October 25, 2013 Dear Friends, I led our chapel service this week at the General Council Office, and am pleased to share with you the notes from the reflection I offered on Jeremiah 14:7-10 and 19-22, and Psalm 84: We have had quite a bit of rain lately. These rainy October days can be dreary. I had to drive back to Toronto from Niagara-on-the-Lake in the driving rain on Saturday evening, and it was not fun. In our society, cushioned as most of us are from the need to worry about the growth cycles of the plants we eat, we think of rain as a negative. We might get wet as we walk to work! A baseball game or picnic might be cancelled! Our shoes might get muddy. Or at our house, the dogs might make muddy paw prints on the floor when they come in. Yes, we prefer sunshine. We sometimes talk about saving for a rainy day. At different times through the financial challenges the church has been facing in recent years, I’ve heard the question, “Is this the rainy day we’ve been saving for?” We’ve used that as a rationale for spending from our financial reserves. The rainy day is a time you save for, and it’s a metaphor for unexpected hardship or need. Our scripture readings today give a different perspective about rain. If you live in a desert, rain is something you yearn for, something you pray for, something you celebrate. If you live where water is scarce, you can never forget how precious it is. Isn’t it interesting how the same thing can look completely different, depending on your perspective? Isn’t it interesting how your perspective is shaped by how much you have of something, or how much you don’t have? Here is a headline from the online version of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz from a few days ago: “Weekend weather — Israelis welcome the rain.” I wonder what it takes to let us understand a burden as a blessing. Maybe it isn’t a matter of changing what we are in the middle of, but of changing how we feel about what we are in the middle of. My son can be somewhat countercultural when it comes to rain. He takes delight in running around in the middle of a heavy downpour. I have a wonderful image in my head of looking out the front window one day as I heard a sudden rain pounding on the roof. I had looked out wondering if I should go and pick him up and give him a ride home, but there he was in front of the swimming pool across the road from us. He wasn’t hurrying towards the house, rushing to get out of the rain. He was just standing there, soaked to the skin and getting wetter, just standing there in the rain. I don’t really know what was going through his head at that moment, but the impression I had was something like, “What a fantastic rain this is, this is just too great to rush through, I’d better just stay in this place for a moment and soak it up!” I can remember times out on backpacking trips when it rained and there was nowhere to go to get out of it. There was nothing to do but keep hiking through the rain, and you know, after a while, that wasn’t so bad. In fact, it was good to know you could manage, rain or shine. When you take a long hike or canoe trip, you have to work with whatever the weather dishes out, and you find that you can get through it all, and even enjoy conditions that you wouldn’t even poke your nose out in at home. It’s a great feeling — a feeling of being very much alive. The times in our lives when we experience adversity can be the times that deepen our humanity. I wonder if the same might be true for the church. A few decades ago when most Canadians identified as Christian — many of them United Church — we in the United Church took that for granted. Today, we’re very aware of having fewer people in most of our churches. We are aware of living in a society where Christianity, or faith practice of any kind, can no longer be assumed. I wonder if there was ever a minister in the 1950s who wished that some of those in the overflowing pews would make less of an assumption of their faith and would go to a deeper place with it. I wonder if we would be thinking and praying so hard about what God is planning for the church of the future, if there weren’t some things in our current situation that are making us uncomfortable! As we struggle with change in the church it can feel like standing in a cold fall rain without any shelter in site. Let’s remember that new growth cannot be nurtured without rain. Let me finish with a few lines from the poem A Desert Rain by 19th-century American poet Andrew Downing: The cool rain poured in sudden haste Upon the thirsty sod, And life throughout an arid waste Rejoices, thanking God. Each wild and lonely desert flower Is royally arrayed, As if in one brief, stormy hour The world were newly made. My friends, let’s get out in the rain and rejoice in it. Nora |
