Is the River of Life Still Alive?

A sermon for the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord

From Sunday, January 11th, at the Church of the Savior in South Bend, Ind., a formerly Christian Reformed congregation now in the process of joining the Reformed Church in America. The day’s texts: Isaiah 2 and Matthew 3. (Yes, the whole chapters.) If you prefer to watch/listen, the sermon begins at minute 27 on the YouTube recording of the worship service.

Detail of a fresco of the baptism of Jesus from the facade of the Enda Iyesus Church in Axum, Ethiopia

The great British nature writer Robert Macfarlane published a book last year called Is a River Alive? It’s essentially a biography of watercourses, a documentation and an exploration of the features that, in some cultures, are called the veins of the earth.

Macfarlane describes a spring of fresh water—“a sleepless flutter of silver movement, rippling the pool it has made with its whispers and mutters.” The water itself, he says, “is transparent as glass,” filtered and clarified as it has made its steady way through gravel and rock. It is a slow process, thousands upon thousands of years in the making—glacial movement, the sun’s steady warmth, gravity’s pull. “History runs both fleet and slow, eddying back upon itself to shape spirals where flow meets counterflow,” Macfarlane writes. “Life and death rise and fall—and the spring, as it has always done, organizes existence around itself, exerting something like will upon the land.”

Is a River Alive? is a remarkable and deeply contemplative work, one I commend to you. But the thing I want most to draw your attention to is the title: Is a River Alive? Macfarlane is concerned with how we treat the rivers of the earth—whether we comprehend them, whether we care for them, whether we recognize the ways in which our lives are intertwined with their steady labor, whether we honor them. Inspired by him, the question that preoccupies me today is a variant on the question he asks. My question: Is the river still alive?

Is the river of life into which John first baptized Jesus, the river of life in whose waters we have then likewise been baptized, alive in us and in our world?

I am also embarrassed to remind you of the reality in which we live, because all you have to do is to read the news or tap on an app on your phone or turn on the TV to be reminded of things of ugliness and death: befouled waters and an ailing earth, war and violence, bigotry and dehumanization, people snatched from the streets and others killed in their cars. You know intimately the pain of God’s gathered people battling over questions of inclusion, purity, and belonging. You have witnessed for yourselves, in the concentric circles of your communities, all the ways in which we are struggling in our life together.

Is the river of life still alive?

If it were mainly about us, about our care, about our labor, about our love, it would not be outlandish to say that the river of life is a pathetic trickle—its waters redirected and deployed for industrial purposes, befouled by pollution and tainted by our waste.

Thank God it is not mainly about us and about our care and about our labor and about our love, though. Because our Scriptures tell us a story in which God is the central actor, in which God’s love is the driving force, and in which God, God with us in the embodied form of Jesus and God sent down to us through the presence of a fluttering dove, is the primary mover and the giver of grace.

And it is because of our conviction that God is still alive, that God is still gracious, that God is still acting, that God is still loving that we can still say: Yes, the river of life is still alive. But what then?

The church returns year after year to the story of Jesus’s baptism because it is also about our baptisms. In re-reading this text, we are reminded in an essential way of our belonging to God, who made us, who loves us, and who is always with us.

Look more closely at the story for some profound truths.

For instance, this story is the first time we see Adult Jesus. It comes right after the flight from Egypt in Matthew’s telling, nearly all of a childhood—all the times he wailed, all the times he was daydreaming instead of studying the scrolls, all the times he fell asleep counting the stars, all the times he didn’t listen to Joseph and Mary—just edited out. Luke gives us one story about Jesus as an awkward adolescent who befuddles his parents by ditching them when he should have been journeying home. For Luke, too, though, the baptism is Jesus’s first appearance after coming of age. And before he does any apparent ministry at all, he receives a blessing from heaven: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Pure grace.

Another truth, this one perhaps more uncomfortable: When I consider the passage’s various characters, the one I am most like isn’t Jesus. It’s not John the Baptist either; despite my love of growing things, I am much less bold, less outdoorsy, and certainly more introverted than that proto-hipster campground preacher, with his homemade clothes and his foraged diet. I suspect I’m not as pure of heart as those many who came to confess their sins and be washed by the river’s waters. Maybe you are. But to my chagrin, I have to admit I’m most like the ones for whom John has the strongest words—the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the overeducated types who have the strongest opinions, perhaps more knowledge than wisdom, and the likeliest odds of entering into a conversation with those time-honored, super-annoying words: “Well, actually….” And the beautiful thing tucked into this story is that, even as he unleashes fierce words on them, John doesn’t withhold the gift of baptism. Again, pure grace.

A third truth: Baptism comes with no condition but it does extend an invitation. “Bear fruit worthy of repentance,” John says.

The word “repentance” can be so loaded in our culture, especially for those of us who grew up in churches where the term felt almost like a bludgeon. But the Greek word metanoia is actually so lovely and so hospitable. It means repentance, yes, but it isn’t a demand. Because true repentance is not something that can really be coerced or ordered or forced. Think of it more as a turning, as a change of heart. The word is a compound of two parts—meta, which means “after,” and noia, which comes from noeo, which means “to understand.” After understanding. After soul-deep understanding, our hearts are changed. After life-changing understanding, we see the world differently. After paradigm-shifting understanding, we bear fruit. Again, pure grace, which leads to gratitude.

Really, the story of the baptism of our Lord is the story of grace upon grace upon grace. And the pattern it establishes—being washed clean; having our gratitude stirred for God’s grace; repenting, which is to say acting in line with our gratitude; and then cultivating the fruit that can grow plump and full only through the miracle of God’s work in our flesh through that water— This pattern is the one to which we are invited to return, again and again, day after day, year after year, throughout our lives of faith.

“Baptism of Jesus,” Lorenzo Scott, 1987, oil on canvas. From the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum

John deploys so much imagery to make his point. The guy clearly likes his metaphors. Packed into a tight span, no doubt in part with Matthew’s editing, we’ve got wheat and chaff, and fire and water, and an ax and a tree, and even some snakes. And in the midst of it, we get that fruit.

The imagery of the fruit that John chooses is especially striking, and it underscores something I’ve learned as a gardener: Fruit is produced in community. A seed must be sown, yes, but that seed can do nothing on its own. Its flourishing depends on forces beyond it—the water that helps to crack its hard exterior open, the nutrients in the soil, the life-nourishing warmth of sunshine. Eventually the plant grows, unfurling leaves, reaching toward light, branching and stretching. Then it flowers, and almost always, it needs something beyond itself to fruit—someone in the form of a pollinator. The fig needs wasps, the avocado depends on bats, apples and cherries count on the bees. The production of fruit is actually a team effort.

Nor can the fruit of one plant feed, heal, or nourish many. For sustenance, we need orchards and groves.

John’s metaphor is a subtle but significant invitation to recognize life’s dependence on community upon community upon community, divine and creaturely, heaven-sent and earth-nourished. And I wonder whether for us, in our individualistic culture, part of our metanoia—part of our after understanding, part of our repentance—is to invest ever more deeply in countercultural community, fed throughout by the water of life, without which none of this is possible at all.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite passages from another prophet, one of the weirdest of them all—a wild dreamer named Ezekiel, who recorded absurdly fantastic visions. He tells us about one of them, a journey during Israel’s exile, when he set down on a high mountain, where he was greeted by a resplendent messenger. “Mortal, look closely and listen attentively,” the man said to Ezekiel.

One of the things the man showed him was an expansive river that flowed from the Temple of God. “Wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be very many fish. Everything will live where the river goes. Its fish will be of a great many kinds. On both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing.”

Nowhere does the man say to Ezekiel that any of the living creatures invigorated by this sacred river earned their access or owned water rights. He doesn’t speak of private property, or of the market price of the fruit, or of the copays due for those healing leaves. This is, after all, God’s economy. It’s a picture of grace.

So, too, with Isaiah’s vision and the invitation to that same mountain of the Lord, from which the life-giving waters of that sacred river flow. “Come, let us go to the house of God,” the people say in chorus. There is labor to be done, the work of the holy transformation of the weapons of war and violence into the tools of peace and flourishing. This is, after all, God’s economy. It’s a picture of invitational grace.

So, too, with John’s ministry in those ancient river waters and the example of Jesus, who was baptized in them. All righteousness has been fulfilled, the Scriptures tell us, not through our work but through God’s. This is, after all, God’s economy. It’s a picture of expansive and all-covering grace.

Mortal, look closely and listen attentively: All around you is grace upon grace upon grace. How then will we respond?

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I don’t think it’s giving much away to tell you that Robert Macfarlane’s title question, “Is a river alive?”, eventually leads to another, perhaps more poignant one: What does the river say?

So, too, for those of us who are concerned with the river of life. What does the river of life say, to us and through us?

“Water speaks in voices that cannot be understood or denied,” Macfarlane continues. It does its steady and relentless work in a way that perhaps fickle and feckless humanity will never entirely be able to comprehend or emulate. It wears down rock and it nourishes the soil, it gives the body form and it provides shelter and home. Sometimes it’s a raindrop. Sometimes it’s a deluge. It rises to the heavens and it showers back down to earth.

Water is a funny thing: You can pool it artificially, you can use it, and you can abuse it, but ultimately it also has a life of its own, one that invites human collaboration but that also eludes total human control. You can try to tame it or to harness its powers, but eventually you’ll be reminded, some way, somehow, whether by snowstorm or hurricane, flood or drought, that it is beyond us.

Detail from a Qing Dynasty plate depicting the baptism of Jesus. c. 1720. From the collection of the Musée Guimet in Paris

The love of God is like this too. Through the waters of baptism, the river of life, which is to say God’s love, greets us in a particular and personal way. God’s love, too, speaks in voices that cannot be understood or denied. God’s love, too, is a force that sometimes works subtly and might even seem absent; other times, it moves on an awe-inspiring scale. God’s love, too, can be taken for granted until a time when, so desperate for it, so thirsty for it, we cry out to have just a taste of it to parch our dry spirits. God’s love, too, can be treated by us as if it were a scarce resource, guarded and hoarded, when in fact it’s never mine or yours alone. God’s love, too, is everywhere, waiting to be recognized, ready to be shared.

You have chosen to call yourselves the Church of the Savior. That’s a bold claim. For seventy years, you have come together here in South Bend to proclaim God’s love as embodied by Jesus and to bear witness to good news to one another and to your neighbors. You’ve wrestled mightily with what that love demands and how the lack of that love has cost so many, and I’m here today to remind you to keep going, keep loving, keep returning to the testimonies of your baptisms—that you and every other child of God belong to a love so much greater and more gracious and merciful than you can even imagine. Through Jesus, you are God’s children, the beloveds, with whom God is well pleased.

Is the river of life still alive? God, I hope so.

Can we find a way not just to honor it but also to share its good news? Only through and by God’s grace.

What does the river say to you and through you? You tell me.

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