From the Penthouse to the Outhouse: Job in Exile
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Jeremy: Welcome to Cabernet and Pray, where we drink good wine and we explore the story of Christianity.
And today, I wanna begin with some exciting big news that I've been working on for a little bit, and I'm excited to officially roll it out. And the big news is this: Cabernet and Pray is moving from every other week to weekly. That's right, friends. If you have been regularly enjoying these, it has been posted every other Wednesday.
And beginning today, you can now count on this happening every Wednesday morning. I hope this is going to allow you to work these episodes into your weekly rhythm, your weekly routines. That's how I enjoy the podcasts I enjoy.
I plan my schedule around them. I know what days they post, and so you can plan around it. You're gonna know that these are gonna post every Wednesday morning. One of the reasons for this is I was doing a second podcast, some of you may [00:01:00] know, called Rebuilding Faith, and I was going through the Gospel of John, and I did it I did the whole gospel.
It took me 77 weeks, 77 episodes through the Gospel of John, and I made it all the way through. You can see any of those or listen to those if you are interested. Those are called Rebuilding Faith. And as I finished that, I thought, "You know what? This is a good chance to, to reset, to evaluate how things are going."
And I came to the conclusion, I think I can do what I'm trying to do a lot better with one podcast, and especially if I make the one podcast every week. And so that's what we're gonna do. In addition to the interview episodes that I do, I'm gonna be mixing more solo episodes in, like we have today, and this is going to allow me to work through bigger ideas that I'm thinking through that I wanna, to teach about, and there's not another venue that's right for that.
And so now [00:02:00] I can do that through this, method. And I'm constantly working on how do I figure out all the different things that I'm working on? How do I get them all going the same direction? How do they be the, the most helpful that they can be for you? And so I think this is gonna be a good change.
And in that vein, if you are interested in these conversations, you're interested in more, I wanna invite you into our online community. I absolutely love the interactions that I get with the people there. That includes a weekly newsletter that I send only to that community every Friday. We do monthly video chats.
We do book studies, right now going through the book CEO of Golden. It just... It's a phenomenal way to have a safe environment to process these kinds of ideas. And so if this podcast is, like, your safe space or perhaps your guilty pleasure, you don't have to do that alone. Like, you can actually do that with other people, and there's gonna be a link in the show notes.
I'd love for you to join our [00:03:00] online community there. Well, today, I'm gonna begin a series called Job in Exile, and this came from an experience I had. I listened to a fascinating lecture from Dr. David Gushee at a recent conference that I was at. And that name might sound familiar to the loyal listeners of the pod.
I had Dr. Gushee all the way back in episode eight Yeah, and things have changed since then. Kinda feels like a different podcast. I, I've learned a lot. I've grown a lot. I think it's better now. Uh, so yeah, he, he was in episode eight. A lot has changed since then, but he's got a new book coming out in September about the Book of Job called Job in Exile.
And as I listened to this lecture I just thought, "This is so good. This is phenomenal," and so I wanna spend eight weeks on the podcast going through the Book of Job. And we're gonna have other interviews. We'll take breaks. We'll have other [00:04:00] interviews mixed into that as well. But here's the fun part.
The eighth part of this series will be an interview with Dr. Gushie about his book, and so if you've got questions that are building as we go and, and there's things you're like, "What about this?" Or I'll tell you what, already there's things that I'm like, "I just don't have time to get into all of the fascinating aspects of this," I'm saving some of those for my conversation with Dr.
Gushie. That's gonna be a phenomenal close to this series. But it's gonna be a deconstruction-focused look at the Book of Job. And so if you have, have had some of these thoughts, if you've ever read the Book of Job, maybe you can see why that would lend itself well to that. Now, a preface, especially for those of you who were a part of the Rebuilding Faith, podcast I did through John, I am not going verse by verse through the Book of Job here.
This is not that. I'm not gonna go every, every line by line. This is going to hit the big [00:05:00] ideas in the different sections, and again, just in eight weeks, and so there's no way I could do the entire Book of Job verse by verse in eight weeks. But we don't need to, 'cause that's not what we're going to do here.
So this is not intended to cover everything. If you want it to cover more and you're like, "What about this?" I'd encourage you pre-order Dr. Gushie's book, and he gets into a whole lot else that I don't have the time to get to. But we're gonna cover some major things that we deal with today, major questions that we have today, and I think the Book of Job is a phenomenal guide for this conversation, a phenomenal resource for us to take a step back and process what this journey has felt like.
So today's episode is called From the Penthouse to the Outhouse
I've never shared this with anybody publicly If this was SportsCenter, that would be like such a hot take. Skip Bayless would have no idea. Stephen A. Smith would have no idea [00:06:00] what to say if you drop that down. That is so good. The joke I always say is like, "How'd you learn so much?" Gotta drink a lot.
Resistance to change is hurting the church. I'm not in the camp that God has a penis or a vagina or a body at all. I'm in the camp that God is a universe spirit. This is the strangest podcast that I have been on. I don't even know what to do. I'm kind of geeked up about this wine. So this is my second glass, and it delivers a little more of a punch than I expected.
So if I get a little loopy, it's your fault. You told me to drink on this show. I will also say as a confession, I am a lightweight. So I've had like three sips of this wine and I'm already feeling it, so this is fun. You've uncovered the mystery. You've exposed the formula. You've just duct-taped together a number of things that aren't normally hanging out together, and I'm here for it.
We're gonna sit down at table, we're gonna have a glass of wine and some food, and we're gonna talk about the beauty of Jesus. Thanks for what you're doing with this podcast and for the creative way you're [00:07:00] doing it, and the beautiful, positive spirit in which you're doing it. I really appreciate this venue, what you're doing.
It is fun, and yet you dig into the deep stuff. I've heard about your podcast for a long time, and I love that you're a pastor and that you explore the world of faith through wine. That's very unique. I never thought of church history in terms of wine drinkers. I love this question. You had me with herbaceous notes, I want you to know.
I'm ready to just stay here and live in the wine tour. I will never forget the first time I bought a bottle of wine by myself, which was yesterday. I- if you're familiar with Drunk History, I thought it's like drunk theology. So I, oh- I got a little spicy there. It's the peach wine. Apparently the wine is but here we are.
Queer we are. Beer we are. No, it's wine, Jeremy. I'm an emotional guy. Paired with a half a glass of wine, I'm beet red, sweating, and about to cry here. By the way, drinking this Pinot Grigio at 3:00 in the afternoon is making me even more direct in my communication than [00:08:00] I normally would be. I know why you had your guests drink wine.
It makes sense now. Yeah. I get it. A little bit of liquid courage here to really unleash the beast. I think you've got a good podcast. Th- throwing the wine bit in there, that's nice. Cabernet and pray, yeah.
Jeremy: As we begin the episode today, I want to tell you what wine I'm going to be drinking in this episode. I have got a 2023 Louis Chavy Coteaux Bourguignons. I don't know if that's how you say that. When you say French wines, you just gotta be a little bit confident. This is a red wine blend from Burgundy, France, and if you know Burgundy, you know, like, oh, this is primo spot.
But they have all different tiers in Burgundy. This is the low tier, which means this can be Pinot Noir, it can be Gamay mixed in as well. On the back of the bottle, doesn't even tell me what the grapes are. I suspect it's a mix of those two, and it's why they call it a, a red wine [00:09:00] which means they have blended some stuff.
Which is fine, it just means you're usually getting a lower entry bottle. You're not gonna spend as much to get that kind of a blend. And as I'm tasting this, it's nice, it's light, it's gonna, it's gonna be good for my afternoon session today. I'm getting a lot of raisin, dried cranberry in it, and it's almost like drinking Craisins.
Like I don't know if you guys have had that snack or candy, I don't know what we call it, but yeah, it's like drinking Craisins, and I'm kind of into it. It's, it's fun. But I did learn a fun detail about this wine. The name of this wine changed in 2011. It used to be called Bourgogne Grand Ordinaire, which roughly translates to Great Ordinary Burgundy.
Which is, like, a really accurate title for what it is. Like this is not top shelf Burgundy. This is [00:10:00] ordinary Burgundy, but it's great ordinary Burgundy, which I think from a branding point of view is hysterical. Uh, the new wine is not named that. The new wine means Burgundian Hills, 'cause evidently they found that including the word ordinary was bad for sales.
We don't, we don't like things to be ordinary, and yet I would argue there is a place for ordinary. There's a place for the daily drinker. There's a place for the wine that's just great for any normal day, right? Not, not that you save it for a special occasion. And so that's what I'm drinking today. I'm enjoying it, and I also wanna invite you to pour a glass with me.
The oldest thing that the church does is share a cup, and somewhere along the way we turn that into a checkpoint. But this is a table with no fence around it, and so I invite you to bring your questions and bring your doubts, because you are [00:11:00] welcome here. Cheers.
So today we are going to cover Job 1 all the way through Job 2:10. So this is... Again, I'm not reading all these verses, I'm just telling you the span that I'm covering. I'm only gonna read a handful of these verses. So if you wanna pause this, and you wanna read the beginning up through chapter 2 verse 10 so you're aware of where I'm going, this is your chance.
Pause it right now, go read it. It's not gonna take you long, and that way you know all the verses. Or if you just wanna listen, you wanna experience it maybe for the first time, that's cool. We're, we're good with that. Uh, for each week of this series, I'm gonna be drawing heavily on the ideas in Dr.
Gushee's upcoming book. I have had a chance to read it, and it's fantastic. And so I'm really excited to get to episode eight. In the meantime, we're gonna get into some nitty-gritty, and a lot [00:12:00] of these are observations that he points out in the book and goes into greater length in the book. One of the questions he raises that is a great question as we begin is this: What is the Book of Job attempting to teach us?
Yeah, because this is one of those we, we need to ask this with every book, with every passage we look at in the Bible. What is this attempting to teach? What's the point? Because if you don't know what you think it's attempting to teach you, you can land all sorts of places with something, and that's not the goal.
The goal is to figure out what do we think is the purpose of this book? What should we be taking away from a book like that? If you've ever studied the Book of Job or you've ever read anything about the Book of Job, you know this is a book that refuses a single interpretation in a lot of ways, right?
There's a lot of sections where like, well, you could view it like that or you could view it like that. And we don't often like that. We want the certainty. We want the tell me what's the right answer, [00:13:00] help it make sense, help me make feel... make me feel good about it. That's not the Book of Job. The Book of Job is gonna leave you with way more questions, and that's my goal for today's episode, is to leave you with a bunch of questions that we're then gonna explore as well in the weeks to come.
So I do wanna read a few verses. We're gonna start with the opening of the Book of Job, just to set the, the tone, set the, the flavor here of what we're gonna get into in this book. This is Job 1 beginning in verse 1. "There once was a man named Job who lived in the land of Uz. He was blameless, a man of complete integrity.
He feared God and stayed away from evil. He had seven sons and three daughters. He owned 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 team of- teams of oxen, and 500 female donkeys. He also had many servants. He was, in fact, the richest person in [00:14:00] that entire area." Now, there are many clues here, as you may have picked up in the style of this, that we are talking about a literary story rather than a historical account.
As just one illustration of this, as a fun fact, we don't know where to find the land of Uz Y- you can't find that on a map. We don't really know where this is. We just know it's, like, in the east. Some of the, the language, some of the text indicates that. What we do know is that Job is not an Israelite, so he's not...
This is not taking place in the region that we know of as Israel. And we also know this is probably literary because the story starts with God talking to Satan, which is a little weird, right? That's, like, a, a strange exchange, and maybe that should be a clue as well. Like, 'Hey, this is a story that we are reading.
It's inviting us into, into some [00:15:00] bigger questions.' There's a Hebrew Bible scholar named Ellen Da- Ellen Davis, and she says this: "No serious reader imagines that the opening scene of a boastful God making a bet with the Satan is a reliable representation of the workings of the universe." I love that, right?
Like, hey, this scene that we get with, with this blameless guy, and then God and Satan talking about this blameless guy and making this weird kind of wager about him, this is not like real life. This is not how the universe functions. This is a story to invite our imaginations to ponder truth, to ponder the way things do work.
This is, this is like a once upon a time kind of an intro, if you will. And if you read the, the beginning verses of Job, hopefully you're picking that up. Now, chapter one, Satan asks God if he can test Job, and the term used [00:16:00] for Satan is a title. It's not a name. We often think of Satan as it's a proper name.
You gotta can't- capitalize it. It's a proper name. Uh, it's more accurately think of this as the Satan, right? Which is... You may have picked that up in the quote I just read, but that's the way this is literally translated. Sometimes it's also translated as the adversary or even the accuser. It's a role being played, not a proper name for a person.
Okay? So you have this role interacting with God. And in this story, the Satan is one of the heavenly beings in conversation with a divine council. This is a weird opening, uh, especially if you've read the rest of the Hebrew Bible, what we know of as the Old Testament. It's different. It's strange. It's got some weird things going on.
Some scholars see the Satan as a member of the council itself. [00:17:00] Other people see him as an intruder into this, uh, council. But the accuser's premise is simple: Job follows God because his life is good. That's the premise. Yeah, of course, this guy follows you because you have given him everything. Who wouldn't follow you, right?
If following God leads to good things happen, then even the most selfish among us would follow God because it would, it would always give us what we want. And this is the wager that we find in the beginning of the book. And then the Satan says, "If the worst were to happen, if Job were to lose this stuff, he would turn on you.
He wouldn't keep following you. He's only following you because of what you've given him, because of how things have worked out." And so God allows the unthinkable to happen, that God allows the Satan to go and take these things from Job First, he loses his oxen [00:18:00] and his donkeys, and the servants who watch them.
Then he loses his sheep and the servants who watch them. Then he loses his camels and the servants who watched them. Then a house falls and kills all of his sons and daughters. And what's not mentioned that we can also just think about, if there were children, spouses involved, they are dead. If there were grandchildren involved, they are dead as well.
Then in round two of this, you get to chapter two, Job loses his health as well. And the fact that this happens twice, that there are two different exchanges of this, makes it even harder to swallow. Dr. Gushee talks about this in terms of four great losses, and this is a helpful way to look at it. We tend to focus on the first, the primary loss, which is more obvious, that Job [00:19:00] loses his family and his wealth.
So he loses all that he had, all that you can see. Like that's what Job had. He had all this massive wealth. He had this big family, and he loses all of that. And we tend to, to maybe pause after that. As the book progresses, you begin to realize he's lost his social power and his status, which again, not the same kind of loss as the first, but a significant loss that any of us would feel as well.
And again, most conversations stop there at the book. But then there's two more losses if you dig a little deeper You could say that Job loses the theology that allowed him to make sense of the world. And this is a significant one. He loses his theology. This is how he made sense of how the world works, and it no longer works the way his beliefs have told him.
And [00:20:00] then he loses his place in the community because of his inability to accept their theology in light of his new reality. And this is huge. Now, those last two in particular are why this book has so much to offer those of us on a journey of deconstruction, because we know those losses. You may have felt these losses too.
You likely lost the theology that you used to have. You used to believe that God was disappointed with you and the world, and maybe you don't. Or you used to believe in eternal conscious torment, that God was gonna be allowing the torment and the burning and the suffering of people for eternity, and you, you stopped believing that.
Or you used to believe that God was only gonna save a few people, and you stopped believing that. Or you used to believe that the LGBTQ+ community was inherently sinful, [00:21:00] and you stopped believing that. Changing your mind about these kind of things will cause you to lose your place in the community of people who still believe those things, right?
And this is the experience many of us have. Many people in the deconstruction, uh, focus on the fact that they chose honesty and it cost them their place in the room, right? We're, we're aw-aware of that. So we often file this a-as a consequence of our choice, right? 'Cause we chose the truth. So we say, "Well, that's a consequence instead of a loss."
And I found that when you, when you make sense of it that way, this easily turns into anger against the institution, right? Because this is what you did to me for choosing the truth. I wanna give you permission to count it as grief Yeah, just to name it as grief [00:22:00] and allow it to be grief. That it's a loss, and you can grieve the loss, uh, of what has been taken from you.
That you made a choice and you wouldn't go back and not make the choice, but you can still grieve the reality of what that choice has led to. Now, chapter 1 ends with Job's famous lament that he has, and this is one of the things that a lot of people know the Book of Job for. This is Job 1:20. "Job stood up and he tore his robe in grief, and then he shaved his head and he fell to the ground to worship."
Verse 21, "He said, 'I came naked from my mother's womb, and I will be naked when I leave. The Lord gave me what I had, and the Lord has taken it away. Praise the name of the Lord.' In all of this, Job did not sin by blaming [00:23:00] God." Today we hear this often at a funeral or whenever some unexplained disaster hits us.
This is where I often see people go to this line. It's a way of acknowledging that things don't make sense and trying to, you know, put the responsibility to God alone and trying to find a way to be worshipful about it. In fact, if you grew up anything like I grew up, you know that there used to be a famous worship song with this phrase in it and this idea in it.
This song made Matt Redman famous. Uh, one of the lines says, "You give and take away. You give and take away. My heart will choose to say, 'Blessed be your name.'" Oof. I had sung that song hundreds of times before I ever stopped to think, "Do I believe this? Do I believe [00:24:00] in a God like this? Yeah, I don't, I don't know if I, if I do.
I don't... I have some problems with a God like this." But this is the version of Job that many readers choose to isolate. And I, I confess to you uh, just to be transparent, I'm not drawn to this version of Job. I don't relate with this version of Job. But this isn't the only version of Job that we see in the book.
This version of Job does not last very long. And so what if, instead, we looked at this version of Job as this is Job in his first stage of grief. This is Job beginning the journey of trying to wrestle with the loss, trying to wrestle with all of the ways that his world has been turned upside down. As we see at the end of chapter two, Job's wife shows [00:25:00] signs of dealing with the grief faster than he is.
That she seems to be out in front of him of, of accepting this, of, uh, being aware of what this all means and actually processing that. He's gonna get there, but not as quickly as his wife does it. Now, I want you to stop for a moment and just consider the logic of this, because this is the logic that maybe you grew up with, and maybe you sang this worship song, and maybe this line was told to you in a season of grief.
If your car is stolen, did God take it away? If a woman is raped, did God cause that to happen to her? If a little child is murdered, did God take them away? Is God the source of pain in our lives? And what kind of a view of God does this actually [00:26:00] create? Job is a character who seems to hold that good people are rewarded for their virtue.
And this is the view of the world that most of us want to be true. This is what we, we wish would be the case. It's essentially the idea of karma, that there's gonna be... You know, if you do good things, good things come back. If you do bad things, bad things come back. And I found that even Christians often reference ideas with karma, even though they're not realizing that's not within Christianity, right?
Because this is what we crave. We want the world to make sense like this. In his book, Dr. Gushee calls this a just world theology, which is a great phrase for it. He defines it like this: "The idea here is that the world is just by God's design. God demonstrates this justice by the rewards that come to the good and the harms that [00:27:00] befall the evil, whether immediately or eventually."
So the idea being we want the world to be just. It is what gives us a sense of order. It is the way that we can make sense of when things go wrong, and this often shows up in subtle ways. Like, for example, imagine someone you know gets a diagnosis, and before you've even finished processing the news of what they told you, some part of your brain is already asking questions like this: Did she smoke?
What was his diet like? How long had she been putting it off? Now, you're not asking these questions, you're not entertaining these questions because you're cruel. You're trying to build a fence. Because if there's a reason that it happened to her, then there's a reason it won't happen to you. [00:28:00] We all need to know in our soul, is the world just?
Can we explain why things happen? Now, as we continue, I wanna make things even more confusing. Need a... I'm gonna need a drink for this one.
We know that the Satan is the insider of this story, and you might want to, as you read this, make him a separate cosmic villain because that solves a problem for us if we can blame this all on the Satan. But we got bad news for you, friends. The text doesn't support this. The Satan never appears again after Job chapter 2.
There's a lot of chapters in this book, and no character in the book [00:29:00] ever offers the Satan as an explanation for anything So you're like, "What do we do with that?" Well, here's what we do with that. We realize that God seems to take ownership of what happens to Job. Now, I want you to notice the language that God uses when God is talking to the Satan.
This is Job 2:3. God says this, "And Job has maintained his integrity even though you urged me to harm him without cause." Wait, what? I thought, I thought that Satan was doing all this. But notice from God's point of view, God was the one who destroyed Job. God takes ownership of it, and this begins to really mess with us.
Now we start to go, "What on earth do we do with that?" Now, one of the things that [00:30:00] Job gets as his health is affected, he gets a miserable skin condition that would have created revulsion from other people. So not just a physical pain, but now you will be this pariah that when people see you, they will respond in disgust to what they see happening in your body.
Now, there are parallels to this idea in other parts of the Hebrew Bible. In Deuteronomy 28:35, it says, "The Lord will cover your knees and legs with incurable boils. In fact, you will be covered from head to foot." So we have other examples throughout the scriptures of God causing people to experience this.
As Dr. Gushie says, "God has destroyed Job's life with staggering comprehensiveness , [00:31:00] which is a great way to sum up the setup of this story. Now, however we land on this, the thing that we've got to remember is that all of the people around Job would have concluded this was God punishing Job. Whether or not you get there, whether or not that's the way you make sense of the story, what we have to realize is that is the narrative that everybody else is gonna pick up on.
That is the narrative that plays immediately, and it's the narrative that plays in our lives today, right? We know this narrative. I felt this as a lead pastor who resigned from a church staff and then didn't go back into that role. I felt the reaction of the community that, "Oh, God must have done something there.
You must have some kind of punishment for [00:32:00] what you did." You begin to feel the way the community treats you differently. You might be able to relate too. Maybe you stopped getting asked to pray at things Or you notice you're not on the text thread and nobody removed you, or the invitations just stopped.
And then someone who's known you for 15 years sees you and says that they're praying for you and praying you find your way back, and you understand you've been reclassified. Yeah. You're, you're no longer that person you used to be in their eyes. You have been reclassified. So here's the question: What's the sentence someone said to you that looked like caring but landed like judgment?
What's the sentence that person said to you and it sounded to be [00:33:00] caring? The, the tone was caring, the words seemed caring, but when you let it settle into your spirit, into your bones, it felt like judgment. This is what Job feels. This is the treatment that Job gets. In Job two verse eight, we see this: "Job scraped his skin with a piece of broken pottery as he sat among the ashes."
Now, an early translation of this substitutes that line with, "And he sat upon a dung heap outside of the city." You might go, "Well, that seems totally different. How are you translating it like that?" There's a traditional belief among Jews and Christians that Job had moved to the dung hill that existed outside of the perimeter of an ancient Near East town.
Because dung heaps were often covered with ashes [00:34:00] because the dung was periodically burned. Hence, Job has moved from the penthouse to the outhouse, and if that's not an accurate description of how deconstruction often feels, I don't know what is. Yeah, some of you are like, "Yeah. Yeah, that, that's what it feels like."
Yeah, I mean, I think about how it used to feel for me in the church as a lead pastor, playing my role, fitting into the center, and then how it often feels today or how it felt to lose that. Right? You, you can feel the loss. You can feel the movement of that journey. Now, what's also interesting to know is that Job doesn't arrive at an empty ash pile.
He's not sitting out on the side of the road by himself. Dung heaps were where the contagious [00:35:00] sick people were sent. It's where mourners went. It's where the outcasts lived. So Job arrives somewhere that is occupied, and he finds himself among a new community that he had never known before. We're gonna return to that idea in a few weeks.
But I wanna wrap this up by saying this, the real question that emerges in this story is easy to miss. It isn't primarily about what kind of person is Job. What, you know, what kind of character does Job have? That's how we often read this story. That's not the primary question. The question is about God's character What kind of a God is able to be incited against to harm someone who actively follows God?
Do we want to follow [00:36:00] a God like that? And how do we trust a God like this when we get our own diagnosis, when we try to make sense of our own stories, our own pain, and our own suffering? These are the questions that this book invites us to wrestle with. And so that concludes part one of Job in Exile.
We're gonna have a total of eight parts to this throughout the podcast, and if you want to talk through these, if this is stirring up questions inside of you, questions about your journey, you're realizing, "I need a new community of people to process this with," I want to invite you to our online community.
It is a safe space to, to bring your questions, to bring your doubts, to ask the things that you don't know where else to ask [00:37:00] them, to realize you are not alone. You can find the link in the show notes. We'd love to have you join us as we walk this journey together. I'll see you next Wednesday on Cabernet and Pray
