Let us pray.
God of the whirlwind, who spoke to Job when everything felt lost,
may your spirit guide us in this time and help us discern wisdom for our world today.
Amen.
So a brief recap of Job. Job was faithful, the best of the best,
the servant that was the servant of the Most High God that was definitely getting...
straight A's on his report card when it comes to his faith life. And so then the enemy is bartering
with Job, well, bartering with God about how he only loves you because he's got all these nice
things. And so the things slowly get torn out of his life, and the text makes it so that God's
allowing it to happen.
Job, early on, writes a poem about how much he wants to die as he sits in the depths of his grief.
which a lot of us have like felt that at some point, that a heavy enough loss that like what's the
point of tomorrow when today already kind of sucks.
Job's friends hang out and they're quiet for a week and they don't stay quiet long enough. They say
all the things that are not helpful when you're grieving.
And then towards the end is interesting. So when Job has finally had enough With all of his
suffering, what he actually realizes is that he's not the only good person who suffered.
And so God starts to speak because Job is demanding God to account for this injustice.
Why must the good suffer? And why is God's justice delayed?
And so our text today is parts of God's response to Job at the end of the book.
God starts speaking in the beginning of the 38th chapter, and for most of the rest of the book,
from the storm, or a lot of translations say a whirlwind.
If you take the time to read all of God's response, which takes a while, we jumped through parts of
chapter 40 to just make it so we can actually get home at some point today, and so that I can make
it back to camp later today too.
God's response is saturated with how God delights in and intimately knows all of creation.
And that's what I want to focus on for the rest of our time today.
So St. Augustine, he talked about how God wrote two books.
The first book was the book of nature, and the second book was the book of scripture.
And so the idea that we can learn just as much from the book of nature as we can learn from the
Bible is a very, very old idea that somehow we have lost touch with in our traditions.
It's actually interesting because in parts of chapter 40,
in God's response to Job demanding that God's justice be poured out,
God points out that He can't even stop the evil and sarcastically applauds Job if he can figure out
a way to do it,
which directly contradicts the opening story in the beginning of Job,
where God is portrayed as allowing it.
And there's an idea that there's some sort of amount of free will that makes it so that God can't
step in. And so... Reading a bit from 40, again,
verses 7 through 8 and 11 through 14. Prepare yourself like a man.
Some translations say, gird your loins. Prepare yourself like a man.
I will interrogate you and you will respond to me. Would you question my justice? Deem me guilty so
you can be innocent?
So
in response to God, we have all of this delights in creation,
and also we have... A God who cannot control creation.
A God that delights in creation so much that allows creation to do the things that it was created
to do, but also to do the things that it's not created to do.
Cells are created to bring life, and new life, and regenerate.
And then sometimes they don't do what they're supposed to do, and they end up destroying life,
and we call them cancer.
In the same sense that we expect everyone to be able to live a long and abundant life,
especially if they're good, and yet somehow other people's actions end up so that many people die.
So in a way... God's response in Job continues this tradition of wisdom,
of using poetry and storytelling to enter into the messiness of life. What does it mean to worship
a God who created all things, who is in control but not controlling?
And so I have three observations that God's response invites us to do.
First, to love without
ever abandoning it. to cherish all of the good things that we possibly can.
This sounds like the wisdom that comes out of Ecclesiastes, but the reality is the level of detail
in God's response can only exist if we're noticing and loving the things that are around us,
which requires us to focus on things that aren't just inside of us. It also invites us to refuse to
participate in systems which seek to control or dominate nature. If we know that nature is
something that God delights in creating and delights in seeing how it flourishes, we see that any
sort of system that is willing to destroy large swath of God's creation in order to have capital
gain and riches being hoarded up is inconsistent with the way that God has designed creation.
And we might look at all of that and have the same response as Job going, God, why are you allowing
it to happen? To which God says, what do you mean?
If you can figure out how to stop it, awesome, I applaud you. And the reality is we,
as a community, get to chip away at all the systems that build ways of destroying life so that we
can find ways of co-creating life abundant with God and the Holy Spirit.
And lastly, God's response invites us to seek ways to know nature intimately,
to know the things that bring God joy.
Just like how woman wisdom delighted in creation when she was there from the very beginning.
We're invited to notice aspects of creation, to stop and smell the lilac bush,
to notice when the crepe myrtle is blooming and when it's not.
Last month, when we were doing our book discussion on We Deserve Monuments, we were talking about
what characters resonate, and Paula noticed that tree and river...
were very prominent characters in the book. At a river that allowed them to have a place to cast
their dreams and allow them to drift, and a tree where they could make their wishes and be rooted
in a place, were a significant part of the story structure for these teenagers in the story.
I think many of us grew up in a very different relationship to nature, hanging out with the trees,
hanging out outside a lot more before our bodies and the amount of heat outside said that we can't
quite do it as much.
And so ways that we can just rekindle that intimacy that God has with nature,
that we can have with nature too, in a way of communing with God. is simply just going outside and
spending like 10 minutes outside a week. Maybe there's a tree or a bush or a flower bed nearby.
Who knows what you'll find. Last night after we got out from dinner, we found that someone had
decided that in the middle of a patch of concrete was the best place to grow a bunch of squash.
So we just stopped and noticed the large swath of squash plants in the middle of this shopping
center.
So in order to know creation, it's just like knowing anyone else. We have to spend time with it.
We have to sit. And if you've ever sat down in a conversation with a friend who does all the
talking, you don't feel known. So that means when we're spending time with nature,
it's not just talking at things, which feels good, but also just listening,
noticing, wondering.
John Young wrote a book, What the Robin Knows. because he took the time to really pay attention to
all of the different calls of birds and how they communicate in so many different ways.
And he looked at all of the research. And even then, because of the fact that birds have regional
dialects, the best way for him to know what the birds in his area were saying is to practice what
he calls a sit spot. Basically finding a spot where he can just go sit out.
At like a park or somewhere in nature on a trail. And he says to do it for at least 45 minutes.
Because when you get there, the first 30 minutes is everyone else around you deciding that you're
safe or not. And so once you get past the 30 minutes, then the birds will change their tone because
you're no longer a threat. And you'll be able to actually hear what the birds have to say. And
you'll notice all kinds of things.
a close enough relationship with the songs of the birds in his area, which there's research that
says that just like 30 minutes in nature in birdsong can help re-regulate your system and heal a
large amount of your body. It's almost as if we were designed to be outside, but we forgot how to
do it. So he's out with the birds in nature, and he noticed that one of them was doing the alarm
for if a coyote was nearby. And then he looked around, And sure enough,
there was a coyote. That the birds noticed way before he even could.
And just taking the time to know nature. This is the level of relationship that we see in God's
response to Job that just requires us to hang out outside a little bit more.
To leave the phone behind or just have it... silenced while we're sitting there so that we can just
be with God in God's creation.
And so while Job does give us so much about what not to say in grief and what does it mean to enter
into the pits of grief, it also wrestles with the question of what does it mean to encounter God in
God's creation? This is the beauty of all of the wisdom literature that we've been talking about
over the past five weeks. This was actually fun because when we were first voting on series,
everything that came before it in the series was the readings that were picked out already.
And so I added this one because we usually try to avoid Job and we seem to only talk about Job when
it comes to suffering. But wisdom literature gives us so much more than just simple answers.
It enters into the mess of life so that we can then learn the tools of how do we discern our way of
being. in the world around us. So let us pray.
God, you are the one who delights in the creation of all things, who longs for the restoration of
everything so that your love can make the world whole.
May your spirit guide us as we leave this place to notice your presence in all that you have
created.
to notice the way that your Spirit is whispering to us in the lives of so many people and so many
creatures, so we can learn to be your people, that work alongside you for the ongoing redemption of
the world,
and so that your Spirit can equip us to love boldly, serve joyfully,
and lead courageously.