First Presbyterian Church
September 29, 2024, Pentecost 22B
Job 38:1-11, 34-41; Romans 8:18-25
(note: above link contains all of Job 38-39)
Know Your Place (in Creation)
During the month of September, and sometimes into part of October, some Protestant churches observe what is called a "creation season," a period of Sundays in which scripture readings, liturgy, and sermons are chosen to guide Christians towards greater reflection on and understanding of creation as a work and gift of God, and the place we humans occupy as a part of God's creation. This year, your pastor was not quite on top of things to plan for a "creation season", but it seemed worthwhile to put forth at least one Sunday for worship and reflection on this theological reality.
The thing about making plans for such a Sunday is that one can't know what'a going to happen between the time you make such a plan and that Sunday. In this case, nature offered forth one of its most brutal disasters in recent years in the form of Hurricane Helene, a Category 4 storm at landfall which brought destruction not only to expected places like the Gulf coast of Florida, but also into Georgia and the Carolinas. One doesn't expect a hurricane to trigger incredibly destructive flooding in the Appalachian Mountains region of North Carolina, but that precise thing is ongoing right now. Places suffering serious damage include the Montreat Conference Center, near Black Mountain, a site near and dear to the hearts of many, many Presbyterians.
To speak of creation and its theological implications in our time means not only acknowledging its sometimes-destructive power, but also acknowledging how human misuse and abuse have contributed to that destructive power. This isn't fun. There are those who refuse to acknowledge such a thing, no matter how clearly climate science speaks on the subject. We dare not come before the God of Creation, or the Christ we worship, with anything less than honesty; to do anything less is a profanation of the Lord's name.
Interestingly, one place in scripture in which creation is described and exalted, not only in its sweetness and light but also in its extremes and potential for harm, is in a book of the Old Testament which few people would think of: the book that tells the story of a righteous man who suffers mightily, betrayed by friends who accuse him of unrighteousness, but eventually demanding an audience of God to plead his innocence. We turn to the book of Job.
Specifically we turn to the thirty-eighth chapter of that book, in which Job finally gets his wish: God appears, “out of the whirlwind” and challenges Job to speak. Except, no, God doesn’t really challenge Job to speak. To be blunt about it, God challenges Job to shut up and listen.
Job had imagined something like what we would call a courtroom situation, in which Job would argue his case and convince God that his suffering was not right and not deserved. Instead, God tells Job to get suited up and takes him on what amounts to a field trip through creation, for most of chapters 38-41. Even when Job tries to back down in the early verses of chapter 40, God is having none of it. Somehow, God’s answer to Job’s demands for justification is a cosmic nature hike.
God first interjects Godself into the ongoing debate with harsh words: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” In truth that could be directed at any of those involved in the conversation thus far, but Job is the one out front, and Job is the one who is going to take the heat here.
After challenging Job to put on his big-boy pants and get ready to be cross-examined, God takes off. In the course of chapters 38 and 39 we are reminded in short order that Job has been neither present for nor involved in:
§ Measuring and laying the foundations of the earth, sinking the base of the foundation and laying its cornerstone, to the accompaniment of rejoicing from the stars and heavenly beings;
§ Sealing up the raging rush of the seas “when it burst out from the womb” (that's some serious feminine imagery applied to a part of creation!), enrobing it in could and mist and fog, and setting its boundaries;
§ Ordering the dawn and the morning;
§ Plunging down into the depths of the sea and knowing its mysteries;
§ Knowing where light itself lives, where the snow and hail gather to descend upon the earth, carving out the channel for the rain and a path for the thunderbolt;
§ Ordering the stars in their courses and constellations;
§ Calling forth the rain and lightning;
§ Hunting down the prey by which the lion might feed its cubs;
§ In chapter 39, knowing the ways of the beasts of the wild, hooved animals and birds and the whole lot.
Like the Prodigal Son from the gospel of John, Job finds he cannot possibly contend with God and attempts to back down at the beginning of chapter 40. God’s not done, though. picking up again in chapters 40 and 41 with a downright rhapsodic celebration of two particular beasts, Behemoth and Leviathan. While some commentators try to equate them to native animals of the nearby Nile delta – the hippopotamus and the crocodile – they frankly sound more like creatures that should be featured in the Fantastic Beasts movies than anything we see walking around on earth. (It is after this that Job’s final reckoning with God takes place, but that’s the end of the book.)
It is wild and wonderful poetry, brash and exuberant and, yeah, a little proud in a way that a deity has a right to be. Truly, I do recommend that at some point you read these four chapters for yourself – not trying to discern the mystery or unlock some secret that will tell you when the Rapture is coming or anything like that; just read them as you might read from a book of poetry for once, and let the sheer beauty of God’s good creation wash over you and overwhelm your senses in its wildness and over-the-top breathlessness.
Still, though, we are left hanging, or so it seems. Yes, that’s lovely and all that, one might ask, but what about Job’s suffering? It’s still not fair. What does all of this have to do with that?
Theologians have grappled with this one for centuries, sometimes ending up in the theological equivalent of throwing one’s hands up in the air in resigned despair of ever coming up with an answer. I have no intention of claiming to be smarter or more gifted or more Spirit-guided than they; I can do no more than offer up one possibility, informed by other commentary. It’s deeply unsatisfying in a way and might even throw into question Job’s declared “innocence” in this whole matter, not to mention the our own.
It is possible, that in all of this dialogue and diatribe and accusing, Job hasn’t even come close to asking the right question. (To be sure his “friends” have been even worse.)
There are many, many possible interpretations of this monologue from God here in chapters 38-41, more than can possibly be attempted in one sermon. However, the following takeaways from this monologue might be suggested, as a means of ordering what all of this means for Job, and for us, in understanding a human place in creation:
1) God orders creation for God’s own purposes and for the good of ALL creation – not just us humans.
This challenges us. This challenges how we read the Bible, and frankly how a lot of the biblical writers wrote. We tend to think that everything about creation is done for our own personal pleasure and comfort. We tend to sing songs and pull out Bible stories that make us the center of the universe.
We’re not, not by a long shot.
Look again at the creation as described here. It is broad and vast and unbounded and all the good words we say and sing about it without truly understanding what they mean. If we take this passage seriously, we have to understand that we are part of creation, and not masters of it.
2) God orders and controls creation. God does not, however, tame creation.
Wild things are meant to be wild. God made them that way. Based on how Behemoth and Leviathan are described, God seems to like wild things that way. Not just the animals; wild winds, wild seas, wildness is a feature in the fullness of God’s creation, not a bug.
Also: remember The Lion King? The big hit Disney animated movie with all the creatures of the African savanna and the young lion with Matthew Broderick’s voice who had to learn to grow up and take his place as the head of the lion pride? Do you also remember the big song as this whole assemblage, this network of creatures, played out on the screen before us? What was it called?
[singing] Circle of Life?
Thing is, though, when you invoke that phrase – “the circle of life” – there’s something included in it that isn’t so much fun to think about. Part of the “circle of life” is no less than death. Death itself is programmed into God’s ordering and controlling of creation. As such, we should know suffering will happen, and not expect creation to get out of our way and avoid harming us at all costs.
This thought leads to two related ideas:
3) If our lives seem disordered, we may need to examine whether we are truly living as part of God’s creation.
Have we as humans lived our lives so determined on our own comfort and control that we have broken our relationship with God’s creation? Have we so separated ourselves from living with that creation, as part of that creation, that we do ourselves actual harm, set off illnesses and injury to ourselves and broken our very bodies and minds by our pursuit of dominance over and exploitation of nature?
And closely related…
4) If creation seems disordered to us, perhaps we need to look at someone other than God for a reason. Perhaps we should look in a mirror.
This is where it gets touchy for us, living as we do in a time where our relationship with creation, the struggle over living with creation or as part of creation against taming or dominating creation, is etched deeply within our very existence. This can be said of anyone living anywhere, but it stands out possibly most in the state where Julia and I used to live, the one known as the Sunshine State: Florida.
In the John Sayles movie Sunshine State, a developer who acts as something of a Greek chorus commenting on the movie’s action makes a few trenchant observations about living in Florida. People come to Florida, or at least some do, because of (what they perceive to be) nature, the “natural beauty” of the land.
Tricky thing is, though, if many of those people saw actual natural Florida, with swamps and wild grasses and prairies and alligators and mosquitoes the size of birds, they’d run screaming in the opposite direction. What they want is tightly controlled “nature,” highly groomed and manicured “nature” instead of the sheer wildness of God’s creation. That developer in the movie freely acknowledges that this is what he sells, describing it as “nature … on a leash.”
Trouble is, as we see too often and too easily these days, our attempts to “tame” nature and put it “on a leash” only make things worse. We tame things with thoroughly unnatural chemicals and end up with red tide and toxic algae. We take out native plants and animals and bring in plants and animals that don’t belong here, and we end up overrun with the less desirable plants and invasive species (ask one of your south Florida friends about Burmese pythons). And yes, we overheat the earth so badly that, just for one most recent example, the Gulf of Mexico becomes a tropical pressure cooker, turning a fledgling tropical depression into a Category 4 monster (speak of a behemoth!) just in time for it to slam into the Florida Big Bend, which is only one example of such monster storms over the past couple of decades. Not to mention our nasty habit of thinking we tamed nature enough that we think it’s o.k. to build to the hilt right up on the coastline, right where those behemoth storms come crashing ashore.
If we think creation is disordered, yeah, we’d better look in the mirror. Norman Wirzba, now of Duke Divinity School, puts it this way in his commentary on Job:
An adequate understanding of creation and an honest estimation of our place within it require that we see creation in terms of God’s intention and scale. Attempts to reduce creation to the scale of human significance invariably result in pain to ourselves and in death to creatures around us.[i]
Let us be clear here; Job’s moral universe is being challenged for being entirely too small. And yes, Job’s presumed innocence is being questioned as well.
For example: Lyle, what about those massive herds Job had kept before? Chapter 1:3 tells us Job had “Seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, five hundred donkeys” with his ten children feasting regularly and Job praying that they didn’t do anything stupid. For just one thing, how would that smell?
I invite you to imagine the size of that stockyard. Imagine, if you dare, the smell of being anywhere near it, not to mention the amount of animal waste involved; that's an environmental nightmare. Could Job really manage those herds in a way that honored God’s creation around him? What was the effect of that massive operation on Job’s neighbors? Was Job actually that innocent, in the full scale of creation?
And what about us? What does our footprint do to others, even if we don't have that much livestock around?
We may need, in the end, to quit peering through the microscope focused ever so tightly on our own desires and comforts, and to spend time looking through the telescope that opens up God’s full bounty of creation to us. We may need to think less about how the world is crashing in on us, and more about how we’re crashing in on the world. It may be time for us to change glasses, go outside, and look at … everything, and ask not if it is ours, but where we belong in it.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless noted otherwise): #32, I Sing the Mighty Power of God; (Hymn sing) All creatures of our God on high, Every creature on your planet, #38 To Bless the Earth; #---, When earth is standing dusty dry; #37, Let All Things Now Living
[i] Norman Wirzba, “God’s Measure of Creation,” Christian Reflection (2001), 24-29.
From a video of the famous-to-Presbyterians Montreat gate, with floodwaters pouring through after Hurricane Helene, 9/27/2024.
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