Shifting from a human-centered to a God-centered view of the universe

Sermon delivered Sunday, Oct. 21, 2012, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, Tenn.
21 Pentecost, Proper 24, Year B (Job 38:1-7, 34-41; Psalm 104:1-9, 25, 37b)

As we continue in our reading from Job this Sunday, we get to the part where God finally responds to Job’s cries of despair. And, interestingly enough, God does not directly address any of Job’s complaints or questions about the injustice of Job’s suffering or the senseless suffering in the wider world. Instead, God’s answer to Job is a creation story.

“Why has all this pain come upon me for no reason?” Job cries, “And what about all those orphans and widows starving out there, and all the wars, and the people who exploit and abuse others and get away with it? I demand an answer!”

And God replies, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Can you create lightning and make it rain? Can you provide food for all the creatures of the earth?”

He draws Job’s attention to the intricate workings of the wider world outside of Job’s small realm of existence and reminds Job that Job is not God, nor does the entire world revolve around Job. The story of Job seems to be suggesting that one possible solution to the “problem of evil,” the question of why suffering exists if the world is created by a benevolent God, is to shift our perspective from a human-centered point of view to a God-centered point of view. To “zoom out,” if you will, to see the bigger picture of how all the elements of the natural world fit together in an amazingly intricate and awe-inspiring configuration, of which humans are just one part. It can be humbling but comforting to realize that we are not the center of the universe.

Sewanee biologist David Haskell recently published a book called The Forest Unseen, in which he records his observations of one square meter of forest on the Cumberland Plateau over the course of a year. Although chock-full of scientific facts and figures, his approach is contemplative: his goal is to “search for the universal within the infinitesimally small” in the same way as Tibetan monks see the entire universe within the circular meditation aids called mandalas that they create out of colored sand, or in the same way as the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich saw the divine love and design of God in meditating on a hazelnut.

Whether describing the atomic physics behind the consistent hexagonal shape of snowflakes or the ways in which plants warn other plants about approaching insect predators by sending out chemical signals, Haskell’s meditations make fascinating scientific insights about the interconnectedness of all life accessible to a general audience. Although Haskell speaks of the inner workings of cells and organisms evolving through natural selection, not of God “tilting the waterskins of the heavens” to make it rain, his meditations on the greater workings of the universe put things in perspective for me in a similar way to what I think the story of Job intends to communicate in imagining God’s response to Job as an account of creation. Meditating on the wonders of creation reminds us that we are part of something much bigger than any of our individual lives.

Other authors of biblical texts turn to creation narratives in times of suffering as well. The “Song of the Three Young Men,” one of the canticles optional for use at Morning Prayer, is a passage from the Old Testament Book of Daniel that appears in the Greek version of the text but not the Hebrew. It details the song sung by Shadrach, Meshach, and Abendego after they are thrown in the fiery furnace for refusing to worship the golden image created by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. Significantly, their song in a moment of persecution and near-death is an extensive meditation on creation and a call for all creation to praise and worship the Lord:

“Glorify the Lord, every shower of rain and fall of dew, all winds and fire and heat,” they sing. “Storm clouds and thunderbolts, glorify the Lord, praise him and highly exalt him forever… Glorify the Lord, O mountains and hills and all that grows upon the earth… O springs of water, seas and streams, O whales and all that move in the waters. All birds of the air, glorify the Lord, praise him and highly exalt him forever.”(BCP 88-89)

In the face of possible death, they sing about the glories of creation. They recognize that the vastness of creation over which God is sovereign is much bigger than their individual lives and that the created order will continue to give glory to God, whether or not they personally survive to continue to give witness to him.

Many of the psalms also recount beautiful creation narratives, sometimes in the midst of a lament or struggle with God’s apparent absence or silence. Today’s psalm, 104, is a song entirely of thanksgiving and praise, with no verses of lament, but taken within the entire corpus of the psalms as a whole, they represent a body of poetic literature that both cries out to God in times of despair and finds hope through remembering and recounting the sacred stories of Israel’s history and recalling God’s creation of the world. During times of suffering, when, like Job, we wonder where God is and cannot feel his presence, we remember the places we’ve seen and experienced God in the past to find comfort – and creation or the natural world around us seems to be one of the primary places that many people, both ancients and moderns, find testament to God’s presence.

Meditating on creation can be comforting because it relieves us of any notion that it is our job to rule the world, to manage or control or “fix” things. Although we see many things that may seem wrong or broken with the world, we are reminded that that “God is God and we are not,” and that can be a very liberating thought for those of us who sometimes feel like Atlas, holding the weight of the world on our shoulders.

Meditating on creation can also help us to see that what may seem evil or horrific from one perspective might actually be quite magnificent and awe-inspiring when seen in the greater scheme of things. Watching a lion devour a gazelle might seem to be cruel, and certainly that moment is one of great suffering for the gazelle, but in the death of the gazelle comes nourishment for the lion. And the lion’s eventual death will provide nourishment for vultures or other birds of prey. Nothing is wasted. The energy bound up in each of these living creatures will not cease to exist, but be transformed, serving another purpose in the great cycle of life that many cultures and religions regard as sacred.

In leading a recent Quiet Day (9/28/12, at St. Mary's Sewanee) on the Song of the Three Young Men, that canticle of creation from Morning Prayer, Episcopal priest and author Barbara Cawthorne Crafton commented on the peace that comes from spending time meditating on creation. “The more time we spend with plants and animals, the more at peace we will be with our own end,” she said. Observing the cycle of life reminds us that, as we say on Ash Wednesday, we are dust and to dust we shall return.

God answers Job’s cries of despair with a song of creation because an awareness of our own mortality and our place in the great cycle of life has the potential to bring great comfort. And there is some indication in the text that Job does find comfort in reflecting on these things.

Although most translations of the final chapter of Job, which we will read in the lectionary next week, say that Job responds to God’s speech by repenting, by apologizing and “taking back” everything he’d said before, Hebrew Bible scholar Rebecca Abts Wright suggests a different translation. She is convinced that Job never repents, since he has done nothing wrong of which to repent – and even God acknowledges this in the final chapter when he says that Job has spoken truth about God while Job’s friends have not. Instead, she points out that the root of the Hebrew word translated as “repent,” while it can mean “to change the mind,” is never used in calls for people to repent elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. The root also means “to comfort,” and indeed, that same word is translated as “comfort” just a few verses later when Job’s relatives come to him and comfort him after the ordeal is over. Wright suggests that rather than translating the final verse of Job’s response to God’s speech as “therefore, I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes,” it could more accurately be translated as “therefore, I melt away and am comforted concerning dust and ashes.”

There’s a very different message there if she is correct. In Wright’s interpretation, the message is not that Job gets put in his place for questioning God and submits after receiving a divine “smack down.” Instead, after being reminded of the vastness of God’s creation and his small place in the grand scheme of things, he finally “lets go,” so to speak – that’s what I hear in the “melt away” part – and is “comforted concerning dust and ashes” – he is comforted about the fact of his own mortality and the human condition. He is reminded that he is dust and to dust he shall return, and he is “at peace with his own end.” He is comforted knowing that God is in control of the universe, and that God has heard his cries of pain, even if he does not understand the reasons for his suffering.

So perhaps the next time you find yourself struggling with something difficult, you might remember God’s answer to Job from the whirlwind and take a step outside to contemplate the movement of an ant on the pavement or the intricacies of the veins of the leaves on the trees around you. Step out of your mind for a moment and contemplate the bigger picture of God’s wondrous creation. Cultivating a sense of awe and respect for creation over time may bring you deepening waves of peace and a holy sense of connectedness with all life.