Sun. Aug. 8, 2010 (Henry Neufeld)

Henry Neufeld continued our series on Job with a vivid and entertaining summary of the dialogue of the ten chapters of Job (Chs 4 - 14). Drawing from Peterson’s The Message, Henry had four readers act the parts of Job, and his three friends, showing Job’s despair as even his friends seemed to leave him in undeserved guilt and sin. Henry noted a distinction between pain and suffering - suffering happens in the mind and the mind decides what the pain means, and whether it is deserved. Job suffers because he can make no sense of the pain he is in. Henry further noted that traditional theology falls down flat when it comes to Job - he was doing everything right when he began to suffer. What is he to do to end the suffering? Human reasoning can give no satisfactory answer to this. There are lessons for us in this story - what do we do when bad things happen to good people? Do we assume that because people we meet have had bad things happen, that they must themselves be bad? Are we fixers, looking for sufferers to fix? Or are we humans, walking alongside? [AP] Listen to the sermon audio MP3 recording from Sunday, August 8th, 2010 using your browser's preferred media player.