by The Rev. Dr. Max Lynn
SCRIPTURE READINGS Genesis 1, Psalm 98, Colossians 1:11-20
Transcribed from the sermon preached on MARCH 6, 2011
The first time I remember having a sacred experience in water I was in a backyard pool under the southern Californian summer sun. It was shortly after I had become a proficient swimmer and I could forget about the laws of staying afloat and getting to the side and just graciously float and weave. I went down in the deep end and just stayed down there, slowly rolling around like a baby sea otter with nowhere to go. I would take breath and go back down. Then for a moment the usual rattlings of a boys mind stopped and I felt joy, peace, and gratitude. I think gratitude is the beginning of our thought of God. We find ourselves grateful in a Sierra meadow, in the ocean, in love, as we sit down to eat and then we ask, who am I thinking. It might have been better if we would have stopped right there, and not tried to put definition to the one we thank. On the other hand, the stories of when we find ourselves grateful unite us and help give us meaning. The stories form us into the grateful community. My parents raised me in this community we call the Church, and so when I found myself saying thank you, I said thank you God for this gift of water.
Life is a blessing. I love the image painted in Genesis of a creative God having fun, drawing forth life, shaping it, stepping back and admiring it. And God saw that it was good. Creation is good. Creation is a blessing. We are a part of creation. We are a blessing and we are blessed with life, with the world around us. The Divine Spirit is life. The Divine Spirit gives life. The Divine Spirit is in all things.
We are going to party today, because this is the last Sunday before Lent, and Lent is traditionally a time of giving up, of showing the ability to release things that distract us from the Holiness of God. Lent is a time of preparation and repentance as we move toward the cross of Christ where he gave up his life for us. This lent we invite you to move aside the business that pollutes vision and clogs the flow of God and water in through and around us.
This Lent and beyond, we will be using water as an element, a conduit to focus our attention on God and God’s will for our lives. Water on this planet is in peril. As Ecclesiastes says, there is nothing new under heaven. But over the last decade we have been shaken by the power and precarious nature of our water ecosystems.
The day after Christmas in 2004 we witnessed the devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean kill over 280,000 people.
In 2005 we watched in horror as hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, and stranded people wrote primitive signs, desperately asking for water and rescue from water.
Last year over a million homes were destroyed, 20 million people affected by floods in Pakistan.
As the earth warms, not only do sea levels continue to rise and storms become stronger, but we have seen an increase of drought and desertification, and the melting of glaciers which in many places are used for irrigation and drinking water. In most parts of the world, consumption and pollution threaten rivers and the fish that live in them, and most aquifers are being depleted at an unsustainable rate. The BP oil spill in 2010 put over 200 million gallons of oil into the gulf. Meanwhile corporations recognizing the increasing value of water have sought to buy fresh water sources at cheap rates, and sell them back to us at rates more expensive than gasoline. Then, as we drink our expensive liquid, and discard the plastic, it winds up polluting rivers and oceans. There are reports of a great pacific garbage patch, or the Pacific Trash Vortex larger than Texas in the center of the North pacific. But we don’t have to argue about the size of the trash vortex, because we see enough of it on our shores.
You would have to be illiterate and without a TV to be unaware of these troubles. Magazines and journals, TV programs and movies have brought the issue of water to our attention. But why does it matter? Why should we care? Why does the environment matter? Why is global warming, oil spills, pollution, or depletion of aquifers and fisheries bad? Does reason tell us what is good or bad? Perhaps, as many would answer, we should care about our children? But as Herman Daly notes in his book, Beyond Growth, this only begs the question, why do future generations matter? This is an impossible question to answer with logic alone.
Daly criticizes his non-religious, “materialist” colleagues for missing the point: "There is something fundamentally silly about biologists teaching on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday that everything, including our sense of value and reason, is a mechanical product of genetic chance and environmental necessity, with no purpose whatsoever, and then on Tuesday and Thursday trying to convince the public that they should love some accidental piece of this meaningless puzzle enough to fight and sacrifice to save it."
David Malin Roodman in the Faith of an Ecological Economist in a September ‘97 article for World Watch magazine writes, “The force of logic can test values for consistency with each other, but it cannot produce the values themselves. Rather, values must develop from somewhere within us. Thus before environmentalists can persuade people to follow their reasoning, we must first work to spread the values on which that reasoning is based.”
As Christians, our values begin with the notion that God is the source of all life, that God is deep within us, deep within all life, and God is love. There is sacredness to life. Life starts out with value. God made land and sea, stepped back and said, hey, that is good! And we see that Jesus embodied the Spirit of the Creator: [15] He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; [16] for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities -- all things were created through him and for him. [17] He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
We are not so concerned with using the Bible to tell us how things were made. We will use our friend science for that. But what we want to affirm the creative force of life, our relationship with the one from whom we gain those values, which help us direct, our application of knowledge. Life is sacred, filled with the Spirit of God. Life is good. Life is a blessing. God has called us to love life and love one another as God has loved us and all creation. The Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ are in all life.
So in our journey through the waters over the next couple of months, we are not just going to focus on the issues, depletion and pollution, not just on our action, on what we can and should do to help move toward sustainable use of water, but on water in the biblical story, and on our many, many ways of relating to it.
I invite you to not just observe and act on its behalf, but to swim in it, to be lifted up and ride on God’s power. Swim in God. Be nurtured in God’s Womb. Drink the Living Water. Get out of the boat.
One of the byproducts of the Enlightenment is the relegation of God to the heavens. God was removed from the flow of life, and we therefore were removed from the flow of God in life, and God was placed in a dry box above the sky. The Creator had created and has now taken a break, and now it is our turn to move in and take over for God…to save God so that others may believe. But then we ask, what use is this God, why do we need her, why believe? It is a short step from Deism to atheism and a thirsty world dehydrated of meaning. In the end our efforts to save God or save water is like trying to save the womb in which we are conceived. Water will still be water and God will still be God long after we have sailed over the horizon of history.
To make it plain, I am giving a call for balance to we liberals who love to focus on our human work. We mustn’t forget the balance of praxis, the reflection and worship and Sabbath, which inform our work and establishes the values to direct our work. Worship may be seen as ethereal. Too big an emphasis on the spiritual put our heads in the clouds. But healthy life is about balance, the clouds of the spirit send the rain, which seed the rivers of work, which carry us to the deep sea of God’s love. Jesus took time for himself, to go sit by the sea, to play with children, to worship and rest, to party at wedding and turn water into wine. So I invite you to swim in worship of the Living God, but not a God who sits imprisoned across the seas of rational thought, but the one who delights in Creation. We worship the God who, when we are anxious, leads us beside still waters and restores our soul. And when we are oppressed and trapped between the deep and the forces of darkness, He parts the sea and leads to liberation. When hunger for profit sucks the people and land dry, when lending practices and foreclosures stop the flow of wealth in a stagnate pool for the few, he says, “let justice flow like the waters and righteousness like and ever flowing stream. He visits with the outcast at the well and shares living water, calms the stormy seas of prejudice and goes with us to bring Good News to the foreigners on the other side.
This not a distant God, but the intimate one who bends down to wash our feet, the one whose grace cleanses us of our sin; the eternal One who shall bring us to the rivers of the water of life, bright as crystal, which feeds the trees of life for the healing of nations. This is intimate One in whom we live and move and have our being.
So this Lent we are going to invite you to take action on behalf of water and life, which is dependent on it. But we are also going to invite you to stop and take the time to get intimate, to walk and play and pray with God and the water around you.
Psalm 23
[6] With trumpets and the sound of the horn make a joyful noise before the Mother of all life!
[7] Let the sea roar, and all that fills it; the world and those who dwell in it!
[8] Let the floods clap their hands; let the hills sing together in joy
In thanks to our God.