Difference between revisions of "Sermon for February 8th, 2026"

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Job 38:1-11; 22-41

1Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: 2“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? 3Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me.

4“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. 5Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? 6On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone 7when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? 8“Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?— 9when I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, 10and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, 11and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped’?

22“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or have you seen the storehouses of the hail, 23which I have reserved for the time of trouble, for the day of battle and war? 24What is the way to the place where the light is distributed, or where the east wind is scattered upon the earth?

25“Who has cut a channel for the torrents of rain, and a way for the thunderbolt, 26to bring rain on a land where no one lives, on the desert, which is empty of human life, 27to satisfy the waste and desolate land, and to make the ground put forth grass? 28“Has the rain a father, or who has begotten the drops of dew? 29From whose womb did the ice come forth, and who has given birth to the hoarfrost of heaven? 30The waters become hard like stone, and the face of the deep is frozen. 31“Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion? 32Can you lead forth the Mazzaroth in their season, or can you guide the Bear with its children? 33Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you establish their rule on the earth? 34“Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, so that a flood of waters may cover you? 35Can you send forth lightnings, so that they may go and say to you, ‘Here we are’? 36Who has put wisdom in the inward parts, or given understanding to the mind? 37Who has the wisdom to number the clouds? Or who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens, 38when the dust runs into a mass and the clods cling together? 39“Can you hunt the prey for the lion, or satisfy the appetite of the young lions, 40when they crouch in their dens, or lie in wait in their covert? 41Who provides for the raven its prey, when its young ones cry to God, and wander about for lack of food?

Faith & Film XIV - Train Dreams

• Film Clip #1: Trailer

Three Minute Film Summary

Robert Grainier is an orphaned boy who rides the Great Northern Railway into the Pacific Northwest and grows up tough, quiet, and mostly alone. He leaves school early and drifts into the brutal work that will define his life: railroad construction, logging camps, and whatever hard seasonal labor will keep him alive.

As a young man, Robert meets Gladys at a church worship service. They marry, build a small log cabin along the river, and welcome a daughter, Katie. For a time, Robert lives a joyful life. But the work that provides for his family also pulls him away from it, back to the railroads and lumber yards. He moves from camp to camp with men who are rough, unpredictable, and sometimes cruel. He watches a Chinese man thrown from a bridge by angry laborers, an image that haunts his dreams. In the forest, accidents come without warning: a falling tree kills three of his fellow workers in an instant. Robert befriends an older man named Arn--who talks a lot and tries to teach Robert the beauty of God's creation.

After World War I, work gets hard to find, and the world starts changing. Robert and Gladys talk about starting a farm. Robert takes one more logging job to secure their fortune, but when he returns, he finds that a wildfire has swept through the forest, burning their cabin to ashes. Gladys and Kate are missing.

Robert is crippled by grief, but forced to keep living day-by-day. Friends sit with him, help him rebuild, and he carries on with smaller jobs closer to town. Years later, he meets a forest surveyor who understands loneliness and loss, and she offers him company and quiet conversation.

One night, Robert believes that his daughter Kate has returned to him—injured, half-wild, and wordless. He tends her wounds and falls into exhausted sleep. But by morning she is gone, leaving only an open window and a mystery Robert will never solve. He stays in the cabin anyway, in case she ever comes back.

Decades pass. Towns grow. Technology advances. Robert grows old. He rides a train into Spokane and watches John Glenn’s spaceflight on television, stunned at how far the world has traveled while he stayed rooted in one place. Near the end of his life, he takes a short flight in a biplane, and as the plane tilts and loops, memory rushes in until, for a just moment, he feels connected to it all. Not long after, Robert dies in his sleep, leaving behind nothing but traces of an ordinary life lived under an extraordinary sky.

The Foundation of All Things

In the opening lines of the film, the narrator speaks of pathways, mysteries, and the foundation of all things. He never explicitly names God, but it's pretty clear from the imagery that nature--God's first creation--is the centerpiece of the film, and all of the "mysteries" are theological in nature. Here's the clip:

• Film Clip #2 - Foundations

Trees, in the film, are a metaphor for people--they grow, they fall, some are cut down before their time. The struggle between nature and progress (the advent of the railroad) is also a prominent theme, and echoes the struggle of mankind vs. God--or seen another way, control vs. wonder.

One of the characters in the film is Arn (played by William H. Macy). He functions as a prophet figure, a mentor to Robert, and in a key scene sings a song that pretty much summarizes the entire film. The scene also touches on some other great themes, too. Here's the clip:

• Film Clip #3 - Redwood song

The full words to the song (which plays again in the closing credits) are as follows:

If the Lord was a redwood, would you try to cut him down? (Mankind vs. God)
Or climb up his loving branches and look around? (control vs. wonder)
If the river was the tears of all those who've passed (grief, memory, and loss)
Would you try to dam it up... or let it pass? (again, control vs. wonder, and letting go)

That second verse leads into the other major theme of the film, and our biblical analogue:

A River of Tears

The river of tears is a reference to the Book of Lamentations in the Bible, in which God tells his people that it's okay to "let your tears run down like a river." But the greatest, most famous lamentation in the Bible comes from the Book of Job, who's story is echoed powerfully in this film (No wonder I liked it so much!).

As most of you know by now, Job is the story of a man who has everything...and loses it all. When this happens, Job sits on a heap of ashes, and his friends come and sit in silence with him for 40 days and nights, and then they offer him well meaning, theologically correct comfort, which doesn't really help Job that much in his anguish and grief. Job wants an answer from God, not from his friends.

Here's Robert, in our film, sitting on his pile of ashes until one of his friends arrives to comfort him:

• Film Clip #4 - Ashes

Here's another clip, with Robert angrily questioning the justice of his loss. Interestingly, the person he is talking to is a vision of the Chinese man who had been thrown off the railroad tracks to his death--also an injustice--and one for which Robert feels at least partly responsible.

• Film Clip #5 - Why

Wisdom through God's Creation

The Book of Job is part of a genre of literature in the Bible known as Wisdom Literature, along with Proverbs and the Book of Ecclesiastes. Wisdom literature attempts to answer the unanswerable questions (why to bad things happen to good people). One of the hallmarks of Wisdom literature is that instead of looking to direct revelation from God (like the rest of the Bible), Wisdom literature looks to God's creation--to nature, to the plants and animals and even insects--in order to understand the deeper mysteries of the universe. Job's friends, in their attempts to comfort him, use analogies from nature, from plants, animals, insects to try to help him process his suffering.

So do Robert's friends. The following clip is Robert, years after his loss, talking to a forest surveyor he has befriended. You may recognize the actress (Kerry Condon) from last weeks movie, F1.

• Film Clip #6 - Hermits

In the Book of Job, after all of his friends have fallen silent (which takes about 36 chapters), Job still is left with questions--so he demands an audience from God himself. And God (in our scripture passage from Job 38) shows up in a whirlwind, takes Job up to the heavens, and shows him... not the answers that he is seeking, but rather the wonders of creation, the foundations of the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, thunder and lighting, the bear, and the lion and the raven, and all the things live and die in their time. I like to think that God is restoring to Job his sense of awe and wonder, as a tiny--but important--part of it all.

In our film, near the end of his life, Robert takes a trip to the city, and takes a ride on a plane (up to the heavens) where he too has an encounter with the marvels of creation, and this helps him to put his life--the ups and downs, the triumphs and the tragedies--into perspective. I'm going to let the film have the final word today:

• Film Clip #7 - Flight