Worship With Empty Hands: The Road Back After Failure

The parking lot still has last week's bulletin under the wiper. The man who used to park in the third row got here early on purpose, then sat in the car until the first song started so he would not have to shake a hand that already knew. Failure does not get a meal train. Empty hands after failure look, from the aisle, like empty hands after a funeral. They are not the same courtyard.

Someone will want a reason. Someone will reach for a verse that makes the collapse look managed. Someone will say God is teaching you, or that everything happens for a reason, or that at least you can start over, as if starting over were a receipt you could hold up in the foyer. Job 1 will not help you run that sentence. Job 1 will put a blameless man on the ground with a shaved head and a torn robe, and it will let him worship without an explanation.

This is a sermon about the road back after failure. If you preach Job 1:20-22 as a map of anyone's private collapse, you will lie. If you preach it as Job in Uz, after livestock, servants, and children are gone, who tears the robe, falls down, and worships without a transcript of the heavenly council, you give this church a God whose name can be blessed when the hands are empty. You also take away the cheap recovery move that waits for a finished explanation before anyone is allowed to come back.

Text

Hear the first hour of Job's loss, from the World English Bible: "Then Job arose, and tore his robe, and shaved his head, and fell down on the ground, and worshiped. He said, “Naked I came out of my mother’s womb, and naked will I return there. Yahweh gave, and Yahweh has taken away. Blessed be Yahweh’s name.” In all this, Job didn’t sin, nor charge God with wrongdoing."