Doing Something About the Weather--August 20, 2025

Doing Something About the Weather--August 20, 2025

[Jesus] also said to the crowds, “When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, ‘It is going to rain,’ and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat,’ and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” (Luke 12:54-56)

You know the old one-liner attributed to Mark Twain, I'll bet:  "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."  Insert rimshot and laugh-track here.

The point of the joke, of course, is that even though small talk frequently turns to the weather as an easy, non-controversial subject for conversation, there's nothing we can really do about the weather, except to receive it.  My willpower can't make a sunny day out of a rainy one, and no number of signatures on a petition can make it rain when we're in the middle of a drought.  We are all great at talking about the weather, but we can't do much of anything to deal with it.

But, as Jesus points out, we can see it coming--at least some of the time.  And when we do see the signs of a looming rain, we take down our porch umbrellas and roll up our car windows.  When we do foresee scorching heat, we give the flowers some extra water and make sure to keep our dogs off the scalding blacktop.  And when they call for a snowstorm, we make sure to have extra milk, bread, and toilet paper in the pantry and fridge.  We do know how to read the signs of the weather--you could even say that in our day technology makes it even easier to predict tomorrow's weather with better accuracy through radar and satellites and such.  And we also know how to respond or prepare for what we can see coming with the next cold front or storm cloud.  Maybe that's what we're afraid of when it comes to the rest of our lives: we know if we are paying attention, we will be held accountable to act in light of what we see.

And I think that's why Jesus is so fired up here in these verses many of us heard in worship this past Sunday.  We often don't keep our eyes open to the world around us--what Jesus calls "the present time"--because we know that if we pay attention to it, we will be called to respond to it, rather than burying our heads in the sand.  And Jesus knows how tempting it is for us just to stay in the bliss of ignorance, so we can justify staying put in the stillness of indifference.  All too often we look away from what we know will make us uncomfortable, away from news we don't know how to deal with, and away from the suffering of others in the world, because we don't want that knowledge to spur us to respond--to do something about any of it.  Many know the famous quotation of Maya Angelou: "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." But more often than we would like to admit, we try to stay safe hiding in the inverse of that insight, telling ourselves, "As long as we don't learn, we don't have to do better."  As long as we don't pay attention, we can tell ourselves we didn't know what was happening... and let ourselves off the hook.  As long as we don't look at the darkening skies, we can say it wasn't our fault we didn't bring an umbrella to avoid getting drenched.

Jesus knows that about us--and while he absolutely loves us no matter what, he calls us to be honest with ourselves and to start opening our eyes to the needs of "the present time."  That means finding the courage not to look away from the headlines that break our hearts, not to ignore the faces of people we would have rather kept in our minds as an anonymous, abstract "them," and not to cover our eyes from the resources and opportunities we have in our hands to respond to the situations around us.  In both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, we are given the witness of prophets and apostles who call God's people to pay attention to the things they would have preferred to ignore.  

There's Amos, telling the well-fed and comfortable Big Deals of ancient Israel that God is upset at how apathetic and indifferent they are that others are suffering and hungry while they just turn up the volume on their music and refill their wine glasses.  There's Isaiah, pointing out the homeless in their streets and the hungry poor in their communities and saying, "These are the people God cares about more than God cares about our religious rituals!" There's the early church in Jerusalem, realizing that they had been ignoring the needs of widows among the Greek-speaking minority, and then stepping up to change the system and appoint people (also from that Greek-speaking minority) who could oversee the food program to make sure that they were not left out or unseen any longer.  There's the apostle James, helping his congregation see that they have been showing favoritism to the rich and shoving the poor aside--and of course, his intention is to get them to change their practice so that nobody gets treated as "less-than."

And then there's Jesus, calling attention simultaneously to the generosity of a widow who gives all she has to the temple offering plates and the greed of the Respectable Religious Leaders who get rich foreclosing on widows like her (see Mark 12:38-44).  Jesus is the one who sees a man whose hand is withered while he is teaching in the synagogue, and when the rest of the congregation wants to ignore him, Jesus heals the wounded man and calls the rest out for being willing to pretend the man isn't even in the room.  Jesus looks up in the tree and spots Zacchaeus, even when everyone else chose to ostracize the tax collector; meanwhile Jesus invites himself over to Zach's house for dinner.  Over and over again, Jesus compels people to see the needs, the faces, and the pains of others around them, even when we have been deliberately hiding our eyes.  So it's no surprise that Jesus speaks up again in today's verses to tell us open our eyes to read the needs and the calling of the present moment.  He knows we are good at feigning ignorance to get out of responding to the needs of the world--and he is intent on changing us.

In our own day and time, we know the temptation to turn our heads rather than acknowledge the panhandler at the street corner or the parking lot, because we don't want to have to wrestle with how to help them if we do admit they are there.  We know the impulse not to listen to the news because we are worried it will depress us, and "We just don't know what to do..." about the children starving in Gaza, or the rubble accumulating daily in Ukraine, or the local food program that lost its funding.  We would rather not have to pay attention to the stories of people who have been abused, or who have been mistreated, or have been victims of discrimination, or have been ignored all around. There are a million ways to keep our eyes from seeing what's right in front of us, and we have tried them all, because we don't want to take action to respond to the suffering we would see.  Jesus has come to take off our blindfolds and yank our heads from the sand so that we will see... and so that we will act accordingly.

I wonder... what might we need Jesus to help us to see today--what might we have been covering our eyes from recognizing or facing?  How might we be stirred up to action in response to what we will see if we let Jesus deepen our vision?  

Maybe we'll be provoked at long last from just making small talk about the weather... to offering an umbrella to the person in front of us at risk of getting drenched without our willingness to share.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage to open our eyes... and to open our hands in response to what we come to see.