God Talks Back!

Job 38:1-7, 34-41
Then YHWH answered Job from out of the tempest,
“Who is this who darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
Let's see if you are man enough to face me.
I will ask the questions now
and you will declare what you know to me.
Where were you when I established the earth?
Let me know if you have the understanding.
Who set its measurements?
For you certainly know!
Or who stretched the measuring line on it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang out together
and all the children of Elohim shouted out in triumph?…
"Can you lift up your voice to the clouds,
so that a flood of waters may cover you?
Can you send forth lightnings,
so that they may go and say to you, 'Here we are'?
Who has put wisdom in the inward parts,
or given understanding to the mind?
Who has the wisdom to number the clouds?
Or who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens,
when the dust runs into a mass and the clods cling together?
"Can you hunt the prey for the lion,
or satisfy the appetite of the young lions,
when they crouch in their dens, or lie in wait in their covert?
Who provides for the raven its prey,
when its young ones cry to God, and wander about for lack of food?

There were folks who said Bill Fitchett was never the same after the last nor’easter. When he brought his last goat back from the island in his Adirondack guideboat, a swift little canoe-like racer he’d bought off a New York steamer, folks in Oyster thought it was an admission of abject failure and defeat. There was a reason old Bill had earned the nickname “Hardtime.” It seemed like his whole life had been a series of reverses. Call it bad luck. Call it a curse. Call it the wrath of a fickle God. Folks on the Eastern Shore called it all three.

In 1839 Hardtime Fitchett finally quit the shifting strip of land that was sometimes one long stretch of barrier island, sometimes two. Prout’s Island the northern end was called. Great Sand Shoal was the name of the southern. But the names changed as quickly as the island itself in those days, migrating between the names of locals and the most prominent features discerned by frequent visitors.

Folks said Hardtime’s sale of the island was as much a sign of his consistent misfortune as any other example one might draw from his beleaguered life. He finally sold out to a Yankee merchant by the name of Nathan Cobb who had been running a store in Oyster for a couple of years but who really made his living from salvaging cargo and more from wrecks along the coast. Cobb bought the island for $100 and 100 bags of salt. The suspicion among the locals was that the salt came from the very island he was buying from Hardtime.

Cobb seemed as blessed as Fitchett was cursed. Though residents thought him strange to head out eight miles from port with a wife and three sons to make a home on the hostile strip of marsh and sand, he made it work for over sixty years, transforming the island, which he renamed Cobb Island, into a premier hunt and beach resort that welcomed the rich and famous from all along the Eastern seaboard. It was only another great storm in 1896 that ended the Cobbs run of good fortune.

Hardtime Fitchett knew all about the destructive power of storms. His own efforts at scratching a profitable existence from the island were frequently mocked by storms that spit sand into grazing land and salt ponds, that wrenched the timbers from the small structures he had occasionally built for barns and short sojourns, that sucked his cattle out to sea and split the island with new inlets. Each time the land changed, Hardtime would rebuild, restock, and recover what he could.

But the neighbors noticed the toll it was taking on him. One time his cousin, Elijah, helped him out in transporting five new sheep out to the island on his sloop. It was a miserably hot, August day in the middle of what the locals called “the sick season”. The wind was calm as they pulled ashore at the head of a creek that wound through the marsh on the back side of the island. Black flies swarmed around the sheep. Elijah was swatting furiously at biting insects he couldn’t see. But Hardtime seemed not even to have the will to resist the noxious mix of flies, mosquitoes and no-see-ums. Elijah wondered if he felt he didn’t deserve better. As Fitchett drove the sheep past the foundation of a ruined barn, Elijah spoke his nickname for the first time. Out loud, to no one in particular, he said, “God knows, that’s a man who knows hard times. Hardtime Fitchett must be your name.”

There were other maladies to add to the aura. The smallpox had attacked him as a child and left Hardtime permanently scarred. He’d lost two children in childbirth and his wife on the birth of the third. That child survived to adulthood, then died herself when the cholera came to the Shore. Hardtime never lost his religion through the trials. Each Sunday he went to church to sing of God’s amazing grace and prayed that a thousand tongues might sing his great redeemer’s praise. But there were times when his own tongue stuck in his mouth, when his own praise was choked by tears. He was an upright man, but the sheep on Hardtime’s island knew that he could also raise his voice to challenge God, to ask the vast Atlantic Ocean and its maker why he should suffer such hurt.

It was the nor’easter that changed things. There were signs that it was going to be a bad one. The winds had shifted dramatically in the night before the storm and Hardtime knew it was going to be bad. He was out on the island for a few days tending to his cattle, staying in a small shack he had constructed behind a dune just at the thin line of pines.

He got up and pulled his heavy cloth jacket up around his ears. After making some coffee on the small stove he had pulled from a wrecked ship, he sat in the drafty shack in silence wondering what this storm would bring. He briefly considered launching his guideboat to cross the bay, but decided to take his chances with the wind. He pulled his coat to and climbed the small dune to look out at the storm.

Already the beach had disappeared though it wasn’t close to high tide. The waves close in were roiling white while further out it looked like a blanket tossed on top of writhing snakes. There was menace in this storm. It could take his cattle. It could take his land. It could take his life. But Hardtime didn’t care.

He let loose with his strongest argument yet against the injustices of this world. “Just why is it that I have been permitted to see such calamities, God? All that I have set my hand to has been like sand. All the dear attachments of my life have been taken from me. I know that there is nothing substantial in this world and no place that I can go to escape these woes.

“And you, O God, where are you? I know that my redeemer lives. I know that you would come to me in my aid and rebuke the devil and his torments. Even when Jonah went out into the sea, you found him in the storm and threw him back up on the land to begin again. But to me, O Lord? When will you come to me?”

As Hardtime looked around him, the land began to disappear beneath small lakes of water. The marsh beyond the trees began to infiltrate from behind and the waves before him crashed closer to the dune. The shack strained in the wind. The storm was fierce and mighty. And whether it was in the air or in his head, Hardtime couldn’t tell, but he heard God speak.

It wasn’t a comforting voice. It did not tell him that he would be vindicated or that the world would be put right for him. In fact the voice seemed a little mocking. “So, you wanted me to show did you? Let’s see what kind of a man you are, Hardtime. You think yourself brave enough to question me. Answer me this: Where were you when I made this roaring sea? Where were you when I set this earth in place? Who laid the cornerstone while the angels sang?

“Who holds the sea in place? Who set the stars in the sky? Who sends forth lightning? Who rolls the clouds across the heavens like unfurled sails and who sends forth rain like torrents? Who does all this, Bill Fitchett? You’re being awfully quiet.”

It was all so unfair. What could he say? Of course he wasn’t there when the story all began. And of course he would be dust before the consummation of all things. Of course, he spoke out of turn, out of proportion, out of all common sense. Who can stand before such a God? In the end, when the God of all Creation speaks from the tempest, there is no word that anyone can say to justify themselves.

Hardtime felt, though, that he had at least forced God’s hand. God was no longer hidden in some heavenly council, lost to history because he was so far removed from the slings and arrows we all suffer. Hardtime had demanded a hearing, and though he didn’t speak, he was rewarded with the knowledge that God had not left this world…that though the wrong seems oft so strong, God was the ruler yet…that God was working a purpose through the broken storylines of this earthly pageant. When it seemed that all hope was gone and that God was gone, the cry of a wounded man on a lonely dune at the edge of the world had not gone unheard or unnoticed. God was flushed from the spartina grass and lassoed from the winds to face him down.

The next day, Hardtime loaded a goat into the guideboat and began to row back to the mainland. The eel grass brushed lightly against the keel of the boat as he moved away from the island. Light from the rising sun broke through the thin tree line. Oyster reefs scraped along the side. The goat shifted its weight as it watched the shoreline recede.

Hardtime knew he would not go back to the island again. He would sell it for whatever price it would command. The world was fierce and vast and devastating and beautiful and God was everywhere within. It was a time for another hand to tend the island. There was something new for him ashore. Whether it meant hard times or good, he didn’t know. But he could no longer pretend that it was a world God had forsaken.

Many people, reading Job’s story in the Bible, think that it comes to a very unsatisfying end. After all, Job is such a sympathetic figure. We identify with his sufferings and we want to see justice win out for him in the end. We want an explanation of his pain that is equal to the challenge he has thrown out to God. We want God to engage in a point by point debate as to why it had to be that Satan would be unleashed on Job and his family to do his worst and to take away the good that had come to a very good man.

But God comes and seems to kick a good man when he’s down. He insults Job’s manhood and peppers him with questions that he knows Job can’t answer. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” God knows where Job was. He was not around and wouldn’t be for centuries. God comes in the whirlwind to remind Job of how limited his vision is when he can only see God’s purposes from the perspective of the ashheap.

Job needs something more. Job needs a wider lens. Job needs to see the world, not as it is in its broken state, but as God sees it, in its redeemed state.

The theologian David Bentley Hart says that we are limited in our vision because the time we live in is “only a shadow of true time, and this world only a shadow of the fuller, richer, more substantial, more glorious creation that God intends.” In this time before the end of all time, “all of nature is a shattered mirror of divine beauty, still full of light, but riven by darkness.”[i] It is a world of broken things and broken people. It is a world of terrifying storms and quakings of the earth. But it is also a world of remarkable beauty and heartbreaking love. It is a world where periwinkle snails and laughing gulls sing with equal testimony to the redeeming work of God. And it is a world where evidence abounds that God is not tearing the world apart, but pulling it together – despite the resistance of evil and our own sin.

Of course, it takes a believer to see this. It takes a believer to see the injustice of a world with a moral center that operates as it so often does. It takes a believer to see how something as empty as a tomb can change the world. As Hart says, “When…we learn in Christ the nature of our first estate, and the divine destiny to which we are called, we begin to see—more clearly the more we are able to look upon the world with the eye of charity—that there is in all the things of earth a hidden glory waiting to be revealed, more radiant than a million suns, more beautiful than the most generous imagination or most ardent desire can now conceive.”[ii]

I don’t know if that’s what Hardtime Fitchett saw as he left his island behind and sold it to Nathan Cobb. Actually, I don’t know anything about Hardtime Fitchett except his name. But I can imagine this man because I know that there are still people like him here on the Eastern Shore. There are people here who have known such sorrow and heartbreak that they must have been tempted to doubt God’s goodness. There are people here who have known storms, and floods, and perils on the sea who must have been tempted to doubt God’s power over the wind and wave. There are people who are so lonely that they must be tempted to doubt even God’s love. Some of those people are here in this sanctuary.

But there are also people who have seen how God has lifted us up time and again from despair into life. There are people who know the beauty of the earth and the glory of God’s grace. There are people who have been forgiven, healed and freed for new life. And there are people who have seen that even here on the Eastern Shore, perhaps especially here, the kingdom of God is coming and is at hand and is among us.

They know all this because Christ has transformed their lives. Christ is transforming the world. Christ can transform your life. And in the vision that comes from seeing the world as God sees it in Christ, we can see how it will be at the end of all things when hard times come again no more.
Thanks be to God.

[i] David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005, p. 102.
[ii] Ibid.