Reading the Water  
Ezekiel 47:1-12 1 John 5:4-8 
 First Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, AL
March 4, 2007 
Rev. J. Shannon Webster

We don’t know who discovered water, but we’re pretty sure it wasn’t a fish. Canadian philosopher of communication, Marshall McLuhan said that. He meant that we are oblivious to an environment that is so much a part of our life that we can’t even see it as a distinct or unique thing. To some degree, humans are like that about the grace of God. Every breath breathed, every sight the eye sees, every sensation we pick up in touch, is because God has given life - put us in this world with the senses to apprehend it. As the apostle Paul said, In God we live and move and have our being.

The Biblical writers recognized that when God created life, it was with an abundant, extravagant, exuberance. And so it is described in Genesis. There was nothing, and God began to create - light and land and plant and fish and birds and people and life, life, life, everywhere. Creation was a great, rich, fecund, abundance of life.

Ezekiel describes that with the metaphor of water. God waters the deserts of Judah, and not with a trickle in the arroyo, but with the deep and rushing River of Life. God has been absent from the Temple, and in Chapter 47 we see the results of that relationship restored: water comes gushing from the Temple, over the sill of the doorway, forming a deep river that brings the Dead Sea back to life. Forests pop up along its shores like magic, and so do villages of fishermen, and the barren desert is transformed. The wounded earth is healed, brought to life.

Water in the desert - a powerful image for desert people, in the place where I come from. I’ll use some New Mexico images this morning, and those can double as an introduction of sorts in this, my first sermon with you.

Most of the politics in my home state is about water: the ditches and acequias, whose cousin is president of which water association, who has the rights for irrigation; Texas suing New Mexico for water again; low flows in the Rio Grande and so on. So it is not surprising to me that a desert people - the people of the Bible - found water a powerful, transforming metaphor all the way through Scripture.

Where the water goes, there is life. A line of cottonwoods in the desert marks a winding, green line where an arroyo or a river has touched barren sand with the finger of life. Mostly that is where the towns are in New Mexico. If you read the water line, you find where life lives.

Even weeds that grow by the highway where condensation from the exhaust of passing cars show the little bit of water it takes to call forth life in the desert. Read the water, and you know if there have been many cars down that road. Where the water goes, there is life. There is a green zone of trees and farms that mark the valleys. You can tell where the river is, and you can tell where the aquifer is. Read the water. You can read it in the trees, whether it’s a drought year or a wet one, by whether the deer have eaten the bark, and how high up on the tree they've chewed, and whether the bears are coming in to town when there’s no feed in the high country. It’s a way of reading the water - or sometimes the lack of it. Where the water goes, there is life.

I read the water when I’m fishing for trout - how high, where is the main flow and the back currents, where it curls into a pool below one of the boulders in some free-stone stream. I remember being with a youth group up on the Jemez one time; we were picnicking at the confluence of the East and West Forks of that river. A couple of the boys and I had fishing rods with us. Looking at the river, the East Fork was clear and green-colored. The West was higher and a muddy, frothy brown - and so you knew it had rained a lot up that direction. So it would also be washing down nutrients and bugs. The two rivers came together and ran side by side, brown and green, for a hundred yards before finally blending. And I realized that if I had been a trout, I would lie in the clear water, just off the seam where the two rivers met to run parallel, and get me a tasty morsel floating downstream. I told the lads I was going to catch a fish and exactly where, landed a wet fly just short of the seam where it would drift to the edge of clear water, and caught the fish lying there. They were very impressed, and my stock went up. But it really wasn’t fair. I’d been reading the water. Where the water goes, there is life. And the trout know that.

Water. In the New Testament, prayers for water are answered in an unexpected way. Jesus tells the Woman at the Well that he has the living water for those who thirst, and says the same thing at the Festival in Jerusalem. During the Feast of Tabernacles they brought water in a golden cup from the healing Pool of Siloam to use in libations at the Temple, and he said, Everyone who thirsts, come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. Out of the believers hearts shall flow rivers of living water. Jesus offers himself in place of the ritual water, as that which sustains believers.

That is the real Jesus, Jesus in human life, incarnate as one of us, part of that teeming, abundant, fertile creation of God. The 1st John passage we read is countering the Docetists and Gnostics, who claimed that God could not have actually suffered, therefore the heavenly Christ descended into Jesus at baptism and left him before his death. No, said John, this is the one that came by water and blood (read: baptism and crucifixion), Jesus Christ. There are three that testify, the Spirit and the water and the blood, and these three agree. The witness of the Spirit is precisely that the historical Jesus was the One sent us by God, and in celebrating baptism with water, and the Lord’s Supper with the cup that holds the blood of salvation, we continue to incorporate Christ’s life into our own, God’s life-giving grace into human life.

On this day we performed a baptism, and young John Max Slaton entered the church universal through this congregation. We will do both sacraments this morning, and remember the Spirit that brings us life through the font and the cup, through the sacraments that define us as a Christian community.

One of the reasons I am here is that I became fascinated with this congregation - a church that has a rich history and internal life, and a serious and joyful commitment to ministry to those who need care in the heart of the city. That’s a challenge, of course, and one which can only be met by people who have the Spirit of God in their life together.

In spite of the self-absorbed religiosity of our times, we live in an essentially secular and cynical secular age, when the presence of God’s Spirit seems sometimes remote, seems more exotic than the rumors of UFO’s . . . a world of consumerism where we have allowed Madison Avenue to dictate our tastes, Wall Street our hopes, and Hollywood our passions. The end of the Cold War brought us no peace, there is violence at home and abroad, poverty on our streets, and meth labs in our rural areas. The world might not be going to hell in a handcart any more than usual; neither does it show signs of becoming idyllic, and we may rightly begin to question the myth of progress. The present culture would seem to offer a dry environment for the working of the Spirit. Yet we do not come unblessed or un-baptized into such a challenging ministry, into such a world thirsting for love. Where the water goes there is life.

We baptized John Max this morning, and can claim our own baptisms at the same time. We can know that, whether or not we are always aware of it, God so waters the hearts of believers so that they create life wherever they go. In these sacraments, There are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood, and these three agree. They help us read the water, and help us all know where the abundant, amazing grace of God is at work in the world.

The congregation made some promises to John Max, and one of those was to help raise him to know his inheritance as a blessed child of God, and to train him to have a sense for what is holy service of God - to teach him to read the water. And where does the water go, in our common life?

I’ll be learning that myself, as I live into ministry with and among you. But I think I know this already: the water has gone onto the heads of believers who have touched this community B starting First Light for the homeless, Ruth and Naomi Senior Outreach for the lonely, Rushton CDC to help parents care for children, and sending that care abroad to. The family of faith that young John Max enters has cared for transmitting faith to the next generation, has built up the church, cares for one another, and (on our better days) lives out a thinking faith. There is more to do, but here= s where the waters have gone - the blessed and the baptized are making a home in the heart of the city.

We don’t know who discovered water, but we’re pretty sure it wasn’t a fish, said McLuhan.

A Jewish proverb says it another way: Days pass, and years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles. God is in us and around us and through us in ways we neither perceive nor imagine. But at least we can read the water, and know that where the water goes, there is life.