Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to comm.church for more information.

So good to be here in the room with you or watching on livestream or maybe later in the week listening to the podcast. My name is Bobby, and that's just Bobby. Unless you're my niece or nephew, then I'm auntie Bobby to you. Now I say that because I finally cracked the code on how to love Zoom. Just this week, it happened.

Are you ready? Zoom is great if you are hanging out with your six year old nieces in a Saturday morning Zoom meeting just for fun. I'm telling you, it is the highlight of my week slash life. Like for many relationships, the pandemic means I don't see my nieces and my nephews as much as I'd like to. So for the last couple of Saturdays, I've started a Zoom meeting with the kids who get to call me auntie Bobby, and one of my nieces calls it exercise class with auntie Bobby, which is pretty hilarious because I hate exercising.

But we do a little yoga, and we also have a dance party. And it's truly delightful on Zoom when they show me the teeth that they've been losing. If you're here in the room, you get to see that moment where these six year olds have, like, no ability to feel self conscious about this. And I say all of that because I am always learning how to be a good friend to my nieces as they grow. And while this pandemic means I don't make that three hour drive to see them as much as I used to, we have these Zoom meetings to attend, and even that helps us to keep each other close.

There is so much room for us to learn about friendship. If you've been tracking with the series in 2022, you know that we're in a series called relearning friendship, and friendship is one of my favorite f words. Just kidding, you guys. Fun fun is the word I'm thinking about. But for real, when I left for college, I flung myself into new friendships, and I am who I am.

I even married who I married because of the friendships I devoted my life to. For those of you who don't know, I married the younger brother of three, yes, three sisters who all became my friends over the years after I finished college. And then twenty years later, I just married their younger brother. It's great. And that story is one of the most unexpected and truly precious things in my life.

So, yes, I am passionate about friendship. And just as I've been adjusting to being an auntie for nieces in this setting that is all of our lives, a pandemic, so too have we needed to think carefully, maybe even relearn some things about the friendships in all of our lives. And if you're growing, I really think your friendships, they're changing. And the last few years of our lives have shown us that. In the first week of the series, Jeremy outlined our need for friendship.

And just like in the friendship Jesus had with Lazarus, Lazarus whom Jesus raised from the dead, Friendship involves a rapport that's pretty hard to put into words. The intricate work of friendship might even stay kind of off the page when people go to read about your life. There's a privacy to friendship, knowledge that's just between you and the ones who were there. And then in the second week of the series, Scott did this really helpful work on loneliness. And even just naming the ubiquity of loneliness is a gift.

Loneliness is a part of the human condition. And Scott took us into the life and the correspondence of the apostle Paul to see not only the times when Paul is a little bit prickly, but also the affection that Paul encounters in communities that follow Christ. Inspired by Paul, one of the things that Scott invites us to do, and I love this, is to call each other to mind and to let this mental visitation flow into affectionate action and thoughtful correspondence and everyday support. Well, today, in relearning friendship, we are going back, way back to the mythical land of us where a blameless man encounters more suffering than any of us will know in our lifetime. And while you may not think of the book of Job as a text about friendship, I argue that it is.

Chapters three to 37 are poems that go back and forth and back and forth between Job and his friends. So let's follow the plot of friendship in Job and encounter wisdom that has the potential to make us better friends. Today is all about how to be a friend in hard times. We're gonna talk about sitting in silence, dialogues of distrust, a breakthrough, and making up. Before we dive in, please join me as we pray.

Loving God who offers unending friendship to us all. We take a moment to be still, enjoy the quiet. We notice our breath in and out. We slow our racing mind, and we center on something good. Maybe it's a memory from your week.

Maybe it's a need that you were able to name. Maybe it's a fun time on a Zoom call. And today, as we think about how to be a friend in hard times. We think of the times that we have been loved so well by friends. But we also know and acknowledge the times when we have not been loved really well by friends.

And we trust that in all and through all, we can meet the wisdom of Christ who shows us how to love. So spirit surround us with your care and renew us with wonder today. We pray. Amen. Now before we get to Job's friends, you maybe need a bit of a setup.

Basically, Job loses everything. His kids, dead. Sorry. This is rough. His sheep burned.

Those he enslaved are also dead. His camels stolen. His land pillaged. His body wrecked with burning sores from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet. So what's behind Job's living nightmare?

Well, the prologue tells us that God is. Now right away, you need to know that Job is designed as a folktale. It begins with the Hebrew equivalent of the phrase once upon a time. So once upon a time, there lived a man named Job who did everything right. And once upon a time, a group of angels present themselves to the Lord in an imagined celestial court.

And one of them says to the Lord, I know you think Job is good and so faithful, but he's only faithful because you bless him. I bet Job will curse you to your face if you take everything Job loves away from him. And in the wager, the adversarial angel is allowed to strip Job of all of his blessings. Now if you're like, ugh, I sure hope God doesn't play a cosmic game like that with my life. Let me assure you that this once upon a time tale is not literal.

It's made up to make a point like all great stories do in telling a tale. It actually tells the truth. Then near the end of chapter two, Job's wife says, are you kidding me about how good you are? Just look at how bad your life has become. Curse God and die.

And then Job's three friends arrive. Chapter two verses 11 to 13. When Job's three friends, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuite, and Zophar the Naamathite heard about all the troubles that had come upon him. They set out from their homes and met together by agreement to go and sympathize with him and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they could hardly recognize him.

They began to weep aloud, and they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads. Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him because they saw how great his suffering was. Now the Hebrew word for sympathize here is nude, and it's physical. It literally means to move to and fro, to nod the head, to shake.

And the second word comfort in Hebrew, nikkum, carries this definition of repentance. So even before the friends are face to face with Job, they decide we'll mourn with Job, but we'll also get to the bottom of his troubles. And then the action just ramps up from there. They see Job at a distance. They hardly recognize him.

They cry out. They tear their robes. They sprinkle dust on their heads to symbolize how low Job has been brought down. And for seven days and seven nights, no one says a word. The friends do not know what is behind Job's suffering, so they shut up and they weep.

Now allow me to interrupt this very bleak scene with some pretty cool science. The story of Job written anywhere between the seventh and the fourth centuries BCE expresses a well researched fact about our circles of friendship. We have evolved to socialize in a very predictable pattern as a species. In the nineteen nineties, researchers narrowed in on something called the sympathy group. And this group is the social circle that explains why we shape sports teams and cabinets and government and the apostles the way that we do.

A sympathy group is about 12 to 15 people. And later, research led to finding a group within the sympathy group called the support clique. And the support clique or close friends, as the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar writes, is all of the people who would unstintingly give you support and help if you needed it. And Dunbar discovered that most people have five close friends, but 150 friends in general. And to give you an idea of scale, I drew you a diagram of the circles of friendship.

It's nice. Right? It's real nice, very sciency. And so it's a bunch of concentric circles with intimate 1.5 at the middle, to close friends five, to best friends, to good friends, to just friends, 150. And that 150 may seem big to you, but those are the people that you'd feel pretty comfortable asking for a favor.

150 is about the maximum number of friendships you can actually maintain. It's just science. But let's not get too hung up on Dunbar's number, that a 150. Let's focus on the five. I'll give you a second to think about who your close five are.

Just quietly. Maybe use your hand. Who are your close five? They can include your partner, maybe other family members, your best buds. And, again, those are averages.

That's why that inner circle on the diagram is 1.5. Some people have a partner and a BFF. Some people see their partner as that sole best friend. So, okay, are you holding your close five? Great.

I'm assuming so. So we'll turn back to Job. My question for you isn't, have you ever done what Job's friends do at the end of chapter two? Stayed silent for seven days and rocked back and forth in pain with your close friends because that's that's awfully dramatic. Right?

But my question for you is this. Do you know the sitting in silence moments in the lives of your close five? Do you know their childhood wounds? Do you know their life's biggest heartbreak? Do you know what keeps them up at night with worry?

And while there's no footnote in the text that says, do this, do this for your friends. I am so drawn to this moment in Job's life with his friends. There's something sacred about bearing witness to what hurts our friends, not looking away, deciding to stay near. It's not comfortable. When the ones you love hurt, you hurt.

And there's also this daunting likelihood that we could make matters much worse, which is actually what happens next with Job. Now most of the book of Job is made up of over 30 chapters of dialogue set as poetry. Fun. Right? It's this great big back and forth between Job and his friends, and this dialogue is one of distrust, and it's pretty electric with conflict.

And the friends assert that there is this reliable way that wisdom works, And they say to Job that he is working against it. They say, if you've been so good, God would not inflict you with all this pain. They say, there must be something that you aren't telling us. They say, come clean, repent, and God will restore your life. But Job insists over and over and over and over again, no.

You're all wrong. I am innocent. I am so confident of that fact. I'll argue my innocence in a court where God sits as judge. Even God can't convict me of wrong.

Now to get to the heart of these speeches, we need to wrestle with a theological tradition that pops up in the dialogue. In biblical wisdom, Proverbs is like this introduction. Proverbs promises that if you obey Torah, you will be rewarded. But then Job comes along and points out the limits of this retributive principle. Referencing the liberation theologian, Gustavo Gutierrez, whom I love, the scholar Alyssa Nelson puts it like this.

Job is challenging the basis of an established theological understanding of the world. Job does so because to him, this way seems absurd. It's horrible. But the friends find this viewpoint even more disconcerting. Going on, Nelson writes, these different perspectives are both understandable reactions to suffering.

Integrity and experience are most important to Job, but stability, security, authority, and intellectual understanding are primary for his friends, so we sorta get both sides. Job's friends represent this conventional wisdom in the history of Israel's theology. If you obey God, God will bless you. But that's just not good enough for Job. And so with Job, the wisdom tradition clears a new path.

Yes. Proverbs, wisdom is true until it isn't. Job says until you suffer as I suffer, you don't know what you're talking about. When you are in pain, when life doesn't make sense, when what used to work for you just doesn't work anymore, the friend that you need is Job. Job will not settle for cliche, for quotes on Instagram taken out of context, for simple formulas of faith.

The truth of Job is that Job isn't actually even about suffering. I mean, sure, suffering is a major, major theme in that book, but to be human is to suffer. That's not up for debate. What's up for debate is just how honest we can be when we suffer and how much we can shoulder the honesty of others in their suffering. And honesty is not the same as the truth.

Honesty is the work of trying on language for our experiences and our feelings until we get to the truth. The point isn't that everything Job says is true. The point is that he just gets to say it. And relearning friendship is about being the kind of person your friends can speak honestly to. That you won't make their pain about you, that you won't rush in and explain their heartbreak away, that you won't insist that God works the same way God has always worked, as if you can see the ceiling on divine mystery.

Come on. Now near the end of Job, God breaks through the friend's speeches with a speech of God's own. And the divine poetry in chapters 38 to 41 portrays a God who has both the qualities of Yahweh and the qualities of an ancient near eastern deity who rules from the storm and gives birth to the sea. And this poetry is a blast, as in, like, it kinda blows your hair back. Listen to some of it from chapter 38.

Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the whirlwind. God said, who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge? Prepare to defend yourself. I will question you, and you will answer me. Where were you when I laid the Earth's foundation?

Tell me if you understand. Who marked off its dimension? Surely, you know. Who stretched a measuring line across it? Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb?

When I made the clouds its garments and wrapped it in thick darkness. That poetry, it soars. And if you're sitting here ready for God to explain why Job suffers, well, I'm sorry because this deity does not play like that. God speaks, but God does not explain. There's no reference to the drama of an adversarial angel challenging the Lord in a heavenly court.

That story just doesn't get picked up again. And there's no reason given for why Job's blamelessness was part of the test. The divine only points out the wonder of a world that is so sublime. And scholars still debate whether Job buys any of this or not. And what is clear from this divine breakthrough is that Job is not the center of the cosmos.

Job, like all creatures, will spark, burn, and then be extinguished. And all he needs to know is limit and humility, smallness, and brevity, beauty, and believe it or not, friendship. Walter Bruggemann writes, Job in an artistic way is endlessly contemporary because the inability to reduce raw life to explanation is a perennial human reality. Words fail us. Now I've walked with God for a long time now, and I don't think God will give us the answers we want, at least not all of the time.

And so we cling to each other. I mean, what else is there? For each other, we are reassurance and a soft place to land. We are compassion and makers of fine or simple meals for each other. We are a helping hand and a ready ride to the doctor.

For each other. We are the voice on the phone calling to say hi, and I got you. We are speakers of the complete sentences. I'm sorry. And can I try that again?

We are hosts to Zoom meetings where we dance around our living rooms on screens just because, yeah, it's a pandemic. For each other, we are learning to listen. We are learning to make friendship a priority. We are learning how to show up in hard times. Friendship is amazing, but friendship is also a practice, and you don't need to be perfect for that.

Now there's this really cool twist in the friendship plot of Job that I think I love the most. You would think that after three long cycles of speeches that enraged Job, God would say to him, you know, you don't need those stinky friends anymore, Job. They're not good for you. Take your toys and move to a land far away from those rotters. But that is not how this story ends.

It finishes with these friends making up. In chapters forty two seven to nine, the lord says to Eliphaz the Temanite, take seven bulls and seven rams and go to my servant Job and sacrifice a burnt offering for yourselves. My servant Job will pray for you, and I will accept his prayer and not deal with you according to your folly. You have not spoken the truth about me as my servant Job has. So Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuite, and Zophar, the Naamathite did what the lord told them, and the lord accepted Job's prayer.

After betrayal and many mistakes, god still wants these guys to be friends. And to really drive the point home, we read that it isn't until Job prays for his friends that his fortunes are restored. Now it's pretty common to hear people call friends their chosen family. And if you like that, that's great. Cool.

That's wonderful. But the language for me doesn't work. My family is my family. Some of them are really easy to get along with, others not so much. But they are the people I come from for better or worse, but my friends.

My friends don't need another name for what they are. Friend, that word alone, it means so much to me. A friend doesn't owe me anything. They could walk away any day because family lines and DNA do not bond us. Choice does.

We choose each other. In his book on the evolutionary origins of a good society, Nick Christakis explains how humans have adopted group living as a survival strategy. Figuring out how to live through conflict and with differences makes it possible for our species to thrive. Christakis says, like snails, carrying our physical environment with us on our backs, we carry our social environment of friends and groups with us wherever we go. Friends are our protective shell.

They're our home away from home. We will not survive without them. So Job and his buddies, they make up. I mean, how strange and how wonderful is that? Like, welcome to a second chance at friendship.

And if you feel a little wobbly when it comes to friendship, work on it. The people around you, they're gonna need you. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, and certainly in the years ahead. So give yourself to that. Please join me as we pray.

Loving god, thank you for our circles of friendship, for the people that we know in community, for the friendships that stay strong through so much change, for the new friendships that develop and meet needs we didn't even know we had. We take a moment just to say thank you. We hold these close relationships in our hearts. Jesus, teach us the joy and the security of friendship all over again. For those of us who hold pain or unresolved conflict in our friendships, spirit of the living god, present with us now.

Enter the places of our relational hurt or friendship betrayal, And will you heal us of all that harms us? Amen.