Job had worried, earlier in the book, that if God did actually appear to answer him, God would simply overpower him. And here, God’s initial appearance seems to confirm this fear: God answers Job out of a whirlwind, or, better, out of a violent storm. And God’s first, gruff words to Job command Job to “gird up [his] loins like a man”, the implication being that he ought get ready for a physical encounter – as if that would be any help if God Almighty was determined to have at him! And the content of God’s questioning that follows seems, at least on the surface, to confirm a reading that God is in fact overpowering Job. The message seems to be that Job needs to remember that God is God, and Job is not; that Job and his problems are but a brief and insignificant blip in the history of the universe; that Job just needs to have an attitude adjustment, to get a bit of perspective.

On one level, the whole thing reminds me of a Bill Belichick press conference (for those who are not sports fans, he is the brilliant and yet close-mouthed coach of the New England Patriots football team). Belichick, who led the Patriots to three Super Bowl victories over the last five years, is famous for his standard response to those Monday morning quarterbacks in the press and talk radio who ask him to comment on the meaning of a win or a loss, to expound upon its significance. Belichick invariably answers: “It is what it is.” Next question.

Under this reading of Job, God, at least to me, comes across as a bit of a tyrant, and what supposedly heals Job is a calling to him to humility – and yet, for this man who has lost everything, who spends his day on an ash heap scraping his sores, it seems that humiliation would only compound his suffering, not heal it. And so when Job, after God is done, repents and seems to back down from his legitimate questions about unmerited suffering, that repentance neither rings true nor satisfies me – I am not convinced.

But this past week I have been led to question this reading of Job, and what has led me to this questioning is paying closer attention to exactly what God says to Job, and particularly to how God says it. After all, if God’s message to Job were simply “I am God and you are not, I have the wisdom and you don’t”, that could have been said in two short lines. But instead we get two whole chapters devoted to the wonders of creation, which on the surface seems to be completely irrelevant to Job’s situation. And yet they lead to Job’s healing, they lead him to a point where, if we are to take the text seriously, Job repents of uttering that which he did not understand, and finds a peace which had previously eluded him. Job is somehow answered – and yet that answer comes to him not through God explaining to him why he suffers, but indirectly. So let’s take a look at what God says to Job out of the whirlwind, and how.

The first thing that strikes us is that what we have is a creation story, and a creation story that is far more poetic than even the creation story which we find in the Book of Genesis. “Where were you [God asks] when I laid the foundations of the earth? . . . when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly being shouted for joy?… Who cut a channel for the torrents of rain, and a way for the thunderbolt, to bring rain on a land where no one lives?” And this is not an anthropocentric creation story, humanity is not at its center – we hear of ravens feeding their young, of lions lying in wait. It is a vision of a created wildness, of nature.

David Strong, writing in Theology Today (July 1991, p. 174), proposes that “The vision of Job is essentially a vision of wilderness and wild things….Wild country and wild things are what they are, quite apart from human existence. In a culture where things are viewed as needing to be reshaped, such character is seen either as so much raw material or worthless. ‘What good is it?’ ‘I hate to see it go to waste.’ And yet the fresh vision of things in their created wilderness, in there being what they are, quite apart from both being for us or being assisted by us, is what, I take it, heals Job.”

What heals Job, Strong says, is not any coercive power of God, no browbeating by the Lord, no intellectual overpowering of this long-suffering man. What heals him is a vision of the created order in all its wildness and its wilderness, its majesty and its mystery. What heals Job is not logic and reason and answers to all the “Why?” questions which he and we have, but a sense of awe and wonder, of the goodness of creation as it exists in its own right, not as fodder for us to manipulate or consume, but simply as it is. What heals Job is not some divine wisdom which God alone has, for God was not telling Job anything he did not already know – it was more like God was reminding Job of a wisdom which lay buried in tradition and his soul and which he had neglected, had forgotten, had been clouded over by his understandable concentration on the very real suffering and misery which lay close at hand. What heals Job is not the answer to the question, “Who created the world?”, but living the questions themselves, being open to the mystery and the majesty and the re-creating power inherent in the wild things which surround us.

We live in a technological age, in a time where wilderness is something to be tamed, where the wild is viewed as an inexhaustible well of resources for our use, management, and consumption. We banish the night through the power of electric illumination, tune out the evening serenade of bull frog and cricket with our radios and televisions, manicure the fields out back and fence out the wilderness. And yet, despite all our technology, we, like Job, are unable to banish suffering, and we, like Job, find ourselves wondering “Why?”, sick at heart and uneasy in our souls.

Friends, I do not believe we will ever, in this lifetime, get any closer than did Job to having these questions answered. And yet, like Job, I know of many who have been open to the wisdom of the wilderness, and who have there found healing. I think of Marge Dow, a long-time member of this congregation, who always found renewal walking at Craigville Beach. In her last months, when she was increasingly restricted from physical activities, she would have her sons drive her down to the beach, where she would simply sit for an hour watching the rolling waves, the play of the whirling gulls, the glint of the sun through the shifting clouds. And there know renewal, a sense of peace, healing. A friend tells me of a time when she was young and struggling with school and friends and a family situation and then, one cool fall evening, looked through a neighbor’s telescope at far off stars and galaxies – and in that looking, in the awe she experienced, in the sense of how tiny she was in the face of the magnificence of the universe and eons of time, she found herself moved to a profoundly different place, a place of right-sizing and soul-healing. These past weeks, as I have driven home along Route 6A, I have come around a turn and been pierced to the depths of my being by a solitary sugar maple, rare for these parts, ablaze in vibrant orange foliage – its beauty calling me out of my funk, moving me from self-absorption to awe, from anxiety to peace. Mae Kershaw, another long-time church member, would begin each day, sunshine or rain or snow, by looking out the window and exclaiming, “I love the weather on Cape Cod!” This right through the illness which finally took her, there in her home on her beloved Cape Cod.

These stories, these experiences, call us to be intentional about our healing, to remember the wisdom which lies in our tradition, such as in the Book of Job, but which also I believe lies too often neglected deep in our souls. It is a vision of wildness and wilderness, of awe and wonder, of praise and thanksgiving. It is a wisdom which too few of us remember to live out on a daily basis – an exception to that might be the poet Mary Oliver, with whom, and her poem “Am I Not Among the Early Risers”, I will bring this sermon to a close.

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(Her poem may be found in West Wind; it is omitted here due to copyright concerns.)