Lectionary 12 (B) — Job 38:1–11
My father died in 1991, when I was ten. (That sentence is designed to make most of you feel old.) Thirty years. Sometimes I try to drag up memories, and it’s a struggle. There are moments that rise to the top, though. And they all seem to have a theme.
My parents had a party for my fifth birthday, and rented a video camera, one of the big, early consumer models that took a whole VHS tape. I still have the video. It features a good hour of footage of the inside of the lens cap. It also features my dad, annoyed with me the moment I got home from school. The camera was supposed to be a fun surprise for me; I demanded it be shut off. I was kind of a brat back then.
Then there’s the time that he took me fishing at the Maidencreek nearby. I was less a fishing kind of kid, and more a video games kind of kid. But my eight year-old self decided that if I had to do this, I was going to enjoy myself. That lasted just long enough for me to fail miserably at casting my line, getting the hook caught in the weeds. I went to untangle it, my shoes slid in the mud, and I ended up in the river. We went home.
Then there was a summer backyard picnic. Dad was grilling, probably his famous “blacked chicken,” by which I mean chicken accidentally left on the fire too long so it burned. My little brother was outside, hovering like a mosquito, until our neighbor’s kids saw we were outside and came over. When it was time for dinner, and dad was about to send them home, my brother took a pair of toy handcuffs and snapped them on our neighbor’s hands. The key was nowhere to be found. My father’s language got a bit… colorful sometimes. This was one of those times.
These memories all involve a healthy dose of chaos. I suppose that’s part of a father’s job, to inject chaos into his family’s life. At least our chaos was mostly good, even if it was also mostly accidental.
The book of Job is the bad kind of chaos. Tragedy befalls Job again and again, and he wallows in his misery. Most of the book is just people giving him advice—advice he never asked for. Job’s wife says that if God has turned his back on him, then he should just “curse God and die.” The words of a loving spouse.
Job has three wise friends. One says Job should repent from wrongdoing, since bad things only happen to bad people. But Job insists he doesn’t deserve his misfortune.
Another says the opposite: Good things come to those who love God. Job should love God more. This sounds like certain TV preachers these days, and like them, Job’s friend is wrong. No one loves God more than Job—even now, even in his despair.
The third friend says that, well, bad things happen, whatever, what can you do? But Job isn’t willing to let it go at that. God isn’t being fair, and he demands God come to explain himself.
And today, we get God’s answer. It’s not the answer Job wwanted. God arrives in a whirlwind, a great storm with power to strip the earth bare. Pretty normal for the Old Testament. When God speaks, he begins with a demand, a sort of, “Who do you think you are?” After all, this all-powerful, only God has had demands made of him by some guy sitting in dust and ashes.
But the content of God’s answer is interesting: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” Where were you when creation began? When God himself sunk the foundation of the world into the loam of the universe? When the sea threatened to wash everything away, and God held it back? And wrapped clouds and thick darkness around it, used the pull of gravity to hold it in place, to stop it from reaching beyond its bounds and boiling itself off into space?
Through two beautiful, poetic chapters, God describes creation in perfect detail, how he causes the constellations, the Pleiades and Great Bear, to cross the sky; how he protects ostrich eggs incubating in the heat of the desert sun.
When God is finished expounding on the perfect order of each millimeter of creation, he turns to the powers of chaos. While Israel’s ancient neighbors ascribed the mess of life to other, evil gods, the Israelites knew there were no others. And so in chapter 40, God explains that the great chaotic powers are things that “I made, just as I made you.” Like the seas, God holds them back, but God made them just the same. And like the rest of creation, they are creative. Just like childbirth, a very messy process, the chaotic forces in life are generative as well, making it so that even death will lead to new life.
We’re not talking about evil, the willful destruction and fear and hate that we spread. We are talking about the general craziness of life, the fact that sometimes bad things DO happen to good people, with no reason behind it. In Job, sometimes there’s no reason behind the mess of life, whether small as a sleepless night or large as a hurricane. There is not always a purpose for everything.
But God can bring purpose out of anything.
My dad and I were very different people. I WAS a brat back then, and frankly, so was he. We fought constantly. Looking back, I’m tempted to say that life was better off without him.
But a year after he died, we all became a mess. Adam was in trouble at school, mom had some major changes in her work life. I, well, not everyone can be as perfect as me. Including me, evidently. Our attempt to do life as usual finally caught up with us. Life without Dad was missing something.
So, while I mostly remember the chaos, that’s not all there was. I don’t recall him listening to a two year-old try to speak, hearing words into existence before my muscles developed enough to make them. Or remember him taking me to lunch down in Reading with his business colleagues, wanting me to be a part of his life even when I clearly didn’t care. Or see the stupid sense of humor I inherited from him, the kind that thinks the Pu-pu platter is the funniest Chinese food.
But I can clearly say I was well-loved. Yes, the chaos of my childhood was frustrating, and it did not always have purpose. But even so, my Heavenly Father produced great things from my earthly father. And it was very good.
God’s answer to Job is unsatisfying. It does not explain why bad things happen undeservedly. But God does answer. Yes, Job is just some miserable guy sitting in dust and ashes. But when he calls on God, God appears, and speaks.
In our pain, in our chaos, in the storm of our life, God is present. He never promises to stop the floodwaters from coming. But he does take them, and turn them into baptismal waters, taking the death that comes our way and making us rise again from to new life. This is God’s promise: Not that bad things won’t happen. But when they do, we are carried through them by no less than the creator of the universe. And in him, all manner of thing shall be well. Amen.