How should we preach on Job on a Sunday morning? Although many of us love it, we love it because we spent weeks or months struggling with the text, perhaps with the help of an original language and/or academic commentaries. But to condense one of its wisdoms into a single thing, even for a short passage, is daunting. I'm not sure I know how to do it.

But as we hear the climax of Job this Sunday, with the terrible/wonderful ambiguity about being dust and ashes (the Hebrew makes it very ambiguous to what extent Job is recanting his protests, a beautiful ambiguity utterly lost in English), it seems worthy to try. Someone has got to convince us all to spend more time studying Job, and if we can't provide an advertisement on Sunday morning, no one will even know it's there. We'll all be stuck in Luke's gospel forever, with all its Samaritans and prodigals, only because it seems less complicated.

If I were able to offer a single window into Job at its climax, I would suggest this: human experience is inescapably ambiguous. And: God finds this to be no barrier to relationship with us.

By ambiguity, I mean that our experiences can be understood, or read, in different ways. If a word is ambiguous, this means that I could understand it in different ways with different meanings. When my dog injures her back, I can understand that experience in a number of different ways: I can believe it was an accident of the universe, a result of her pride, a result of my carelessness, a work of divine providence, a karmic response, or I can be entirely undecided about it. The ambiguity of our experience means that NOT that we can't decide among possible readings of the world, but that we are always aware of other readings and the possibility that they, rather than our own reading, are more truthful.

Although the ambiguity of human experience is part of all of our lives, it is not easily preach-able. After all, who wants to point to someone in a hospital bed: "well, maybe God is with you when you suffer, or maybe not--you could understand the situation either way." We hate to point that out, even if that's the feeling of the one in the bed.

But this is the heart of Job, the experience of a suffering human who demands to know why he must suffer. And God's reply is a difficult one: God seems to reply that the answer is outside Job's understanding. The theological move offered here is so unusual it's almost difficult to understand the full breadth of it: suffering is ascribed not to Providence in a world of sin, not as part of a Process of becoming, not as a result of chaos in a free will world. God replies that Job can't understand the answer by bringing up all kinds of things Job isn't prepared to understand, comprehend, know, or even apprehend. The whole book of Job is, to be anachronistic for a moment, like a long reflection on the idea that Paul mentions when he talks about 'seeing through a glass darkly,' where things appear dim, unknown, perhaps this or perhaps that.

The question of suffering in the book of Job remains unanswered because humans can't understand it. If I were to wax philosophical a moment, suffering is "pain we feel at our own limitation." If suffering stems in part from our human limitation, this limitation again asserts itself in seeking an answer--our understanding simply isn't big enough, and it can't even be made big enough. Jesus, the perfect human, feels pain at his own limitation on the cross and thus suffers. Not even Jesus in his humanity understood why the universe is constructed precisely this way--put crudely, his brain was not big enough. This is perhaps a radical idea for us, because we humans these days seem to think that nothing is ultimately beyond our understanding, given enough time and experimentation. But, says the book of Job, that's just wrong. Our limitations are precisely that: limitations.

And then, God turns right around and affirms Job's decision to push the question. Apparently, God doesn't care that humans try to reach beyond themselves, so long as it's toward relationship with God. Even if they reach out in anger, in frustration, in a lawsuit (which is the language both Job and God use), God doesn't seem to mind. He answers Job's complaint, and in the cryptic end to the story, Job finds healing. Not, we might add, restored--his children are still dead, and he will likely never forget these years of pain. But nonetheless, he finds healing, a way to move forward, a restored relationship with God. Indeed, Job has developed a relationship with God precisely by recognizing and accepting that he does not understand God.

I am reminded of a graduation speech at a college offered by Tom Brokaw some years ago, a snippet of which I caught while pausing in a truck stop. He said, and I quote from memory, "I bring you bad news today. Real life is not like college. Real life is not like high school. In fact, real life is like junior high." Why junior high? Because it's awkward, certainly. But to build on Brokaw's point in a theological manner: in junior high, things are ambiguous. Are we adults, or children? Are we popular, or unpopular, or beyond popularity? Are we sexual, or not? The answer is that it depends, that it is ambiguous.

And real life is like junior high. Real life with God is ambiguous, not one string of certainties and good feelings. Real life with God is awkward, halting. In real life with God, like in junior high, we both want to pretend we understand everything, and in fact have many things that are simply beyond our understanding.

So: good old, difficult Job. Maybe too true for us, some days.