It’s been raining for days.
The part of the world in which I live is rather famous for the frequency of rain. The schools started their spring break last Friday and it’s rained pretty much every day since. The forecast is for more rain. Does the rain get you down?
I was speaking with someone yesterday who lives near Winnipeg. He told me that they still have 4 feet of snow there and that every day that it doesn’t snow is so cold that nothing comes close to melting. On the days that are less cold, it snows. After saying this he added, “I could never live in Vancouver. I just can’t handle the rain.”
The evangelical church where I was pastor for 25 years has some rain stories. When the building was built, years before I became the senior pastor, there were stories circulated about how the day that the foundation was poured it was raining everywhere except in a two block radius right around the church building project. This was a way of saying that God was so into what we were doing that rain would fall on others, but not on us.
Even at the time, I was more than a bit skeptical. My suspicion was that the story seemed to imply that God was with us particularly, that God was more interested in what we were doing than in what others around us were doing. If a piece of the founding myth of the building was that rain and its effects were divinely withheld, then it is interesting to consider the very negative impact of rain in the actual life of the building through the years.
In the last few years that I worked at the church, every time it rained hard, our phones didn’t work properly. We would get static, crackling sounds, as if we had a bad line. What was actually happening had to do with the perimeter drainage around the building and the phone lines coming in from the outside. I never heard this story told as something that God ordained as a special blessing (or curse). The phone lines were a minor problem compared to the deterioration of the building itself. When the rains came water would leak into the building through one exterior wall. The basement would frequently flood due to the aforementioned drainage issue. Occasionally small pieces of the ceiling from above the stage would fall onto the platform after particularly heavy rains. Water would fill up the window ledge of a Sunday School room before running down the wall to the floor. If a person happened to use the elevator they would have an audio accompaniment of the sound of water in the walls and water collecting in a pool at the bottom of the elevator shaft. Maybe God protecting the building from the rain was not really the story that should have been told after all. Currently, the building still stands and the new owners have repainted the exterior. It would appear that initial “miracle” is being reclaimed as a business plan.
I don’t begrudge the people who issued such confident declarations years ago. Many of us struggle to acknowledge the positive and negative of rain. Rain is one of the main reasons why this particular part of the world is so beautiful, but it can also be really really grey and wet for long periods of time here. I often had in mind, as I prayed for people feeling down because of the season, because of the rain, a verse in the book of Ezra in the Bible.
It’s embedded in a story of purity and sin and lament. There is a lot that can be unpacked in the larger context, but there is a gathering called for by religious and political leaders in which people will face some kind of reckoning over their misbehaviour. In other words, it’s not a great day to begin with. The verse (chapter 10, verse 9) has a very Vancouver sounding description of the mood of so many people that day. It simply says, “The people were gathered, sitting in the square, before the house of God. They were greatly distressed, because of the occasion, and because of the rain.”
So, that’s my prayer for you today. It’s a “because of the rain” prayer. You may feel that there has been a lot to get you down lately, but sometimes it’s something as basic as the weather that can tip the scales.
Dear God,
Bless those who, by way of rain or some small circumstance, are feeling particular distress. As we pray for those in this world who face actual terror and fear, we sometimes become more aware of how the smallest thing can darken our day and our mood. Help us to see the blessing around us. Help us to see the blessing even in rain. I pray that you would sustain those who feel terrible about feeling terrible. May we know the life that comes from you.
Amen.
Vladimir the Terrible (Preacher)
Quoting scripture can be very problematic. Sometimes people who quote scripture are doing so instrumentally. What I mean is, they have a program or an interest or a stance of some kind, and then they quote the Bible in order to prop themselves up, and to coerce others into thinking that their views are just the same as God’s views.
Such was Vladimir’s scriptural citation.
In evangelical churches you ought not to automatically cede authority to people who say, “The Bible says …”. Hopeful Christian theology learns from Karl Barth, who said that the Bible is not the word of God if it is being used against the way of Jesus. For Barth, the Bible is the word of God when it is “the word about the Word” (that is, when it is pointing to Jesus). After all, even the devil quotes scripture. You remember the temptation of Jesus in the desert. It was, in some ways, a Bible quoting contest as the devil read scripture to Jesus in attempt to get Jesus to be very un-Christlike.
Sometimes the caricature, the almost comical proves the point. Yesterday, in the midst of a war that he started but is losing, Vladimir Putin held a political rally in Moscow. He did his Putin-esque “gunslinger gait”, to and fro across the stage. He was decked out in a turtleneck and a puffy jacket that he, no doubt, thought made him look extra cool and powerful. With his sly grin fully powered-up, he soaked in the disturbing adulation of the crowd. Then, during the rally, in support of the murder of civilians, the murder of children in Ukraine, Vladimir quoted the Bible. He said that there is no greater love than a man laying down their life for a friend. There is more than one appropriate response to this, but among the valid responses is, “You -ucker!”
Vladimir the pastor. Vladimir the preacher. How ridiculous can evil become?
Vladimir is getting desperate.
May you be free from the voices that sought to use the Bible against you or that saw you as an accessory to their identity and intentions.
In responding to such use of scripture by preachers and pastors and leaders, you ought to be able to say, “You F-cker!”
If only we had known earlier that the moralistic voices of so many preachers were not actually strong. They were often just desperate to prop up their own false power and authority.
Winnipeg was a great place to grow up. I lived there for the first 19 years of my life.
My wonderful memories are seared in my mind but among those memories are mosquitos
fish flies, very hot, dusty, windy summers and snow that never seemed to end….snow that was so cold that the wind blew it into huge drifts that we kids could walk on. The house where I lived currently has snow that extends to the top of the living room window. That would be higher than the fence that surrounds the house. When the snow finally does melt, the grass will be completely brown and the trees will look lifeless until later in May. Summer will happen some time in June and by July the temperature will be 40C. By Hallowe’en there will be snow.
I do not complain about the rain…at least the rain will end.
As for Putin….God’s power is bigger.