Crossing The Water
It was on the last day that we wandered down from the lodge, through the long meadow, and gathered at the water’s edge, a couple dozen of us, to sit on logs tiered in seven or eight rows. Before us stood an altar made of stone. Above, in the treetops, hung a cross. Beyond, the lake stretched out to the far shore, its calm surface rippling with tiny waves.
We were on retreat, and on that last morning we had come down to the water to worship.
Followers of Jesus have always gathered around water, perhaps not physically, but always in thought and spirit. Read the first Psalm, a bedrock text for believers, and you will find that you “are like a tree planted by streams of water”, or the Gospel of John where Jesus says that anyone who “drinks the water I offer will never be thirsty again.” What a pair of thirst-quenching images for a world short of hope and sustenance, then as well as now. The early church quickly embraced the power of water as a symbol, indeed as something much more, when it began the practice of baptism, a cleansing of the soul for newcomers to the faith. The practice continues today, 2000 years later. Water, yet again.
These twin threads of spiritual nourishment and inner cleansing, woven together, run through the tapestry of Christian belief and history; as importantly, they are woven into the everyday lives of believers practicing the disciplines their faith offers. Disciplines like the worship we had been called to at the water’s edge on that summer Sunday morning.
Yet sitting on my log and gazing out over the water, absorbed in the litany of hymn, prayer, and homily, another thought stirs. This water stretching before us, this lake, isn’t this the world we all journey across as we go through life? A metaphor perhaps, but a rich and powerful one. Aren’t we all, believer or not, out on the water everyday of our lives from beginning to end, sometimes becalmed, sometimes lost, sometimes straining at the oars, trying to make our way across to the distant shore?
From our lakeside perch that morning, secure on solid ground, the distant water seemed almost perfectly flat – no doubt an illusion. But still, no storms were imminent, no heavy waves roughened the surface; it seemed a day for a safe journey, with a great calm hanging over all. Much of life is like this, calm and peaceful. Yet sometimes unexpected events come tumbling into our lives, breaking the calm surface, even brewing up a storm of turbulence, fear, and anxiety. What then?
The story of Jesus and his disciples crossing the Sea of Galilee comes to mind. The Galilee, prone to sudden and violent storms, is suddenly tossing with great wind and fearsome waves. Jesus lies asleep in the boat. His disciples, terrified, waken him. He rises in the boat, stretches out his hand, and commands the seas and winds to cease. Within seconds all is calm once more. Having Jesus in the boat has saved the disciples from a watery death.
Today, in our increasingly secular culture, many will scoff at this story. Miracles, they will say, do not happen. But whatever you may believe about miracles, the story offers a deeper spiritual meaning, a meaning that leads inward. How do we find inner calm in the midst of stormy times? When we must row through troubled, even treacherous waters, what would it mean to have Jesus in our boat?
John Wesley’s experience at sea is instructive. Wesley, best known as the founder of Methodism, was sailing from England to America in the 1730’s. While crossing the Atlantic a storm arose, and the ship was threatened. Wesley writes, “the sea broke over, split the main-sail in pieces, covered the ship, and poured in between the decks, as if the great deep had already swallowed us up.” What saved the crew from panic, and possibly all aboard from death, was the amazing calm of a party of Moravian Pietists who continued singing a psalm throughout the ordeal.
The Pietists had spurned the dominant religious culture of their homeland where dogma and its many shades of interpretation dominated, where too often pastors used the pulpit to engage in theological debate. Instead, seeking a religion closer to personal experience, they turned inward to find faith and conviction. Their calming presence during the storm, built on this solid rock of inner certainty, not only saved lives, but also radically transformed Wesley’s life.
This calming presence, found when we cross the water with Jesus, be it a mountain lake, an ocean, or the sea of life itself, continues to transform lives today.
Suggested Reading
Psalm 1
John 4:13-1
Mark 4:35-41
Just The Stories Please
My initial encounter with the heavy theological questions of Christianity came early in a college theology program. I was given the task of exploring the relationship between salvation and sanctification and clarifying their connection to the true self. I found a whiteboard and markers and as was my habit after years of working in information technology, began to sketch the problem on the board.
One box for salvation, then sanctification gets one, finally this strange concept called the true self in a third box. Question – is there such a thing as the false self, and does it need its own box? Ahead of me lie three areas of exploration. First, the basics of my two theological terms. Then, some sense of what the true self is. And finally, I need the lines connecting the boxes – the relationships among all these big ideas. Now is when the digging begins.
I had returned to the church a few years earlier after a decades-long absence so a great deal of what I might have learned earlier was gone. I ran to the bookcase where I had a few books that might help, then to the internet, and after that the local library. Finally, hours spent at Barnes & Noble, digging through a book too costly to buy, glancing over my shoulder, nervous that I’d get caught scribbling in my notebook.
And so I made progress. I fleshed out my understanding of salvation, the act by which God saves us sinners. But sanctification seemed more complicated. It’s not a thing or a single event; instead it’s a process that begins at the moment of conversion and continues through the rest of life. Today, many Christians use the word transformation to describe this process of continuous growth.
But after two weeks of searching through several books on theology, scouring half a dozen websites, and annotating and rearranging my boxes and lines on the whiteboard, I was stumped. I had made progress, but something was wrong – something was missing. It was all so …. well, abstract – so remote from life. Diagrams on a whiteboard by their nature have nothing of life in them. There is nothing concrete; they are not anchored to the real world. I would have to find a new way to think about these great theological ideas.
There’s something big and grand about words like salvation and sanctification and their cousins redemption, grace, incarnation, and so on. They stand like mountains above a valley floor, marching along the horizon, drawing – even commanding – our attention. Like the mountains ringing the valley in which I live, mountains on which I gaze every day, my eyes are often drawn upward to the highest peaks..
No one lives on any of these high peaks, although occasionally hardy and venturesome souls visit for a few hours before heading back down to the valley. Still, many people explore the lower slopes – they take a family drive on roads winding through dark green forests, they hike a favorite trail with a friend, they cut firewood, they throw up a tent and camp, they hunt in the fall. Others find their livelihood in the hills- they haul logs down to the mill in the valley, they fight fires in the summer, they thin out and salvage trees burnt by fire or thrown to the ground by windstorms.
But even when we’re in the valley below, we often feel our eyes drawn upward to the heights. In early morning, on the way to work, we glance at the mountain hulking to the east as it slowly emerges in the morning light. And as the sky dims at day’s end, we wonder what lies beyond the long ridge, darkening now, that borders the valley to the west.
There’s no escaping these mountains. They form the physical landscape in which we live. And it’s in this landscape that the stories of our lives unfold, day by day, and year by year.
So too with the spiritual landscape that we inhabit, where the great themes of theology stand on the horizon. Few of us will climb to the summits but many are drawn into the foothills and beyond by careful study, prayer and reflection. Even those of us who live mostly in the valley, with only an occasional foray into the foothills, cannot escape the presence of these grand ideas.
The high-sounding words of theology only come to life when they are embodied in everyday lives, lived out as most people struggle day to day. The history of these struggles to find faith, to hold fast to hope, is found throughout what theologian and church historian Jerry Sittser calls Big Story Little Story; the big revealed in the grand narrative of the Bible, the little found in each of the hundreds of stories found in the long arc from Genesis to Revelation. Although the Bible is ancient, little stories continue to unfold in the lives of believers today as we reach for the best in ourselves, struggle with our many lapses, wrestle with our fears and anxieties, and offer our prayers for help and comfort in times of pain and grief. All of this as we struggle forward, seeking to live a better life tomorrow than we did today, hoping for the eternal life that has been promised.
This is how we come to understand the big themes of our faith. Not in the airy domain of abstraction, but in the concrete thoughts, words, and deeds that make up our daily lives.
In other words, in our stories.
