Humans and the Sky

I am so excited that we are talking about Creation Care and there have been so many ideas that have come to my mind to talk about today that I apologize if it feels like I’m throwing a whole lot at you today. So instead of wasting more time warning you, let’s get started.

One of the things that has been on my mind a lot lately has been monsoons. It was so nice to get some rain the other day and I feel like every day I am looking up at the sky and down at my weather app to try to figure out if it is going to rain or not. I get so excited when my weather app sends me a notification warning of thunderstorms and possible flash flood. I then switch to the radar part of my weather app and watch the predicted path of the storm and try to figure out if it is going to hit Mesa or not. Just last night I got both of those warnings and looked at the app radar to see that the storm was going to hit nowhere near us and of course we had neither thunder nor rain. Then of course there’s the reverse when I get no notifications like last week and all of the sudden there is a downpour of rain at our house and we all rush to the window to see the rain pouring out of the sky.

This isn’t the first time I’ve complained about weather apps before. I get so frustrated when I get all these notices of the possibility of rain and it doesn’t happen. Now I am not blaming the meteorologists, at all, but it just goes to show that as good as we are about predicting these kinds of things there is still so much that we can’t predict or know about weather patterns and whether or not it’s going to rain or not. Or when sudden rain appears without any kind of warning.

And wouldn’t it be wonderful if instead of clutching to our weather apps and hoping for those green, yellow and white blobs on the radar to pass over Mesa, we could instead know that it was going to rain? And, no I don’t mean by having better or more advanced equipment to accurately detect and predict storms. I saw a headline from an article in my news app and as I read the headline I knew that I had to read it. The headline read, “The New God’s of Weather Can Make Rain on Demand - Or So They Want You to Believe” and the article was from Wired. Am I right? How could I not read this? The article focused on how many countries including the USA are studying a practice called ‘cloud seeding’ where they put certain elements into existing clouds to make the clouds rain when they otherwise might not. The article focused mainly on the United Arab Emirates where they have been investing heavily in cloud seeding. At the very end of the article it briefly brought up a new form of technology that won a monetary award in a new method of creating rain by using lasers. You can ask read the article or ask me about it the science behind it later, but my point is that the world is trying to bring about more rain in the world especially to parts of our world that naturally have less rain than other parts.

And I look at this article and all the science and money being spent on cloud seeding, and I look down at my weather app and then I look at this passage from Job and I wonder what in the world are we doing. And I’m not saying that we shouldn’t try to bring rain to our world, but I read things like verse 34 and I wonder if we are misplacing our importance in the world and how the world works and most importantly how we should be working with our world to continue to make it the world that God gave us.

Job has been asking for quite some time to have a conversation with God about everything that has happened to him and why it happened and this is God’s first response to it all, and God answers from a whirlwind. What is interesting is that God doesn’t address Job’s questions about Job directly and the suffering he has endured, but instead addresses Job with questions about the grand order of the not just the world, but all of creation which includes the the cosmos and the heavens. And what is interesting is that nowhere in God’s conversation about creation does Job, let alone any other human, get mentioned.

God instead shows how little Job understands about the created order of the world and the whole universe and that Job’s ability to control and work in it is miniscule. Not only that but perhaps more importantly God points out that the world, despite what we as humans think, doesn’t revolve around us. Meaning that while a wildfire may be devastating, it brings new life from the seeds of the trees. Out of its destruction brings life. When a flood happens the waters that then flow out to dry lands far from where the flood happens brings new life to those areas that were dry and barren. It’s not creation’s fault that we decided to build our towns and cities in those areas. We shouldn’t blame creation that some natural order happened to cause destruction in one area, becuase we are not paying attention to the larger picture of how that may benefit another part of creation. We, like Job, are focused on how it affects just us.

I’m not saying that we should just be lais·sez-faire about the devastation the natural world has on ourselves or others. I believe that one way we live out our faith is by caring for those who have been negatively impacted by both nature and other humans. But God wants Job, and all of us, to understand that there is more to this world than just us, and even though we know way more about the way that nature works than Job did, we are still not in control of how nature works. Even if cloud seeding or lasers work in helping relieve drought in parts of our world, we need to be good stewards of this vast creation we have been blessed by God to be a part of.

As many of you know, I just got back from vacation visiting the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Perhaps if God has whisked Job off to one of the points that I visited it may have driven God’s point home even further to Job. Though we do see later in the story of Job that Job get’s God’s point. As I looked out into the Grand Canyon and the vastness of the sky all around me, I realized just how tiny I am. I am not really afraid of heights, but being on some of those narrow points with the nothing but sky around me and the canyon below helps me to realize what God is trying to say.

And what I am ultimately trying to say myself is this: In the grand scheme of God’s creation we are just a small part of it. We are an important part but still small. But because we do play an important role we need to be mindful of the impact we have on our world, and everything in it including the sky. We must also trust that God is working through all of it and with our help we can shape this world and the sky and all of the beauty and importance the sky holds for us into the way that God intended from the beginning of creation. So that we and God can look at it and declare it as God did as being “very good”. Amen.