Job Changes His Mind About Dust and Ashes

It’s been thirty one days since Helene visited us.

And today we come to the end of the story of Job.

Do you remember the beginning? Job was a good man, if a bit of a nervous parent – so fearful of God that he would offer sacrifices not just for himself, but also for his kids, just in case they happened to sin. He was careful, and good.

And then he lost everything. Fire came for his sheep. Raiders slaughtered his camels. A great wind came from beyond the wilderness and blew down the house where his children were eating dinner, sweeping them all away. A burning rash covered his whole body, and he threw dust on his head and sat in the dust in silence.

He did not curse God.

But after seven days of silent mourning

he cursed the day of his birth. 

And then, he and his friends went back and forth, for hours. For days. These friends tried to explain God to Job (God wouldn’t have done this unless you sinned! they said. They didn’t know what they were talking about.) Job lamented some more. He claimed that God had hurled him into the muck, and he had become dust and ashes. He lobbed questions at God – questions that were legitimate –  and urgent. But God didn’t answer any of those questions when God spoke to him, out of the whirlwind.

God did not explain pain and suffering. God just added more questions to the list. 

Were you there when I founded the earth? God asks. Do you know where light dwells, and where darkness makes its home? Does the rain have a father?

God takes Job on a whirlwind tour of the beauty and terror of creation: earth, sea, morning, the underworld, light, snow, storm, rain, stars, clouds, the lion, raven, goat, wild donkey, ox, ostrich, horse, hawk and falcon. Sometimes, God says, the ostrich forgets her eggs and steps on them. The leviathan, God says, this fearsome sea monster, is the best thing I ever made.

It’s as if God is showing Job: look, I created all this, and I gave you all freedom, and 

beautiful and terrible things happen as a result. But isn’t it magnificent? 

And then we come to today’s passage. And we find that

Job has been transformed.

After this experience of God, Job finds himself no longer furious but awestruck.

Instead of a problem to solve, his situation has been transformed for him 

into a mystery to enter. 

He admits that he has come to see that the whole structure of God’s reality is beyond what our brains can comprehend. Like it’s written in a musical notation that we’ve never seen, sung in a range so high our ears can’t perceive it. 

I want to pause on the final lines of Job’s response to God here. The NRSV translates them “therefore I despise myself,and repent in dust and ashes.”

But my Old Testament professor, Ellen Davis, argues that a more accurate translation would be 

Therefore I change my mind 

concerning dust and ashes.

Therefore I change my mind 

concerning dust and ashes.

These lines aren’t lines of self-hatred and misery. They are lines of transformation. In his despair, Job had thrown dust on his head. In his despair, he had claimed that God had thrown him into the muck, and made him into dust and ashes.

But now he has changed his mind about dust and ashes. 

Now he sees something else. Now – having seen God, having witnessed the vastness and incomprehensibly intricate creation, and God’s delight in creation and in creation’s freedom, he understands mortality differently. Now he sees that yes, we are dust – but to be dust doesn’t make our lives meaningless. To be mortal and to be a part of this delightfully diverse world God has made, even in all its tragedy and suffering, is to be part of a system that is far bigger than his old ideas about right and wrong and moral purity. To be taken up by God into the mystery of this is beautiful, and rather than sinking into the mud, he’s going to keep choosing life, despite the suffering it brings, again and again.

Job’s story does not explain for us why we suffer. But it shows us what it can look like to be transformed: to rail at God, to be brought into an experience that shows us how little we see, and then to find a way forward.

There’s not a resolution, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a future.

God restored the fortunes of Job, and gave him twice as much as he had before. 

This ending isn’t meant to be a glib happily ever after, as if getting twice as much stuff erases the pain of loss. This ending isn’t a glib happily ever after

because this concluding act isn’t just something that God gave to Job.

It’s something that Job participated with God in. 

Job chose to have children again. Job chose to rebuild. Job chose to love, even knowing all the risks love entails. 

We see glimpses, in these final verses, of particular ways Job has been transformed by his suffering. He’s no longer the overanxious father offering sacrifices to God just in case any of his kids sin. Instead, he’s delighting in the beauty of his children. He’s giving his daughters whimsical names – dove and cinnamon and horn of eyeshadow. He’s learned from God to delight in the freedom and beauty of what he’s made, rather than to try to control it. He’s learned that while we can’t protect the things and people we love, we can delight in them while they’re here.

And he is changed in another way, too. Job divides his inheritance equally among his sons and daughters. Normally at that time, daughters didn’t get an inheritance – only sons did. But Job’s suffering has led him to desire justice and equity in his world, as far as it depends on him. 

In conversations I’ve had over the last few weeks, everyone is wondering if Asheville will “come back.” Will our restaurants and breweries survive? Will our artists have to relocate? Will All Souls Cathedral be restored? What about Chimney Rock and Swannanoa and Marshall and Bat Cave and and and it won’t be the same. We will always grieve what we have lost. 

And maybe it’s too early to move to talking about mystery and new life. But when we are ready: I hope we find ourselves transformed as Job was. Willing to trust an inscrutable creator. Willing to love as that creator does, delighting in freedom and beauty and whimsy. Willing to buck convention in a bid for a bit more equality and justice in our relationships and our world. 

When I begin imagining what that might look like for us, my mind goes a hundred different directions. I find myself wondering about things like solar energy, as we rebuild. Or housing equality – making sure as we rebuild that we have affordable housing available that is more secure than mobile homes by the river. I find myself hoping our loss will change the way we respond to those across the world whose homes and livelihoods are swept away by floods or war and whose governments aren’t able to respond as quickly and effectively as ours is.

When I begin imagining what that might look like for us more specifically, right here at Trinity. I think about the eight towering trees we lost. Where the trees fell, we might replant them. But in the space they left, we might also plant a pollinator garden. 

Choices made in America in the last century have left us with fewer species – fewer testaments to the creativity and whimsy of the Creator – and one of the small ways we can support biodiversity is by making sure the pollinators have the native plants they need, so that they can live, so that we can live (scientists estimate that a third of the food we eat depends on insect and animal pollinators existence), so that we can continue to be awestruck witnesses to God’s world.

We can replant and rebuild with more beauty and more justice.

We can change our minds about dust and ashes, remembering that in the beginning, a wind swept over the surface of the waters, and God scooped up some dust and breathed into it the breath of life. 

We may be dust, but I’m beginning to think it’s dust made of rainbow sparkles and cinnamon and eyeshadow. 

We may be dust, but we know what God can do with dust.