Out of the Whirlwind
MaryAnn McKibben Dana
July 12, 2009
Mark 4:35-41
Job 38:1-11
——————
Many of you asked me this spring whether there would be a sermon series this summer like the Harry Potter one and the Children’s Lit one. And as you can see, I decided not to do one. I gave it a lot of thought, and nothing really felt authentic for this time and place. And I didn’t want it to be forced, so I decided to let it go… and yet as I prepared to preach this week, I realized that today’s text is in a similar vein with the sermon I preached a few weeks ago. So maybe there is a bit of a series here, just with a three-week gap! I’m not sure what I’m going to share today is part II of that other sermon so much as a dialogue partner with it. Both of them deal with that basic question of why there is suffering in the world. Just from different angles.
Today we look at the 38th chapter of Job, and before we read the text, I need to tell you what’s happened up to this point.
Job is an upright and blameless man who loved God and worshiped God and turned away from evil. He also lived a prosperous life both economically and emotionally, with a wife, many children, and friends and associates. That’s the “once upon a time,” and he was well on his way to “happily ever after.”
Job’s troubles start from a conversation between God and Satan. God is bragging about Job’s righteousness to the heavenly court, and Satan (ha-satan, the Accuser, who is a member of that court) says, “Of course Job’s righteous. Of course he loves you. You’ve given him everything he could ever hope for! Financial security, loving wife and family, good health… Let me tell ya, you take that all away, and he will curse you to your face.”
And God says, “You’ve got yourself a wager. Bring it on.”
Yes… it started with a bet.
First it’s Job’s oxen—slaughtered. Then his sheep, donkeys, camels, his livelihood—massacred.
Then it’s his sons and daughters—destroyed, in a freak windstorm that tears the house right out of its foundations and collapses it on their heads while they are eating dinner.
Finally it’s Job’s health. He is stricken with sores from his head to his toes, until he is himself a walking wound, his external pain a mirror for the agony of his soul.
His friends come and sit with him on the ash-heap for seven days in silence. They see his suffering and don’t try to explain, they are simply there to comfort him, not with words, but with their presence.
But over time, they just can’t help themselves. The bulk of the book of Job is made up of passionate debates between Job and his friends about the nature of God and of suffering. The friends seem almost desperate to make some meaning out of it.
“You must have sinned in order for this to make any sense at all,” they say. “It must be your fault. Just deal with it, move on, repent. Tell God you’re sorry! Clearly, you were not as faithful as you thought. If you were, you would not be sitting here today.”
Through it all Job remains resolute. “I hold fast [to] my righteousness and will not let it go; my heart does not reproach me for any of my days.” (27:6) I haven’t done anything wrong, Job says, and even if I have, this amount of suffering is totally out of proportion to it. I’m not the one who needs to answer for myself; it’s God who needs to answer.
You’ve probably heard the phrase “the patience of Job.” I actually don’t think Job is all that patient! He does not bear this tolerantly and good-naturedly. He continues to insist on an accounting from God. He is wrestling with God as surely as Jacob wrestled with the angel back in the book of Genesis.
Well, the arguments build, Job’s questions pick up speed, Job’s demands that God answer for this “crushing unfairness” grow more and more intense until finally in the midst of this whirlwind, God speaks:
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:
2‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
3Gird up your loins like a man,
I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
4‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
5Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
6On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
7when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings* shouted for joy?
8‘Or who shut in the sea with doors
when it burst out from the womb?—
9when I made the clouds its garment,
and thick darkness its swaddling band,
10and prescribed bounds for it,
and set bars and doors,
11and said, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stopped”?
A friend of mine wrote recently about this passage:
It almost has a Disney-like quality. I envision a very small person walking up to a huge, huge dark door in the dead of night. He reaches to knock, but before his hand reaches the door a voice calls out, Who goes there? What do you want? Who has the courage to dare to confront me here?
(Chris Tuttle, a member of The Well preaching group)
Another commentator has compared God’s response to a lion turning around and roaring at a flea perched on its back! (Barbara Brown Taylor)
I remember doing a study with a group here about the lament psalms. I read some of those psalms in which people are like Job, demanding an accounting of why God has forsaken them, shaking their fist at God and saying “Answer me God, Answer me!” I remember reading one of those, stopping for a reaction, and a woman in the group drew herself up in her chair, looked at me and said, “That psalmist sure knows how to sass. If that were my son talking to me that way, I’d smack him.”
Well that’s a very traditional reading of God, isn’t it? God is so great and so good and we are so insignificant and so… flea-like. But what if that’s not the whole story?
Consider: this is the God that Job has been following and worshiping for much of his life. The God who has been with him in all things. Consider that Satan says “Job will curse you…” but Job doesn’t. He never does. He laments. He cries out. He demands that God answer—and that is an act of faith!
Consider also that Job says, incredibly, after everything that’s happened, “I know that my redeemer lives… and I will see him.” (Job 19:25)
A God of fear does not inspire this kind of honesty.
A lion who roars at the flea on its back does not inspires this kind of devotion.
So what kind of God is this?
Job may be a flea compared to the awesome power of God. But a God who comes stomping out of the whirlwind to shame a suffering man for not having been there at the beginning of the world is not a God I’m interested in worshiping. And it’s not the God we meet in the gospel of Mark. Jesus stands up and says “be still” to the storm for no other reason than that his friends are about to drown and they’re scared. And he asks them, “Why are you afraid?”
Just about every parent out there has his or her “because I said so” moments with children. And you know what? We all say we won’t do it. But sometimes we just have to say, “Because I’m the parent and you’re not and I know better and that’s the end of the discussion.” But it’s not very satisfying. Because we know that a relationship built solely on “because I said so” is not the kind of relationship that nurtures strong and competent kids. And a relationship between God and God’s people built solely on “because I’m God” will not lead to the abundant life that Jesus promises.
No, we may have an incomplete picture of God here.
Listen again, and take note of what God is actually describing here. God is talking about boundaries and limits:
I laid the foundation of the earth
I determined its measurements.
I stretched the line upon it. (God prepared a place for us)
Who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? (God delighted in creation!)
Or who shut in the sea with doors
when it burst out from the womb?— (God tamed the chaos)
I made the clouds its garment,
and thick darkness its swaddling band,
and prescribed bounds for it,
and said, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stopped”? (God set boundaries)
This is the God who places limits on the chaos…
Who draws boundaries.
Who measures out the foundations of the world with holy precision.
Who swaddles the sea with a garment of clouds
Who looks into the eye of the storm and says, “Here is where you stop. You will go no further.”
We’re so buffeted about by the whirlwind that maybe we’ve missed what God is really saying here: “I make the whirlwinds cease.” Do you see it? God isn’t railing at Job. God is saying, “I am more powerful than the chaos!”
In her latest book about the spiritual life, Barbara Brown Taylor has a chapter entitled “The Practice of Feeling Pain.” It’s a gutsy thing to write about because it’s tricky to suggest that pain has a spiritual dimension or purpose. We live in a culture that peddles all kinds of products, drugs and mindsets that seek to numb pain. And we never want to give idea that we should seek out pain, that pain is God’s true will and way for us. Yet it’s undeniable that profound insights come within painful experiences.
Once, when I was confined to bed for the better part of a week, I spent hours watching the sunlight that came through the slats of my wooden blinds move down the white wall of my bedroom. First thing in the morning it made honey-colored rectangles with soft edges. By 10:00 a.m. the wall was striped with bands of light as straight as rulers. By noon they looked more like the rungs of a ladder, dappled with leaves from the winged elm outside my window. By 2:00 the light had lost most of its character, as the sun moved over the roof of the house and left the front yard in deepening shadow.
This may sound boring to you, but it was not. It was beautiful. It was reassuring. It gave me a place outside myself to go. I did not have to do anything to make the light change… If I didn’t not like the way the light looked at a given moment, I knew it would change. If I loved the way the light looked at a given moment, I knew it would change. Paying attention to it, I lost my will to control it. Watching it, I became patient. Letting it be, I became well. (An Altar in the World, pp. 172-3)
Make no mistake, those patterns of light were whisperings from God, saying, “I drew the foundations of the world. I make the sun to sweep across the sky day after day.”
When you’re in the midst of a hard time, sometimes what gets you through that dark night is knowing nothing more than the reliable truth that tomorrow morning the sun is going to rise over that horizon and bathe the world in light.
I learned in seminary that there are three kinds of sermons:
Go sermon: those great calls to mission, to stewardship, our response to the gospel—cheerleader sermons!
Yes sermon: sermons about the unbridled grace of God, who is for us, and who can be against us
But there are also No sermons: these deal with what is not allowed, what cannot stand (injustice, oppression, fear, death)… and unbridled chaos does not stand, there is a limit to it, it does end, it is not ultimate, and that is what the resurrection is about, that death has been defeated, somehow, forever.
Vaclav Havel, the writer and former president of the Czech Republic, has said this: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
I’ve thought a lot about that quote, and what I think he’s hinting at is that there is a coherence to things.
Now we can’t take this too far. Suffering is very real and it’s not a neat and tidy thing. Job goes on to have more children at the end of the story, but make no mistake, the children he lost are not coming back. Job doesn’t get his questions answered, exactly, but he is satisfied somehow, I believe because he gets to see some of that coherence. God goes on from here to give Job glimpses of all of the creatures of the earth, creatures that God delights in, creatures that make up this wondrous creation, that has its own sort of order to it, however messy that order might seem to us.
We all see that coherence in different ways. Job got to see the big picture—the entirety of this creation that God loves. Barbara Brown Taylor saw it in the constant steadfast shifting of the sunlight in her room. I’ve seen it—living through the experience of having my father die suddenly just days before my daughter was born, it was hard, but there was also an undercurrent of “this is how it has always been, this is how it is, death, and life, tumbling along together.” Arrangements are currently being made for Jack Stephenson’s memorial service during this, our Vacation Bible School week. It is entirely possible that here in this meeting house, memorial flowers will share space with banners and scripture memory verses, that in one breath we will celebrate the end of his life and in the next we will be ministering to the budding young lives in this community. And there is something deeply right about that.
Here is the scripture again. Hear it in a different voice, not dripping with righteous anger, but infused with love and grace. See if there is any comfort in it:
4‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
5Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
6On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone
7when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
8‘Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?—
9when I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band,
10and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors,
11and said, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stopped”?
…‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’ 39He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. 40He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid?
