Behemoth and Leviathan, watercolour by William Blake from his Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826). Welcome to our Service today. We invite you to watch the live stream on our YouTube channel at 10 am from our Clevedon Church. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxBzxjBb3xU8ra2NHwvD_9A(The service can also be viewed at any time afterwards.) The Leviathans The reading and reflection from today's service are below:   Job 41:1-8; 42:1-17 41:1 "Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook, or press down its tongue with a cord? 2 Can you put a rope in its nose, or pierce its jaw with a hook? 3 Will it make many supplications to you? Will it speak soft words to you? 4 Will it make a covenant with you to be taken as your servant forever? 5 Will you play with it as with a bird, or will you put it on leash for your girls? 6 Will traders bargain over it? Will they divide it up among the merchants? 7 Can you fill its skin with harpoons, or its head with fishing spears? 8 Lay hands on it; think of the battle; you will not do it again!" 42:1 Then Job answered the Lord: 2 "I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. 3 'Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?' Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. 4 'Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you declare to me.' 5 I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; 6 therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes." 7 After the Lord had spoken these words to Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite: "My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has. 8 Now therefore take seven bulls and seven rams, and go to my servant Job, and offer up for yourselves a burnt offering; and my servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has done." 9 So Eliphaz the Temanite and Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite went and did what the Lord had told them; and the Lord accepted Job's prayer. 10 And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends; and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before. 11 Then there came to him all his brothers and sisters and all who had known him before, and they ate bread with him in his house; they showed him sympathy and comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him; and each of them gave him a piece of money and a gold ring. 12 The Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning; and he had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand donkeys. 13 He also had seven sons and three daughters. 14 He named the first Jemimah, the second Keziah, and the third Keren-happuch. 15 In all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job's daughters; and their father gave them an inheritance along with their brothers. 16 After this Job lived one hundred and forty years, and saw his children, and his children's children, four generations. 17 And Job died, old and full of days. Reflection We’ve just come back from a three-week holiday in Mexico.  I took a lot of photos on my phone and, while going back through them, I realised how many bad photos I had taken. Anyway, on the long trip home,  I spent quite a lot of time going through the hundreds of photos on my phone –back years. And deleting a great many of them.  I came across a photo I had taken when I was out fishing on my little boat. It was a photo of a shark I had caught. It was still in the water, up alongside the boat. I think for most people who go fishing, that one thing they do not want to catch is a shark. You don’t want to haul an angry shark onto your small boat. And so it can be a difficult moment. Even as you are trying to free the creature. The teeth, the anger, the power of even a small shark, the hooks, the nylon—all this mix. And the little inflatable boat. I thought about that experience and this passage today where God says to Job: "Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook, or press down its tongue with a cord? 2 Can you put a rope in its nose, or pierce its jaw with a hook? 3 Will it make many supplications to you? Will it speak soft words to you? 4 Will it make a covenant with you to be taken as your servant forever? 5 Will you play with it as with a bird, or will you put it on leash for your girls?” And we, with Job, say, ‘no’. We can’t do any of that. Leviathan is too big, too powerful, too out of control. The image of Leviathan captures that deep sense of things that are overwhelming:  Viruses, wars, acts of terrorism, the climate, the news of challenges we face here. And things in our own lives.  Present-day Leviathans. Every age, and probably every person, has their Leviathans. We hold Alcoholics Anonymous here on Thursday nights at 7:30 pm. The first step says, “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.” What we hear about in this final chapter of the Book of Job - God is asking Job if he can control the Leviathan. And maybe with Job and with others who know some of those events in Biblical history, we remember these stories from Scripture: The formless void from which God brought forth creation. The terrible floods at the time of Noah. The murderous conflict between Esau and his brother Jacob. The slavery of the Hebrew people. The destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians. And we imagine these powerful forces at work that must have seemed so overwhelming. We think too of the forces that conspired to see the crucifixion of Jesus—not just one thing, but one thing after another: the greed, the betrayal, the denial, the lies, the fear, the threat. Sometimes that little boat we are on can seem very small and the Leviathan very large. And so we come to the question at the start of this chapter: 41:1 "Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook, or press down its tongue with a cord? 2 Can you put a rope in its nose, or pierce its jaw with a hook? To be confronted with overwhelming forces, to be confronted by situations which seem hopeless or out of control, is not a new thing in our faith or in our lives. Job has been through so much. Job answered the Lord: 2 "I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.” The events that have happened in Job’s life had left him in the dust. Remember he had lost much of his livelihood, his children, his health. And then he hears these words from God. A God who even has power over the wild Leviathan. It is not a soft, gentle conversation. God, we discover, can even control the most overwhelming and fearful things. And we are reminded of the God we see in Jesus who calmed the storms. That story of Jesus and his disciples on a boat: Suddenly a furious storm came up on the lake so that the waves swept over the boat. But Jesus was sleeping. The disciples went and woke him, saying, “Lord, save us! We’re going to drown!” He replied, “You of little faith, why are you so afraid?” Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the waves, and it was completely calm. The men were amazed and asked, “What kind of man is this? Even the winds and the waves obey him!” Can we love what we cannot control? Who is the God whom we worship? Has God become too small, too controllable, too conforming to how we think God should be? The shark is on the line, the Leviathan is there, Job has been sitting in the dust and ashes. Then we read: After the Lord had said these things to Job, he said to Eliphaz the Temanite, “I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has.” And they are told to make an offering. And then God says, “My servant Job will pray for you, and I will accept his prayer and not deal with you according to your folly. You have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has.” Job is being asked to do for his friends what he used to do for his own children. If you go back to Chapter one, you will hear that Job prayed every day for his children. We are told back then that “Early in the morning he would make an offering for each of them, thinking, ‘Perhaps my children have sinned and cursed God in their hearts.’ This was Job’s regular custom.” So God is entrusting Job with his friends’ spiritual well-being just in the same way Job cared for his children’s spiritual well-being. Job is being asked to expand the way that he has cared for his children to the way that he now cares for others. Even those who have said and done the wrong things. The verses conclude with the ways that God blesses Job—with new wealth and friends, with a long life. And we are told this unusual detail, which I think Robyn may have touched on last month: We are told that Job also had seven sons and three daughters. The first daughter he named Jemimah, the second Keziah, and the third Keren-Happuch. "Nowhere in all the land were there found women as beautiful as Job’s daughters, and their father granted them an inheritance along with their brothers." These verses aren’t right. Just like a lot of things in the Book of Job that change our understanding of how things are meant to work. First of all, the names of his daughters and not his sons are listed. Not only are the names listed, but the names are very over the top. Jemimah is a reference to a beautiful queen of Arab folklore. Keziah is the name of a spice tree used for perfume. Keren-Happuch is a type of make-up. It’s like naming your daughters Cinderella, Passion, and L’Oreal. And they were beautiful. And Job gave them an inheritance along with their brothers. This is what we discover is true from the start of the Book of Job. As we move through the Book, we see: A man who can find time to worship and give thanks even when terrible things happen. A man who has faith even when all the formulas of who is blessed and who is cursed get turned on their head. A man who can look at a hopeless situation and against all the evidence affirm that life and light are still triumphant. A man who knows that he is powerless in the face of the Leviathan, but learns that with God’s help there still come blessings and a future. Finally, the conventional rules are overturned. The daughters are named in a very spectacular way, and are given an inheritance. We had believed that things would carry on the same—that pain, suffering, and death would define our worlds. And we discover this ancient faith: things will be different. While there will be loss, there will be abundance. You won’t ever face the Leviathan on your own. And as we are told at the end of the Good News: "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away." Amen.

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