Whirlwind

Bishop Wright: 0:00

Faith is a currency, and sometimes we have some to lend and sometimes we need to borrow, and so what would it be like to be alongside someone who’s a Job or a Jobette right and not to lend them a platitude, but lend them a faith, a faith that touches a hand or touches a shoulder, or has a word that’s encouraging, or a compliment or something.

Melissa: 0:42

your host, Melissa Rau, and this is a conversation inspired by Bishop Wright’s For Faith weekly devotion, sent out every Friday. You can find a link to this week’s For Faith and a link to subscribe in the For description. Good morning, bishop.

Bishop Wright: 0:55

Good morning. For

Melissa: 0:57

This week’s devotion. You called Whirlwind and it’s based off Job 38. And I know you have a really great relationship with Job. Kind of want to unpack Job 38, create kind of that big picture idea.

Bishop Wright: 1:12

Yeah Well, I like Job, I like the story. I think it’s a must read. It’s quite a journey. It’s about suffering, undeserved suffering, and who is God in suffering. It’s about who your friends are in suffering. I mean it’s an incredible. I mean it’s a conversation starts off as a conversation between the devil and God. Right, some folks, some scholars, wonder if there was ever a Job. Other people think this is some important literature, whether there was an actual Job or not. This is important literature because it centers us at the intersection of where is God in suffering? And so that’s the perennial question. I mean, millennia of people have wondered that. All the ancient traditions try to walk us through that. So Job was important. So whether Job lived or not really for me at least, is a secondary matter. What we can learn about God and ourselves in this phenomenal story and particularly the 38th chapter, I think, is good for all of us.

Melissa: 2:28

Okay, so you called it whirlwind and I really like where your devotion goes into this it’s really talking about. I love this line. The truth of Job’s story in ours is a great paradox because it’s in the whirlwind of troubles where we experience the depth of our frailty and the height of God’s foreverness. Yeah, Kind of a big, bold statement right there.

Bishop Wright: 2:50

It’s a big, bold statement. Well, job is full of big, bold statements, so the whirlwind is a quote from the actual story, right? So the Lord answered Job. So we heard Job’s questions. Job was basically like I mean to paraphrase hey, god, where were you, man, you know, when my health was failing and my children were dying and my herds were run off and these raiders assaulted, and my wife just tells me hey, you ought to just curse God and die. Your life sucks. I mean, I’m paraphrasing, that’s not actually in Job, but I mean that’s the spirit of it, right, the friends come and the friends think that your misery is a consequence of your secret, immoral life. And so Job, he’s suffering, he’s alone, he has legitimate questions. I mean, he’s buried his children, right. And so now, when we get to the 38th chapter, god is now ready to answer Job, right, and it’s instructive to see how God answers right, according to Job.

Bishop Wright: 4:01

And so Job gets his answers. You know, the Lord frames the answer in three ways who, where and can. And here are the quotes. God asks who determined the measurements of the earth’s foundation? And oh, by the way, job, where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? And incidentally, job, can you direct the lightning strikes Right.

Bishop Wright: 4:30

So why I said is that in the depth of Job’s frailty he finds the height of God’s foreverness is because of that. I mean, god does not give him granular answers to his suffering, he simply tells Job who God is. Here’s who I am right. So I’m God Almighty, I’m doing all this kind of stuff. It may be that I’m working on some stuff that may be over your pay grade, right Over your head, and I don’t feel like Job is being diminished by these answers, right? Because some of us might hear this and say, wow, god is not that nice. I mean, job is, you know, being vulnerable and asking. But again, scripture is always moving us, moving us, moving us, opening up our ego, opening up our mind.

Bishop Wright: 5:25

And so there’s a paradox here, and the paradox is is that the truth of the matter is and it’s an unfortunate truth for many of us, we don’t like it, and that is, is that some of us know God because of the depth of our hardships.

Bishop Wright: 5:42

And the truth of the matter is is that many of us would not know very much about God if it weren’t for real life hardships that we had to find our way through, that have, in fact and here’s a word for us purified our faith and made it more of a genuine article.

Bishop Wright: 6:00

I heard a quote the other day that said religion is for people who are afraid of hell, but spirituality is for people who know full well what hell is. I think they’re on to something, and so Job is invited beyond religion, this quid pro quo if I live a good life, I’ll have a protective hedge around my life, nothing bad will happen. So God is purging Job of that idea in this. The truth of the matter is you can be a good little boy and a good little girl, say your prayers, go to church every Sunday, tithe, do all that and you might get cancer, or someone you love might get cancer, or here we are in the aftermath of Helene, or your church might get flooded, or you might lose your home, etc. So that is not God’s equation and I think that needs to be purged from some of us. Some of us have a quid pro quo relationship with God, but the deeper end of the swimming pool is life happens to the just and the unjust, and God is still God.

Melissa: 7:55

Job’s little life. And Job’s life was hard, man. I mean, we know it right, we know it on purpose. That’s not the point, I guess. I don’t know. I kind of feel like the whole quid pro quo thing, the prosperity gospel. If I do this I’m going to get X. I’m thinking life can be life and life is really hard. And yet what I think you’re saying is that it’s not so much our relationship with God or God’s deliverance from the difficulties, but that God is present. Is that? Yes, I don’t know. Yeah, I guess.

Bishop Wright: 8:31

I mean, it’s a complicated thing, isn’t it? I mean, I think that what are the benefits from a companion who loves you unconditionally and who will walk beside you in anything and everything? What are the benefits? Right, the benefits, in some ways, are more than wealth. The benefits are sort of more than all the sort of material things that we can say. Right, there are significant benefits.

Bishop Wright: 8:58

And also and this is the hard part of the story, it may be that we have constructed a religion that puts us at the center and not God. I mean, I think what Job gets in this illumination, right, I love God. God, being sarcastic, where were you, job, you know, when I designed lightning? You know, in another part of the story it says is that do you feed the birds of prey? Joe, right, can you tell me? You know how much snow is in the warehouse of snow? I mean, did you put the leopard? I mean, did you put the spots on the leopard? I mean, it just goes, god in the story gets a little bit sanctimonious, but you take the point.

Bishop Wright: 9:42

But I think one of the things that you know it’s a funny line that I’m trying to walk here and what I’m trying to say is is that we matter to God. We matter an awful lot to God, right, but in mattering to God, the way that God has decided to be with us is to be the most real, most durable, most trustworthy thing that there is in all the vicissitudes of life. Look, here’s one of the things that the modern mind believes that death is the worst thing that can happen to you. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that death is the worst thing that can happen to you. I believe that meaninglessness is one of the worst things that can happen to you. Absolute despair is one of the worst things that can happen to you. To feel absolutely alone and isolated in this world of 8 billion people and in this country of 360 billion, to think that no one gives a flying fig about you, might be worse than any kind of hell we could imagine. And so to know that there is a God you know, I mean Psalm 8 does this the best. There’s a God who designed the universe and yet came, as we say in the South, came to see about us, means the world. And that that God is more than cancer, more than divorce, more than hardship, financial hardship, et cetera, et cetera, means an awful lot, and so we’re at this 38th chapter. But then, in God’s time, job gets another sense of God, this restorative sense of God. But let’s not focus on that, let’s not race ahead.

Bishop Wright: 11:17

What did the whirlwind I mean? Here’s a question for all of us how has the whirlwinds of your life deepened your faith? Now, the risk there is this Sometimes faith gets broken in the whirlwinds, and sometimes this is complicated. Sometimes that’s the best thing that can happen to you.

Bishop Wright: 11:46

I was talking to a young seminarian the other day, a young fellow who was in his first year of seminary to learn to be a priest, and he was sharing with me how the faith that he brought to seminary is being dismantled. And you know, having graduated from seminary, graduated from seminary 28 years or so ago I said oh well, that’s par for the course, not to worry, it’ll be reassembled by the time you graduate, in a more durable and, I would say, a more scripturally coherent way. He laughed and I hope that will be his experience, and that certainly is the experience of many of us. And so the whirlwind of life can actually deepen our faith with God, because what we find in God, in the whirlwind, is the authenticity of who. God is right, which is not, you know, this little mansy pansy God, but a God who brings God’s foreverness and God’s depth of meaning and God’s depth of presence to all of our situations.

Melissa: 12:59

And so what about the innocent bystander who might be viewing a Job, a real life Job, you know, in their own wallowing and hardship and hell living, hell yeah. What does this passage say for those folks, the people beyond hell?

Bishop Wright: 13:22

Now this is an important question because as Job is suffering, and then Job in this chapter and God are having their conversation, so what is the role of Job’s friends as Job is suffering? I think that’s your question, right, and notice what the friends do in the story, right, they come because Job had been affluent and Job had done well and Job was pious and he was upstanding in the community. You know he was that guy right. Job had done well and Job was pious and he was upstanding in the community. You know he was that guy right. And so what they kind of did was sneak in through the side and sort of show up in a salacious way that you know they really wanted to see if they could get a handle on what his private immorality had been that had yielded all this suffering.

Bishop Wright: 14:03

And so, rather than to be those people, I think how we get alongside of the Job’s in our own life is to say I am praying for you, I am with you, you can call me anytime, what do you need, et cetera. And in their own time, and if they’re able, they can tell their story, they can walk you through their lapses and meaning, their lostness, their misery, their legitimate questions about where God is in their own suffering. So I think we show up with here’s the way I like to say it Faith is a currency and sometimes we have some to lend and sometimes we need to borrow. And so what would it be like to be alongside someone who’s a Job or a Jobette, right, and not to lend them a platitude, but lend them a faith, a faith that touches a hand or touches a shoulder, or has a word that’s encouraging, or a compliment or something, or just even a pledge. Hey, I’m right here with you.

Bishop Wright: 15:10

I just got off a call with the Bishop of Western North Carolina that has been utterly laid low by Hurricane Helene I mean, he’s not sure right now that he can account for everybody and to hear his heartbreak in all of this and to hear him wonder about what to do next, etc. And then we I was so proud of us as the province, four bishops there out of us as the province for bishops there we were there in that silence that was reverent and understanding, but also there to pledge. You know our alongside-ness, you know in ways that were material and ways that were spiritual. So I think that’s what we do, because our season is coming.

Bishop Wright: 16:05

If we know anything about this life with God, either we’re heading into a whirlwind, we’re in the midst of a whirlwind or we’ve just come out of a whirlwind. That’s kind of a definition of life. And so in God’s economy, sometimes I need to borrow and sometimes I need to lend Right. Sometimes I need to borrow and sometimes I need to lend, but all of us are the beneficiaries of God who says you don’t know my ways, but I’m still God and I’m right here with you.

Melissa: 16:37

Come and know me even in this. Bishop, thank you for that. And listeners, thank you for listening to For People. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at Bishop Rob Wright. Please subscribe, leave a review and we’ll be back with you next week.