Proper 7 Year B 2024: Job 38:1-11 and Mark 4:35-41

At the end of the summer after your first year in seminary, it’s common to go on some kind of vacation. Usually that’s because you’ve spent the ten weeks before that vacation completing a chaplaincy internship known as CPE, or clinical pastoral education. My CPE was ten weeks working 60 hours a week at a hospital in Fredericksburg, VA. After graduation from CPE, my husband Stefan and I went on a long awaited trip to Germany. One day we rented a car and drove into the Black Forest, where we visited a farm/museum that had some historical exhibits of what life would have been like for the people who had originally worked the farm in the early 17th century. There was kitchen equipment, an organ, children’s toys, and a room of religious items. It was the caption in the room of religious items that…set me off a bit. It essentially said that these people lived such hard, miserable lives that they needed the promise of something better after death to keep them hanging on. 

This is, at its kindest interpretation, a fundamental misunderstanding of faith. This room was after the display of children’s toys and of music. People who are just trudging through life hoping death will be better don’t make toys for their kids. They don’t waste their precious little free time or hard earned money on an instrument.

But these were people who understood chaos. Who felt the unpredictability of our mortality in their daily lives. For whom the story of Job losing his family and his livestock and his own health felt uncomfortably possible. Like this could happen to them. We live in a time now when life has never been more predictable. With the advent of things like vaccines and fortified foods, infant mortality has plummeted and malnutrition in general is easier to fight than ever before. With all that said and true, chaos remains real. There remains chance and unpredictability in different ways today like mass shootings and bigger and stronger weather events and a lack of explanations for all sorts of things in our individual lives that can make it all feel like a whirlwind.

Which is right where we meet God. Out of the whirlwind. The whirlwind is the linchpin that holds our lessons from Job and from Mark together. It is where the Lord makes himself known to Job and it is from where Jesus shows who he is to the disciples. 

The word translated to “whirlwind” in Job and the “storm” in Mark comes from one and the same word. It is true that Job and Mark were written in different languages, Job in Hebrew and Mark in Greek. But the writers of the New Testament would have had the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. The Greek word in Job in the Septuagint is the exact same word as the Greek in Mark: λαῖλαψ. Λαῖλαψ is never a single gust, nor a steadily blowing wind, but it is violent; it is a storm breaking forth from black thunder-clouds in furious gusts, with floods of rain, throwing everything topsy-turvy.

It is through all of this that God arrives. That God makes Godself known. That the storms are calmed and our fears assuaged. That we are reminded that we are not in control, not only of the world at large, but in our own corner of the world, our own personal lives. We are reminded in these stories of Job and of the disciples that just because the world doesn’t make sense to us doesn’t mean that it doesn’t make sense to God. And we are reminded that the answer is not in figuring out the why or how, but in letting go, surrendering to the power of our God who comes out of the chaos and has the power to quiet and still the storms.

Mark goes further to make his point. The Greek phrase is clumsily translated as “a storm violent of wind”, with “violent” and “of wind” actually being two unnecessary words. But this redundancy drives home Mark’s point: this storm isn’t messing around. And it should be setting off alarm bells to Mark’s readers that the disciples are about to hear from the Lord - much like how going up a mountain, any time in scripture, is a cue or code to be ready for the Lord - the same thing when there’s a whirlwind. In 2 Kings, the same word describes the whirlwind that took Elijah up to the heavens. In Jonah the same word describes the storm that is only stilled by Jonah being thrown overboard. The word is used only two other times in the New Testament. Luke uses it in his telling of this same story. And in 2 Peter, it is used to describe the punishment that will befall false prophets: waterless springs and mists driven by a λαῖλαψ. Each time this word appears in these scriptures, God makes Godself known and asserts Godself in creation.

My daughter just turned five and she got her first big girl bicycle for her birthday. And at first she didn’t, and to some extent still doesn’t, want to ride it downhill. It goes too fast for her. She’s not in control yet, largely because she hasn’t learned to look far enough ahead of her handlebars. She can’t see that her bike is about to go back uphill and she’ll slow down. God can see further ahead of us than we can fathom. Even if we are looking farther than our handlebars, God can see hills we can’t imagine. So often, more often than we’d like to admit, our job is to trust and to follow.

I have a colleague who is a retired Air Force chaplain. The chaplains would have friendly debates amongst themselves. One day, my colleague asked his rabbi friend about his thoughts on heaven, about what happens after we die. The rabbi, as good rabbis do, answered the question with a question. He said, “that’s the problem with you people, you’ve turned it into a rewards system. Let me ask you this. Do you love your parents because you hope you’ll get an inheritance after you die, or do you do so because it’s the right thing to do?”

We don’t do this, this practice of our faith, of following Jesus, in case we die, like a bargain. The resurrection didn’t offer us a contract of hope after we die in exchange for a lifetime of misery as was alluded to in that exhibit Stefan and I visited. We practice our faith in case we live. Because the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is so compelling, so transformative for our lives here and now that we follow this Jesus. We can take our troubles, our struggles, our pain, our sorrow, and leave them at the foot of the cross for their transformation now. This symbol of death and suffering that was the cross was transformed into a reminder of the hope in Jesus that carries us through every day. That because death has been transformed, nothing can get between us and Jesus. The death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus wasn’t just a trick that unlocked everlasting life that begins after we take our last breaths here on this earth. It changed everything throughout all of time. It matters now, in this life. The cross was its own whirlwind, out of which came an everlasting life that has already begun.

Because of Jesus’ resurrection, whatever λαῖλαψ, whatever violent storm, whatever whirlwind interrupts our lives, we can hear God speaking to us through that whirlwind. We worship a God who redeems; in him there is no darkness that can overcome the light. And we can take all of our darkness and leave it at the cross, surrender the pain and the suffering, cling to the hope of the resurrection, and live in peace and joy today…and always. Amen.