Will you pray with me?  Lord, may the words of my lips and the meditations of
 all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our rock and our redeemer.  Amen.

At 3:59 in the afternoon on Friday, 29 September, New York Times columnist Joe Sharkey and several other passengers were relaxing aboard a brand-new corporate jet making its inaugural flight 37,000 feet above the rainforest of Brazil.  The passengers were all working on whatever things people who fly on corporate jets work on, keeping quietly to themselves, when suddenly, the air was split by a huge bang, and the plane was shaken by a ferocious jolt.  There was a long, pregnant pause, and then a fellow passenger uttered the three words Sharkey says he will never forget: “We’ve been hit.”

A look out the window showed that something had gone very wrong: the five-foot-tall upturned winglet at the end of one wing was gone.  Bolts there were beginning to loosen and the skin of the wing to peel back.  They were palpably losing speed.  It was obvious that the plane would not stay aloft for long.

After thirty terrible minutes, the plane continually losing speed, the pilots finally saw the airstrip of what they would later learn was a remote military base hidden deep in the jungle.  They landed safely.  No one was hurt; all seven people on board survived.

Several hours later, as the passengers were celebrating their survival with military rations and Brazilian beer, the only Portuguese-speaker in the group returned from a conversation with the base commander and approached the celebrating passengers with news of what it was that had hit them.  It was, he reported, the wing of another, much bigger airplane, a Boeing 737.  No one had any idea how it had happened.  All that they knew was that the other plane had then gone into a spiral out of which it could not be pulled, and crashed in the rainforest.  All 154 people on board were killed.

Over the next several days, as investigators tried to discover how the accident had happened, and as recovery crews picked through the jungle looking for bodies and black boxes, the business-jet survivors would hear over and over again that no one—no one—ever survives a midair collision.

But they had, in their tiny plane.  154 people in a much bigger, stronger plane had not.  And one is left to wonder, just where exactly is God in a situation like that? [pause]

Job is an upright man, living a life of faith and integrity.  Suddenly, there is a great jolt, and servants come running from all sides with the report: “We’ve been hit.”

The story will eventually culminate in a rather sheepish divine appearance.  God will restore Job’s fortunes to him, rebuilding his wealth, possessions, and family, though never explaining how his first set disappeared.  It is almost as if God is embarrassed at what God has done.  In the end, the story refuses to give any easy answers to the problem of why this innocent man suffers so much.  Job’s friends come to offer comfort and end up insisting that he must have done something to deserve it.  Job proclaims that he is innocent and that either God or the universe is seriously out of whack.  The narrator says it’s all whimsy and wager between God and a member of God’s divine court.  God rather stubbornly refuses to reveal any motivations at all.  So at the end of the story we started today, the book’s assertion is as unsatisfying as it is true: it says simply that there is innocent suffering in the world, and leaves it at that.  Bad things do happen to good people.  That no one ever survives a midair collision—except sometimes they do.

It is a terrible story, isn’t it, this story of Job, with God making bets and destroying a life just to test a man’s faithfulness?  It’s chilling.  And yet, and yet it is one of the most familiar and beloved stories in our Bible.  I’m willing to bet that, even if you don’t know much about the Bible at all, you know who Job is, and what happened to him.  I think we know this story so well, and we tell it so often, because there is truth in it, and the truth is this: sometimes terrible things happen to people who don’t deserve them.  You know that, don’t you?  Can’t you think of someone in your own life with a sad history and a burden that he or she doesn’t deserve?  Maybe that person is you. [pause]

But in the end, the truth of the story isn’t exhausted by the assertion that terrible things happen and we usually don’t know why.  It asserts one more thing: when Job was at his saddest, his angriest, his most destitute, God noticed, and God showed up.  God noticed Job’s pain and fear, and God showed up there on the ash pile with Job, and did not leave him alone.  God didn’t give many answers, but God did give Godself.

The psalmist asks, “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?”  Why, asks the psalmist, do you even notice us next to all the grandeur of the rest of Creation?  I think the answer is not that we as humans are especially great, or especially favored, or especially able.  I think that the reason God notices us is that we’re especially needy.  God pays attention to humans not because we’re wonderful enough or work hard enough or are perfect enough to deserve it but because, more often than not, we need tending to.

Don’t we?  Don’t we humans sometimes barge into schoolhouses and tie people up and kill them?  Don’t we sometimes fight unjust wars with no cause and little hope for anybody’s victory?  Don’t we sometimes fight just wars and still have no hope of victory?  Don’t we walk, and move, and work through the world, and don’t we screw up, and don’t we screw it up for others, all the time?  And don’t bad things happen to good people whether we mean them to or not?  Don’t we sometimes feel a terrific jolt and hear someone say, “We’ve been hit,” and don’t planes fall from the sky while others land safely?

And don’t we know with Job that, search as we might, sometimes there is no answer when we ask, “Why?”

The King James Version of Psalm 8 renders the text this way: “What is man, that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man, that thou visitest him?”  I have to say, I rather prefer that version than the New Revised Standard Version that we read today, which aks, “what are…mortals that you care for them?”.  Caring is good, to be sure, but the thing about our God is that once God notices—and God always does—God doesn’t simply care, God cares enough to visit, to show up.  What is “…the son of man, that thou visitest him?”

I think about the people on the other plane, the one that went down, and I cannot help but think of the other people in this story, the ones we don’t mention very often.  I think of the servants, quietly tending the flock when the enemy raiders fall on them.  Or of Job’s sons and daughters feasting together, and of how full of terror they must have been when the wind suddenly whipped up and the house began to come down around them.  And though the story nowhere says it, I have to believe that when that happened, when terror and fear and death came suddenly to call, God was there with them.  I believe that it is the innocent ones around whom war suddenly erupts, the vulnerable ones who crouch in terror as the storm rages around them, that God notices first.  God notices them, and God shows up, visits, to bring all the strength and hope and love that the Creator of heaven and earth can bear to her creatures as they learn the hard way that the innocent can suffer.  And so I picture God on that plane as the jolt happened.  God there as the realization of what was coming began to dawn on the people.  God, speaking love and peace to the terrified, feeding strength and hope to the despairing.  God, reminding each person, “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you, I have called you by name, you are mine.”

With all due respect to the authors of Job, I do not believe that God makes some planes to fall from the sky, and I do not believe that God makes others to land safely.  I believe the terrible, unsatisfactory, inevitable truth: that some planes stay up and some fall down, and for the most part the people on them did not deserve what they got.  But I believe this: that when the bad things and the good people meet, God notices, god feels the pain more deeply even than we, and God comes to us to share it, to remind us that God has been through it before, and that there is hope on the other side.

I believe that God loved the world enough to speak it into being, with all its mixture strange of good and ill.  I believe that God noticed the sufferings to which we were subject, and I believe that God so loved the world that God visited us in the love and person of Jesus Christ.  I believe that God notices still, and visits us in the strength and person of the Holy Spirit.  I believe that God calls us to notice the need and the suffering of the world, that God might visit it in our love and persons, in us.

I do not know why some airplanes go down in the jungle and some land safely on hidden airstrips.  Bad things happen to good people in this world.  I do not know why.  But as surely as I know anything, I know this: when the storm begins to rage, when hearts beat in terror, when hearts break with sorrow, when bodies waste with suffering, God shows up to whisper, “I love you, and I shall not leave you alone.”  And that is good news, indeed.  Amen.