Job and God and Transitioning into Wildness

Tuesday, March 31, 2026 - Trans Day of Visibility

Jonathan L. A. Morgan

LGBTQIA+ Person of Faith

Quote

“Look at Behemoth, which I made just as I made you; it eats grass like an ox…

It is the first of the great acts of God; only its Maker can approach it with the sword…

Even if the river is turbulent, it is not frightened; it is confident though Jordan rushes against its mouth...

“Can you draw out Leviathan with a fish hook or press down its tongue with a cord? Can you put a rope in its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook? Will it make many supplications to you? Will it speak soft words to you? Will it make a covenant with you to be taken as your servant forever? …

On earth it has no equal, a creature without fear.It surveys everything that is lofty; it is king over all that are proud.”

Job 40:15, 19, 23; 41:1-4, 33-34 (NRSVUE)

Devotion

Today is Trans Day of Visibility. As a Trans theologian, I am drawn to one of the most strange, confusing, and ultimately real feeling stories of transition in the Bible, the Book of Job.

These verses about Behemoth and Leviathan are from the part of the Book of Job known as the “God speeches,” which happen after Job has lost nearly everyone and everything; and had his so-called friends (and a stranger) assure him that all these horrific things that have happened to him are his fault, and if he would just ‘get right with God,’ then he would be forgiven and all would be well again. Maybe Job’s experience feels familiar to you, especially considering how too many of our churches treat us in the LGBTQIA+ community. It’s easy to read the God speeches as God humbling Job, ‘putting him in his place;’ in fact, that’s how many people read it. But over a lifetime of pondering, and the intensive study I’ve been able to do as a theologian, I read these verses differently.

Job has been struggling up to this point to find a way out of the punishment-and-reward style of religion that his community practices, and that tells him he must have done something wrong to be punished so badly. God helps him reframe his understanding of the world and his own suffering. Here and in the rest of the God speeches, God isn’t bringing up these powerful and wild creatures and environment around them to make Job feel even worse after all his loss, pain, and the guilt-tripping of well-meaning but deeply misguided friends and strangers. Instead, God is telling Job that Job, too, is one of those wild and amazing creatures that God delights in.

My relationship with Job’s story, as I mentioned, goes “all the way back.” I was a young child when I played one of Job’s children in our church’s production of Archibald MacLeish’s “J. B.” In college, I pondered and wrote poetry on the God speeches for a class as my grandfather was dying; it had been a difficult few years for my mom’s family, as my uncle died suddenly, then my grandfather had his first debilitating stroke, and both he and my grandmother declined and then died a couple years later. I found the God speeches in the Book of Job reassuring then, and now decades later as I navigate life as a gay Trans man and proud seahorse dad who does not “pass.” Those speeches are deeply centering and decentering for me, assurance that I am part of something much bigger than myself – a whole planet – that the human community is not the only one that matters, that the society we live in is not the sole arbiter of what is ‘good and proper,’ that I am subject of the same divine regard as all the rest of creation.

And as the story of Job reminds us, bad things happen to all of us. We all know loss and grief, and I’d hazard that many of us understand trauma through personal experience, as well – especially as members of the LGBTQIA+ community living in a society and religious traditions that too often do not love us. God is with us through it all, just maybe not in the ways we’re often taught to believe: not to fix, but to console; not to coddle, but to exhort; not to punish, but to comfort; not to take power, but to motivate; not to insist we ‘get over it,’ but to grieve with us as we continue living.

The Book of Job gives us an example of something many of us are familiar with: fighting for ideas of ourselves and God that don’t mesh with the ideas of society around us. In the God speeches, God says to us, “You’re right, about yourself and about how I work in the world. I don’t hand out punishments and rewards. I delight in you, as I delight in all the wild and wonderful (and scary).” The invitation in the God speeches is to let the transition (!) happen; let ourselves be “re-wilded” by God into the fullness of our being as lesbian, ace, enby, intersex, bi/pan, gay, Trans, Queer and all the rest of our glorious alphabet soup of a community.

Reflection

1.    How does the thought that you are one of God’s “wild creatures” feel?

2.    What transition(s) have you experienced in your life and relationship with the Divine?

Action

Take a moment to sit with the ideas. What images, feelings, thoughts do they bring to you? If you’re inclined, write, draw, move your body, sing – whatever creative impulse you get – about it.