Creationtide 1 Year A

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O God our Strength and our Redeemer.

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For all the ills of both the mainstream and social media, and they are manifold, there is an incredible connectedness and immediacy about it that brings the world close, and as we see almost daily on our news, our world, God’s creation, is suffering immensely, and consequently, so are we. Who hasn’t seen the terrifying videos of the massive flood pouring down through the valleys of Nepal over this past week?

The Hebrew bible – the Old Testament – is a vast array of related texts developed over many centuries, and within it one of the great themes is that of creation – God’s creation, its immensity an outcome of Yahweh’s generous, sovereign freedom.

We are all familiar with the creation story found at the beginning of Genesis. Walter Brueggemann, one of the great Christian theologians of the Hebrew bible, comments that the Genesis story does not begin by describing creation ex nihilo – out of nothing. Rather, it portrays God bringing order and fruitfulness out of what is wild, disordered and chaotic.

Brueggemann describes how Yahweh orders what is wild and chaotic to make possible “an ordered, reliable place of peaceableness” – an act of sovereignty on the largest scale, in which God’s good intention for life imposes a will on destructive forces and energies. And the outcome is a place of fruitfulness, abundance, productivity, extravagance – all terms summed up in the word blessing.

Humanity has a particular place within this understanding of creation. We are given the task of naming the creatures, giving them identity. Humanity is given responsibility within this immense fruitfulness and abundance; we belong within creation, in profound relationship with the earth, with its creatures, and with the Creator.

Psalm 139 gives an account of the extraordinarily intricate involvement of Yahweh in our very being. And remember – the Hebrew tradition is not about science or history in the way we understand those disciplines; it is more about weaving theology, or theological meaning, through story and poetry.

But apart from the Genesis story, there are other visions of the created order within the Hebrew bible, layering complexity of meaning across it. Psalm 104, for example, is an account of the great variety of creation, with humanity named almost as an aside, a beneficiary, far from central and dominant.

And then – there is Job.

This morning we’ve heard part of God’s speeches in the whirlwind to Job. Apart from Genesis 1–3, this is the longest sustained reflection on creation in the bible. And from the morning stars who sing at the dawn of creation to the great sea monster Leviathan who makes the deep boil like a pot, this vision of creation and the creatures who inhabit it are untamed and untameable by human beings.

To give a little context… I once read that Virginia Woolf wrote in a letter to a friend, “I read the book of Job last night – I don’t think God comes well out of it.”

Job is not an easy read at all, as an extended meditation on undeserved suffering. In it, God enters into a bet with a character known as The Adversary, apparently to test whether Job really does “fear God for nothing” (Job 1:9). And God afflicts – or allows The Adversary to afflict – Job with incomprehensible suffering.

The main part of the book of Job describes this unfolding journey and Job’s lengthy exchanges with his “friends.” Finally, at the end of the book, God shows up in a whirlwind and answers Job.  Job’s previous understanding of creation seems to have been quite ordered, and in which he used to sit as “king” (Job 29:25). Now he encounters this huge and daunting outpouring of power, majesty and wildness, in which humanity is very far from the centre.

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Who determined its measurements?” comes the voice of the Creator out of the whirlwind. “Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place?… Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know all this.”

And there is no way to comprehend the immensity and complexity. It fills us with awe.

Job is confronted with a creation unimaginably larger than himself and his suffering – a creation which does not revolve around him, and which he cannot possibly comprehend.

And perhaps Psalm 139 holds the other side of this truth. We are tiny within the immensity of creation; we are not its centre. And yet the God who lays the foundations of the earth also knows us intimately: our sitting down and our rising up, our coming in and our going out.

We are small, but we are known. We are not central, but we belong.

And yet… beyond all expectation, there is something in this outpouring from God that moves Job from a place of profound despair, to this response:

“I have uttered what I did not understand,

things too wonderful for me, which I did not know…

I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,

but now my eye sees you.” (42:3, 5)

Grasping something of the immensity of creation, and the immensity of God the Creator of all, moves Job from despair and back into life.

In the final chapter of the book, Job regains his prosperity. And – most importantly – Job and his wife have more children. It is his most courageous act, to bring children into a world he knows is fraught with the possibility of inexplicable suffering. The voice in the whirlwind has given Job a vision of hope.

How can this be?

And what hope can we find in this for ourselves, worlds away, living now within a climate crisis whose scale most of us still find hard to comprehend?

Around the world we see extreme heat and fire, drought and flood, failing ecosystems and communities already being displaced by a changing climate. Here in the Pacific, these realities are particularly close to us. Creation is wounded and disordered.

What does Job show us?

Of all the things the God of the Whirlwind describes in creation, the Sea is the wildest and most chaotic and dangerous. In the ancient world there is no greater symbol of darkness and chaos.

But here, God “shut in the sea with doors… and prescribed bounds for it… and said, ‘Thus far you shall come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped.’”

In other words… God gives the Sea, the symbol of chaos and darkness, a place within the created order.

The forces of chaos are not allowed free rein, boundaries are set, but those boundaries do not exclude all things wild and dangerous. In the creation theology of Job, the world is not a perfectly safe place for humanity, nor is it organised around us, but it has an order, and it is profoundly beautiful and free.

I wonder what Job would make of our world today?

To use his language, there are forces of chaos loose in our world. Humanity has pushed at the boundaries, and the wildness and delicate balance of creation has been profoundly disturbed. We have indeed glimpsed the gates of death, and seen the gates of deep darkness.

Much of our modern industrial culture has lost its awe before creation, reducing it instead to something we can endlessly commodify and exploit. This sinful stance is profoundly counter to Job’s vision, and to Job’s learning about humanity’s place within the vast complexity of creation.

A complexity and wildness and delicate balance in God’s creation that is becoming more and more apparent to us, the more it is disturbed and broken.

We must work and pray that the voice of the God of the Whirlwind will be heard again, so that humanity would turn back from grasping dominion, and mend our ways, and learn Job’s humility and wonder at the Creation of which we are a small part.

So that one day we too would hear the morning stars sing together, and all the heavenly beings shouting for joy, and regain Job’s hope for the future, and our children’s future.

Amen.