Sunday, September 21, 2025 – Leviticus 25:23-24, Genesis 2:4-15, Job 38
We’re now in the second Sunday of our “Season of Creation,” a season that churches all over the world are celebrating. The Season of Creation began in 1989 in the Orthodox Christian Church as a Day of Prayer for the Environment. It was later expanded into a global Season of Creation and in 2015, Pope Francis officially adopted the Season of Creation for the Catholic Church, and it has since been adopted by many Protestant churches as well.
Why do we do this and why do I feel it’s important? Of course, as Christians, our worship and praise is centered on the saving work of Jesus Christ. Therefore, we celebrate Jesus’ birth at Christmas and his death and resurrection during Passion Week and Easter. But I think it’s important to remember that we also worship God as Trinity. We use language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and also of Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. Before there was Jesus, before there was human sin, there was a creating God who manifested a glorious cosmos that God delighted in.
The Season of Creation is a time when we are invited to think about our cosmos, who it belongs to, what our role in this creation is as humans, and how we can honor and care for the world that God so loved that God sent His Son to save it.
Last Sunday, we heard the first creation story in Genesis, how God created all that exists, and how God called all of it “good” and even “very good.” God delighted in what God had made. Today, our readings begin with a simple and straightforward statement from God that “the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants. Throughout the land that you hold, you shall provide for the redemption of the land.”
The land is not ours, but God’s, and we are to provide for the land’s redemption. It’s not just human redemption that God cares about! God’s redemption – we are shown repeatedly in the Word – is for the entirety of the world. Not just humans!
We hear a similar message in the second creation story in Genesis, that of the Garden of Eden. Here we read that God created the first human being out of the dust of the earth. We can’t help but think about Ash Wednesday, when we are reminded that “we are but dust, and to dust we shall return.”
Our translation says that God made “man” out of the dust. But the original Hebrew says that God made the adam out of the adamah. That’s a very creative play on words, because it’s basically like saying that God made the earthling out of the earth, or the human out of the humus.
What we learn from this reading is that we are inextricably linked to the earth. We didn’t drop onto this earth from somewhere else. We arose out of it. And yet we also have been brought to life by the breath of God breathed into us as spirit and we have a particular purpose: we were put in the Garden “to till it and keep it.” We are meant to be God’s gardeners. When I was in seminary in Chicago, I heard an Old Testament professor say that he would translate that phrase as that we are to “serve and protect” the land. That’s what “dominion” is truly about. We are meant to love and care for the land, not to rule over it and harm it. That is our proper role.
Our third reading today is just a portion of what God says to Job out of the whirlwind. But let me remind you here of the bigger story so you can really see what’s going on and how it helps us to understand our place and role in God’s creation.
Poor Job, described as a faithful and righteous man, is put through all kinds of horrible trials by the Adversary. His animals die, his crops fail, his family dies, and he is left covered with boils and sitting on an ash heap. And he’s furious because he doesn’t think he deserves this horrible suffering. He can’t see that suffering strikes all, no matter how “good” or “bad” we are.
His friends come to sit with him in his grief, but then Job curses the day he was born and rails against God, demanding to meet God in court to make his case. He wants to prove that God has wronged him, that he did nothing to deserve this treatment. Job questions God’s righteousness, saying that God is unjust, complaining about all the things that the evil get away with, but here he is, a good man, subjected to this terrible suffering. Job’s friends are scandalized that Job would talk this way about and to God. But God can handle our fury, because at the end of the story, God is not angry with Job, but at Job’s friends, who kept trying to stop his tirade. God blesses Job with a new life that is more bountiful than before.
But in his tirade, Job really gives God both barrels, and God’s response is to show him his proper place in God’s creation. Now look, we believe that God is love. We know that Jesus reveals who God is, and we know that Jesus is love incarnate. But in this text, when God shows up in the whirlwind, it’s not as a touchy-feely loving embrace. No, it’s as the majestic creator of everything; the One, the All, the God in whose presence we drop to our knees in humility, the God who is beyond all names and forms. The God we can never know or understand fully.
This God says, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Was it through your voice that this glorious creation was made? Was it through your wisdom that this whole adventure was designed? Are you even aware of what all goes into this?”
Remember that television commercial for Maxell audio from the 1970s where the guy’s being literally blown away by the sound coming out of his speakers? That’s how I imagine Job during God’s speech. After God has finished, Job says, “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me that I did not know…therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.” This phrase, “I despise myself,” can also be translated as “I reject my words.” I think of it as something like, “I take back what I said and now I’m willing to go quietly back to my ash heap.” Job returns in humility to the dust of the earth with a better understanding of his place in the whole of life. He sees that he is part of something much greater that can never really make sense to us and that we can never adequately explain. All each of us can do is live our one life as fully as possible, glorifying God through the beauty we create, and giving God our gratitude, knowing that we will all experience suffering because that is the nature of the world. It is both beauty and tragedy, and our place in it is not as rulers but as servants, gardeners, tenders of all of life.
