Wednesday, May 31, 2017

                I have been considering whether it is time to build an ark. Not that God has given me such a task, but with the amount of rain that we are getting in this merry month of May, the old joke comes to mind, “How long can you tread water?” Last year we were dying for rain; this year, it’s “Rain, Rain go away, Come again another day.”

                In biblical parlance, rain, floods, and drought were often considered signs of God’s activity.       

  

                Rain can be a sign of God’s covenantal blessing “So if you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today—to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul— then I will send rain on your land in its season, both autumn and spring rains, so that you may gather in your grain, new wine and olive oil. I will provide grass in the fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied,” (Deuteronomy 11: 13 – 15)

                Or the lack of rain, i.e. drought, indicated God’s displeasure over his people’s disobedience to the covenant, “Be careful, or you will be enticed to turn away and worship other gods and bow down to them. Then the Lord’s anger will burn against you, and he will shut up the heavens so that it will not rain and the ground will yield no produce, and you will soon perish from the good land the Lord is giving you,” (11: 16 – 17).

                This probably seems like a lot of superstitious nonsense in our mostly modern, urban, secular culture.  Weather is simply weather and we take the good with the bad. Although, as humankind messes so badly with the environment, adversely affecting weather patterns, perhaps there is still an ardent message in the extremes that this planet is experiencing, a kind of judgement upon our poor stewardship and our indifference, ignorance and denial that is putting all of God’s creation in serious jeopardy.

                God has always used nature, our natural environment, to express and reveal his love, his hope, his joy as well as his disappointment and distress. Who has been awed at the sight of a sunset or an ocean view? Who has not trembled at least little in a fierce thunder storm?   

                Symbolically, God gives us his best, showers of blessing.  But if and when we abuse, neglect, ignore and abandon God’s Love, we may find ourselves in floods of being overwhelmed by the chaotic  world around us. Our prayer is like the one in Psalm 69, “Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck; I sink in the deep mire where there is no foothold. I have come into deep waters and the flood sweeps over me…”

                It’s then we want a life line.

                One of my all-time favourite jokes is about the man who prayed fervently to God when the floods came and over took his house. When the waters reached his front steps, he prayed, “O Lord, save me!” Then some people in a canoe came by and offered him a ride. “Oh, no; the Lord is going to save me.”  When the waters came up to the second-floor window, again the man prayed, “O Lord, save me!” Then a motor boat showed up, and the people offered him a ride to safety, “Oh no; the Lord is going to save me.” When the waters came up to the roof, again the man prayed, “O Lord save me!” Then a helicopter hovered over the man’s house and offered him a ladder and a ride to safety. But the man said, “Oh no; the Lord is going to save me.” The man drowned in the flood. When he got to heaven, he asked the Lord why he hadn’t saved him. The Lord replied, “I sent you a canoe, a motor boat and a helicopter; what more did you want me to do?”

                One more rain-scattered thought today, expressed in the wonderful song by Sister Miriam Therese winter, “I saw raindrops’. I particularly find the third verse inspirational: “I saw Christ in wind and thunder, Joy is tried by storm. Christ asleep within my boat, whipped by wind, yet still afloat. Joy is tried by storm.”

Dale