By: Karen Hoover
“But now I tell you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of God who is in heaven. For God makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love only those who love you, how does that help anything? What more are you doing than others? You must love everyone, just as God does. In this, seek to be perfect as God is perfect.” (Matthew 5:43-48)
I tend to experience rain as an irritating and inconvenient annoyance. I attribute this to growing up in Los Angeles during an historically wet decade of winters. Wanting only to pull up the covers, we instead donned clumsy galoshes and raincoats and trudged to school each morning feeling particularly resentful and arriving rather damp. But when I am in the tropics I experience a rain shower in a completely different way. I am the same person but now I feel refreshed and secure that the warm breezes will gently blow me dry in just a very short time! Rain can be a dispiriting disappointment when a long-anticipated flight or hike is cancelled. It can be frightening in its relentlessness, and even life-threatening as we experienced just over five years ago when our creeks and rivers swelled over our capacity to contain them. Rain is God’s life-giving blessing yet the climate change that we have created is causing more life-destroying drought.
More recently I have been meditating on the cleansing nature of rain. Just as our baptism is a sacrament of new life through the cleansing ritual of water, the soothing rhythm of rainfall and the dim gray skies of these past days have provided me a much needed cleansing of my mind and spirit. And I was in greater need of this than I realized until I felt somehow that my burden of built-up anger and sorrow from the relentless news of the last several weeks had been somewhat lightened.
There are countless references to rain in the Bible, including the memorable time God tried to cleanse the world of evil by flooding it! We know how well that worked! Reflecting on evil, my thoughts turned to the Bible passage in Matthew (5:43-48) where we are reminded that God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”
When I turned to this passage while meditating on rain, I was caught short to be reminded that the passage is within Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and his commandment that we love and pray for our enemies, and even those who seek to disrupt and do harm. Otherwise, we are really no different than they are. I will need an extended season of monsoon to approach the perfection of God’s love for my personal list of evil-doers. But with every day of healing rain, I will be mindful that this is the work I need to do. With God’s healing love, may it be so.
Loving God, help us to be more loving of those who are unjust that they and we may more fully experience your perfect Love. Guide us daily with your wisdom and gentle mercy. Amen.
