Sermon: Down by the Riverside

Texts: Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5; Acts 16:6-15

Date: May 9, 2010

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational United Church of Christ

            In your mind’s eye, seat yourself on a riverbank you know.  If you don’t have a river in your history, you can re-visit the small one we meditated with a few moments ago.  Breathe a moment, and listen to the river with your memory’s ear. 

            “On the Sabbath day,” Paul and his companions write, “we went outside the [city] gate by the river, where we supposed there was a place of prayer.”  Readers are not told why exactly they “supposed” there was a place of prayer there on the riverbank.  It is possible, since they had been in the city for a few days, that they had been directed there by residents who had heard that some of the God-fearing folk of Philippi went there on the Sabbath to pray.  Paul usually sought out the local synagogue when he visited a new place, but apparently there wasn’t one in Philippi.  Lacking a conventional sanctuary, they went looking for the small congregation of seekers down by the riverside.

            Even if there hadn’t been rumors of a congregation of sorts gathered there, it would have been an excellent instinct.  You can hardly go wrong supposing that if you set yourself down by a river, you will find an ideal place to pray.  I have more certainty in this conviction than I have evidence or the ability to articulate why.  It just seems  to me, since I have been mesmerized by so many rivers and streams, that  a riverbank is a perfect place to pray.

            I found a poet, Howard Nemerov, whose words touch on what I’m getting at.

To watch water, to watch running water

Is to know a secret, seeing the twisted rope

Of runnels on the hillside, the small freshets

Leaping and limping down the tilted field

In April’s light, the green, grave and opaque

Swirl in the millpond where the current slides

To be combed and carded silver at the fall;

It is a secret.  Or it is not to know

The secret, but to have in your keeping,

A locked box…[1]

I don’t know if that verse sings to you the way it does to me, but the reason I am drawn to it is that it evokes something of what I feel when I contemplate a river.  Like you are seeing something that is both revealing and concealing the secrets of the earth and of life itself.   You are seeing something that is both eternal—water will fall from the sky and run to the ocean; and something that is constantly changing—no river is the same two days in a row.  A river is a gorgeous paradox, flowing with mystery and wonder.  “To watch water, to watch running water is to know a secret…Or it is not to know the secret, but to have it in your keeping, a locked box…” 

            Isn’t being in tune with God in our lives something like this: to know a secret, to catch glimpses of  Light tumbling through our existence as our life flows on, and at the same time not to know the secret but to have it in our keeping, a locked box.  God is both revealed and concealed in this earthly life, both knowable and ineffable.  And God is constantly  on the move.  Therefore, a riverbank is a perfectly wonderful place to pray.

            I’ve had rivers as neighbors at different times in my life.  The most memorable was living on a high bank above the Yukon River in Alaska for a couple of years when I was a kid.  The mighty Yukon was about a mile wide where we lived in the village of Kaltag.  It was a changing waterscape throughout the year. It froze over each winter, with ice 8 or 10 feet thick.  It would seem quite immobile for a number of months, though of course it wasn’t; we just couldn’t see what was still flowing beneath the ice and snow.

            We humans may go through our seasons of time when God seems immobile---frozen in the past, buried under layers of antique doctrine and dogma as chilly and obtuse as an arctic snowfall.  Or we who were once warmed by the presence of God go through a season when God seems chillingly absent from our daily lives, as silent and still as 10 feet of ice.   Such an experience is not a bit unusual, nor is it an occasion for guilt.  It’s a season.  It’s a good season to sit by the river and pray; to lament God’s seeming absence, to cry out for a thaw.

            In the spring in Kaltag the village keeps its eye on the river.  It’s sort of an honor to be the first one to see the great sheet of ice over the river move and to shout for everyone to come and see.  When the ice starts to move and break up the whole town thunders out to the riverbank to watch and celebrate.  The trash that has been piled up through the long winter is carried away, a clean sweep.  The ice breaking up is an amazing spectacle, dramatic and noisy and powerful.  Listen to a few more verses of Nemerov’s poetry:

…I have seen,

White water, at the breaking of the ice,

When the high places render up the new

Children of water and their tumbling light

Laughter runs down the hills, and the small

Fist of the seed unclenches in the day’s dazzle,

How happiness is helpless before your fall,

White water, and history is no more than

The shadows thrown by clouds on mountainsides,

A distant chill, when all is brought to pass

By rain and birth and rising of the dead.[2]

His line about the “new children of water” running down the hills in a dazzling new day reminded me of the two main characters in the Acts story.  Paul, who had been Saul, he of a chilly heart and a murderous vocation to persecute Christians, was dazzled by the light of God on the road to Damascus and became a new person in the water of baptism.  His natural zeal was converted to use for God and he set out as a missionary to Gentiles, winning them over to Christ.  He was drawn by the gravity of his new mission, but was astoundingly flexible about how he would go about it.  He and his partners had it mind to go to Asia, but the Holy Spirit forbade them to go there.  Then they tried to go into Bithnyia, but the Spirit did not allow them.  The Spirit seemed to be building little dams where Paul and friends had planned to flow.  I wonder if they had any moments of idle frustration, like I do when my plans are thwarted.   I wonder if they examined whatever the Spirit was using to block their progress and said to themselves, “Dam!  Now what?” 

Then a vision comes to Paul, rising out of his unconscious, a man from Macedonia pleading with him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us!”  So Paul sees a new channel opening for his mission, and he immediately crosses over to Macedonia, convinced that God was calling him there.  If one way closes, Paul (a new child of water and rain and birth and the rising of the dead) will find another way to bring the gospel with which he is overflowing to thirsty people.

            Lydia is one of the thirsty.  She is a seeker.  She is not Jewish, but has been drawn by that ancient faith to study Judaism.  One of my commentaries says that there were a number of what are called “God-fearers” at that time, the majority of them women, who were drawn by the ethical teachings of Judaism to study it and to worship at the synagogues.  Lydia was apparently a successful business woman, but she was not content with mere material success.  She was looking for something more.  That’s what drew her to the riverbank, that excellent place to pray, with a number of her companions who were also seeking something more.  It seems to me that the both knew and did not know the secret of a higher power flowing through the universe.  They were attracted to it, this locked box in their keeping (to borrow Nemerov’s words).  Then Paul and his companions came along with the key, the name of Jesus: a story of healing, hospitality, sacrifice, and resurrection so powerful that it unleashed in Lydia a mighty YES!  She was baptized in the river, that superb place of prayer.  “I have seen white water, the breaking of the ice, when the high places render up the new children of water and their tumbling light laughter runs down the hills, and the small fist of the seed unclenches in the day’s dazzle…when all is brought to pass by rain and birth and rising of the dead.”  No sooner is she rendered up as a new child of the water, a child of God, than she was engaged in her own ministry.  Her whole household was baptized.  She absolutely insisted on bringing Paul and his mission partners into her home for shelter and food.  By the end of Acts Chapter 16 she is the host if not the leader of a house church for the nascent Christian community in Philippi. 

            These are amazing disciples, Paul and Lydia, meeting by that splendid place of prayer, the riverside.  It is remarkable how they were not only able to be washed and cleansed in the waters of baptism but were able and willing to become like the water itself, to become children of water, active, drawn by the gravity of love flowing through the world to become one with that movement.  I have been savoring a descriptor of God I had not heard before this week: Omni-active.  I’ve heard God named omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent before; but never omni-active.  It may be my new favorite adjective for God.  The omni-active God flowing through all time continues to draw others into the activity of watering the world with love.  Paul and Lydia were absorbed like drops of water into that movement, and God has drawn countless others into the stream.

            I had the privilege this week of hearing a Nicaraguan Jesuit, Father Fernando Carenal tell some of the story of his faith journey at Seattle University.  He began by telling of a season of his life which became the key to understanding everything else he did.  He chose to spend some time with a Jesuit community in Medellin, Columbia near the end of his studies.  He had grown up in Nicaragua, but had apparently been somewhat sheltered from extreme poverty until he went to Medellin.  The second day he was there he was given the task of going out to buy bread for the community.  There were no bakeries in their neighborhood, practically no businesses at all, just blocks and blocks of shanties housing unemployed people.  He found a place to buy bread, and started toward home.  On the way he began meeting hungry children who smelled the bread and followed him like so many puppies.  What could he do?  He gave away a piece of the community’s bread to one hungry child, and then another, and another.  By the time he got back to the community’s house his sack was empty.  He told them that either they would have to come up with another way of obtaining bread or send someone else to get it or forgo having bread as long as he was there. 

Cardenal began to get acquainted with his neighbors, and he grew to love them deeply.  He remembers one of the young women coming to him to say that she was going to the heart of the city to enter into prostitution.  He says it was a terrible blow to him; he loved her.  He tried to talk to her about the dignity of her womanhood and how it would be lost if she entered this life.  But she felt there was no option.  Even more deeply affecting to him, he realized that she didn’t really  have any concept of the dignity of her womanhood, her personhood; it was a concept she had never been able to learn in her ground-down existence.  She went off and he never saw her again.  Another time he looked out the window and saw the children across the street, a household of eight children he had come to love, eating out of the trash cans of his Jesuit community.  Another time he had a long talk with a young woman who announced to him that she was going to commit suicide because at age 19, she was the only one in her very large extended family who had been able to find work and she was utterly exhausted by having her whole family standing on her shoulders.  These experiences and many others over the course of the nine months he spent with the poor of Medellin caused him to take a solemn vow when he left that place for his first assignment: that he would spend the rest of his life doing his utmost to ease the suffering of the poor and to work for justice.

His pledge got him into trouble immediately at his first job at a Jesuit university, where he sided with the students in a conflict with the administration and was canned after about 4 days on the job.  He asked the Provincial to send him to a place where he could work with the poor and he wound up teaching and leading a school in Nicaragua.  He came to another crossroads in his life when the Sandanistas were organizing guerilla warfare against the dictatorial Somoza regime and a young man came to him asking him to join the revolutionary movement.  He had a difficult decision; it was very dangerous to be associated with the Revolution.  He would undoubtedly be jailed, tortured, and killed if it was even rumored that he was a part of it.  But he felt it was a movement for justice, and he agreed to support it (nonviolently) after meditating on the story of the Good Samaritan and deciding that Jesus was calling him to be a good neighbor to the people who had been beaten and left to die by the brutal government.  He was given a code name by the leaders of the movement, as everyone was.  His new name was Justus, which translated in English is “Justice.”  It pleased him very much.

He got kicked out of the Jesuit community after the revolution succeeded in unseating Somoza for continuing to work with the new government.  He was soon made the Minister of Education and he helped organize a massive literacy campaign.  His movement recruited 60,000 young people to go into the hills and rural farms and teach the peasants to read and write.  60,000 young people in a population of 3 million; the equivalent here in our population would be 6 million young volunteers mobilized.  The workers were threatened and intimidated by the supporters of the old regime since they could see clearly how the success of this literacy campaign would cement the revolution.  They said they would capture the volunteers, poke out their eyes with pencils, and then kill them.  And although there were seven murders and a few rapes, not one of the 60,000 young people left their posts.  The dregs of the old regime gave up eventually, seeing that killing was not having the desired effect, and let them do their work.  Within five months the literacy volunteers reduced the overall illiteracy rate in Nicaragua from 50% to 13%.

Cardenal and the volunteers he inspired not only joined the movement, the river of love flowing through their land, the mighty waters of justice tumbling down, but they seemed to choose the rapids.  If water flowing downstream has any say in where it flows, it seems that Cardenal (with his early pledge) and his sisters and brothers leaned toward the Class 4 rapids rather than a stream that branched off to more tranquil pools.  It’s the most breathtaking witness of discipleship I have heard in a long while.

Do such stories of discipleship leave you overwhelmed, a bit breathless?  Let’s go down to the river to pray.  Let’s seat ourselves on the bank of the river of John’s vision in Revelation: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, through the middle of the street of the city.  On either side of the river is the tree of life, with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” [Revelation 22:1-2]  Can you see it?  Can you see the river of the water of life, flowing bright as crystal, from the dwelling place of God?  Have you been made clean and been refreshed by its waters?  Are you feeling its allure, its omni-active magnetism?  Has whatever had frozen in your life begun to thaw and move?  Might you hear in the musical voice of the river the sound of someone calling you to come and help them?  Can you imagine yourself rendered once again a child of the water, giving yourself to the gravity of Love’s current, wherever it might flow?

To watch water, to watch running water

Is to know a secret, seeing the twisted rope

Of runnels on the hillside, the small freshets

Leaping and limping down the tilted field

In April’s light, the green, grave and opaque

Swirl in the millpond where the current slides

To be combed and carded silver at the fall;

It is a secret.

Beloved, this is the secret: It is to the river of the water of abundant life that we are called, children of water, to be one with Love and to water the world.

[1] Nemerov, Howard “Runes”  Poet’s Choice Paul Engle and Joseph Lanland, ed.  New York: Time Life Books, 1962, p. 186

[2] Ibid, p. 184