as preached August 3, 2025 at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston
It is good to be with you and to be back in the pulpit this morning. I love our congregation and the work we have been called to do together. The painful events of the past month have led to lean into one particular aspect of that work, consolation.
In the face of grief and loss, we often seek consolation. The word comes from the Latin consolor, to find solace together. “Consolation,” the philosopher Michael Igantieff has observed, “is what we do … when we share each other’s suffering or seek to bear our own. What we are searching for is how to go on … how to recover the belief that life is worth living.”
Working towards that recovery, seeking consolation, this week I returned to the Book of Job. I went to that text because in times of difficulty, I find it useful to remember that suffering is part of the human condition. Many of us try to make sense of that suffering. Job helps me in my own efforts to do so.
Scholars use the word theodicy for the branch of theology that seeks to understand why suffering exists. Theodicy attempts to answer the question, “why is there evil?”
People come to religious communities to seek answers to such questions. When things fall apart, having a place where we can ask those questions is vital. When the center cannot hold, the opportunity to have a community that can provide consolation, through struggle with the deep questions, is crucial. When the very places that can provide consolation seem under threat or unsteady, the reminder that we are situated within a larger tradition and network of care and concern can be a balm.
The Book of Job is part of that larger tradition. It belongs to the great project of making sense of loss and seeing consolation that stretches back as far as humans have had words–maybe further. The ancient book reminds us that the question of how we get through hard times is one that has been with us for as long as we have told stories. Stories have something to offer us as we search for consolation. They help us place our grief within a larger frame and create a sense of meaning amid the morass.
Grief and loss are universal and inevitable. There are the ordinary losses of our lives: illness, aging, death, the dissolution of relationships. And there are the extraordinary losses of our times: the degradation of democracy, the disappearance of civil discourse, economic instability, and the climate crisis.
Many of us in the congregation are feeling a sense of loss right now from the shock of the comments that my partner made on social media as well as my public disavowal of them. The maelstrom that accompanied all of that included numerous racist personal threats on our lives, the harassment of the congregation’s staff by white supremacists, and the need to take our social media temporarily offline. These events and actions lead many of us to seek consolation and clarity. I am unsettled. More than a few of you are still very unsettled.
I say more than a few of you are unsettled because, as many of you know, I am in the process of calling all of the members of our congregation. One thing that I am learning from this exercise is that there are varied personal interpretations of what occurred and how we should respond. Each of us has our own perspective and feelings, which are rooted in our individual histories.
This returns me to the Book of Job. The story is probably familiar to many of you. Before I recount it, I want to share that I am not casting myself as Job in the narrative. Nor am I casting anyone as his friends. Instead, I suggest simply that in times of hardship a lot of us can feel like Job and that when we attempt to make sense of suffering, some of us, especially myself, can act a bit like his friends. I turn to the biblical text because probing it has long provided lessons for consolation.
The tale the scripture concerns a man named Job who was “blameless and upright … [and] feared God and shunned evil.” He was richly blessed by the divine. He was wealthy. He had a large family. He was beloved by his community. He embodied the sort of spiritual purity to which I can only aspire. His goodness is portrayed in the text as reminder that suffering comes to everyone, no matter how well we have lived our lives.
The God that appears in the Book of Job is all powerful. But he–or she, or they, God’s gender is elusive and beyond reckoning–anyway, God in the story, is an entity that can be manipulated and flattered. A figure whose can be translated as the “adversary,” but who is regularly referred to as satan, appears on the scene. The adversary convinces God that Job should be put to the question.
So, God strips Job of everything. His wealth is destroyed by marauders. His children are slain. But his faith does not waver. Job declares, “the Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
The adversary still believes that Job can be broken. God is convinced to put him to a further test. God places a plague upon him. But covered in sores, impoverished, hungry, Job still refuses to curse the divine. His wife–his one remaining relative–implores him, “Blaspheme God and die!” Job responds, “Should we accept only good from God and no accept evil?”
This is where we begin to find wisdom about how to face grief and loss, the wisdom of consolation in the story. After Job refuses to denounce the divine, in the depths of his pain, three of his friends visit him. The text tells us that they “met together to go and console and comfort him.” When they found him, “They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights. None spoke a word to him for they saw how very great was his suffering.”
It is what happens next that reveals the true nature of consolation. Job’s friends open their mouths. They each take turns trying to convince him to accept his fate. They tell him that his faith is being tried. They suggest that his suffering is a punishment for wrongdoing. They attempt to get him to accept guilt for his misfortunes.
Job will have none of it. “I am blameless–I am distraught,” he tells them. Their words offer no consolation. Each effort to explain only makes Job feel worse. Every time they speak, he offers his reply. It is often a variant of “Why … do you offer me empty consolation?”
The words of Job’s friends seem to appear to him, to invoke William Shakespeare, as tales “told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” They do not help.
After they are done talking, once Job has finished, through his tears and pain, arguing with them, the divine returns to the scene. Speaking “out of the tempest,” the holy challenges anyone who might question the celestial will. “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?,” God asks.
The message is clear. The reasons for suffering, the reality of pain and death, are inscrutable. It is arrogant for mortals to assign our travails to God. What do we know of the deep nature of reality? What do we understand of the ground of being? How can we name that which exists beyond all naming? The task of the human is to make peace with that which cannot be understood.
Recognizing this, Job says to the voice in the tempest, “I spoke without understanding / Of things beyond me, which I did not know.” Ceasing to seek comprehension of his suffering, Job humbles himself, admits that “I recant and relent / Being but dust and ashes.” He prays and, the text recounts, “the Lord gave Job twice what he had before.”
There are many lessons about consolation to be found with Job’s story that we might apply to our lives and our communion. I want to lift up two. The first is found in the arguments of Job’s friends. The second is discovered in their silence.
The arguments of Job’s friends, each of them offers a different understanding of his suffering. They do not share a unified narrative. In one passage they blame Job. In another they suggest that his faith is being tried. They argue amongst themselves, and they argue with Job.
I have seen the same pattern emerge again and again in the wake of loss and trauma in many contexts. In our community right now, I am witnessing the same thing. For some, my sermon on July 13th was a bit like words of Job’s friends, not the consolation that you needed. For others, my words were exactly what you desired. Each of us has our own interpretation, our own understanding of the seriousness, the blame, and the healing that must occur, in the aftermath of the maelstrom. Some decipher it through a political lens, others through a theological one, and still others by relating to stories in their own family of origin.
As I have been contemplating the difficulty of this dynamic, I have been considering the distinction that the novelist Richard Powers makes between a satisfying story and a meaningful one. The distinction came to me by way of my Oxford colleague the environmental legal scholar Liz Fisher.
Satisfying stories are those, Liz writes, “with appealing narrative elements.” There is a problem. There is a hero. There is a battle. And there is “a ‘win’ at the end.” Emotionally, they often contain a moment of catharsis when all is set right. Such stories typically simplify. In order to provide a satisfying narrative, they, she notes, are often tidied by “leaving much out.”
In contrast, meaningful stories, Liz observes, “capture the full complexity of what is going on, and what is ongoing.” They “are harder to tell.” They do not rest on an understanding that life is best “understood in a relatively linear way.” Instead, meaningful stories focus on the ongoing process of living. Liz focuses her energies on legal strategies that will help manage the various processes that will lead to “transitions to low carbon economies.” This means that rather than seeking to tell satisfying stories, she encourages legal scholars to develop meaningful ones that tend to “practices, reasoning, and institutions.”
In my ministry, I have found that meaningful stories–stories that capture the complexities of life–are typically more consoling than satisfying ones. This dynamic is often most present in times of grief and difficulty. I learned early on that one of the most unhelpful comments which clergy can offer after a death are those that suggest that the loss was “the will of God.” The great preacher William Sloane Coffin reflected that such statements risked turning the divine into “a Cosmic Sadist.”
I experienced how damaging such declarations could be when I was asked to do my first memorial service. It was for two of my friends who died just as I was beginning my seminary studies.
My friends were what we call “spiritual but not religious.” But they had grown up in Christian fundamentalist households. Both were alienated from their birth families.
Several of their closest friends and I went to the funeral organized by their parents. It was structured around a satisfying story, related by the families’ minister. He assured us that our deceased friends had been good Christians. They had fought the battle against sin on Earth. They had achieved salvation. Now they were headed to their reward.
We, who were their friends, who knew and accepted them in their complete identities, could not recognize the deceased in this traditional narrative. We knew that they had rejected the satisfying story offered at their funeral. As adults, they did not identify as Christian.
Perhaps their fundamentalist families found comfort in the theological narrative offered before they were returned to the Earth. None of the rest of us did. Their real lives, their meaningful lives, had been beautiful messy affairs filled with the complexities of queer families of choice, quotidian struggles, and the daily quest for bread.
So, their friends asked me–with my handful of weeks of seminary–to conduct a second memorial service. It took place a few days later in the backyard of the apartment building where they had lived.
We planned for a short service before a scattering of their ashes. The service began. A windy late autumn Chicago night, the stars struggled through the city’s murk. We sat in silence. I said words, read a poem, and led a prayer. Then the real stories started. They formed no neat narrative arc, were bereft of any tidy resolutions. But slowly our spirits shifted. Someone shared memories of the couple’s dog, two toy poodles that they loved to groom. It was almost as if they practiced topiary on them. The animals’ haircuts contained smashed spheres, triangles, or even squares atop tails or heads. But that was not their most endearing future. Poodle fur takes vegetable based dye wonderfully. And so, on evening walks the dogs would roam along the lakeshore–active hallucinations of electric blue, neon green, and shocking pink.
Lightened by these canine stories, as we ended our service, it was time to scatter the ashes. Chicago is not called the Windy City without reason. The person charged with the task made a miscalculation. She tossed a big handful of ash into some flowers. It flew back on us, getting into our hair, coating our clothes. A moment of shock and then the laughter began.
There we were, laughing and crying, not knowing exactly where one emotion started and the other ended, covered in what someone euphemistically called “dead girl.” Baptism by ash. Have you ever had a similar experience? When in the face of the truly awful joy can also come crashing in?
Meaningful stories tend to be like that. They do not have neat narrative arcs. Instead, they contain something of the messiness of life. They often gesture to those lines by William Blake:
Joy and Woe are woven fine
A clothing for the soul divine
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
Here I return briefly to Job. I suspect that one reason why, once they opened their mouths, Job found his friends’ efforts to console him so unhelpful was that they were trying to offer him satisfying stories. There was a clear meaning to be found in his suffering that they wanted him to know. But the lesson from the voice in the whirlwind was different. I suggest that the moment Job’s friends began speaking is when they stopped being truly consoling.
This is another lesson I learned early in the ministry. Presence is more healing than words. There are many stories that we could tell about sitting at deathbeds or visiting families right after devastating losses. But the details are unnecessary. The truth is that consolation is frequently found in knowing that you do not have to go through pain alone, that there is a community, that are people, willing to be present with you as go through it.
One of my mentors, the radical lawyer and historian Staughton Lynd, used to quote his friend Jack Melancon on this point. Jack said, “Sometimes all you can do for another person is stand in the rain with them.”
In moments of grief, in times of struggle, companions who will stand in the rain matter. That is an expression of love. I have been reminded of this during my own recent challenges. I have lost track of the number of congregants, colleagues, and other friends who have made the effort to express care and concern for me and for our congregation–not to seek explanation or understanding but simply to stand in the proverbial rain.
Standing in the rain, we need not go through life’s difficulties alone. Here I leave you with two thoughts. First, I suspect that our congregation will not develop a satisfying story to fully account for what has happened. After talking with so many of you, I know that there are just too many different perspectives for us to find fully unifying thread that contains a neat conclusion. But this does not mean we cannot make meaningful stories out recent events. I know that for me there is much to be understood about myself, my relationships, our congregation, our moment in history, and the whole of the world contained within them. I anticipate that the same is true for many of you.
Second, I am reminded that healing comes primarily from being together in grief and pain. In that shared practice, in communal work of presence, I suspect that we will found what Job found, consolation. Not the consolation of satisfying stories, but the consolation of love, testified to in the larger tradition of which we and Job are a part, and found in our communion.
So, I close with a prayer.
Spirit of life and love,
flowing through each,
unnamable and incomprehensible,
inspire within each of us
the strength to be present to each other
so that in our times of difficulty,
in hours of need,
we might remember
that we are never truly alone
and gift each other consolation.
That it might be so, I invite the congregation to say Amen.
