A Story for Pentecost

          “From within him shall flow rivers of living water.”

Once upon a time, something went terribly wrong with the water supply. Whenever you turned on the faucet, only a small dribble of water would come out. The water never ran out, but it wouldn’t do more than seep through the pipes, and no one had enough time to stand around waiting all day for a glass to fill up, let alone a bathtub or a wash bucket. They had other things to do for goodness’ sake; they had jobs to do and committee meetings to attend and carpools to drive. The people at the Water Company couldn’t figure out what was going on; they scratched their heads and kept trying and trying to make the same repairs that used to get water flowing, but to no avail. The young engineers proposed that they should dig up all the underground pipes in the city and lay new ones, but the old-timers wrung their hands that such a drastic solution would be much too expensive and destructive of property. So people began to get thirsty and to set off on their own to look for water.

          One older gentleman walked slowly along, using his cane to poke under logs and rocks. He knew where he was going—he remembered that, when he was a young boy, he had visited a beautiful rushing river high in the hills with his grandfather. He wasn’t sure exactly which path to take, but he knew the general direction, and he could still see that abundant water in his mind’s eye. As he slowly made his way forward, he shook his head sadly over the disagreement that he had had with his children before he left. They had refused to come with him. They thought that he was getting fuzzy in the head and that he was leading them off on a wild goose chase. “They think I’m not good for anything anymore,” he muttered, “and when I talk, it’s like they don’t really hear my words anymore. They just smile and nod condescendingly and then go and do their own thing.”

          And then there was a family with young children heading to the river. The two children, still in elementary school, ran on ahead of their parents, climbing over rocks, kicking pebbles on the dry, dusty path, too busy watching for butterflies and forest gnomes to think much about their thirst. “I’ll bet the water is a million miles deep,” one proposed.

        “Yes, and just the right temperature, and we can swim in it and drink as much as we want, and it won’t even taste like swimming pool water,” crowed her sister.

       Then she called back to her parents, “Mom, Dad, the water that we’re looking for to is going to be deep, dark blue like the night, and there will be mermaids swimming with us.”

       “And there might be treasure down at the bottom, too,” her sister chimed in, “and we can dive down and get some and be rich forever.”

       “What imaginations!” sighed the mom to the dad.

        “At least they’re not asking us, ‘When are we going to get there?’” he responded.

       “They don’t realize that nobody knows where we’re headed,” added the mom, dread in her voice.

          And on another path, a middle-aged couple climbed purposefully over a hill, with their teenager in tow. This couple knew where they were going. The wife had the latest GPS equipment, and the husband was on the Water Board and had inside information. They focused intently on the GPS and walked briskly and silently along. They knew that if they arrived before the others, then they could help sort everyone out and be sure that the water was divided fairly and in good order. Their son, too, was quiet, walking a safe distance away from his parents, listening to good music on his I-pod and texting his best friend on his phone. He had some Pepsi in his backpack and didn’t know what all the fuss was about in looking for plain old boring water. He also wasn’t so sure that his parents knew where they were going, but he knew that they wouldn’t listen if he spoke up about it, either.

          Well, all of these little groups and individuals finally wound up at a river, a wide, gushing river that seemed to spring forth right out of the cliff. To the children’s delight, the water was indeed deep blue, and it led down hundreds of feet below to a huge lake that must have been a million miles deep. “It’s like that Old Testament story about Moses hitting the rock with his staff and the water gushing out into the desert,” thought the old man. Everyone approached as close as they dared to the water. The middle-aged couple pulled out a couple of watering cans and tried to stick them into the torrent to fill them, but the rush of water knocked both cans out of their hands and into the stream. “Stay back!” the young couple yelled to their children, who were much too close to the water’s edge. All of a sudden, though, a dark, bearded man appeared from behind the cliff.

       “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink,” he said enigmatically. “All you have to do is to get into this raft and ride down to the lake together,” he explained, “and there will be all the water you can drink.”

         “Ride down in that thing?!” the dad exclaimed.

         “My heart won’t take it,” grumbled the older man.

         “Yipee! Whitewater rafting!” cried the kids, while the teen smiled and quickly took a picture of the raft to show everyone on his Facebook page.

         “I don’t think that we’re all going to fit,” worried the middle-aged lady. “What if someone falls out when we hit a rock?” “Where are the life-preservers?”

          Suddenly, a huge surge of water swept them all from the river bank and into the river, and they grabbed onto the raft for dear life. After pulling each other into the little raft, they all held hands during the wild ride. The old man, who used to be the canoeing counselor at summer camp in the ‘40’s, grabbed a stray branch and began guiding the raft along, so that it passed in between the sharp rocks. He taught the teenager to do the same thing and to put his strong muscles to use in steering the group. The little girls sang songs with their beautiful, clear voices, and the young parents encircled everyone with their arms and legs so that no one could fall out. After their GPS fell into the river, even the middle-aged couple pitched in to bail out extra water from the raft. I hear that, after the most frightening but exuberant ride of their lives, they reached the lake and were then able to return to their town bursting with stories that unplugged those pipes better than Drano and with words that could lead everyone back to the miraculous water.

            We, too, like the people in my story, are on a hunt for water, for the water that fills us like the Holy Spirit, the water that quenches our inborn thirst for God, the water that saves us from ourselves. When Jesus sends us the gift of his Spirit on Pentecost, he sends it to us with all the power and strength and flexibility of water—both the patiently flowing water that carved the Grand Canyon out of hard rock, and the wild, foaming water that spills over dams and gushes down waterfalls. For us, the powerful river of the Spirit is made of words, words that pour from the divine Word, words that pour through us and from our lips. In Numbers, God’s judging and discerning words pour from the people of Israel in the desert, regardless of who they are or whether or not they are speaking in an authorized and holy place. In Acts, God’s transforming words pour through the Christians gathered in Jerusalem, in sounds unbound even by the formal grammatical structure of languages. God’s saving words pour through God’s people in the last days, as described by the prophet Joel, when God’s words are spoken by everyone—by the powerless, forgotten ones like women and slaves and children, just as effectively as they are pronounced by powerful men. And so God’s mighty words want to pour through us today, too: words of love, words of hope, words of forgiveness, words that bestow meaning, life-giving words, life-changing words, action-filled words, Jesus’ words. Our thirsty world needs those words, is dying for those words, and yet they seem to be coming from our churches in but a trickle. Is it because we are searching perhaps for the words themselves, rather than for the thirsty places all around us where we must pour them out? Is it because we are expecting the words to come from the organized people with the GPS, so that we hush the very young and the very old and those who are a little bit different or from the wrong side of the tracks? Is it because we are afraid to get in God’s untested and shaky-looking little boat with a bunch of strangers for a ride with the untamed spirit of God?

          To quote Moses, thirsty and circling round in the desert, too: 

“Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!” Come, Holy Spirit, open our lips, that our lives may proclaim your praise.