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Grace Church
257 Kendall Street
Burlington, WI 53105

(262) 763-3021

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Pastor Scott Carson

Secretary Patti Hall

PASTOR'S PENS 2007

Grace Church of Burlington November 18, 2007  “Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces up, snow is exhilarating; there is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.”      John Ruskin     A jet was flying through a severe thunderstorm. As the passengers were being bounced around by the turbulence, a young woman turned to a minister sitting next to her and with a nervous laugh asked, "Reverend, you're a man of God, can't you do something about this storm?" To which the minister replied, "Lady, I'm in sales, not management."     The changing seasons are a constant reminder to us that God is still running this world. The changing seasons often bring mixed emotions– especially when you are looking at the cold dark winter months after the crisp air and brilliant colors of fall. But as long as God still changes the seasons, He is still faithful and will keep His promises. Jeremiah 31:35 says, “This is what the LORD says, He who appoints the sun to shine by day, who decrees the moon and stars to shine by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar— the LORD Almighty is His name. ‘Only if these decrees vanish from my sight,” declares the LORD, “will the descendants of Israel ever cease to be a nation before me.’” Jeremiah reminds us that all of nature follows a fixed order. As long as that fixed order stands, God is still the Lord of Hosts. But if that fixed order changes—the scheduled changing of the seasons, the timing of the tides, the movement of the stars—then God will also abandon Israel.     The next time the weather report tells us that the high will be in the 40's or the next time you grumble about raking, why not praise God for His faithfulness? We don't grumble when the weather turns warm and the trees begin to bud, do we? We don't grumble when the 90 degrees days give way to highs in the 70s, do we? Let's use these changing seasons as an opportunity to praise God that He is faithful and that He keeps His promises to His children.    The weather also reminds us that as powerful as man thinks that He is, God really is in control and the Sovereign of the Universe. If you were to ask a group of your friends what issues came first to their minds in terms of the big problems facing our society, the answers are pretty much to be expected. International terrorism; the war in Iraq; the scourge of abortion; the definition and disintegration of the family; genocide in Sudan; the monopoly of secularist, statist education; a dismaying electoral process in the United States. It won’t take them long to assemble a list of several gloomy things to think about. Most of those things though are under man’s control to some extent. We have a new contemporary problem in the United States that is a vivid reminder that we are not in charge: drought. Just one more year of shortfall in the usual rain patterns in big regions of the country might well lead to social disruptions of a kind that would eclipse our concern for the list that most of us first think of.  We modern Americans just aren't used to drought. Geographically, drought is for people in Ethiopia, Sudan, and remote parts of northern Africa. Historically, we've got vague recollections of something our ancestors called a "dust bowl" in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas—but certainly all that was in the day of hand pumps and outhouses. Modern technology has for sure put all that behind us...until now. Of all the spigots that the Lord God of heaven and earth could spin shut to get our quick attention, I can't think of any that match His big faucets in the sky that control our fresh water supply. Subprime mortgages? Cut them off, and we'll still adjust. Oil and gas? A lot more critical, of course. Electricity? Black us out, and society goes into shutdown mode. Social Security checks? Cut them off, and you'd trigger a depression.  But there's a difference between shutting down and dying. Without water, life dies and deserts appear. Major parts of Georgia reportedly only have 90 days of water left. 50,000 people related to the landscaping business in just two or three states are out of work. Throughout history the need for water has driven vast populations to war and to relocation. People become nomads and exiles because they are thirsty even before they become nomads because of political oppression. Nor is that only the case in distant history; go this very week to Darfur in Sudan to see how a dried-up water supply can help to ignite evil on a whole region of the world. And then when you hear that Gov. Sonny Perdue of Georgia has declared a state of emergency in 85 of Georgia's 159 counties—where rainfall the last few years has been about half of what is normal—and when you hear hints that the National Guard might have to be called out to enforce the conservation measures that are on the way, maybe then your knees, and those of your neighbors, will begin bending to a kneeling position. Amazingly, he’s now also called for a day of prayer...hard to believe in a secular political world but the Governor knows that this is beyond his control.     If the situation worsens, it won't be the first time God has used a drought to remind people who's in charge. We humans can drill deeper for oil and gas, and we can build higher kilowatt electrical generators, and we can print money to bluff our way through an economic crisis. But no one has figured out a way yet to hook a fleet of 747s to a bank of rain clouds, tow them to Georgia, Arizona, or southern California's wildfires, and flip a switch to make those clouds drop their rain. Ever since Elijah's showdown with the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 17), folks of virtually all religious persuasions have generally understood that the job of getting the earth watered belongs to powers higher than ourselves. I truly hope that we don't need to go as far as Elijah did, but I'm not pretending that anything short of a few God-given gulley-washers can help our nation avoid this new and very real crisis.