October 25 Proper 25
The first “real” tool I ever bought was a Skil model 77 worm drive saw. Before that purchase, what little equipment I had fell into the category carpenters derisively call “homeowner models”.
I tried to play it cool the next morning, nonchalantly unfurling my extension cord, which was a way too bright orange compared with the others. It lay in a rigid zig zag, obviously having emerged only recently from its cardboard packaging sleeve. And then I dropped my shiny new saw beside it, hoping the rest of the crew would notice. But hoping they would pretend not to.
Fat chance on the pretending not to part.
They all oooohed and aaaahed and slapped me on the back. I was mildly embarrassed but mostly pleased. But then James, our boss, said, “Did you look at it last night? You had to, didn’t you? It just sat there in the corner of the room and you just had to look over at it every now and then, didn’t you?”
I felt like a kid whose mother had found dirty magazines in his room. Heck yeah, I looked at it. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever purchased, and it announced to everyone who had the sense to know such things that I was a real carpenter. How could I ignore something so wonderful as it lay there on the linoleum by the front door of my apartment.
Then James told me to finish lugging sheets of plywood to the roof where Bob and John would do the skilled work of actually cutting and nailing them into place.
This story will translate into almost any other human endeavor, and it’s not just “a guy thing” either. It works with knitting needles, fishing rods, kitchen utensils, laptop computers, and fountain pens. Whatever the tools of your craft or trade, the tools themselves bring a certain satisfaction.
And don’t you think this satisfaction is related to control? A good tool suggests competence. And competence is another name for control. If I’m competent in this little corner of the world, I’m gaining control. I can make a 2X4 or a meringue or a sousaphone do what I want it to do.
There is something very good in this impulse to master a task and gain a little control. It’s what sends us humans forward. It’s how wonders of the world come to be, how diseases are cured, how cantatas are composed, and how children learn and grow up. There is a proper satisfaction in a well made tool or a task well done.
But is it enough to control more and more of our world? Or even more and more of our lives? Do we get what we really need in our lives by gaining control? In the end, the book of Job may simply be a long, elegant ‘no’ to that question.
“I have uttered what I did not understand,” says Job to God “things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.” These aren’t the words of a guy who is satisfied with his own competence. If life is a jobsite, at the end of the book, Job is carrying nothing but an old Sears brand circular saw with a bad blade. Clearly this guy doesn’t know what’s going on.
To which Job would respond, “Yeah, you’re right. I don’t know what’s going on. And isn’t it all just wonderful?”
Job’s world has been closing down upon him for this whole story. Less and less falls within his control. He started out with health and wealth and pretty much everything else life has to offer it seems. Then it’s all slowly taken away. He started out this story competent at life with all kinds of things falling under his control. As the story comes to an end, he controls almost nothing.
And it is precisely in that moment in which he can do almost nothing, that moment in which he seems to control almost nothing in this world at all, that he looks up and is shown the mystery of all that is beyond him. The wonder of everything that has always been beyond human control, even in the best days of Job’s life. “Were you here when I laid the foundation of the earth?” God asks. “Can you draw out the sea monster Leviathan with a fishhook?”
These divine questions, which come in the chapter before what we read today, are rhetorical, of course. Job’s unspoken answers are no after no after no. No, the hawk does not soar by Job’s wisdom, nor did he give the horse its might. No, Job was not the one who shut the sea with doors nor had the gates of death been revealed to him.
“Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth?” he is asked. “No,” is Job’s tacit response. “I can’t comprehend even that.”
But the strange turn in this story is that the universe begins to open up again to Job, not as he begins to control it again, but as he realizes that he never controlled very much of it at all. It’s as Job sees how small he really is, that he sees how wonderful, how full of wonder, God’s creation truly is.
We modern people are awfully competent. Our control extends down to the splitting of atoms, and our tools include vehicles that scurry around on Mars. We’re also very good at explaining things. Science has cleared up lots of mysteries for us. The sea wasn’t shut in with doors by God. The people of Job’s day just hadn’t heard about plate tectonics.
But wonder isn’t really about whether or not we can believe fantastical things. Job didn’t suddenly come to believe God made the world at the end of this story. He didn’t suddenly realize that the hawk soars by God’s wisdom or the horse receives its might from God. No, it wasn’t different or better information that changed Job’s perspective. God doesn’t tell Job anything he doesn’t already believe. God uses the world Job already knows to awaken Job’s wonder. Job just needs to look up and out from his life and remember the wonder that’s all around him.
So whether our language about the world or our understanding of the world is more accurate than Job’s may not be relevant at all to how awakened our own wonder is. If I live in a culture that believes bad weather is the result of angry gods, I don’t automatically have a greater capacity for wonder than I would in a time that understands jet streams and high pressure systems.
Believing that gods make the weather isn’t the same as believing that life is a miracle.
And conversely, believing that there are natural explanations for things doesn’t necessarily push any of the mystery and wonder out of life at all. Does believing serotonin levels in the brain affect our moods have to do away with the mystery of a mother’s love for her child? Of course not. Biologists and neuroscientists fall in love and have children too.
Believing that gods don’t make the weather isn’t the same as believing that life’s not a miracle.
Now when Job says, “I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes”, you probably weren’t thinking, “Well, good. Job seems to be feeling better.” But in a way, I think he was. He wasn’t saying, “I’m worthless” so much as he was saying, “I’m small.” The end of the book of Job isn’t about Job’s decreasing self esteem. It’s about Job’s growing astonishment at the grandeur of God. And he sees his own life as wonderfully small in comparison to miracle of the life itself.
Job’s blessings are returned and increased in the end. Job isn’t meant to live forever with so little control over his world. He returns to a life of competence and decent tools. Maybe he bought himself a brand new staff to celebrate his changed fortunes. A staff made by the finest staff carver in the area to use as he walked around inspecting all those new sheep and camels and oxen and donkeys. Maybe he even leaned that gleaming, perfect staff next to the door of his tent and had to look over at it every now and then the night before he got up and put it to use inspecting his herds.
But if he did, that perfectly human satisfaction about a fine new tool, that very human joy about exercising a little control over a corner of God’s creation was put in a healthy perspective now for Job. Satisfaction in what or how much he controlled of his world wasn’t enough. He knew that most of life—from the meaning of love to the answer to the simple question “Why?”—most of life is a wonderful mystery. Our lives are small, and God is great. Which is wonderful, wonderful news.
Because it may be only when our wonder has been awakened by God that we see the people and things around us as the blessings that they truly are. Amen.