Dear people of Grace,
As I sit here at my desk we are experiencing a much-needed deluge of rain. It got me thinking, when is it appropriate to pray for the weather?
During a quick internet search, I found the following prayers:

Dear Lord, please remove the cold and rain spell Chicago is experiencing. We need dry and warm weather on April 7 and 9 so we can enjoy Cubs’ baseball. Thank you.

Dear Father in Heaven,
We love you and thank you for your blessings. Please allow for good, beautiful weather the week of May 16-22 down in Key West Florida for my daughter’s wedding. We will have many activities planned and the wedding itself will be outdoors…

According to records, the Chicago temperature topped out at a frigid 40 degrees that weekend in April, but it doesn’t seem to have impacted the Cubs’ performance this year. The Florida Keys, on the other hand, appear to have done much better – highs in the nineties with no rain on that particular weekend.

So what does this mean? Is Ms. Keys more faithful than Mr. Chicago? Is God a Yankees fan? Surely not…

Over the next few weeks I’m going to write about prayer. Now I freely admit, in advance, that I certainly don’t have all the answers. Why God appears to answer some prayers and not others is beyond me and, honestly, we do Christian credibility no favors when we get creative with reasons why God does this or that. But we are a praying people. In the gospels, Jesus repeatedly uses variations of the phrase, “When you pray…” For Jesus, it’s taken for granted that it’s not whether we pray, but how.

I’m going to start my discourse on prayer with the weather because Christians have never had a problem praying for favorable climate conditions. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer (still the official prayer book of the Church of England) begins its Prayers and Thanksgivings section with prayers for rain, for fair weather, and two prayers ‘in times of dearth and famine.’ The 1979 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer contains prayers for rain, for agriculture, which includes a petition for seasonable weather, as well as several prayers for harvests and fruitful seasons.

What immediately sets these prayers apart from the examples above is in their scope. Until the twentieth century, Christians have prayed for favorable weather because a single bad crop season or drought could have devastating effects. We sadly still see this in parts of Africa even today. Prayers for rain or abundant harvest were rooted in the community, in seeking God’s grace and providence for those who were wholly reliant on a successful, local, agricultural base. With the advent of refrigeration and improvements to transportation, a failed crop probably won’t impact us outside of slightly higher prices at the grocery store.

So when we pray for something – anything – maybe the first question we need to ask ourselves is: who is this prayer really for? Is it about me, or about the broader community? What’s at stake? And what are the consequences to my prayer?

People can get married in the rain and go on to live perfectly happy lives together, complete with a memorable wedding day story. The Cubs can apparently play ball in glacial conditions without it affecting their batting average. I once managed to go an entire summer without praying for rain for my brown, faded lawn, and it still sprang back to life in the fall.

As we pray this week, let’s ask ourselves what it is that we hope to achieve, and who we are really seeking to benefit, from our petitions to God. In the meantime, bless the Lord who gives “you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, and fill[s] you with food and your hearts with joy.” (Acts 14.17)

Blessings and peace,
Deacon Nick