When Your Friends Go Silent
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Jeremy: Welcome to Cabernet and Pray, where we drink good wine and we explore the deeper story of Christianity.
And today you are a part of something monumental. This is the first weekly episode that I have posted here. And so it took us 79 episodes to get to weekly, but here we are. So it's been every other week.
This is the first time we've broken that up, and the last episode posted last Wednesday, and here we are again with another episode. I mentioned last week I'm super excited to post these more often so that these can be a regular part of your weekly rhythm. And so as you figure out what you do week to week, you can figure out the time where these make sense to you, depending on what you're doing in your schedule.
But I'm stoked to be able to release these more often as I really am pouring more of my efforts into this podcast moving forward. I also wanna invite you, like I did last week, into our online [00:01:00] community. A number of you joined last week. If you are interested in taking these ideas and going deeper and actually talking them out with people, having other people to share about, uh, to talk with, to say, "Hey, am I crazy?
This is what I feel," or, "This is what I'm sensing," or, "How about you guys?" And to learn together in community. Podcasts are great, um, but oftentimes you might end at, at the end of an episode and you're like, "What do I do with that?" Or, "I'd love some people to talk about those ideas with." And if that is you, I wanna invite you into our online community.
You can find the link in the show notes. That's a great way to dive into this in real time, and I love the interactions that I get with people there. I also do a weekly newsletter, goes out every Friday for people just in the online community, of 10 things that I'm thinking about that week And I write this every week and I love it, and it's random, and it's me, and it's things that are interesting or things that are making me laugh or things I'm preaching about, all of it into one [00:02:00] Friday recap, uh, for you.
And if that's interesting, that's all part of the online community. We do monthly video chats, we do book studies. There's lots of cool ways to connect with other people there, and so I encourage you to take advantage of that. Today, we are continuing our series that we began last week. It's called Job in Exile, and this comes from originally sitting down at a lecture at a, a conference that I was at, listening to Dr.
David Gushee share about his upcoming book called Job in Exile that's coming out in September. And he was sharing why he thinks the Book of Job is such a natural fit for people in the deconstruction space, people who are asking big questions, who have big doubts, and are trying to figure out, what do we do with this?
What do we do with our views of God that maybe aren't gonna get us where we need to go? And he was laying out a roadmap of why he thought that was so good, and I listened to it and I thought, "Man, I would love to do a [00:03:00] series on this." And so we're gonna spend eight weeks in total just on the Book of Job.
Week eight will be an interview with Dr. Gushee talking about his upcoming book, and that's gonna be phenomenal. It is deconstruction, it is big ideas. It's not verse by verse, and so I mentioned that last week. We're, we're not covering all the verses in Job. That's not what this is. Um, if you wanna get more, I recommend you, you check out Dr.
Gushee's book, but we will tackle the big ideas that you and I wrestle with today. And I'm so excited to get into the topic that we're gonna touch today. This is called When Your Friends Go Silent
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 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 [00:04:00] 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 kinda 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 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 [00:05:00] 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. By the way, drinking this Pinot Grigio at 3:00 in the afternoon is making me even more direct in my communication than I normally would be. I know why you had your guest 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 [00:06:00] nice. Cabernet and pray, yeah.
Jeremy: As we kick into this episode, I wanna let you know what I'm drinking today. I have got a 2019 Gordon Estate Merlot. This is from the Columbia Valley in Washington, and, uh, just a beautiful glass of Merlot. I'm already enjoying this thing. Not a ton of fruit notes that I'm getting, more, more kind of tertiary stuff.
I am getting some red plum, but there's also cedar and new leather that I'm getting Which I think is really fun. I like when you get a bunch of different flavors in a glass, and so I'm enjoying that. A fun fact I learned about this wine, a little story time.
Jeff Gordon was a wheat and barley farmer, and he and his wife, Vicky, and his brother, Bill, decided to plant wine grapes in Washington's Columbia Valley back in nineteen eighty. He [00:07:00] released his first wine in nineteen eighty-five. It was some Chardonnay. And the winery is still family-owned and produces its wine exclusively from estate-grown fruit.
So pretty cool that they have maintained that over the different years. Here's the fun story. Before he ever put a vine into the ground, he brought in a guy named Walter Clore. He was a researcher at Washington State Legislature, and he was recognized as being the father of Washington wine. And he brought in, Walter Clore to walk the land, figure out, "Hey, this is where we think we're gonna put these vineyards.
What do you think?" Clore grew up during Prohibition in a teetotaling Methodist family, so that was his background, and then he spent his career championing the belief that wine grapes could grow in the volcanic soils of Eastern Washington, and that's where he made his claim to fame.
There was a winery that later named a prestige Bordeaux blend in his honor in France. [00:08:00] But I love that a teetotaler from a dry Methodist home became the father of a wine industry. And it just seems appropriate that we're all on a journey and I suspect his parents, especially, but probably even Walter, would not have guessed where his journey would have taken him into the wine world.
And that may be your story today. You're like, "Yeah, I never thought I'd be here." And so I wanna invite you today to pour a glass with me. The oldest thing that the church does is share a cup together, and somewhere along the way, we turn that into a checkpoint. But this is a table without a fence around it, and so I invite you to bring your questions and bring your doubts because you are welcome here.
Cheers.
Well, today we are going to cover Job chapter 2 verses 11 [00:09:00] through 13. That's right. If you're doing the math in your head, that is three verses only. You're thinking, "There's no way Jeremy's gonna cover this book if he's doing it this way." I said that we weren't going verse by verse, and I mean it. And so today is only gonna be three verses.
But in case you feel like I'm just gonna rob the Book of Job, episode four is gonna cover more than 20 chapters. So it's gonna balance out. Don't worry about it. But this book has themes, it has sections that are grouped together and sections that are very similar, so that's how I am going to tackle this.
Each week of this series, I'm unpacking a lot of the ideas in Dr. Gushee's book, uh, this book, Job in Exile. And one of the questions he raises that I, I love as the question of the series is, what is the Book of Job attempting to teach us? So we're not just studying it to be Bible scholars. We're not just studying it for fun.
We're not studying it to dunk on other people with [00:10:00] our knowledge of the Bible. We're trying to figure out, what's the point? What are we supposed to learn from a book like this? And Job is one of those books that you can try to explain it, you can try to offer one explanation, one interpretation, and it's just not gonna play well with that.
It's going to bristle at that. And that's why I love the Book of Job. And so we're just letting it breathe. We're letting it lead us wherever we need to go. And so today we're gonna read all three chapters or all three verses at once in the chapter. And so we'll, we'll read these, and then I'll share a few thoughts.
Job chapter 2 verse 11: When three of Job's friends heard of the tragedy that he had suffered, they got together and traveled from their homes to comfort and console him. Now, in case you got into this podcast and you have no idea what we're talking about, pause it here, go back, s- episode 78, Job part one.
I get into all the things that he lost. That will help this make sense. I'm not gonna reiterate [00:11:00] that here. Job has lost almost everything you can imagine. Now we have his friends coming. Their names were Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. When they saw Job from a distance, they scarcely recognized him.
Wailing loudly, they tore their robes, and they threw dust into the air over their heads to show their grief. Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and nights. No one said a word to Job, for they saw that his suffering was too great for words Powerful image there that we get. Now, due to the details of the names and the locations here, this suggests that this might be an international gathering of friends.
It's almost like this is a formal delegation being sent on [00:12:00] behalf of surrounding areas to go and check in on Job. There are even parallels here to the three wise men, uh, from the East in the, the Christmas story. And so if maybe you're thinking of that, there are some, some parallel themes here or, or nuances to that.
Now, when they arrive, it says that they barely recognize Job. I think we all know that feeling when you haven't seen a friend in a while and they don't look the same . You know what I'm talking about? Where you're like, "Oh, did you, did you do something to your hair?" You know? It's like, wh- how-- what happened, and how do I say it tactfully and like, you don't look the same the way that you used to look.
There are physical signs that we can see in someone that life has been hard on them, and we just know this intuitively. We can recognize when you can visibly see someone has gone through something. It could be as simple as [00:13:00] bloodshot eyes, and maybe they've been crying, or bags under their eyes. Maybe they haven't slept in a while.
Or maybe you see that person who you find out looks many years older than their actual age, and you realize that, yeah, life has been hard on them, and their body shows that. They, they look older than they actually are. Here we find that they show up and Job doesn't look the same. He's not wearing his normal robe.
He has no hair. He's got no beard, no servants, no animals, no children, and he's got a devastating skin condition on his body. So this friend that they knew looks nothing like that version. They show up and they're-- they know it's Job 'cause they've heard about it and he fits the mark, but probably didn't recognize him at all.
Probably didn't look at all like the Job that they knew. Now, we're gonna take strong [00:14:00] issue with these friends throughout the rest of the book. So don't, don't worry, we're, we're gonna get into them. But for now, I want to acknowledge, I think these are real friends, okay? I think we've gotta give them their moment here.
It's only a moment. It's only three verses. We're gonna give them a moment, and then the rest of the book we'll, we'll dunk on them. But they are showing genuine concern for their friend here. But they're also friends within the context of a community that has a shared view of God and a shared view of the world, right?
So they exist together within this shared view. Dr. Gushee says that, "Friendships embedded within communities in which shared theological belief is viewed as essential often turn out to be conditional This is why people often lose their community when they change what they [00:15:00] believe. Because if shared beliefs brought you together, then different beliefs will push you apart.
And so we have to understand that this is this, this first meeting of this, right? So they're going to realize as soon as they start talking that they have different views of what's going on. But for right now, they, they are connected to the previous beliefs that they all had. That's what got them here.
And so in the journey of changing your beliefs about something, you're going to be surrounded by people who used to believe what you believed, and that's who's visiting Job. It's the people who have done life with him. They have shared their beliefs about how the world works and about how God works. In Job two, eleven and thirteen is about friends who showed up, and I wanna honor this.
I wanna honor what we see here in the friendship of this. I want to point out that Job's friends sit with him on the ash heap. [00:16:00] Now, last week I mentioned that there's a tradition in, in understanding the Book of Job that, that this ash heap was likely a dung heap, that the ashes would have indicated this is where they burnt dung and trash on the outskirts of town, just outside of the town.
It's likely where Job is sitting. Dung heaps attracted a different group of people. It's where the contagious sick were sent, where the mourners went. It's where the outcasts live. And so Job's esteemed friends come to spend a week with him, but they're not visiting Job for a bit during the day and then going back to their hotel at night.
They are sitting with him on the ash heap. They're meeting him where he is as he agonizes over his condition. And what we see here, this is a silence [00:17:00] through presence, right? They're, they're there. They're offering a gift even though they're not saying anything. They are sitting with him, and I wanna just highlight this 'cause this is something significant for us.
This is a powerful gesture when someone is going through pain We saw previously in, in last week's episode that Job was, was starting out attributing all of this to God. You know, he had no problem praising God and working through his original ideas of, of what was going on. In Job one twenty-one, uh, 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." Right? So even after he loses it, hey, praise God. This is all fine. In Job two ten, when his wife seems to be showing that she's already ahead of him in grieving and processing [00:18:00] reality, he kind of rebukes her and he says, uh, verse, uh, ten, "But Job replied, 'You talk like a foolish woman.
Should we accept only good things from the hand of God and never anything bad?'" And it says, "So in all of this, Job said nothing wrong." And this is the picture that a lot of people really like. This is the version of Job a lot of people really like. By the time his friends show up in the verses we're looking at today, Job has gone silent.
This is why I find it a bit funny when Christians act like Job's lament that we saw earlier, that sums up Job's posture, that sums up Job's reaction to all of this. You just have to make it to chapter three and you see that that, that unravels quickly. Like, that does not last long. And yet, for a lot of Christians, that's the part we quote of the Book of Job because that's the part that we go, "Yeah, look, when bad things happen, you just praise God and [00:19:00] it's all good and it's all fine and look at Job."
And yet, if we look at Job, we see it didn't last long. Job gets to, to chapter... at the end of chapter two, and he's already silent now. And then in chapter three, he's going to start sharing a very different perspective. But as we sit in this space here, I want you to notice, even with his friends arriving, he is not in a hurry to move on, right?
And there is a, a Jewish tradition that prescribes silence for people mourning with someone, that on arrival, they would not speak until the bereaved person spoke first. And it seems that these friends are honoring that Jewish tradition. So because Job's not talking, they don't talk. They sit in silence for a week.
Dr. Gushee writes, "Sometimes silence is not [00:20:00] just the best, but the only proper response." And it's a powerful response that we can offer people. So I wanna ask you today as we consider the life of Job, where are you rushing to explain away the pain in your life? Where are you rushing to resolve the tension in your journey?
Do you feel a need to move on already? Or maybe has, has someone said that phrase to you, like, "You're still on this? You're still dealing with this? Just get over it." Perhaps it's other people who are trying to rush you. "Hey, you should be fine by now. You're still talking about that thing? You should be over that.
Why, why are you dwelling on that? Why do you keep thinking about that? Why do you keep going back to that?" Or maybe there's a situation that's causing you to feel rushed, like, "Hey, I've gotta resolve this. I'm out of time. I've, I've gotta move forward." What if you [00:21:00] gave yourself permission to let it be unresolved?
Yeah. What if that thing that you're going through right now, you just gave yourself permission? You said, "I'm gonna let this be unresolved. I'm not gonna rush this. I'm not gonna move beyond this. I'm not going to, to try to forget this. I'm just gonna sit in it. I'm gonna let it be unresolved." And I have found that if you need to slow down, wine helps
One of the things I love about wine is that you don't drink it quickly. You drink it slowly. Wine invites you to slow down. It's why I love the idea of doing a podcast around wine. It slows down the conversation and makes you more reflective. In fact, I was thinking about something that Gisela Kreglinger has written.
She says, "Savoring wine at its best is like praying. It takes effort and a willingness [00:22:00] to engage in something that is far more complex than what we are used to when we are simply consuming foods." Yeah, part of the reason we love wine is because it invites you to slow down and reflect, and I love that she compares it to prayer, because prayer is another thing that slows you down.
Like when you're going through something, praying doesn't seem to fix it, doesn't seem to solve it. Praying is just that, that act of sitting in it, having a conversation with God about it, inviting God into that space. It's slow, and yet so often we wanna rush it. We wanna finish the drink, finish the, the issue, resolve the tension.
I think that part of the reason why we often struggle to heal from the pain in our life is that we don't give ourselves space to grieve it, space to feel it, to fully let it teach us whatever we need to learn. We rush in to the next thing, or we [00:23:00] try to replace whatever that thing is that we felt we lost, and so we, we try to find something to take its place.
This is the idea of the rebound, right? We, we know this. That person breaks up with you, so you rush into a new relationship 'cause you don't like feeling single, and that wasn't good, so you, you move on. Or your job ends abruptly, and you find another one as fast as you can because you don't wanna be the person that doesn't have that job, and you, you just rushed right back in to whatever it is, even if it's not a good fit.
Or a pet dies, and suddenly there's a new one in the house. Maybe by the time the kids get home from school, right? There's already another pet to replace that pet. Or maybe you leave a church, and already by the next weekend you've found another one because you didn't like that feeling. Now, the problem in all of these is not the speed.
I don't think there's a [00:24:00] right speed in which to deal with this stuff. I would suggest that an unhealthy rebound is when the point of the next thing is to avoid feeling the last thing Yeah. When you are rushing to the next thing so that you don't have to feel the last thing anymore. That's an unhealthy way of rebounding from pain in our life.
And we're seeing something better here displayed in the Book of Job. So I want you to use your imagination for a moment. I want you to picture Job sitting silently on the dung heap outside of town. Just imagine him sitting there. With him are the sick, the mourners, the social outcasts. It smells terrible.
It feels terrible. There is no comfort or [00:25:00] reassurance to be found here Now imagine his friends arrive and they sit with him. No one says anything for seven days in a row. This is the power of the silence of presence, being with someone in their misery. You know, there's, there's that expression, "Misery loves company," and the way that is said is, is very different, that we like to make other people miserable when we feel miserable.
But that expression is actually true literally because misery does love company, and Job is sitting in misery, and his friends meet him there. They give him company in the midst of his misery. That's the silence of presence. [00:26:00] But there's also a second type of silence. When I resigned as a lead pastor, the way it worked in my situation is it created a rift between me and the board of elders in my church, and we had two competing narratives of what was going on in the church.
And so I, you know, was, was telling people my version of it. They were telling people their version, and they didn't line up. And so people had to realize, like, these two versions don't go together. Something is off. And what that did is it made it very challenging for people inside of our church to reconcile.
Because you have two competing narratives, they don't go together, they don't sound the same. Both can't be true at a face value, and so people had to decide how to navigate that. And what we realized in hindsight, and I, I wasn't prepared for this, was that the people who wanted to stay had an almost impossible [00:27:00] task of reconciling that in their support of me.
Because for them to stay, they had to make sense of the narrative that the, the eldership was saying. That was the only way they could stay in that place. But then to do that meant to discredit my narrative. And I talked to a number of people who were like, "Hey, we, we hear you, and we feel you, and we're so wanting to support you, but we don't know how to do that."
And it became this really challenging situation that a lot of people found themselves in. And what ended up happening was a number of people who actually supported us said nothing to us because they didn't know how to navigate that space. They didn't know how to navigate that situation. And this is a different kind of silence.
This is silence through absence This is the experience of a lot of people who deconstruct what they believe. [00:28:00] They suddenly sense a very loud absence from the community, from the people who they used to hear from all the time, they used to see all the time. Now they don't, and that omission gets loud. And so in your story, as you think about it, maybe no one has said something hurtful to you.
Maybe they just haven't said anything to you, and you're wondering why that hurts so much. You're wondering why that has affected you the way it has. That silence can be loud. I regularly talk to people who tell me about the pain that they felt when they took a break from their church community and no one reached out to them.
No one seemed to notice, no one seemed to care. And a lot of times these were people in volunteer roles or leadership roles, very involved, and they just couldn't make sense of it. They step back for a moment thinking, "Hey, someone will reach out and [00:29:00] we get to talk through this." And in a lot of these situations, no one reaches out.
No one notices. No one talks to them. And if they do notice, they don't say anything. It's the silence of absence, and it's incredibly hurtful. But I could also tell you in that season, I have a friend named Mike, and Mike called me up one day and he said, "Hey, what are you doing tonight?" And I said, "Nothing.
I'm unemployed. I, I've got nothing going on. My life, you know, is falling apart." And he said, "Cool. I'm gonna be in town. Uh, can I stop by tonight?" And I was like, "Yeah, that'd be amazing." Mike lived in a different state. And so Mike shows up and shows up on my front door. I'm like, "Dude, this is, this is great to see you."
And we just start talking. And I desperately needed a friend because I didn't have people in my community reaching out to me and supporting me. It was silent. So for a friend who was [00:30:00] out of state to be there was incredibly significant. And I remember at some point that evening asking Mike like, "What are you in town for?
Like, what's going on?" And he said, "I'm in town for this." And it dawned on me that my friend
My friend had flown out just to be with me, just to sit with me in my pain. And Mike spent the night, and he flew back home the next day. I'll never forget the power of someone sitting with me in the midst of my own journey, in the midst of my own pain. Mike got on a plane, and he sat with me. He didn't bring answers.
He didn't resolve my situation. He didn't fix anything. He brought presence, his presence. And that's the same silence that Job's friends offered him, the silence [00:31:00] of presence, of being there. Now, I want you to name your own Mike. I want you to think about who has done this for you because this story of Job honors the friends who showed up.
And I think as we work on healing from the pain in our own stories, that we should too. And so I wanna encourage you to think through who has been there for you, who has sat with you in your own season of grief, and what would it look like this week to thank them for that? This is out of the blue. What would it look like to say, "Hey, I just want you to know that I remember you being there for me.
I remember you sitting with me, and it meant the world to me." In case you're wondering, I'm, I'm practicing what I'm preaching here. I, I texted Mike, uh, earlier this week as I was writing this, and I let him know, "Hey, man, all these years later, I will never, ever [00:32:00] forget that. That spoke volumes to me, the, the way that you were silent with me."
See, there are two silences, and the question-- question for each of us is which one have we been handed as we go through our own journey? And the question is also which one will we hand to the people around us who are in pain, to the others in their own journey of, of suffering and pain? And so I also want you to think about is there someone in your life right now who is sitting in their own dung heap, who is going through their own season of incredible pain?
What would it look like for you to meet them in that? What would it look like for you to repay that kindness? Not to resolve it, not to solve it, not to fix anything, to go be with them, to be present, not with a fix or an explanation or a [00:33:00] theology to make sense of it. Dr. Gushee writes that, "Sometimes the best ministry is the ministry of quiet presence."
So that concludes part two of our series of Job. We will have eight total weeks through our Job in Exile series on the podcast. You've got a couple assignments after this episode, to thank someone who is there for you, and to look around you, and to see if there's someone who needs you to be with them right now as you meet them in silence.
What kind of silence will we offer to the people around us? If you want to work through these ideas, if you want others to be with you, and you want to figure this out in real time, and you don't want to do this alone, I invite you to check out the online community. This is the space to do this. This is the space to practice these kinds of ideas and encourage one [00:34:00] another as we go through the work of healing the pain of our journeys and the pain of trying to make sense of God when things do not seem to make sense.
I'll see you next Wednesday on Cabernet and Pray.
