“From within him shall flow rivers of living water.”
Water! I didn’t know to treasure it until I moved to Colorado. I’d always lived in places too full of water, you see, places with floods, or hurricanes, or ice storms, or month-long drizzle, places so humid that the air itself clings to you like wet cotton. In Colorado, after the Marshall Fire, I know the value of water, the beauty that it brings to a brown landscape, the deep fear that a lack of it can stir up. I know how even my skin can long for water, how my throat can parch from a lack of it.
Jesus, of course, isn’t talking in today’s Gospel about ordinary water. But Jesus, living in the dry land of Palestine, knew the value of water like we Coloradans do. For Jesus and his disciples, as for us, the image of water carried magical abundance, green growth, and life itself. Growth, life, transformation, abundance. Aren’t we all parched for these? Doesn’t our world thirst for them all? Can you feel the desperation for this water deep in your gut? Yet, if this water is flowing from Jesus right now, why are we still so thirsty? Let me tell you a little story:
Once upon a time, in a small mountain town, something went terribly wrong with the water supply. Whenever you turned on the faucet, only a small dribble of water would come out. This was a real problem. 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.
The leaders at the Water Company couldn’t figure out what was going on, either; 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 town and lay new ones. The old-timers wrung their hands that such a drastic solution would be much too expensive and destructive of property. And people gave up on the Water Company, setting off on their own to look for water.
One older woman walked slowly along, using her cane to poke under logs and rocks. She knew where she was going—she remembered that, when she was a young girl, she had visited a beautiful rushing river high in the hills with her grandfather. She wasn’t sure exactly which path to take, but she knew the general direction, and she could still see that abundant water in her mind’s eye. She was sad that her children had refused to come with her.
Further down the road, 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 to think much about their thirst. “I’ll bet the water is a million miles deep,” one proposed. Calling back to his parents, he cried, “Hey, the water that we’re looking for is going to be deep, dark blue like the night, and there will be mermaids swimming with us.”
“What imagination!” sighed the mother. “The children don’t realize that nobody knows where we’re headed,” she added, dread in her voice.
On another path, a middle-aged couple climbed purposefully over a hill, with their teenager in tow. This couple seemed to know where they were going. They focused intently on Google Maps 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 while texting his best friend. He had some Pepsi in his backpack and didn’t know why the adults were so focused on boring old water. He also wasn’t so sure that his parents knew where they were going, but he figured they wouldn’t listen if he spoke up about it, either.
Well, all of these people finally wound up at a river, a wide, gushing river that sprung forth right out of a dark cleft in the mountainside. To the children’s delight, the water gushed down hundreds of feet below to a dark blue lake that truly looked a million miles deep. Everyone approached as close as they dared to the water.
The middle-aged couple pulled out a watering can and tried to stick it into the torrent, but the rush of water knocked the can 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.
That’s when, all of a sudden, a dark, bearded man appeared from behind the cliff.
“Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who trusts in me drink,” he said enigmatically. “Just get into this raft and ride down to the lake together,” he explained, “and there will be water enough for the world.”
“Ride down in that thing?!” a parent exclaimed.
“I’m too old and tired,” grumbled the grandmother.
“Yipee! Whitewater rafting!” cried the kids, while the teen smiled and quickly took a picture of the raft to post on social media.
“I don’t think that we’re all going to fit,” worried the middle-aged woman. “What if someone falls out when we hit a rock?” “Where are the life-preservers?”
Just then, 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...
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 running water. The Spirit can descend like the patiently flowing water that carved the Grand Canyon out of hard rock. The Spirit can come as the hurried, impetuous water that spills over dams and gushes down waterfalls. On Pentecost, the powerful river of the Spirit is made of words.
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.
The Holy Spirit’s mighty river of words wants 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 these words, is dying for those words, and yet they seem to be coming from us in but a trickle.
How can that be? Are we stopping the flow of them by refusing to venture out into the thirsty places? Are we expecting the words to come from the organized people with Google Maps? Do we hush the words of the very young and the very old and those who are different than we are? Are we afraid to get in God’s untested and shaky-looking little boat with a bunch of strangers?
After reading Paul’s words today about the gifts of the Spirit, my hope is that my story—and our story as a church, as St. Ambrose, can have the following ending:
After pulling each other into the little raft, the people all held hands during the wild ride down the roaring river. The grandmother, who used to be the canoeing counselor at summer camp, grabbed a stray branch and began guiding the raft along, so that it passed in between the sharp rocks. She taught the teenager to do the same thing, until the teen knew how to put his strong muscles to use in steering the group. The children sang songs with their beautiful, clear voices, and the parents encircled everyone with their arms and legs so that no one could fall out. After their phone with Google Maps fell into the river, even the middle-aged couple pitched in to bail out extra water from the raft.
Did they make it to the lake? I hear that they did, after the most frightening but exuberant ride of their lives. They then returned to their town bursting with stories of their journey. From their words of testimony, streams of living water began to flow freely through the town once more, and out into the world.
