Rain or Shine
James McTyre
Lake Hills (PCUSA)
Deuteronomy 28:15, 20-24
15 But if you will not obey the Lord your God by diligently observing all his commandments and decrees, which I am commanding you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you:
The Lord will send upon you disaster, panic, and frustration in everything you attempt to do, until you are destroyed and perish quickly, on account of the evil of your deeds, because you have forsaken me. 21 The Lord will make the pestilence cling to you until it has consumed you off the land that you are entering to possess. 22 The Lord will afflict you with consumption, fever, inflammation, with fiery heat and drought, and with blight and mildew; they shall pursue you until you perish. 23 The sky over your head shall be bronze, and the earth under you iron. 24 The Lord will change the rain of your land into powder, and only dust shall come down upon you from the sky until you are destroyed.
Luke 12:54-58
Interpreting the Time
54 He also said to the crowds, "When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, 'It is going to rain'; and so it happens. 55 And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, 'There will be scorching heat'; and it happens. 56 You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?
Again, I want to welcome our sisters and brothers in Christ joining us from Etowah this morning. Etowah comes from the Creek Indian word, "itawa," which means, tribe or town. Etowah is in McMinn county, about 50 miles southwest of Knoxville, along highway 411. It's a beautiful part of the world, about spitting distance from North Carolina, not that we'd ever encourage anyone to spit on another state. Not even Georgia.
Alan Payne is the current Moderator of the Presbytery of East Tennessee. You know Alan. He's preached here in my absence. Alan lives in Etowah, and, like me, Alan is a computer nerd. Also like me, Alan enjoys watching weather radar on the Internet. Both of us would rather watch the radar than stick our heads out the window.
Every time there's a severe weather warning, I log onto the computer, and yup, I see Alan's online, looking at the same maps. And we'll instant message each other with helpful hints. "Hey Alan - Looks like a big red blob is headed right for you. Better fire up the generator so you can stay online." "Hey James - saw you had a lightning strike nearby. Better put on rubber-soled shoes." Alan and I, we're like foul-weather friends. We're each the other's personal Jim Cantore. You see Jim Cantore showing up in your town, it's time to head to the basement.
Well, last week, Alan and I were online again. Thursday night. Things were bad. It was a weird collection of storms. Morristown got it first. And then cells started swirling and popping up all over the map. A lot of people lost trees, lost power, and some lost a lot more than that. To make matters worse, the temperature kept flirting with 100 degrees. Some call it climate change. Some say it's global warming. The term like is, global weirding. Hot, cold, storms, drought - it's hard to predict how the weather's going to be. It's just weird. The world's a weird place. And now the planet's getting weird, too.
Some well-intentioned Christian people (I guess they're well-intentioned) take it as a sign. They watch the weather, they see the news, and then they read the Bible. Usually they read passages like Deuteronomy 28. Deuteronomy 28 is Moses telling the people of God what's going to happen to them if they don't shape up. Moses is kind of like a Jewish grandmother imagining all the possible horrors that'l befall you if you disobey God. It says,
15 But if you will not obey the Lord your God by diligently observing all his commandments and decrees, which I am commanding you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you:
And then Moses puts the fear into them.
20 The Lord will send upon you disaster, panic, and frustration in everything you attempt to do.... 21 The Lord will make the pestilence cling to you until it has consumed you.... 22 The Lord will afflict you with consumption, fever, inflammation, with fiery heat and drought, and with blight and mildew; they shall pursue you until you perish. 23 The sky over your head shall be bronze, and the earth under you iron. 24 The Lord will change the rain of your land into powder, and only dust shall come down upon you from the sky until you are destroyed.
And that's the good news. Anytime you want to give your kids nightmares, don't take them to see "The Hunger Games." Just read Deuteronomy 28 to 'em. They'll be in therapy for years.
Some well-intentioned Christian people (I guess they're well-intentioned) read passages like this and use them as their guide for interpreting all the weirdness around the globe. Whether it's weird weather, or weird people, or weird shifts in culture. Weird things happen because people are bad. You know. "As ye sew, so shall ye reap." You sinners.
Tell that to the couple whose house got leveled. Tell that to a woman whose husband died because the power went out, and the machine that keeps him breathing in his sleep stopped working.
Do you think maybe Moses was exaggerating a little to make a point?
Jesus did. And he said as much in Luke, chapter 12. And we would do well to interpret all kinds of global weirding by his words.
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Jesus had this saying. He said, "God sends rain on the just and the unjust." (Matthew 5:45)
Now, remember, rain's a good thing when you live in the Middle East. The people Jesus preached to thought they were sinful when it didn't rain. We get a soccer game rained out, and, OK - bad example. (The kids are going, "Uhhh," and the parents are saying, "Thank you, Jesus. Let's get pizza!" And then you get to Gatti's and think, "Maybe four hours of bleachers in 100 degree sun wouldn't have been so bad after all." Luckily, our girls are dancers, and you do that inside.)
Jesus knew people use rainfall as a gauge of righteousness. Rainfall and righteousness. They just go together. Of course, whether rainfall is a sign of being just or unjust depends on your point of view. If you're in a drought, rain is good. If you're sitting on the roof of your house floating downstream, rain is bad. So the rainfall equals righteousness formula doesn't always hold up.
Jesus didn't predict the weather. Jesus contradicted the weather-watchers. And that's where we are in Luke, chapter 12. Verse 54 says,
54 He also said to the crowds, "When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, 'It is going to rain'; and so it happens. 55 And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, 'There will be scorching heat'; and it happens.
These first-century folks didn't have weather radar. Which is a shame. Because they really got into it. They had to. A lot of them were farmers. Sadly, they didn't have industrial chicken farms. They had to watch their fruit ripen on the vine, instead of dumping it into a warehouse and gassing it with ethylene.
(Which, by the way, is why your store-bought tomatoes look ripe, but don't taste it. They're picked green, then ethylened. And then they're red.)
Jesus looks out at these people who want to predict or manipulate nature and he says this. In verse 56, he says,
56 You hypocrites!
Now, remember, hypocrites didn't mean quite the same thing we hear it to mean. We think it automatically means, "sinners." But it comes from the Greek word that describes actors. People pretending to be something they're not. People with their heads in the sand, so to speak. People who deny reality, and blame weird people for bringing evil on the earth. Jesus says,
You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?
So, I'm guessing Jesus would not be a fan of the Weather Channel. Jesus was more of a stick-your-head-out-the-window kind of guy. Only Jesus was more of a stick-your-NECK-out kind of guy. And not stick-your-neck-out for the weather. He was a stick-your-neck-out for the people who are victims of the weather, a stick-your-neck-out for the people who are victims of the predictors and the manipulators kind of guy. Jesus was a stick-your-neck-out for those whose life-climates have changed, those whom the weirdness has overcome, with no warning. That's the kind of guy Jesus was.
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I've seen a lot of good people suffering this past week. Maybe you have, too. And their suffering makes absolutely no sense. I can predict the weather - with the help of computers, but I'd be an total hypocrite if I said I have any idea how to interpret the present time. I'm sure there are other ways and reasons I'm a hypocrite, but not that one. Good people in pain makes no sense to me. The rain to righteousness rule doesn't hold up.
But it's tempting, isn't it? We're flooded with "experts" these days. They blame this on that. They blame that for this. It's those lazy kids' fault. It's the gay people's fault. It's the Democrats' fault. It's the Supreme Court's fault. It's the Muslims' fault. It's the Greeks. It's the bar codes. It's the immunizations. It's those rotten tomatoes, that we genetically engineer and then eat when they're secretly green. The world has gotten weird. It's so tempting to just pick some peck, and say THAT'S why we're in a pickle.
You do it. I do it. We all do it.
To which Jesus says, "You hypocrites." "Don't you see? Don't you see you claim to be experts when you really don't have a clue?"
He says, "You people can barely predict the weather. What makes you think you can accurately say why the world, is, the way it is?"
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There's a great quote attributed to Mark Twain. "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."
And I'd say that's true. Except for those of you who carry an umbrella and then it never rains. To you we say, "Thank you," for all those pretty days. Good job.
We spend so much time talking, and worrying, and thinking, about things we can't control. About people we can't change. About problems we can't explain. Doesn't stop us from trying to control, change, and explain. Doesn't stop us from pretending that we can. We spend so much time inventing reasons. Some of us even pick out scriptures that seem to explain why - usually - someone else - usually - is to blame for the current global weirdness.
Now, I know this is never going to happen. This is total fiction. You're not going to do this. I'm not going to do this. But I wonder. I wonder how it would be if we did a mash-up of Jesus and Mark Twain. I wonder how it would be if we all agreed that for one week, if we coudn't do anything about it, we wouldn't talk about it. Whatever it is. Weather, your brother in-law, whatever. Now. It's totally not going to happen. I know that. But I wonder how we'd be different if we agreed that for one week we'd all stop talking about the stuff we can't change. And maybe stopped obsessing, and worrying, and - I don't know - maybe, stopped blaming other people for it. Might be a whole lot of silent houses.
And hey, we're pretending here. Let's take it a step further. I wonder how things would be if instead of TALKING about the stuff we CAN change, we just did it? Without comment, without editorial opinion, without waiting for applause?
I wonder if we'd feel any happier. I wonder if our friends and family would be happier. But more than that, would the world, or at least our little corner of it, be improved?
Jesus said, "You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?"
Maybe interpreting the present time doesn't mean what we think. Maybe interpreting the present time doesn't mean being able to explain why things are so weird, or so wrong, or so bad, or so good. Maybe our interpretation of the present time - in that sense - doesn't mean a thing. We won't know unless we find a way to silence some of the opinionating.
Maybe interpreting the present time means simply appreciating your present time, the time you're presented. Appreciating it and doing what you can with it. Instead of wishing it were some other way. Instead of trying to predict how it's going to be tomorrow.
The Book of Ecclesiastes is one of the coolest, weirdest books in the Bible. It's weird because it doesn't try to explain anything. It just observes.
In the 11th chapter it says,
...you do not know what disaster may happen on earth.
3 When clouds are full,
they empty rain on the earth;
whether a tree falls to the south or to the north,
in the place where the tree falls, there it will lie.
4 Whoever observes the wind will not sow;
and whoever regards the clouds will not reap.
5 Just as you do not know how the breath comes to the bones in the mother's womb, so you do not know the work of God, who makes everything.
6 In the morning plant your seed, and at evening do not let your hands be idle; for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good.
In other words, do what you can. Because you don't know how things are going to turn out. Or why. Do what you can. Interpret this present day. Rain or shine.
