THE LIGHTNING HAS UNZIPPED the sky, letting loose a rain of Biblical proportions. Nevertheless, the church parking lot fills up early. They’ve come here every Thursday night since anyone can remember, treading the fine line between hope and expectation, spurred on by the knowledge that if they play their cards right they may win the jackpot.

An old Buick with a grinning grill rolls to a stop next to a Chevy pickup. The occupants smile at each other and await the evening’s entertainment — a few grains of sugar in the bitter tea of life. It’s hard to imagine that these people are offending their Creator for what they are about to do. At 7 p.m., the social hall door opens and light leaps out at 186,000 miles per second.

BINGO. IS THERE ANYONE WHO has not heard of it? Is there anyone who does not know how to play? This game of staggering odds and stupefying simplicity flourishes all over the world under scores of names — beano, bolita, lotto, marco, tombola, housey-housey. And for a half-century it has been a source of enjoyment and an antidote to loneliness for millions of Americans, be they high rollers, low rollers or holy rollers.

Bingo was a godsend to struggling Catholic churches. In many parishes it was singlehandedly responsible for keeping parochial schools open — though it did more to divide Catholics and Protestants in America than the doctrine of papal infallibility. Bingo also has equipped volunteer fire companies, saved entire towns and outfitted high school bands.

Although several obituaries of the game have been written, we are currently in the midst of a bingo binge. Industry experts estimate that 50 million Americans play bingo today, wagering between $3 billion and $5 billion a year. If we make the modest assumption that 20 percent of that total finds its way into worthwhile causes, then bingo ranks right up there with the United Way as a charitable institution.

Bingo now ranks as the fourth largest form of gambling in the United States, behind casinos, state lotteries and horse racing.

In Florida, it may already be a billion-dollar industry, though nobody knows for sure. State officials say that more than 5,000 bingo games are operated in the state and estimate that 25 percent of those games bring in a total of more than $150 million a year. The size of the total handle is unknown; Florida is one of 22 states that allow bingo but do not keep statistics.

Florida’s new bingo law, which was supposed to take effect on Oct. 1, was designed to provide statistics and bring in some much-needed revenue for the state. But the law set off a howl among charities, church groups, civic and condominium associations and bingo operators.

What they screamed loudest about were the provisions requiring civic groups to register as bingo operators — and to submit to background checks and fingerprinting — and the higher tax they must pay to operate the game. The new law required operators to pay a $350 licensing fee and 1 percent of their gross proceeds.

Bingo operators complained that the law was unfair and unconstitutional. A state court judge in Tallahassee agreed, stopping enforcement of the law in late September. The Legislature will have to hammer out a new law when it convenes this week.

Complicating the situation is the fact that the biggest bingo operations in South Florida are run by the Seminole and Miccosukee Indian tribes and are exempt from state control.

The Seminoles, who used to wrestle alligators to keep the wolf from the door, opened their Hollywood bingo hall, which seats 1,200, in 1979.

They have used their profits to launch agricultural projects, set up a reservation police force, and build libraries, day-care centers and gymnasiums.

But the Seminoles learned the hard way that bingo doesn’t always generate big profits.

In 1987, the tribe built the 5,600-seat Big Cypress Bingo Hall on reservation property in Palm Beach County and billed it as the world’s largest bingo hall. To manage it, the Seminoles brought in Steven J. Blad, known from Oklahoma to Florida as “Mr. Bingo.”

Blad was a rotund showman who often wore a tuxedo and threw money to the crowd. His critics say he threw too much. When the corrugated-tin bingo hall closed in April 1988, checks were bouncing, creditors were unpaid and prize winners couldn’t collect. The Seminoles’ non-Indian partners were more than $1 million in debt.

There is now a third Indian bingo hall in South Florida. This one, located in Miami, was built by the Miccosukee tribe at a cost of more than $6 million, and seats 2,000.

Indian bingo is not just a Florida phenomenon. There are now at least 105 Indian bingo parlors in 30 states, and bingo is an entrenched part of Indian life throughout the United States.

SCREECH — SNAP! GOES THE Scotch tape as they stake out their table tops. Most carry compartmentalized plastic boxes, like sewing kits, that accommodate their equipment for the night. All of them are equipped with Majic markers — red, blue, green and purple — which they use to mark the numbers on their paper, or on their soft bingo cards.

They can play 10, 20, even 30 cards at a time, stamping away as each number is called, like border guards marking passports. For hard-card bingo, they have chips they can distribute as fast and sure as a Benihana chef. Some have metallic chips, which can be swept from the cards with a magnet so that no time is lost getting ready for the next game.

There are about 120 people waiting to play at 7:30. Perhaps three of every four are women. An astonishing number of them, over 90 percent, are wearing eyeglasses.

They congregate in groups of four and six, wagging their tales, taking in rumors. Conversation is everywhere, and the threads of one intertwine with those of another. Windshield-wiper waves float back and forth.

At 7:28 the caller walks up to the microphone. The conversation stops abruptly, as though someone had lifted the needle from a record. The players sit erect with their hands folded — markers, chips, cigarettes and snacks placed in just the right position. No brain surgeon was ever better prepared.

A FEDERAL STUDY TITLED Gambling in America disputes the stereotype of the bingo player as a low-income, elderly woman. It shows that nearly 70 percent of the nation’s 50 million bingo players are between the ages of 18 and 44, and that 43 percent of them are men — though women tend to play more often. Half of all bingo players have attended college.

Nor is bingomania confined to America. When Britain legalized the game in 1961, people lined up outside the halls at 7 a.m. to be sure of getting a seat for the afternoon games. In 1973 Mrs. Helen O’Donnell of Birmingham, England, admitted to being so addicted to the game that she had sold her family home to cover her debts.

Bingomania centers on a 5-by-5-inch card, containing 24 alphanumeric combinations and one free space. Bingo cards can be arranged in 32,760 different ways, and the odds of winning are perhaps 200 to 1 — depending on the number of cards that are involved in the game.

In basic bingo, the winner is the first person to cover five spaces in a row, up, down or diagonally. But there are infinite variations, like arrowhead, Lazy T, pyramid, dogbone, airplane and finally blackout, which requires that all spaces on the card be covered.

Ritual and superstition play a big role in the game. Some players set onions at their places because the odor keeps evil spirits away. Others go to astrologers before every game. But bingo is a totally random process. There is no system, no way to beat the odds — at least honestly. There was an enterprising player in 1950 who sneaked a small printing press into a game in Danielson, Conn., and used it to run off the winning card. But when he tried to collect the $980 jackpot, the manager smelled fresh ink and turned him over to police.

CAGED, AIR-BLOWN PING PONG balls bounce around like neutrons. The caller extracts the first one and says, “Oh-70… Oh-seven-zero.” He speaks slowly, distinctly, like a pilot radioing his latitude to a control tower. An electronic board lights up with each number as it is called. A woman, bearing up courageously under a towering burden of hair, comes in late, buys her hard and soft cards, and sits down without taking off her coat.

Bingo is labor-intensive, requiring workers to call the numbers, verify winners, and sell extra cards. At many bingo halls they are volunteers, who walk between row upon row of players, their faces a buttery color in the flickering fluorescent light. The players’ hands trace the numbers from card to card while the caller’s voice continues the litany.

“Gee-For-tee-Eight… Eye-Twen-tee Nine… Bee-Fif-teen.”

IT IS SAID THAT A FORM OF bingo was being played with marked blocks by the Egyptians before the pyramids were built. The game we know as bingo is a form of lottery and therefore a direct descendant of “Lo Giuoco del Lotto d’Italia” — the Italian National Lottery, which was organized in 1530 and is still going strong. From this emerged the European game of lotto, which had special playing cards with rows of numbers. There was a caller who read numbers out loud; the players would cover the number if it appeared on their cards, and the first player to complete a horizontal row was the winner.

It was this game that was being played at a country carnival just outside of Jacksonville, Ga., in December 1929, when a tired traveling toy salesman named Edwin S. Lowe pulled up in a Nash Ajax. Lowe saw people clustered around a horseshoe-shaped table covering numbers on cards with beans. They called the game beano.

“I decided to play myself,” Lowe recalled in a 1957 interview. “But I couldn’t get a seat. I stayed until 2 a.m., but nobody budged. The operator finally had to chase everyone out. They kept shouting, ‘One more game!’

“Later, the man told me he had encountered the game in Europe, where it was called lotto. He had printed his own cards with rubber stamps. The numbers were on wooden disks, which he also had imprinted.”

Lowe returned to his home base in New York and considered adding beano to three other games his small toy company was producing. He bought a rubber stamp set, some cardboard and beans, plus a few inexpensive prizes from Woolworth’s, then tried out the game on a dozen of his friends in his Brooklyn home.

“We played with myself calling the numbers. Well, one girl needed just one number to win, and she was so excited she almost burst. Then the number she was waiting for happened to come up. She was so excited that she stuttered and what she said was ‘B-b-b bingo’ instead of beano.”

Lowe felt the spur of the moment dig into his flanks. “I cannot describe the elation that girl’s shriek brought to me. All I could think of was, ‘This game is not going to be called beano. It’s going to be called bingo.’ Well, you know, I couldn’t get rid of that crowd. When the prizes ran out, they started to play for money, taking turns calling out the numbers.”

SOON THE E.S. LOWE CO. WAS on the market with a game called bingo, and it caught on as a form of home entertainment. It might have remained just that were it not for a telephone call to Lowe from a priest in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. The priest told Lowe he was in desperate need of funds for his parish and was trying to raise money through a weekly bingo game in his church basement. The problem was that people were losing interest because there were too many duplicate winners. Could Lowe, the priest asked, print up a few more duplicate cards?

Lowe quickly hired Carl Leffler, a retired Columbia University math professor, to devise 6,000 bingo cards with non-repeating number groups. Leffler agreed to do the task on a per-card basis, and as he worked, each new card became more difficult. Leffler developed mental problems soon after completing the job, and they were blamed on the mind-boggling work he had done for Lowe. Professor Leffler’s work has been the basis for the bingo card ever since.

Lowe found himself with a financial bonanza in the midst of the Depression. He had been born in Poland, the eldest son of an orthodox rabbi, but with the money he earned from bingo he became a prominent New York City real estate developer. In 1973 he sold his company to Milton Bradley for $26 million, and died in 1986.

With the help of the expanded bingo game, the Wilkes-Barre church survived its financial crisis. Then bingo helped a Knights of Columbus hall in Utica, N.Y., veer away from fiscal disaster. By 1934 the number of public bingo games in the U.S. was estimated at 10,000. On one memorable evening in that year, some 60,000 people showed up at the Teaneck, N.J., armory for bingo, and another 10,000 had to be turned away at the doors for what has been dubbed the largest bingo game in history. In 1939 St. Augustine’s parish in a poor section of Cincinnati raised $219,913 from a once-a-week bingo game. Catholics began joking that the next canonization was going to be St. Bingo.

John Harrah, an Iowa attorney who moved to California, opened a group of very profitable bingo parlors in Santa Monica, Venice and Long Beach during the 1930s. His son, William Fish Harrah, bought out his father and moved the operation to Reno, Nev. He added style and glitz to his bingo parlors, and when he opened the first Harrah’s casino in 1946, it was literally “the house that bingo built.”

By 1950 the game had become the financial backbone of thousands of churches, volunteer fire companies and other charities. It built field houses, cancer clinics, parks and in 1951 it built a factory that saved the town of Renovo, Pa. In the mid-’50s, bingo games on Cubana Airlines flights from Miami to Havana began as soon as the plane left the ground.

THE GAME PICKS UP SPEED LIKE a train. Anticipation is baked on the players’ faces, and they sit posture-perfect, alert as exclamation points, as though a nun were walking up and down the aisles with a ruler in her hand. The only sounds are the faint hum of the overhead devices that suck smoke from the room and a clock cutting tiny notches in the silence.

The caller says “Oh-Seven-tee-Five” and someone in the room says “Thank You.” There is nervous laughter, and glances are stolen this way and that to see if anyone is about to cover the winning numbers. The room is a cauldron of possibility.

And then…”BINGO!” The shout is like a gong cutting a tunnel through the silence. The word, unspoken since the game began, opens a door through which rushes a crowd of images. A blush spreads on the winner’s face, and the tension leaves the room as air from a balloon.

There is just one winner among the hundred players. She collects $25.

—- WILLIAM ECENBARGER is a freelance writer. Sun-Sentinel business writer Lane Kelley also contributed to this article.