Over the last month at Evensong we have been working our way through the book of Job. We have heard Job’s lament as he loses everything that he has; we have heard him make his complaint to God; he is an innocent man, why is he suffering? We have heard his friends who have stated the traditional OT view- that Job must have, somewhere along the line, done something wrong; his current suffering means he is at last receiving his just deserts for his unknown crime.
Today we reach the denouement- God has appeared out of the whirlwind to answer Job’s complaint. Or at least this is what we would anticipate. We would hope that this is a God who will provide the answers; surely God will declare whether Job, or Job’s friends, are right?
But God provides no such response; He both reproves Job and vindicates him. Job’s friends are also the subject of his rebuke. It seems no one can regard himself in the right before God.
Rather than provide definite answers God points to his grandeur as the Creator of the Cosmos. As creatures, when we stand before the glory of the natural world how can we expect to question its creator? How can we even expect to talk of its creator in a way which does justice to the mysterious power of the universe? Do we know when the deer crouch to give birth to their offspring? Do we give the horse its might?
Both Job and his friends are seeking, in the book of Job, to find ways of talking about this mysterious God. Job’s friends are relying on the accepted wisdom of their culture to understand how human suffering can be possible in a world created by God. Job on the other hand begins with his own experience of suffering and finds no easy way of accommodating this with his faith in God.
As Fr Stephen said in his sermon when we began reading Job 4 weeks ago, where there is a mismatch between our faith and our experience we can argue and complain to God but perhaps in the end we have to be silent before God.
In the silence we might learn what God is; because learning what God is isn’t simply an intellectual problem that we are trying to come to grips with. It is partly a devotional and spiritual one. Whilst it is important for to us to know to what sort of God we are giving devotion when we worship and pray, we learn this partly through the very act of worship and prayer. This requires us to be silent and listen as much as to probe and examine.
In her poem The Summer Day’ with which you may be familiar, Mary Oliver, for me, sums up this contemplative approach to the natural world. In many ways it is reminiscent of the reading we heard from the book of Job tonight.
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down- who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts up her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face Now she snaps her wings open and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what it is you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver For Mary Oliver contemplating the detail of other creatures leads her to reflect on her own life. She is not led to question the Creator but to question herself. What will she, or rather she addresses us, the readers, what are we to do with our one wild and precious life’. In the grasshopper we can see the sanctity of all things and this gives us responsibility to use our lives. So it seems life is not necessarily about finding the right answers but about realising and relishing its significance.
Interestingly Archbishop Rowan Williams, in tackling a completely different issue- that of Christian Sexual Ethics, takes up a similar point. In debating the different ways of approaching sexual ethics he contrasts a traditionally conservative view with a liberal one. Neither is, for Rowan Williams, intrinsically Christian. The gospels make clear that God isn’t about obeying rules. We cannot put God in a Conservative box. But nor is God about a liberal sentimentalism where as long as no one is hurt by my actions it’s OK to engage in whatever sexual activity gives me pleasure. Rather living a godly life is about recognising the significance and sacramentality of the sexual encounter. The real question as he writes is ” how much am I prepared for this to signify?’ A Christian sexual ethic ought to be saying before all else that there is a distinctively Christian sense to be made, the sense God makes in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, where flesh itself carries the meaning of God’s Word.”
Tonight’s passage from Job might seem like a rebuke from God. But it can also be seen as an invitation to contemplate God in the material world. In our busy lives we can easily feel that contemplating the beauty of the natural world around us is a luxury we can ill afford. In a culture which is more preoccupied with finding answers than contemplating the mystery it might seem that to attend to the beauty of the world around us is a waste of time. But in doing so we might find ourselves silent before the Creator God and we just might find ourselves the wiser for it. Amen
Sarah Eynstone