Word Matter

“Daddy, do think it will rain today with lightning and big scary thunder?” “No, my child. “See how God has painted the day with a robin-egg blue brush and spread angel hair across the sky, reminding us of His love and kindness and love for His children? If we were going to have storms, He would have made the heavens angry with sky mountains of black and blue, snapped His whip and you would have heard Him groaning for the sins of all creation.” Compare this with, Is it gonna rain? Nope, don’t think so.

In our readings of the Bible, we are struck with the powerful language of passion. Consider Psalm 5, “My heart is in anguish within me, the terrors of death have fallen on me. Fear and trembling have come upon me and sorrow overwhelms me.” Or, from Jeremiah, “Heal me O Lord, and I shall be healed, save me and I shall be saved, for you are my praise.” Or, the certainty of the quote from John’s gospel when, “a voice came from heaven”.

The messages of the Bible are universal and unchanging but we aren’t. We have changed from a people who find God in the “robin egg blue sky”, to people who speak in tones of grey and who love in shades of white. We no longer can think in passionate terms because we are no longer passionate about what we believe. We are a luke-cold people who in many ways are losing the battle to save the world and are handing it over to those who are on fire for their God.

Yet in our baptism we have been anointed with the capacity to see God touching everything we do, monitoring all that we are and offering everything we need to feed our passion. But, did our baptism endure very long past the drying of the last drop?

Perhaps we do not need so much to imitate the people in the Bible but be inspired by their passion. Maybe then we could see miracles as the prophets did and, better yet, speak of them to a world in need of sight.

“But”, you say, “People just don’t speak like that today.”

That is the shame of it all.