Reimagining the Whirlwind

Guest Preacher Chris Bohnhoff

October 20, 2024

Scripture: Job 38:1–7, 34–41

Our scripture reading this morning is from the Book of Job, a book that has given scholars and interpreters fits since it was written. An extended parable about where God is in human suffering, it relates the story of a man named Job as he goes through a time of unrelenting loss and personal destruction. Job is in the prime of his life, with a healthy family, a vast household of servants and employees, and considerable wealth and comfort. Not only is he successful by all human standards; he’s also righteous, a devout follower of God, a helper of the poor and marginalized, a grateful person who prays and gives back to the community of which he is a part. A good man.

God, we hear, looks on Job with pride, as God’s perfect servant. Then into this peaceful scene comes the Accuser who convinces God to put Job to the test. The Accuser wants to prove to God that any human, however righteous they may appear, will turn on God when life gets hard. God takes the bet and the scene is set. Next thing we know, Job’s body is covered with sores, his children all die, his fortune evaporates. All is lost.

Three of Job’s friends come to him, sitting shiva with him in the Jewish tradition for seven days in solidarity consolation for the death of his children. Then they get into it. “Job, what did you do to make God so mad at you?” they say. One by one they press the issue, insisting that the way of the universe, the way of God is punishment and reward: you’re a good person, you prosper. You screw up and you’d better be prepared for the consequences.

Again and again, Job declares his innocence, reminding his friends of his upstanding life and purity before God. But as their argument continues, Job gets sucked into their logic, proclaiming that he is ready to argue his case to God directly—to plead innocent to whatever crimes for which he is being punished.

Then, as will happen in a parable, the unexpected happens. God appears to Job, interrupting Job’s friend to respond directly. Hear now these words from chapter 38, verses 1–7 and 34–41.

Then God answered Job out of the whirlwind:
“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
Gird up your loins like a man; I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements–surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
“Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, so that a flood of waters may cover you?
Can you send forth lightnings, so that they may go and say to you, ‘Here we are’?
Who has put wisdom in the inward parts or given understanding to the mind?
Who has the wisdom to number the clouds? Or who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens
when the dust runs into a mass and the clods cling together?
“Can you hunt the prey for the lion or satisfy the appetite of the young lions,
when they crouch in their dens or lie in wait in their covert?
Who provides for the raven its prey, when its young ones cry to God and wander about for lack of food?

Will you pray with me?

God of the whirlwind, God of young lions and clods of dust, of lightning and hungry ravens, hear our call. From our small, time-bound existence we seek the comfort of your infinity, your ways that dwarf our limited perspectives and definitions. Like Job, gift us with your insight and release us from our small portion of sureness. Find us in our disorientation, Holy One, we pray. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts together be ever acceptable to you, O God, our courage, our source, our being. Amen.

Before we go any further, I’d like to take a minute to thank you, Plymouth Church. As a long-ish time member here I know many of you, but just so we’re all on the same page, my thanks is for the support that this community has provided me over the past four years as I have completed my Master of Divinity program at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. At every step this community has been there for me, and much further back than that, from the moment Johanna and I arrived in this sanctuary you all have had a hand in forming my sense of vocation, my calling to ministry, my attunement to God’s movement in the world. You—and this place—have been my home and I am forever grateful. As one of you, it is a special honor to be able to stand here and give you a word this morning.

What is your response to loss? To change? The Book of Job presents a situation of extreme and sudden loss, but you don’t need to look far to see small and large examples of change and loss here in your own life. Sometimes things really do come crashing down around us. War, addiction, employment, natural disaster, our health. . . the structure of our lives that we spend years building can suddenly crumble for any number of reasons. But even changes that aren’t catastrophic, even those that are largely positive, we know, can still cause an unsettling inner chaos. In this season of my own life, for example, I’ve been a little surprised at my internal response to graduating from seminary. Believe me, I looked forward to being done with homework, with paper writing, with the year-round grind of graduate school for a long time. But when I finally finished, I didn’t feel free like I expected to; I felt alone, like I was floating in a boat far from my known shore. And then I questioned myself for those feelings. My mental landscape had changed and it felt chaotic. My family can tell you that for a few weeks I wasn’t fun to be around.

What is your response to change and loss? We followers of the Way of Jesus are taught to look at the world through the lens of justice, and rightly so. As DeWayne preached last week, it does all come down to doing justice for others, for acting in service and care for those around us who have suffered and sit on the margins. That is our calling. It’s a difficult calling, one that requires us to open ourselves in empathy to the plight of our neighbor, to give of ourselves, to sometimes risk our own privilege and standing and free time and wealth for another and for our community. And. We can mostly wrap our heads around what’s expected of us when someone else needs help. What happens when we, when you, are Job: the one suffering, grieving, and feeling cast adrift?

The friends that surround Job in his loss, being faithful people and fictional versions of certain kind of our spiritual ancestors, tried to apply the justice lens in reverse to Job’s situation. It sure looks like Job is being punished, they reasoned, so he must have done something wrong. Then they invoke a powerful, punitive, controlling God to explain a scary situation that otherwise has no explanation. In fact, for chapters and chapters, Job’s friends describe how God created the world and brings good things to the poor, and how God strikes down the powerful and the guilty alike. I think that we as the readers are left to ask, maybe only subconsciously, which side of the ledger we are on. On the side to be lifted up or the one that deserves to be struck down? Are we innocent or guilty? It’s a frightening question in the context of the infinite power evoked in the Psalms and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. But Job responds that is ready to defend himself, like a defense attorney in court, ready to look across the courtroom at God as prosecutor and judge. And Job, in his moment of suffering and under intense pressure from this idea of a judging God, has been sucked into the trap of feeling like he must defend himself against God. The chaos in his life, the unexplainable, sudden series of losses that he’s suffered. . . why is he, a good person, being punished?

Then, into this intense, hypothetical yet very relatable situation, comes God. The God that Job insisted he had done nothing to offend. The God whose retribution Job’s friends had just spent many words insinuating Job deserved. Can you imagine? We as readers wait to see whether God will punish or comfort Job. But the passage’s opening words render the entire question irrelevant. God doesn’t come from a place of judication, God comes out of the whirlwind, a power that affects all, whatever they’ve done or haven’t done. Theologian Catherine Keller points out the significance of the whirlwind. She writes, “The whirlwind revelation celebrates the undomesticated creation, the wild things of the universe, from weather patterns to ostrich wings.”[1] God enters the scene not in a judge’s robe but wrapped in wildness and instead of smiting Job, God describes poetically, lovingly, what it is to be God: to care for all of creation in its complexity, spontaneity, and cross-purposes. God begins mockingly, but listen as God continues: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements–surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?” (Job 38 4-7) I guess it’s possible to hear an angry God in these words, but I don’t. I hear a God honoring a man, a finite creature, by meeting him where he is in his fear, in his expectation that he needs to gird up his loins for judgement, and then flipping the script by reminding him that there is so much more to justice than his small perspective.

The whirlwind forces us to let go of our certainties, our calcified understanding of good and evil that we use to protect ourselves from the fear of God’s judgement. When the wind rages, when the diagnosis comes, when the beloved person leaves us, when we come face to face with the roiling waters out of which God created the world, if we can loosen our grip on the notion that chaos is punishment and allow ourselves to be changed, might we come to realize that our self-justifications, our self-righteousness, our dwellings of comfort and safety are anything but in the face of the infinite? That’s existentially scary. . . IF you believe that you and you alone are responsible for your own safety. But the Job story suggests another alternative.

Again, theologian Catherine Keller: “Is this the truth of the whirlwind: that God, the ‘spirit of the world-wind,’ does not will our suffering—but does will a world, a living, whirling, open-system of a world? That world happens to be this creation, this real world of finite creatures who live, feed, risk, exult, and die, a world of change and interdependence in which suffering is inevitable. Yet this genesis collective is so intensely alive, even or precisely in its chaos, that new life is also always happening. Therefore, even for one as tragically hurt as Job, new life can take place.”[2]

Friends, what if the whirlwind, the very place that feels the most dangerous and out of control, is the place we are most likely to find God? What if chaos isn’t a place to be avoided at all costs, but a place where our perspective is broadened and new possibilities emerge? Could we transform the defensiveness and fear that separates us into humility and curiosity, and a compassion towards our fellow travelers? What new life would we co-create with God’s Spirit, knowing that chaos is God’s dwelling place? May we reimagine the whirlwind, and may we navigate it together. Amen.

[1]Catherine Keller, On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity In Process, (Fortress Press: Minneapolis, 2008), p. 75.

[2]Ibid., p. 76.