You’ve Got a Friend (or Three)

 Here is a link to a video of the sermon, starting with the scripture reading.

August 18, 2024, Orchard Ridge UCC

Job 2: 1-13 (From The Message)

Annette flew from Madison to Ireland about a quarter century ago to attend the wedding of a good friend and her soon-to-be husband. So much joy! Such a bright world ahead!
 
Three weeks later, Annette flew to Ireland again, this time to attend the funeral of the husband, who had been killed in a motorcycle accident. So much grief! Darkness covered the world! 

How could this happen? What could anyone do? Annette struggled with these questions as she pondered how she could console her friend.

Annette told this story several years ago at a conference on dealing with grief. It is a story had has embedded itself within my being.

 

When Annette arrived at the wake, the line of mourners was long - very long. She had brought along a red rose for her friend and stood in line clutching it as mourner after mourner tried to find the right words to console the young widow. There were soft words, tears, the line moving slowly as Annette tried to fashion the rights words to say to her friend when she arrived at the place where she was sitting.

 

Finally, she was there. And no words came to her. She simply sat down, handed her friend the rose and remained there in silence for a minute. Then she got up and walked away, embarrassed, feeling that she had failed her friend.

 

A few weeks later, she called her friend to check in. She told her friend how sorry she was that she could not find the right comforting words at that moment at the wake.

 

“Oh, Annette,” her friend said. “There were hundreds of people who spoke to me that day. I don’t remember anything they said. The only thing I remember is that you gave me a rose and sat next to me. That was all I really needed.”

 

Carole King wrote a song about friendship a few decades ago. James Taylor made it popular. I’ll bet many of you will recognize it. Vicki will play a bit of it on the piano and I’ll read some of the lyrics.

 When you're down and troubled
And you need some lovin' care
And nothin', nothin' is goin' right
Close your eyes and think of me
And soon I will be there
To brighten up even your darkest night
 
You just call out my name
And you know, wherever I am
I'll come runnin'
To see you again
Winter, spring, summer or fall
All you have to do is call
And I'll be there
You've got a friend
 

This brings us to the story we heard today about Job and his friends. 

 

As someone you know – Daniel Cooperrider – wrote in his study guide for the Book of Job, “Job’s story is the kind of story that never was but always is because it’s the timeless story of what it’s like to be human.” 

 

Often discussions of Job focus on the question of suffering. How can God allow this? Did God even encourage this as a brutal test? How do we respond to suffering? Those are important questions and so much of the Book of Job revolves around those kinds of questions. 

 

But for today, I’d like to focus on Job’s friends and what we might learn from them.

We, after all, live in a time when many suffer, when we can feel overwhelmed by the chaos all around us. I think one of the lessons from today’s reading is that we need to stand together to care for one another, not with easy answers but with an openness to each other.

Job’s friends started out like the story of Annette. They heard that Job was suffering and went to be with him – “to keep him company and comfort him.” They cried out, they showed their grief, “Then they sat with him on the ground. Seven days and nights they sat there without saying a word. They could see how rotten he felt, how deeply he was suffering.”

Let’s pick up the next verse of "You've Got a Friend":

If the sky above you
Grows dark and full of clouds
And that old north wind begins to blow
Keep your head together
And call my name out loud
Soon you'll hear me knockin' at your door
 
You just call out my name
And you know, wherever I am
I'll come runnin', runnin', yeah, yeah
To see you again
Winter, spring, summer or fall
All you have to do is call
And I'll be there, yes, I will

 

The story of Job and his friends goes on and it is a reminder that it is not easy to just sit there in silence and be supportive. The next chapter begins this way: “After this, Job broke the silence. He spoke up and cursed his fate.”

OK, so Job was not quite as grateful and comforted as Annette’s friend. That opened the floodgates for Job’s friends. 

 

Eliphaz assumes that Job has done something wrong. “Would you mind if I said something to you?” he asks politely. What a set up. “Has a truly innocent person ever ended up on the scrap heap? Do genuinely upright people ever lose out in the end?” 

Clearly, Eliphaz thinks Job must have sinned to deserve this punishment. But he has a solution. “If I were in your shoes, I’d go straight to God. I’d throw myself on the mercy of God.” In other words, acknowledge your faults and trust in God. 

 

Job is not buying that. He replies, “Comfort me with the truth and I’ll shut up, show me where I’ve gone off track. Honest words never hurt anyone, but what’s the point of all this pious bluster?”

So much for friend number one. On to Bildad, who is all into the scales of justice and offended that Job is ranting at God.

 

“Does God mess up?” asks Bildad. “Does God Almighty ever get things backward? It’s plain that your children sinned against him, otherwise why would God have punished them?”

 

The solution? “Get down on your knees before God Almighty.”

 

As Eugene Peterson wrote in his commentary in his translation of Job in The Message: “Job didn’t need an argument. He needed empathy.” He described Bildad’s words as “the sterile diagnosis of a doctor with no bedside manner. And then he scrawled out a prescription.”

Job has no more patience with that either. 

“Believe me, I’m blameless,” he tells his friends. “I don’t understand what’s going on. I hate my life.”

 

Enter the third friend, Zophar. Peterson describes him as sitting in the chair “as a pious moralist” whose world is black and white – “no shades of gray, no uncertainties, no ambiguities.” 

 

What Zophar has to say is hardly comforting. How about these words: “You haven’t gotten half of what you deserve.” And he too has a prescription for Job: “If you scrub your hands of sin and refuse to entertain evil in your home, you’ll be able to face the world unashamed and keep a firm grip on life, guiltless and fearless.” 

Job is not impressed. He replies with more than a touch of sarcasm: “I’m sure you speak for all the experts, and when you die, there’ll be no one left to tell us how to live. But don’t forget that I also have a brain.”

 

Let’s go to the final verse of the Carole King song.

 

Now, ain't it good to know that you've got a friend
When people can be so cold?
They'll hurt you, yes, and desert you
And take your soul if you let them
Oh, but don't you let them

 

You just call out my name
And you know, wherever I am
I'll come runnin', runnin', yeah, yeah
To see you again…

 

I suspect many of us here have been either in the position of Job – why is everything going wrong, why does nobody understand – or the position of his friends – I wish I could find the right thing to say to make it all better – and then we say the wrong thing.

 

I learned a bit about this from my wife. It took a few years, but she is a patient teacher who also loves me – so that helped.

 

When she would be discouraged about something, worried about something, I would go into Mr. Fix-It mode. Fortunately, I don’t think I was like Job’s friends in blaming her – at least not very often. But I surely had good ideas for how she could make it all better. 

 

Over time, she taught me that she did not need my great ideas. She needed someone who would listen, who would empathize. If she wanted my great ideas, she would ask for them. But mostly, like Job, she knows that she also has a brain – a very good brain, actually.

 

What I learned from her has also – I hope – helped me when I encounter others who are struggling with something in their lives. First empathize. Offer ideas if they ask for them. Walk through the journey with them. Don’t offer a map right away.

 

I think this applies when dealing with people in the midst of illness and grief, facing broken relationships or trouble at school or in the workplace. 

 

But I think it is also useful in this time in our society when political divisions break us apart and we are pretty sure if people only saw the world as we saw it, if they listened to our wise solutions, if they followed the map we are offering them, that all would be well.

 

Author Brian McLaren has a new book out called Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart. One of the stories he tells is about the night he was babysitting for his granddaughter who was crying because her parents were gone. He remembers an old pattern – tell her to stop crying and be brave. You know, words like “Don’t be a baby.” 

But Brian had learned not to deny another’s feelings, but to look for what they needed. He reassured his granddaughter that he knew she was missing her parents and that he would help her have a good time. And then he added, “It’s really tough being a kid sometimes, isn’t it?” She nodded, knowing that he had tapped into what she was feeling. 

Then he added what became a mantra for them: “There’s only one thing to do when life is tough like this,” he said. “When life gets tough, we get tougher…and eat ice cream.”

 

Empathy. Encouragement. And when appropriate, a touch of humor.

 

Now let’s carry that over to the folks we may encounter in the next few months. We may need to feel an inner toughness when we face people with whom we have deep disagreements. 

 

We don’t need to give up our core beliefs to hear their concerns and worries, to empathize with them. We probably won’t have any more luck than Job’s friends if we try to tell them how wrong they are. But we might still be able to have ice cream with them.

 

Since I am weaving music through this reflection today, I’d like us to end with a song that I think gets to our lives when we may feel abandoned and alone. Those friends who we hoped would be with us cannot find the right words. But like Job, we still at our core trust that God’s love can be with us, no matter what is happening.

 

Thomas A. Dorsey was a successful blues musician in the 1920s, even accompanying famous blues singer Ma Rainy for a couple of years. Then he made a slow transition to gospel music. But in 1932, his wife died in childbirth and their son died the next day. He was performing in St. Louis at the time. He of course was devastated.
 
In deep despair, he was walking around a college campus with a friend and went into a music room. He tells what happened next:

"I sat down at a piano and began to improvise on the keyboard. Suddenly, I found myself playing a particular melody that I hadn't played before that time. (It was an adaptation of George N. Allen's melody used with the old hymn, Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone?) As I played I began to say, 'Blessed Lord, blessed Lord, blessed Lord.' My friend walked over to me and said, 'Why don't you make that precious Lord?' I then began to sing, 'Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on, help me stand.'"

 

It has been a go-to hymn for so many since then. It was the hymn Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. requested just before he was murdered. And today, we can join our voices together with confidence that no matter whether we’ve got friends who know what to do or not, God’s love is always there.

It’s number 472 in the hymnals. Let’s sing “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.”

 

Here’s version by Mahalia Jackson

 

More contemporary version