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Where the River Goes
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis November 18, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 2:4b-14; Ezekiel 47:1-12 Revelation 22:1-5
Little did I know when I chose these lessons and this text in September that I would spend last night attending a celebration of Ruth Patrick’s 100th birthday at the Academy of Natural Science. Renowned for her study of the ecology of rivers, Ruth can tell you precisely what lives where the river goes. She also will tell you what is at risk of death given our pollution of the airs and the waters. Like the prophet who saw in a vision everything alive where the river goes, Ruth takes the river to be a sign of the presence of God’s glory which we miss at our own peril and the peril of the planet. We begin this morning, therefore, with the vision at the end of the Book of Ezekiel where the prophet is transported from Babylon to Jerusalem. There he reports seeing water trickling from a corner of the temple in Jerusalem because God’s kabod, God’s glory, God’s presence had returned; soon the water is running down the city streets as a stream; then the deepening stream rushes through the desert, watering it like a garden until finally the river flows into the Dead Sea thick with salt and miraculously brings life where only death had reigned. The vision was a vision for a generation that had wept by the waters of Babylon. Now at last Ezekiel speaks a word of hope to the exiles, a word that must have called to mind the words of the psalmist: There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most high. God is in the midst of her. She shall not be moved. Then Ezekiel is taken for a walk along the banks of the river. “Wherever the water goes,” Ezekiel assures the exiles, “every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be very many fish…and everything will live where the river goes (a new creation!). On the banks…there will grow all kinds of trees….Their fruit…for food, and their leaves for healing.” But his words also must have returned Judah’s imagination to the story of creation, a story told and written down in exile. In the beginning, God had escorted Adam to the river that flowed out of Eden and watered the garden. Trees also grew on the banks of that river, two trees in particular: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The exile of Adam and Eve from the garden and from God’s presence was surely told as the story of Judah’s own exile and rebellion and shame. That Ezekiel now spoke of their return to the garden where the Lord God would dwell with them was simply astonishing. But what the prophet could not have foreseen was the vision of the elder John. Exiled on the island of Patmos, John’s vision was ignited by Ezekiel’s and was a word of hope for Christians who soon would undergo a great persecution--even as it has become a word to many who, down the dark corridor of history, have dared to hope against hope in the face of oppression and death. For these John wrote down the vision of a new heaven and a new earth (again, a new creation) and of God’s promised kingdom where God would dwell with people and be their God and wipe away every tear from their eye. Again in this kingdom there is a river. This time an angel takes John to the river of the water of life that flows 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, the tree from which we were exiled in the beginning. The leaves of the tree, said John, are for the healing of the nations. What is this vision to us? In a generation by whom nature has been spent, the dearest freshness deep down things blithely destroyed, how are we to give thanks this Thursday next with straight faces? No doubt from the beginning to the end of Scripture, from the birds of the air to the lilies of the field, from sea monsters to cattle and creeping things, all culminating in creatures who know “light as light and can have dealings with God”: all this was very good because, in the act of creation, God was making a cosmos and a world to correspond to God’s purpose, was laying the groundwork for God’s covenant of grace. Moreover God’s purpose in making creatures who know light from light and can have dealings with God is so that we may glorify God and enjoy God forever. This should not be difficult, says Karl Barth, for after God beheld creation finished and good, “There was no place for grievance or complaint in face of this totality (For who could make it? Who could be the critic?), but only for the praise and thanksgiving of all creatures in heaven and on earth.” Yet in the middle of the second creation story and so in the midst of human history as well as in the muddle of any given human life, we who can have dealings with God do find room for grievance and complaint and a groping after other gods. The consequence is always exile: God from us; we from God. To wit, the people who long ago in Jerusalem had quit the scales of rejoicing for a recitation of complaints and had quit the praise of God for the worship of things (just as their ancestors in the wilderness had done and as we who succeed them still do) now in exile could not remember who they were and to whom they belonged. “Suddenly,” notes Marilyn Robinson of another forgetful generation, “it seems there are too few uses for words like… dignity…graciousness…fair-mindedness, openhandedness; loyalty, respect and good faith. What bargain did we make? What could have appeared for a moment to compensate us for the loss of these things? Perhaps,” she goes on, “I presume in saying they are lost. But if they were not, surely they would demand time and occasion—time because every one is an art or a discipline, and occasion because not one of them exists except as behavior.” Perhaps that is why, in a feeble attempt to compensate, we designate a day, declare an occasion—as a nation, as a culture--wherein we collectively call a halt to our murmuring in the wilderness, our complaint in exile, our selfish use of God’s gifts in order that the One who has afforded us our brief pilgrimage might be thanked. We were made for thanksgiving and the problem is, after all these years in exile, we are out of practice. We seem to have forgotten, if we ever knew, how to behold as God beholds. We understand utility, we glorify productivity, we amplify noise. But behold? Imagine the exiles as they listened to Ezekiel relate his walk on the banks of the river, beholding the creeping things and the fish leaping and the leaves on the tree of life. Can we remember the time or occasion we last beheld with astonishment God’s good creation: dew on a single blade of grass…the smell of a sunrise…the last ember out? No wonder we are about to do God’s good creation in! If we turn for help to the theologians, mostly we find word of God’s goodness parsed into a logical system. No, here we need the artist, the poet, the musician, the architect: the creators with a small “c,” whose seeing and hearing and ordering of the space and time and sound of God’s creative hand beckons us to see and hear and touch and taste not first as exiled critics, but as God’s grateful, astounded, awe-struck and silenced children who, over the river and through the woods, are about to be welcomed home. The psalmists are God’s poets and musicians, literally leaping with their thanksgivings across the rocky hills of Palestine. They help us first and most. Without them Gerard Manley Hopkins would not have noticed the world charged with the grandeur of God [And for all this, nature is never spent;/There lives the dearest freshness deep down things]; nor would W. H. Auden have punctuated our Time Being with late word of Him who is the Life [Love Him in the World of the Flesh;/And at your marriage al its occasions shall dance for joy]. Though it is a less weighty poet’s words I offer as help for this Thursday next when around the table graced by heads unaccustomed to bowing twice in one week, we attempt our thanksgivings. The poet is Mary Oliver and the poem, which I have read to you before, is simply entitled Gratitude. Its text asks eight questions, questions I imagine the Lord God will ask as we gather in the new heaven and new earth on the banks of the river before the tree of life. They prompt our thanksgiving: What did you notice? What did you hear? What did you admire? What astounded you? What would you like to see again? What was most tender? What was most wonderful? What did you think was happening? These questions call us to attention before God’s glory returned to a creation that is good beyond our deserving. They invite us to look and listen and remember and cherish and delight and inhabit the depth of things. They address us as the only creatures left to wander the planet wholly and utterly in wonder before a gift undeserved. Curiously what Oliver notices and hears and admires, what astonishes her and causes her to look again, coincides with all that God beheld as good in the first of Genesis, with what Ezekiel saw as he walked the river and with what John considered from the perspective of eternal life. So Oliver asks herself, What did you notice? and turns our mind’s eye to see “The dew-snail;/the low-flying sparrow;/the bat, on the wind, in the dark;/big-chested geese, in the V of sleekest performance…” This demands time and occasion to notice. What did you hear? “The thrush greeting the morning;/the little bluebirds in their hot box;/the salty talk of the wren,/then the deep cup of the hour of silence.” What astonished you? “The swallows making their dip and turn over the water.” What would you like to see again? My dog; her energy and exuberance, her willingness, her language beyond the nimbleness of tongue, her recklessness, her loyalty, her sweetness, her strong legs, her curled black lip, her snap.” What if, around the table we paused in preparation for having dealings with God and asked one another these questions …or asked them of ourselves before alone we sipped from the deep cup of the hour of silence? “Help us,” we have prayed before, marking the end of a life, help us “walk, amid the things of this world with eyes wide open to the beauty and the glory of the eternal.” Help us to take the time, to create the occasion, to accept the invitation to glorify and enjoy God forever. When asked by the religion editor of the New York Times what made the occasion of Thanksgiving day important, Yale theologian Miroslav Volf replied that there were two important features of his family’s celebration. One is the presence of strangers, in his case often students from Croatia (his homeland) and Serbia. The other is his brother-in-law’s prayer. “He has a rare ability,” said Miroslav, “to make the ordinary sit comfortably within the sacred space of a ritual…. After he has said amen, all around the table—those of us who are deeply religious and others who think, ‘The less religion the better’—have seen the ordinary shimmer a bit with transcendence, a sign that what surrounds us is neither just there nor somehow owed to us, but a gift from on high.’” May this Thursday next be for you and yours an occasion set aside to behold creation as God beholds, to see the ordinary shimmer a bit with transcendence, to give thanks that, in Jesus Christ, who is the glory of God dwelling with us, we will be given grace and good sense enough to live where the river goes. |