Text: Job 38

Now that I started this series using poetry, I felt like I needed to continue that pattern. So I went looking for poetry about creation. And especially about the heavens, about the weather and sky. And I found Joy Harjo. Thank God for Joy Harjo. This is her poem “Praise the Rain.”

Praise the rain; the seagull dive

The curl of plant, the raven talk—

Praise the hurt, the house slack

The stand of trees, the dignity—

Praise the dark, the moon cradle

The sky fall, the bear sleep—

Praise the mist, the warrior name

The earth eclipse, the fired leap—

Praise the backwards, upward sky

The baby cry, the spirit food—

Praise canoe, the fish rush

The hole for frog, the upside-down—

Praise the day, the cloud cup

The mind flat, forget it all—

 

Praise crazy. Praise sad.

Praise the path on which we’re led.

Praise the roads on earth and water.

Praise the eater and the eaten.

Praise beginnings; praise the end.

Praise the song and praise the singer.

 

Praise the rain; it brings more rain.

Praise the rain; it brings more rain.

Joy Harjo is an indigenous poet (and author and musician) of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She often draws on First Nation storytelling and histories, as well as feminist and social justice poetic traditions, and frequently incorporates indigenous myths, symbols, and values into her writing. She once commented, “I feel strongly that I have a responsibility to all the sources that I am: to all past and future ancestors, to my home country, to all places that I touch down on and that are myself, to all voices, all women, all of my tribe, all people, all earth, and beyond that to all beginnings and endings.”

What we encounter in the scripture text today is also a poem. It’s a very different kind of poem with a very different tone. I read somewhere that this is one of the only – if not the only – time in scripture where God expresses sarcasm. I’m not mad about it.

In this poem, God is responding to a long dialogue between Job, who has experienced a fall from fortune, and his friends who blame him for his own suffering – he must have provoked God in some way to cause it. And God’s response to this argument is more or less, “Who do y’all think you are?” and/or “Do you even know who I am?”

In other words, God is setting these humans and their petty problems in the context of all of Creation and in the vast expanse of the universe and the non-human world. They, and Job in particular, need to find their right place. 

I understand that losing his family and livelihood and land etc is not a petty problem as he experiences it. And he has in all accounts been faithful and observant. But what the Biblical poem explains, in some ways like Harjo’s poem, is that the world is so big and so magnificent and so beyond human, we are called on not only to recognize it but to praise. For Harjo, recognize and praise the Creation itself. In Job, God challenges the reader to recognize the Divine hand in all things.

I grew up on the prairies. Although I lived in town, our house was literally right at the edge of town and my bedroom window looked out on the sun rising over miles of wheat fields. Saskatchewan is called the “Land of Living Skies.” It’s on the license plates. The sky is ever present and I feel like I breathe deeper and more fully when I cross the into the wide open space of the prairie and shrink under all that sky.

That upbringing in the Canadian prairies meant that weather and its impact on the land was a real determinate of livelihoods and day to day functioning. Farm kids needed to have a designated billet family in town so that if there was a blizzard they’d have a place to stay. Busses wouldn’t run in a storm. And if it didn’t rain enough one year, that impacted a farm family’s ability to stay afloat. Dad might have to take some shifts driving truck or mom pick up work for the school office.

One summer when I was Naomi’s age, after my first year in college I worked as the general all-purpose farm hand for a family who had a few head of cattle and also farmed wheat and oats. One of my jobs was patching fences, so I got to be out under the sky a lot and see the weather coming. You can see a storm coming from a long way away on the prairie.

So when the poem in Job talks about God speaking from the whirlwind, the image I have is from the back of a pick-up, the sun hovering low and red in the western sky and from the east, low, flat clouds that are dark grey, almost purple. And from the clouds, one after another, first farther off, then closer, then off aways, almost like tentacles, funnel clouds reaching toward the earth and being pulled back up into the shelf of cloud, some almost touching the field but not quite. 

Lightening crackled here and there in the distance. The golden light reflected off the clouds and off of the fields. It was all both terrifying and so so beautiful. The power in those whirlwinds could have destroyed everything they touched if they’d met the ground. My boss and I headed back to the farm to hang out in the basement until the danger was passed. There were lots of days in my summer childhood when we were told to spend time in the basement because of tornado threats.

And now I imagine those prairie skies and the tornados of my youth as I read about God speaking form the whirlwind. Because I can imagine one of those whirling clouds coming close and speaking with power and beauty and anger and snark the words of this poem that are also both powerful and beautiful.

I mean, listen to the majestic rhetoric of the Creator:

‘who shut in the sea with doors

    when it burst out from the womb?—

when I made the clouds its garment,

    and thick darkness its swaddling band,

and said, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther,

    and here shall your proud waves be stopped”? 

I love the image of God making the clouds the garment of the sky, or using them for swaddling. But also the limiting – the holding back of the chaos of the waters.

Or how about this:

‘Where is the way to the dwelling of light,
    and where is the place of darkness,
that you may take it to its territory
    and that you may discern the paths to its home?
Surely you know, for you were born then,
    and the number of your days is great!

Again this poetry of light and dark each has a place, a dwelling. A home. And God’s very snarky reminder that humans think we know it all. We think we’re long-lived. And the writer of Job didn’t even have an understanding that we do that in fact our time on this earth is miniscule compared to the age of the planet, to the millions and billions of years when it’s been inhabited by non-human life.

We humans have become far too big and take up way more than our fair share of Creation. It is true that humans become too big for our right place. Our consumption, our pollution, our destruction, our assumption that it’s all ours, that we are central has led to an imbalance – so that the whirlwinds and weather too are growing larger and larger. 

Now, I don’t literally think that God is becoming a hurricane to punish us for our consumption and our dependence and use on fossil fuels, but that has been the natural consequence. I often thing about Sarah Augustine and Sheri Hostetler’s book that we studied together last year, So that We and Our Children May Live. Primarily their repeated reminder that we live in a closed system. The resources of God’s creation are finite. If we continue to act as if they are not we will – we already do – feel the consequences. 

Here in the Pacific Northwest, on the coast and in the mountains, we know the sky in a different way than the prairies of my youth. We don’t get blizzards, but we feel the imbalance in non-balance in smokey summers and heat domes. In winters where the usual misty sprinkle is replaced by floods that destroy and that MDS is still cleaning up after. Or we go for weeks or months without rain when we would usually have a steady drizzle. 

We would be wise to remember the words from Job and of our indigenous forebears and neighbors. Wisdom Joy Harjo invokes. To invite balance and remember our right place as a relative among the raven, the fish, the frog. As a speck below the vast expanse of the sky.

In fact indigenous peoples have been leaders globally in preserving the wisdom of care for Creation and I hope to talk about that more next week. But for now, I will conclude again with the words of Joy Harjo. And when she says something like, “Praise the rain!” Perhaps you will think of the rain and give thanks. Or perhaps you will remember that the rain, like the icon of a beloved saint in some traditions, is a window to the Divine to whom it belongs and as such we find our place in Creation, praising the Creator.

Praise the rain; the seagull dive

The curl of plant, the raven talk—

Praise the hurt, the house slack

The stand of trees, the dignity—

Praise the dark, the moon cradle

The sky fall, the bear sleep—

Praise the mist, the warrior name

The earth eclipse, the fired leap—

Praise the backwards, upward sky

The baby cry, the spirit food—

Praise canoe, the fish rush

The hole for frog, the upside-down—

Praise the day, the cloud cup

The mind flat, forget it all—

 

Praise crazy. Praise sad.

Praise the path on which we’re led.

Praise the roads on earth and water.

Praise the eater and the eaten.

Praise beginnings; praise the end.

Praise the song and praise the singer.

 

Praise the rain; it brings more rain.

Praise the rain; it brings more rain.

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