There are many people around this world who spend a lot of time worrying about the weather. You may not see it in their wind-worn faces, but when your livelihood (or your life) depends on something you have absolutely no control over, you can’t help but have anxiety. That is why farmers and small town folk have developed a very effective psychological coping strategy for dealing with the weather… they talk about it … all the time! And I mean, ALL the time.

Now if you wish to participate in this group counseling session, you should know that you are required to have a certain kind of knowledge -knowledge not found in any text or taught in any class- knowledge that must be discovered using… a rain gauge! That’s free advice to any of you who find yourselves in a rural context next year. Buy a rain gauge and put it up. If somebody asks you if it rained last night and you respond with, “Umm, I think so. The grass was wet,” you might as well wear a t-shirt that says, “Don’t bother me with your petty little questions.” But if you can respond with, “Yeah. That was a nice rain. I had inch thirty-five in my gauge,” that’s the CPE equivalent of “Tell me more.”

Each of us has a relationship with rain. Mine has been shaped by 40 years of living on the plains of Nebraska. Your own place and community will shape yours. Water falling from the sky is a diverse, yet universal experience on this planet. That is what makes the analogy between rain and God’s Word powerful. So powerful, that one might wonder when talk of rain and talk of God becomes mixed precipitation!

The universal nature of rain means that whether it comes often or rarely, whether it arrives in due season or all at once, whether it falls gently or comes in torrents, there is no getting around the fact that we simply must have this water. The salty oceans that cover 75% of the earth are poison to us. We all need life-giving water that comes down to us. So rain (like the Word of God), is fundamentally… GIFT.

People of all cultures and histories have long recognized rain as gift - as something that comes to us from the outside. Legend would say the rain sticks we use in worship today have their origin in the ancient people of Chile, who used them to ask for water from their gods. Today, people around the world still come together to pray for rain because they recognize it as a gift that they must receive yet have no power to obtain on their own.

But when we reach up our hands to God, Dr. Frambach reminded us last week that we are in a vulnerable position. Far from the nice gift we always wanted, rain comes in shapes and sizes we cannot comprehend. On Saturday we picked a beautiful harvest of grapes here at Wartburg in a gentle, soaking rain while at the same time a powerful hurricane was causing widespread destruction in the lives of so many. I don’t like that. My thoughts like measured gifts. If I had my way they would always fit in my gauge. Nothing as precious as rain should come is such a nasty package.

But the deep irony of rain as gift is that while it can destroy, it is also be the joyous gift of life. The posture of vulnerability is also the universal posture of children running in the rain, opening their mouth to drink in life falling from above, their hands in the air and their faces to the sky. It is the posture of the first gentle snowfall, catching flakes on your tongue and dancing on a fresh, new landscape. The power of rain (like the Word of God) flows out of the ability to make new-to saturate the dust-where all the dead return -and from that death, sprout new life.

So rain is more than Gift. Rain (like God’s Word) is Promise. True promise. Effective promise. Not promise in the sense that we have gotten accustomed to in our thoughts. We are broken people. Our way is often the way of broken promises – of reducing promise to something that might happen sometime in the way off future, IF … IF everything falls into place, IF nothing unexpected comes up, IF I decide that I want to keep the promise. Our way is so barren that sometimes we have no choice but to break our promise. Our distorted way fails to grasp the power of true promise.

True promise is rain. It comes as gift with sure benefits. When rain falls, wilted plants are revived and refreshed. When rain falls ongoing life springs up from death as seeds germinate and grow. The promise is so sure that seeds lye in wait, sometimes for 30 or more years, until the rains come.

The sure benefit of rain is a biological “now, and not yet”. Rain produces nourishment now - bread and rice and maize and sorgo for the eaters around the world - but rain also promises a future so that seeds can be sown in hope. In the wheat growing regions of Kansas and Nebraska there is an old saying, “Sow in the dust and the bins will bust”. In the arid regions of Africa, sowing in the dust is the common practice. Seldom is there enough moisture to germinate the seed. It is sown in hope that the sure benefits of rain’s promise will bring life from ground that is now only dusty death.

So it is that long before rain was known as a bond of hydrogen and oxygen, it was received as gift bound with promise. And the prophet declares the same is true of the Word that goes forth from the mouth of God. The Word shall not return unfulfilled and empty. The Word will make, create, produce, and yield that which God delights in. That delight is not in the strength of created things, it is not in doing evil, or the death of sinners or in sacrifices but God delights in mercy, and justice, and righteousness.

To an ancient people coming home from exile, crossing a wilderness, seeking to find meaning in the destruction of their whole way of life, God speaks joy and shalom. The gift of God’s Word binds to the promise of new beginnings and new possibilities and in doing so, it effects that new life in the present. Underneath and below what are seen as thorns and prickly bushes, lie great and precious seeds: Cypress trees will grow up to rebuild temple floors and doors, lush and fragrant myrtle plants sprout as symbols of peace and joy and justice. The promise is sure. It is never-ending and so the creative power to effect new life is never-ending as well.

You will be cautioned, if you haven’t already, to be careful about reading Jesus back into the Hebrew Bible. It’s a practice that can lead to “questionable” interpretations. Yet the Hebrew bible is the great well from which the early Christian community drew to find meaning in the death and resurrection of Christ. In this human being, they saw the Word of God Isaiah proclaimed embodied as real flesh - as the ultimate “coming down” of the divine rain where gift of grace and promise of new life are inextricably bound together.

In this Jesus, God enters into the emptiness of death and there, right in the middle of that kind of utter meaninglessness, God creates new life and new possibilities! And the truly incredible, unimagined thing is that in faith, this Christ is present in us today. When we enter into the midst of floods and hurricanes and droughts and broken relationships and hospital rooms and despair of all kinds, Christ is there with us, in us, using our hands and feet to embody both the gift and the promise of life-giving, watery word of God.

As we gather around the font again this morning, let us remember and be refilled with God’s gift of forgiveness and sure promise of new life. Let us go out trusting that God has showered us and the whole world with a love too great to measure. - A love that cannot be contained in our own small gauges but must spill out into the world, sharing bread and seed with all.