Sermon: River of Life

Texts: Psalm 104:27-33; John 4:5-14; Revelation 22:1-5

Date: September 25, 2011

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

          Take a moment to recall a time when you had an encounter or connection with a river or a stream.  Remember what it was like…Now imagine that the river or stream is going to tell the story of your encounter with it.  What insights come to you as you consider the encounter from the river’s perspective?

          That was the question posed by the curriculum writers in the Seasons of the Spirit Bible study this week as texts for River Sunday were examined.  I lived next to the Yukon River in Alaska for a couple of years as I was growing up, and that river left a deep impression on my consciousness.  The Yukon was about a mile wide where we lived; “vast” is about as apt a description as I can conjure up.  It was deep, wide, muddy, cold, powerful and inscrutable.  We traveled on it by boat in the summer and by snow machine, ski, skate and sled in the winter months.  We watched awestruck as the ice moved in the spring.  I can’t imagine living next to anything else so fascinating as a river, with its spellbinding combination of constancy and change. 

          As I said, the river left a deep impression on me.  I sincerely doubt I left much of an impression on the river.  We swam in it a few times (wearing lifejackets); if you can stand the first minute or two in the chilly water you get pleasantly numb all over and you can paddle around for a bit in its current.  I’m pretty sure a skinny screaming kid jumping in makes less of a lasting impression on the Yukon than a dust mite alighting for a fraction of a second on the hair on my left pinky toe in the dead of night.  You know what I’m saying—river: big; me: small.  River: ancient; me: only on this earth for a short time, and only in one place like the banks of a mighty river for the blink of an eye, in the overall scheme of things.

          Perhaps it’s the way gazing at a river leads us to contemplate our relative insignificance and impermanence that inspired biblical authors to write of rivers in connection to God.  One of the earliest references to a river in scripture is the mighty river that flows out of Eden.  Its source is in the subterranean ocean our ancestors imagined beneath the earth’s floor.  The river bubbles up out of that unseen ocean into the very center of the world where the tree of life is planted; it waters the garden of Eden, and flows out to every corner of the earth, dividing into four branches that flow in the four directions. 

          This same river flows through time into the prophet Ezekial’s sacred religious imagination.  In the vision he is given, the river flows from the threshold of the temple into the four directions.  Wherever the water from this holy river flows, life abounds.  Its waters teem with fish and swarming things.  The water makes fresh and sweet that which had become stagnant.  Along its banks trees whose leaves never wither nor fruit ever fails are watered by the river.  Does this ring a bell?

          The visionary author of Revelation picks up the lovely image where Ezekial leaves off, as he is shown by an angel the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, running down the streets of the renewed city, Jerusalem.  On either side of the river is the tree of life with its 12 kinds of fruit, yielding food each month, with leaves that are for the healing of the nations. 

A river runs through the holy imagination of our ancestors in faith.  Let’s wade into that river they envisioned for bit and see where it takes us. 

I don’t share the ancient Hebrew’s cosmology represented in Genesis, their understanding of a three-story universe and a flat earth.  However, I find the idea of a great subterranean ocean, immeasurable, hidden in darkness, out of which God waters the earth, an evocative image.  One of Wendell Berry’s poems begins, “As timely as a river/ God’s timeless life passes/ into this world.  It passes/ through bodies, giving life,/ and past them, giving death.”[1]  God’s immense life force flows through this world, coming from a source we do not see, and flowing on to times and places we cannot imagine.  The fact that we cannot see the place and time from which God’s life-force originates signifies nothing except our inability to grasp what is so far beyond our comprehension. 

I find this perception of the timelessness, timeliness, and sheer inevitability of God’s life flowing through our universe immensely comforting.  As a child I could stand in awe of a great river and understand that I was powerless to impede it or effect its flowing on.  I know humans have succeeded in changing the course of various rivers with dams and other interventions, but they can never change the fact that rivers flow, beginning at a source and ending at an ocean.  In another poem, Wendell Berry writes, “gravity is grace.”  Humans are utterly powerless to stop the grace that sweeps silently through our earthly landscape, powered by God’s design and an almighty will to keep it flowing.   It’s wonderful to know that grace flows with or without us, before we came to be and after our allotment of time passes.  It’s profoundly impersonal and uncontrollable; it flows in every direction, rather than trickling into the constricting culverts we have constructed in the imaginations of our hearts.

More of Wendell Berry’s insights:

In a single motion the river comes and goes.

At times, living beside it, we hardly notice it

As it noses calmly along within its bounds

Like the family pig.  But a day comes

When it swiftens, darkens, rises, flows over

Its banks, spreading its mirrors out upon

The flat fields of the valley floor, and then

It is like God’s love or sorrow, including

At last all that had been left out.[2]

We may not always be aware of it, but God’s love is everlastingly in flood stage as it flows on.  It goes even where we have heaped up scorn like so many sandbags, spilling over our barriers and boundaries like they aren’t even there.

When Ezekial was gifted with his vision of the river of grace, he saw it flowing not from an invisible source, but from the threshold of the place of worship, God’s temple.  I don’t think this new insight was so much a narrowing of the earlier center-of-the-earth understanding of the Source as it was a recognition that the community of faith has a role to play in the outflow of grace into the world.  This very human institution, the temple, became the spillway through which grace descended into the world in Ezekial’s visualization.  He probably had a particular temple in mind, the one which was the center of his religious practice.  It seems more in keeping with God’s style to think of this as a kind of every-temple.  The insight here, I think, is to realize with appropriate astonishment that God’s willing to claim us as partners in enabling the flow of grace into the world.  Our deeply flawed churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, shrines and all manner of houses of worship are still, by God, leaking grace into the world.  God’s grace is flowing over the threshold of our praise, our prayers, our projects, our potlucks.   It’s remarkable!  Therefore, we have a responsibility, as long as our house of worship stands, to see to it that as we worship and work together we are more of a tap than a dam where grace is concerned. 

In the exile’s vision in Revelation, the beautiful river flows from the throne of God.  In one sense this is a more precise perception than the primordial perspective of Genesis where the river flows from an unseen source.  It is given to the people of faith to see the Source as the place where God dwells, the throne where God reigns over all that was, all that is, and all that is yet to be.  What does it mean to say that God reigns?  To many people of faith, to say that God reigns reflects a conviction that God is in total control of everything, and that God’s life force is moving us around like so many little wooden boats caught up in a strong current.  That is not my belief. 

I don’t think God is just pushing us around.  But I do believe that it is a wonder to be part of something so much larger than we are as individuals.  Somehow—with our consent—our little life force becomes part of the mighty current of God’s loving work in the world.  The flow of grace that we join goes before us, flows with us, and goes on after us; it is our privilege to be part of it during our days on earth.   I love the idea that the force of God moving in the world makes more of my life than I could ever effect with my feeble strength and all-too-brief lifetime.  Again, let me share some of poet Wendell Berry’s reflections on the metaphor of a river, in his poem “The Gift of Gravity.”

All that passes descends,

And ascends again unseen

Into the light: the river

Coming down from the sky

To hills, from hills to sea,

And carving as it moves,

To rise invisible,

Gathered to light, to return again….

We are what we are given

And what is taken away;

Blessed be the name

Of the giver and taker.

For everything that comes

Is a gift, the meaning always

carried out of sight

to renew our whereabouts,

always a starting place.

And every gift is perfect

In its beginning, for it

Is “from above, and cometh down

From the Father of lights.”

Gravity is grace.

The encouragement I draw from these verses is the understanding that our life falls into the world like rain into the great river of life, and the meaning of our lifespan is carried out of sight to contribute to the renewal of the earth.  Our life is given; our life is taken away; and the meaning of it, of which we get occasional glimpses, while carried out of sight is part of the ever-new flow of grace into the world.  I believe with all my heart that the God who reigns is using all the little drops of water that we are to circle through the world with a draught of grace.  “All that passes descends, and ascends again into the light” in a spiritual circle that is hinted at in the life cycle of water moving on earth.  It is an unspeakable blessing to be part of that cycle, to feel the gravity of grace drawing us through the flow of our days, and to trust that we are part of the gift of grace in the world even on our worst days. 

          There’s a moist little beacon of this hope within each of us.  Jesus, in his encounter with the woman at the well, wound up describing it as a spring of water gushing up to eternal life that is available to every one of us.  This reminds me that we don’t have to be at the center of the world, or at the threshold of the house of worship, or at the foot of God’s throne in some future time and other place to experience the living water that flows from God.  We may at any moment tap into what the Spirit has located in every soul.  It’s quite portable, in other words, not to mention potable.  It goes where you go. 

          We began by imagining how the river or stream with which we have had an encounter might describe our meeting.  I myself was led immediately to a sense of smallness as I remembered the immensity of the river and its near-timelessness compared to my finitude.  It’s possible that our little lives are little felt by our great God.  If we were only dealing with the realm of the physical, that would be an inevitable conclusion; the cup of our lives, the little refreshment captured from our tiny little individual springs, would hardly register on the great river of grace that is God’s life. 

          Yet we are contemplating the spiritual realm, not merely the physical.  We are given to hope and dream that the impact of our lives—even though its meaning is carried away from our sight and comprehension—is somehow felt and needed by the immense Source of Love that flows through and around us.  Why would God implant a spring of water gushing up to eternal life in each of us if God didn’t intend for the grace that flows out of each of us to add something to the divine life?

          Andy Himes was here with us this week to tell some of his story growing up with a fundamentalist family.  Some of his story is painful; Andy came as a young adult to leave behind the faith of his childhood, in part because of what he perceived as lack of concern about racial injustice.  He went away to college and became everything his grandfather hated—a long-haired hippie communist liberal atheist.  There was considerable estrangement between Andy and most of his relatives.  Andy became a cautionary tale in some of his grandfather’s sermons, illustrating points about how people can go bad.  Nevertheless, Andy’s grandmother continued to love him and affirm him.  Andy says that she was the one person who gave him unconditional positive regard for his entire life; the most critical thing he can ever remember her saying was a gentle push to polish his shoes so others wouldn’t have a bad impression of him.  She was, apparently, affirming with everyone.  There were 1000 people at her funeral; and Andy expects most of them thought of his grandmother as the best friend they ever had.  And she probably was. 

          It’s now part of Andy’s spiritual practice to try and embody his grandmother’s gift of affirmation.  He’s not sure he can understand God; but he can understand what someone who loved him so completely did in his life.  She was a spring of living water to him and thousands of others she met who were thirsty for love.  I did not know her, but I can see in the way Andy speaks about her that her life is still watering this world even though her days are ended.  I believe that God’s life was reflected and even increased by such a loving person.   

Listen to one more (partial) poem from Mr. Berry:

They come singly, the little streams,

Out of their solitude.  They bear

In their rough fall a spate of gleams

That glance and dance in morning air.

They come singly, and coming go

Ever downward toward the river

Into whose dark abiding flow

They come, now quieted, together.

In dark they mingle and are made

At one with light in highest flood…[3]

          Imagine whatever grace we can channel dribbling, dripping, streaming, gushing even, out of us--sweetening the earth as it flows into the mighty river of life and grace surging everlastingly throughout  the earth.  Imagine that the one to whom we give thanks for every gift, perceives the gift of grace we return, and somehow flows higher, deeper, swifter because of what we pour out.  Imagine, and ask, only ask, for the gift of grace to overflow through us as we come out of our solitude in song, prayer, and thanksgiving.