See How the Farmer Waits

In the Mid-South, your almanac is really only any good as a fire-starter. At least that’s how I felt this week, as I watched snow fall in the middle of November. I can’t imagine a world where my livelihood depended on the reliability of our weather. While less than 2% of our nation now lives and works on a farm, I know we have several builders in our church who still constantly feel the power of climate over commerce. It’s something we have to consider now as we contemplate groundbreaking for our own building expansion. But by and large, we live a climate-controlled existence, and I’m pretty grateful for that. We’ll just let Superintendent Aitken stay up and worry about the weather for us.This week I also finished the memoir of a fellow clergyman whose first pastorate was in rural Illinois. One of the treasured liturgies of his deeply agricultural congregation was the rogate, the blessing of fields and seeds on the fifth Sunday after Easter. As Rev. Richard Lischer puts it, “Rogate is the Latin word for ‘pray.’ Because Jesus is risen and now intercedes for us in heaven, we can pray on earth, and for the earth…” Imagine that. For these folks, this is a life-or-death liturgy. If those prayers aren’t answered, most of them will be forced to start work in the steel mills. The leap from their everyday livelihood to the imagery of scripture is a short step for these folks, and in a way, I envy that.Humming along in the background of James is a view of our spiritual lives as seeds being brought to fruition. We pick up the metaphor easily enough on a surface level, but our lack of real, high-stakes experience handicaps us in some ways. It's difficult for us to fully appreciate the hardships endured by farmers and the true significance of those rains, which fall (or don't) on the just and the unjust. Lord willing, we’re going to try and do some work in unpacking all of that together as we round the corner into James 5 this weekend. -Josh