morgan Freeman taking God’s lines. This is poetry and it is full of powerful images. This is a story about God’s faithfulness to us and to all of creation.

Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind:
“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
Gird up your loins like a man,
I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements– surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
“Or who shut in the sea with doors
when it burst out from the womb? —
when I made the clouds its garment,
and thick darkness its swaddling band,
and prescribed bounds for it,
and set bars and doors,
and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stopped’?”