Racism, a pandemic, and the island of Job

Job 1

This week we begin five weeks on the book of Job. Five weeks on the story of a man who had an incredible series of calamities hit him all at once. It might feel a bit like 2020.

But before we see ourselves in Job too clearly—and before we make ourselves out to be blameless as Job was—we should be clear from the start that Job failed miserably at understanding God. For one thing, Job clearly felt that when tragedy strikes it is God who takes away. It’s that oft-quoted verse that I just read (1:21), “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I depart. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised,” but the story itself reveals that this isn’t true.

It’s probably the most famous verse in all of Job, but 1:21 is clearly a failure of Job to do good theology. God didn’t take anything away from Job; Satan did. I mean God did allow Satan to test him—with conditions—so you could blame God, I suppose, and that is supposedly what Satan is testing, but God didn’t take away anything in this story. Furthermore, the idea that God gave Job what he had is not supported here either. This is one of those tricky sticking points of theology where the question of why some people have material blessings and some do not is not easily answered, and the implied answer about blessings following faithfulness can be extremely damaging and is most often simply a lie. In the real world, the poor are often more faithful than the rich. The moment we use our blessings to prop up ourselves as more faithful is the moment we have jumped the boat.

If you find it easy to place yourself in Job’s shoes, perhaps it’s because he represents the fears of those who have much. If you have a lot, you know a lot can be taken from you. Boy, are those fears poignant right now! As we struggle with an uncertain economy and our nation struggles to come to terms with our complicity in systemic racism, whose causes are so deeply embedded in our history that we hardly know where to start, it becomes easy to ascribe everything that happens to God—the good and the bad. Yet, God’s handiwork is not revealed in Job’s disasters. God has yet to play a role in the story. It’s coming! Oh boy, is God going to take a role in this story, but it’s not yet. God cries with Job; God does not rob Job of his loved ones.

After all, our faith is a faith about taking up our crosses. God doesn’t need to send crosses for us to bear; the world gives them to us! Racism is not something God created; it just happens. Poverty, disease—they happen ultimately because of sin—but God’s role lies further ahead.

We know this is true of God because Job had everything and he was faithful—blameless, the scripture says—but the mark of a God-follower is not how good we are to earn blessings but how we respond when it’s taken away—and it’s not that God is testing us; the world provides plenty of tests without God deciding it’s time to throw another lightning bolt from heaven. Through the next several weeks we will watch the rollercoaster that is Job’s response to tragedy. He begins down an impossible pathway of theological gymnastics to explain what happened to him, because as much as he resists his friends who argue he must have done something wrong, nevertheless Job continues to view the world as if God gives and takes away, and, ultimately, Job cannot get away from viewing wealth as evidence of doing something right. He can’t get past it.

In many ways, Job never stops to realize he is nothing special; that everything he has is a gift not because he is faithful but because God is. He never pauses to consider how the stacked deck benefited him to achieve what he did—just like we rarely pause to consider our own stacked deck. Thankfully, most of us haven’t lost everything, and we may still consider our own privileges more carefully right now.

We aren’t Job, but there are some things we can learn from Job’s story. One thing I take away from Job immediately is that there is no playbook for grief and no hierarchy of grief either. Job has quite a lot and loses everything; other folks start out with little and they, too, may lose everything, and both experience grief profoundly. All the possessions can be replaced, we imagine, but his sons and daughters cannot. When you lose loved ones, nothing else matters.

I think that’s actually a great place to begin, whether you are looking to understand Job, or a pandemic, or the effects of racism. When you lose something you can’t replace, nothing else matters. For too many in our nation, they have lost their dignity and their humanity and their lives because of their skin color. That cannot be replaced, and it is their grief they carry day by day.

In another respect, and as of this moment, we live in a nation that has lost over 100,000 people to COVID-19. This represents an average of ten years lost on each life. So, we’ve lost over a million years of human beings’ lives to this disease in this country with things still speeding up.

And, yet, here we are closer to home perhaps thinking, “None of this affects me!” COVID-19 hasn’t affected us—nobody here has died. Perhaps nobody will. And racism doesn’t affect us, because we don’t have hardly any racial diversity in this country.

It’s a sad reality that it takes knowing somebody to care. The fact that we have black and brown-skinned individuals crying out against the racism embedded in the fabric of America tends to matter little if we don’t know them. More of us in this county know police officers, and we care about them because they represent a face and a story.  Far fewer know our black and brown skinned sisters and brothers crying out that they can’t breathe. We can quote statistics all day long—we can say that you are eight times more likely to go prison if you are black or that you are similarly eight times more likely to live in poverty, but it tends not to matter until you experience what that means face-to-face.

This pandemic has shown us how poorly we translate statistics to real human lives. What matters to us is the scandalous moment these issues hit us in the heart. When you lose something you can’t replace, nothing else matters.

The heart-issue of racism is not that we believe people are inferior because of their skin-color—at least that’s not overwhelmingly the problem here. The heart-issue with racism is that we don’t feel the burdens that people with different skin colors carry by virtue of who they are. Until we feel that, we are going to minimize it. We just will.

Similarly, we won’t feel the gravity of COVID-19 until we can put a face to it. A mask doesn’t matter until we’ve lost somebody. It’s like malaria in Africa or child prostitution in SE Asia—a terrible thing but really, what can be done? “What can be done?” is a question that can only be asked by somebody who believes they are unaffected.

So, we wait, like Job, for it to hit us in the heart. And we hope it never happens—and perhaps it won’t.

But this is not the only way to live. In fact, Job shows us a better way. It’s going to be a few weeks until we get to the payoff—that marvelous scene between God and Job where God shouts down “Who are you, Job? Who created this world, Job?”

What Job never realizes is his connectedness with creation. For all his servants and property and his large family, the story of Job is the story of a man on an island, so when tragedy strikes, where does he go? There is no community to hold him. His supposed friends come to him only to demand repentance for things he didn’t do, treating him again like an isolated individual sick and in need of fixing. Nobody in this story lifts up even a hint of the value of community to hold us when times get hard.

Grief is meant to be held in community where we acknowledge our neighbors as beloved of children of God no matter what they’ve gone through. Community is where we see skin color, not as the same because we know the world doesn’t see it the same, but as a kaleidoscope of beauty. And community is where we see the aged—the young and the old—and their value to us is not a matter their purported usefulness to society. People have value not contrary to their age, not contrary to their skin color; but because of it. The community thrives in diversity. You want to see what Kittson County lacks—there it is! Diversity is a strength, and when we divide ourselves around absolutely minute things like political leanings or church families, then how can we possibly see one another for who we truly are—beloved children of God, who look different—who are young and old.

Grief needs community, and that is a hard pill to swallow right now, living in the tension of communities changed by pandemic. Yet, it is also the cure for all these things. Racism cannot continue if we see ourselves as part of a great neighborhood that stretches far beyond our towns to our nation and our world. We cannot abide systems that oppress any longer; we must confront the ways we have benefited from those systems.

The same can be said for a pandemic, which has pitted economic systems against the lives of our elderly and at-risk neighbors. We cannot abide ideologies that slough off the elderly and the infirmed so casually.

To do this is to become people on an island, like Job, with nothing to catch us when we fall. Covid-19 has probed our connections with one another and revealed our weakness for valuing people only for their usefulness, and systemic racism has tested our capacity to see the long history that has shaped the systems that prop up white supremacy.

So, what? Where does Job leave us?

I think it starts by getting off our islands, by beginning to imagine that our blessings are ours both by chance and luck as much as hard work, by acknowledging that nothing we have is because we are so special, and then, importantly, Job teaches us to come off the island and strive to be a community together. That is how the Gospel will be heard. We need to know we are saved by grace, so that we can acknowledge all the ways we have failed. We are not blameless like Job; we must confess our complicity.

Racism is sin—both personal and structural. Covid-19 is testing our boundaries. Both these things feel big and overwhelming and scary, but when things are big and overwhelming and scary, we have a simple response: Just love one another as God has loved us. And don’t worry about what others are doing. You want to know a secret? There are always people who feel different from you who will also exemplify everything bad that you imagine about them. You can always find evidence that some people are bad. Stop looking for it. Instead, search out what is good. Because they can do the same about people like you, and no community to be founded on the foundation of our worst assumptions.

Instead, strive to love better—to confess better, to care better, to see one another; to see the best in one another. That’s where it starts. Look at Job. See a man who lost it all not because of what he did but because of the whims of Satan. Then, see men and women in this country and this world, suffering not because of what they’ve done, but because of disease, or because of what they look like. See one another. See the best in one another. See people for who they are. Beloved children of God—white, black, and everything in-between—the face of God shining through in each of us.