Job 37:1-5 "When Lightning Strikes and the Thunder Rolls"

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        On the Lenten journey we are taking in worship this year, this time of learning to walk in the dark, we have found all sorts of unusual gifts along the way.  We have discovered feelings and situations that we typically label as signs of weakness or faithlessness that are in fact indicative of our innate strength and fidelity  – at least once we understand them more broadly and embrace them as part and parcel of being human. 

         We have reflected on the gift of uncertainty as an impetus for us to grope for God’s hand while we attempt to navigate through the darkness of our lives, recognizing that we strengthen our faith when we reach out to find that God is there to share in our struggles.  We have also pondered the gift of emptiness and realized that only when we make room for God in our cluttered lives can we expect God to meet us there.

         So far we have concluded that, in the dark woods of our journey, God can be found in the emptiness and uncertainty - and perhaps that is the first step of learning to walk in the dark.  However, that recognition only seems to raise a second, more difficult question. 

          In a Q&A blog I read this week, one reader wrote this query: 

Hi there, I’ve been a Christian for quite some time now. Many people can hear God speak to them, and know his will for them, but I can’t seem to. I can’t hear him. I was wondering if you had any ideas of how I could hear God speak to me, and not just me talking to him. I’ve tried to listen, but nothing seems to be working. I feel lost.

Any ideas?

Thanks guys, any feedback would be much appreciated.

-        Sarah

         Though it may seem out-of-place to be writing to a faceless internet blogger about such a profound theological question, surely Sarah verbalizes something that haunts even the most cynical among us.  If God is indeed somewhere on this journey we find ourselves taking, how, in the midst of the uncertainty and emptiness and all the voices that call to us, how do we hear our God?  How do we know not only that is God speaking but also what, in heaven’s name, the Holy One is saying?

        And so we come to another gift as we learn to walk in the dark.  In his book, Gifts of the Dark Wood (which is the jumping off point for this worship series), author and United Church of Christ pastor Eric Eines writes about the gift of being thunderstruck.  He uses our reading from the Book of Job as a way to begin talking about that gift. 

“Whenever this happens, my heart stops—I’m stunned, I can’t catch my breath.
Listen to it! Listen to his thunder, the rolling, rumbling thunder of his voice.
He lets loose his lightnings from horizon to horizon, lighting up the earth from pole to pole.
In their wake, the thunder echoes his voice, powerful and majestic.
He lets out all the stops, he holds nothing back.
 No one can mistake that voice—
His word thundering so wondrously, his mighty acts staggering our understanding.”

         Great bursts of thunder and lightning is a metaphor (not a literal meaning, mind you, but a metaphor) for God speaking, and it is one that characterizes most ancient religions.  When the gods had something important to say, you can bet they said it with thunder and lightning. 

     Eines writes:  “In every mythology in the Ancient New East, the elements of lightning and thunder are depicted in similar fashion:  as instruments for conveying the voice of the highest deity.  The imagery is the same whether one is examining the monotheistic Yahweh-worshipping culture of ancient Israel or the polytheistic Marduk-worshipping culture of Mesopotamia. It is the same with Zeus among the Greeks, Tahundi and Ivriz among the Anatolian cultures, and Baal among the Canaanites.  In their artistic representations as well as among their literature, each of these cultures envisions their most high (or only) deity speaking to us through lightning and thunder.”

         Eines goes on to say that we in modern times write off the significance of those mythological explanations as a primitive attempt to explain the origins of storms.  He insists that, in doing so, we sell short these ancient civilizations, undermine the breadth of their culture, and the depth of their queries about, and understanding of, life itself.  

         I agree with him. One need only look at the architectural marvels of Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, or the Nasca Lines in Peru or at the astronomical accuracy of Newgrange in Ireland, for example, to conclude that these ancient people were not stupid or mentally underdeveloped as we too often so arrogantly think they are.

         And so Eines maintains that their myths (including those of our Old Testament) are more than simple inventions, born out of fear and trembling.  These stories are not told to teach us the history of science. Rather, the myths (or sacred truths, in the very best sense of the word) seek to unravel, in this case, not the origins of thunder and lightning, but rather where the voice of God comes from and how it comes to us through intuition. 

         Eines would say that it has ever been so – in spite of the fact that we sometimes wonder why God does not appear to speak directly to us now as God seemed to speak in the stories we read in the Bible.  You know:  And God said this, and God said that. 

         However, Eines would say that Elihu in the Book of Job and the prophets and all the others were never intimating that God was audibly whispering in their ears.  No - they were communicating their recollections of those flashes of intuition, those moments of clarity when the world for once made sense to them, those “aha” experiences when their world was rocked like thunder, reverberating sometimes for decades before their reflections were finally written down.  These ancients were not being dishonest in their language about God but merely naïve in thinking that anyone would ever take what they had to say literally. 

         Perhaps then, God does continue to speak to us – just as God did in Biblical times - through those sudden and intense moments of clarity and intuition that the ancients would say strike us like lightning.  An electrifying way to learn, no pun intended! 

         Maybe God speaks to us in those moments when the storm is breaking over us and all we can hear is the thunder reverberating until it reaches the very essence of our soul.  Maybe the moments that are a sudden flash, sometimes even accompanied by a vision, that leave us changed, our perspective transformed, are the way God speaks to us.  And so we say we have “seen the light” or whatever it was has “rocked our world.”

         I remember the beginning of my own journey to come to the conclusion I have come to about gay marriage.  I had always favored non-discrimination toward the LGBT community.  However, when it came to marriage and how that fit in with the church and the Bible and the teachings of Jesus, well, that was difficult for me to grasp. 

         However, one summer – not all that long ago – I had the opportunity to meet my cousin Chris after years of only sporadic cottage-related emails. I had not seen him in literally decades.

         I knew that he had lived many difficult years working in a job he was not cut out for, then being unemployed and eventually retrained as a math teacher, and long ago coming to the not-so-happy conclusion that he was gay.  Chris was a pretty nasty guy for a long time.  On this particular occasion (a reunion of sorts), he and his partner were arriving at the cottage the evening before Joe and I were heading home.

         Looking back on it now, I realize that, as the four of us ate dinner together, a lightning moment was happening to me, a moment of clarity.  In watching the two of them interact, I saw clearly that they were as devoted, loyal, committed, and loving a couple as any heterosexual pair whose wedding I had ever officiated.  And so my journey began.

         I did not know what Jesus would have thought – but I did know that Jesus’ commandment as the Gospel of John records it and proclaimed to his disciples the night before he died was to love one another.  I also knew that, in every instance, Jesus had erred on the side of inclusion and radical hospitality. That dinner in the Canadian wilderness rocked my world:  You may not get it, God seemed to say to me, but I love you anyway – and you ought to do likewise.  

         I was experiencing the gift of being thunderstruck – and those of you who have had similar experiences know they are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we live for them.  Those close encounters with the Divine are exhilarating – especially in hindsight. 

         However, we are also terrified of them.  After all, they force us to move out of our sureties and break down the constraints and boundaries that we have established to keep our lives in check, understandable, and under control. 

         I have to wonder how much we really want those “aha” times.  The flashes of insight, the brief moments when our minds are split by something akin to a lightning bolt, when what we have seen or heard stays with us, rumbling and reverberating like thunder down to the deepest recesses of our hearts and souls, perhaps for years on end, the times of absolute light and clarity, the experience of being led by a hunch or intuition:  Oh, do we really want God to be singling us out and speaking to us – and likely in the midst of a storm to boot? 

After all, we are taught that thunder is a warning sign, and lightning is dangerous.

         Both of our sons are Eagle Scouts, an honor of which I am very proud.  However, I am more proud of the fact that they achieved this rank by most often completing merit badges on their own and not in a troop or camp setting.  One of those badges was the camping merit badge.  I do not know if it is still true, but it used to be that boys could count at least some of their nights at troop camp toward the number of camping nights required to complete the badge.

         Our youngest son, Tim, never went to Scout camp due to family vacation plans and other summer commitments.  For the camping merit badge, he was allowed to count a few nights sleeping in a tent on our cottage property instead.  Sounded easy enough!  However, never in a million years would Tim sleep by himself in a nylon tent in the woods when you could hear the crazy call of loons at night and occasionally the howling of wolves and most certainly the rustle of small nocturnal animals scuttling by on their nighttime forays – to say nothing of the ax murderers that might approach silently in a canoe in the dark. 

         The result was that Joe and I took turns sleeping with him in the tent - proving true the old adage that behind every Eagle Scout is a parent, usually a mother, who is willing to go to great lengths to see that her son completes whatever requirements are in question. 

         One of the nights I stayed with Tim was not (unsurprisingly) restful to begin with.  That being said, at about 4:30 A.M. – in the in between time between night and the first inkling of dawn – we heard the sound of thunder in the distance.  After 10 or 15 minutes, we began to see flashes of lightning.  It was pretty clear that the storm was swiftly heading our way. 

         The thunder became louder, and lightning began to light up the woods and sky all around us.  Tim and I both lay silently in our sleeping bags, counting the seconds between the flashes of lightning and the rolls of thunder.  Both of us were terrified, yet neither of us wanted to call it quits.  I mean, after all, we had made it this far….

         Finally, Tim could stand it no longer.  “Mom,” he asked.  “What time is it?”  “Five o’clock,” I replied.  At that moment there was a brilliant flash of lightning followed immediately by a terrific clap of thunder. 

        “Is it close enough to morning to count this as one of our nights?”  Tim asked in his own logical, rational way.  “You bet!”  I replied, and we both vaulted out of the tent and made a run for the closest sleeping cabin, arriving just as the sky opened up, and it began to pour.

         Experiences of thunder and lightning are indeed terrifying.  Being in the midst of a storm is no fun.  And yet, the storms of our lives seem to swirl endlessly about us.  The claps of thunder that rattle our very bones and the lightning bolts that zig zag up and down and sideways are enough to make us shut our eyes to block out the light and cover our ears to deafen the sound.  All we want to do is hide.  All we want is for the storm to go away.  And yet, as evangelical pastor Nathaniel Bronner wrote, “Sometimes to get where God wants you to be, the only path is through the storm.”

         Sometimes it is in the madness and mayhem and storms of our lives, when the lightning is flashing and the thunder is rolling that, if we can face the storm rather than hide from it, if we can see the lightning not as life-threatening but as an opportunity for an insight that may be life-giving, if we can listen to the thunder’s rumbling not with fear but rather with an open heart, we can catch a glimpse of our God and hear a snippet of what God is trying to tell us.

         Maybe that is what this gift is all about this week – the gift of being thunderstruck.  Maybe it all about remembering that, in the end: “Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass…it's about learning how to dance in the rain!”

by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church U.C.C., Raymond, Maine