The Consuming Fire of God's Love

 Preached at  North Valley Friends Church

September 22, 2024

The Consuming Fire of God’s Love

When Leslie asked me to consider preaching at NVFC, I told her that I think I am always preaching one sermon in different guises, namely that God’s love must have an object and God’s creation is that object, that God loves you and me. Often this is a consoling message. As Jesus said, perhaps with a bit of wry humor, “are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and yet not one of them falls to the ground without my Father knowing. Fear not, for you are of more value than many sparrows.” Here is a bit of the flavor of Micah 3.  "Listen, pray, chieftains of Jacob and captains of the house of Israel. Is it not yours to know what is right? Haters of good and lovers of evil . . . who devour My people's flesh and strip their skin from them and crack open their bones.  And they cut it like flesh in the pot and like meat in the cauldron" (The Hebrew Bible, "Prophets," tr. Robert Alter, 2015).

It was a surprise to me to find that it took only a few hours to see that this message too is about the fact that God loves us, you and me.  This is a message about God’s grace.

But first, I want to respond to Micah. I notice that he addresses three classes of people with power in their culture: priests, judges, and prophets. These define morality for the rest of their society. They tell other people what is right and wrong. But Micah accuses them of cannibalism towards other people, skinning them, breaking their bones, sucking out the marrow. To bring this into non-figurative terms, they destroy the lives of those for whom they define the rules, those in their care, under their influence; they take away their lives in order to enrich their own. They are predatory. 

We can look at those in our own society’s leadership who also cannibalize others, who remove from them the means of life; who destroy others to add to their own abundance; who ruin others’ chances to live fully and freely. 

And while it is comforting to point the finger at corruption above us in the power structure,

it would be a mistake to hear Micah talking only to those at the top of his culture. For this to have relevance to us, we need to consider that power includes greater physical strength, greater prestige and social capital, greater ability to decide who gets in and who must stay out—gate keeping. We need to recognize our own power over others, whether it is coercive or manipulative or accidental. We need to admit when we have misused our power, our privilege, depriving others of the ability to thrive and become their whole selves.

We can hear echoes of Micah’s message in the words of Jesus, first to the religious leaders, but then to everyone who has ears. I won’t rehearse all of the condemnations of the actions of the scribes and Pharisees, but I’ll remind you of this one: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and uncleanness. You bind heavy loads on others’ shoulders but you are unwilling to lift a finger to help them carry those loads.”  I will remind us, remind me, that Jesus also said, shockingly, that anyone who makes it hard for a little one to trust God would be better off drowned, and that whatever is done to the “least of these” is done to Jesus Himself.  And also that not everyone who says Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only those who do what Jesus’s Father and our Father says to do. And further that those who look on their hungry, thirsty, ragged, imprisoned neighbors and do nothing to alleviate this distress are not part of God’s sheep, not among God’s people. How much worse to actively contribute to or even cause another’s misery.  Jesus is not less demanding than Micah, and perhaps, given that he is talking right to us, is even more so. No wonder the liturgical confession includes both what we have done and what we have left undone.  

When Jesus was asked the greatest commandment, he said, “Love God with everything you are and have, and love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus knew he had to add the second, which he said is like the first, because we can talk ourselves into believing we love God while we are doing harm to our neighbor. But also, this contains in it the truth that when we harm others we also harm ourselves, and conversely that love for others and love for oneself go arm in arm.

We have seen that Jesus shares Micah’s outrage about the misuse of power and influence. So how can we move from admitting our selfishness and apathy and self-indulgence at others’ expense to a better understanding about God’s love for us, God’s grace toward us? We need to recognize that God’s grace may look a lot like judgment, God’s grace is surgical, and our response to this intrusive grace of God makes all the difference.

I owe much of my understanding of God’s intrusive and uncomfortable grace to three writers: George MacDonald, Flannery O’Connor, and Julian of Norwich. George MacDonald was a novelist and preacher in the 1800s whose writing was hugely influential on C.S. Lewis.  He writes in one of his Unspoken Sermons, “The Consuming Fire”:

Nothing is inexorable but love….Love has ever in view the absolute [the potential] loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more…Therefore all that…comes between and is not of love’s kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire. (18-19)

Let us have grace to serve the Consuming Fire, our God, with divine fear; not with the fear that cringes and craves, but with the bowing down of all thoughts, all delights, all loves before him who is the life of them all and will have them all pure. (20)

…the fear towards God will be one with the homeliest love. Yea, the fear of God will cause a person to flee, not from God, but from the self, in terror lest that person do [wrong to ] God or [to] a neighbor .… (21)

In sum, God will love us into our best selves, and whatever we carry around with us that prevents us being that best self will have to go. This is the work of grace for us.

I learned a similar view of God’s grace from Flannery O’Connor, a mid 20th century writer of novels and short stories. Her self-satisfied characters are often jolted awake by God’s grace in a way they would never have chosen. Their casual American Christianity is not enough. I’ll mention one character and how God’s grace destroys in order to redeem.  In “Revelation,” a good solid Christian woman named Mrs. Turpin is attacked in the doctor’s office as she is making banal conversation about who is and who isn’t trash. A young woman throws a book at her, raising a bump on the forehead, and shouts, “Go back to hell where you came from, you fat warthog.”

What makes this traumatic moment redemptive is that Mrs. Turpin turns immediately to God and complains about being treated like this, while all the while wondering why God would send her this message. And because she turns toward God instead of away, and in recognition of her willingness to learn despite her anger and humiliation, God gives her a vision of the redemption of humanity, beginning with those she places at the bottom of the heap and ending with her kind of people. She sees the vast stream of human beings moving into glory, and her own kind of people are at the end of the line.

She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were [singing] on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.  She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead…In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah. (The Complete Stories, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 508) 

And finally, to Julian of Norwich, a mystic and anchorite from the 1300s. She had a near-death experience in which she had a vision of Jesus. She meditated on that vision for the rest of her life and gained profound understanding about God’s love and God’s intention to redeem and make all things well.  Along the way, she hears Jesus say this:

“For I will wholly break you of your vain affections and your vicious pride; and after that I shall gather you and make you meek and mild, clean and holy by oneing (uniting) you to me.” ( The Revelation of Love, tr. John Skinner, 86)

So what can we take of comfort and consolation from Micah 3? We can rejoice that God’s love always intends what is best for us and always builds up what is best in us; we can trust that God will make us good, and we can welcome the intrusion of God’s grace when we are not good as we face the both the consequences of doing harm and the divine surgery that will save us.  We can understand that God’s grace is not about excusing but about remaking, about healing, about redeeming what is perverse, wounded, and lost.  We can take heart, even as we tremble, that God’s love is inexorable and will do us good.

The Fruit of the Spirit Is Love

Preached at Wayside Friends Church, 2023

When the pastors asked me to consider speaking on Love, I became immediately conscious of many failures to love in my daily life, and I nearly declined. But often in preparing to speak to others, I find God speaking to me, so I thought this sermon prep might create that opportunity.

I’ll start with a confession that when I was discussing politics, I said, “I despise that person. He’s a liar.” So there’s that. And then, I’ve been married to a lovely man, Mark, for 48 years and counting, and I find that instead of worshiping the ground he walks on as I did at 16 when we began dating, now I snap at him daily for one thing or another. It reminds me of my dad who came up to my house one day from his room at Friendsview and said, “Your mommy loves me, but she doesn’t love all my ways.” So there’s that, also.  And then I have not outgrown neediness—particularly with those I love the most.  To quote the movie “What About Bob,” “I want I want I want, I need I need I need.” Perhaps the most embarrassing on this list.

None of these things I confess to you make me love myself. In fact, I am ashamed of my unloving actions and words. I am also sad that as I age, I am not becoming sweeter and kinder. This actually dismays me.

When I was in graduate school for English literature, I chose to do my doctoral research on George MacDonald. MacDonald was a 19th century Christian who wrote fiction, poetry, and sermons. His thinking has shaped me in more ways than I can identify.

He lost his preaching job because of his beliefs. He believed that God’s love would never rest until hell is emptied, though the way out of hell is to give up saying "I am my own," to cede our sovereignty to God. We must give ourselves to God, and the way we do that is to obey what God says to us to do.

I turned to my friend and mentor George MacDonald and his disciple C. S. Lewis for help in thinking through this topic of love with something that I hope you and I will find useful. Together, George and I will cover topics of vengeance, justice, forgiveness, and obedience, all as aspects of love.  

Much of what follows is directly quoted or my paraphrase of things George MacDonald wrote, particularly in his 3 volumes of Unspoken Sermons.  His writing is infused with scripture.

As St. Paul confessed, “The good I want to do, I don’t do; the evil I don’t want to do, I do.” What MacDonald says is that we do not know the sources or causes of our impulses, our desires, our tendencies, our likings. To put his ideas into modern terms, we are subject to neurological diseases, we catch the contagious evil around us, we have hatreds rooted in our childhoods, we have inherited genetic tendencies and traits. MacDonald also says that God will make every excuse for us that can be made, that God is pleased with every effort we make in the right direction toward love, and that God will not rest until we have been made right from deep within.  MacDonald is fond of quoting that “Our God is a consuming fire.”

We must recognize the inward opposition to love comes from the part where God is not yet present; we need to realize that it takes time for our whole selves to be redeemed because God goes to the roots of ourselves beyond our consciousness, starts there—when God inhabits that part which is presently opposing our desire to love, it will become holy.

MacDonald counsels honesty. Don’t try to feel good when you recognize that you are not good, but cry to God who is good. Wait in the quietness until light goes up in your darkness, and in the meantime, do something positive that needs doing—make your bed, prepare a meal, visit a friend, weed the garden. He says, astringently, we must give up any notion of playing the hero when we are not yet barely honest. Indeed, the purest efforts of will of which we are capable cannot keep us from doing wrong to our neighbor.

Now on to MacDonald on love (what follows are assorted quotations from MacDonald's Unspoken Sermons, many of then collected in C.S. Lewis's George MacDonald, An Anthology):

Why do we love? We do not love because we see why but because we love. In the main, we love because we cannot help it—there is no merit in it but neither is it selfish. The love that is born in us is our salvation from selfishness.  

Where we do not love, the not-loving seems rational. How can we love a man or woman who is mean, unlovely, fault-finding, untrusting and untrustworthy, self-righteous, self-seeking, sneering and contemptuous? These things cannot be loved. But are they the whole of the person? Is there not within the person the divine element of brotherhood or sisterhood, something lovely and lovable, something human, however it seems to be fading or even dying?

Though we cannot make ourselves love, we can and must fight against the hatred inside us.  Hate concentrates itself on the thing hated. Love makes everything lovely.

If your neighbor, who owes you love, gives you hate, you must nevertheless pay that neighbor the love you owe them, says MacDonald (and also Jesus).

Do not heed much if people mock you and speak lies of you, or even in goodwill defend you unworthily. Heed not much if even the righteous turn their backs on you. Only take heed that you turn not from them.  

In the dungeon of self we are breathing in the same air we breathed out.  “Love your neighbor” is the only way out of  this dungeon. “Love your neighbor” frees us into God’s sunlight and the sweet winds of the universe.

However, the impossibility of following God’s command to love our neighbor drives us to God for help.  

God says, “Vengeance is mine.” When we understand God rightly, we might as well pray for God’s vengeance as for God’s forgiveness. God’s vengeance is to destroy the sin, to make the sinner reject and hate it. The same unblinking purifying love God has for us, God has as well for our enemy. No one escapes the flame of God’s love.

Indeed, Christ died to save us not from suffering, but from ourselves; not from injustice, far less from justice, but from being unjust. A human being is not made for justice from another human being but for love, which is greater than justice. Love is the law of our condition without which we cannot render justice.

It may be … less evil to murder a person than to refuse to forgive them. When we will not forgive another, we cannot believe that God is willing, even wanting to forgive us.

The will of his and our Father is the yoke Jesus would have us take and bear together with him—it is this yoke—shared with Jesus—that is light and easy.

Do you ask what is faith in God? I answer, leaving your own way, your purposes, your self, and taking God’s way, God’s purposes, God’s self—the leaving of your trust in humans, in opinion, in character, in atonement itself, and instead doing as God tells you.

Ask yourself whether today you have done one thing because God said "Do it," or abstained from one thing because God said "Do not do it."

To those who obey and thus open the heart’s door to receive the eternal gift, God gives the Spirit of the Son, the spirit of God’s Self to be in them, and lead them to the understanding of all truth…true disciples shall thus always know what they ought to do, though not necessarily what another ought to do.

God does not by the instant gift of the Spirit make us always feel right, desire good, love purity, aspire after God’s self and God’s will. The truth is this. God wants to make us in God’s own image, choosing the good, refusing the evil. For God made our individuality, our apartness, so that freedom would bind us divinely dearer to God’s self with a new and inscrutable marvel of love.

To be right with God is to be right with the universe: one with the power, the love the will of the mighty Mother/Father, the cherisher of joy, the Lord of laughter, whose are all glories, all hopes, who loves everything and hates nothing but selfishness.

It is only in God that the soul has room. In knowing God is life and its gladness. The secret of your own heart you can never know; but you can know God who knows its secret.  

It is by loving and not by being loved that one can come nearest to the soul of another.  Let us be compassionate and humble, and hope for every person.

Let us also be compassionate toward ourselves, humble within ourselves, and hopeful for ourselves.  God is faithful and God’s love is unstoppable until it achieves God’s purpose for us which is to love God wholly and first and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Our Father Who Art in Heaven

I’m writing this on April 23, St. George’s Day, which also happens to be the day my father, George, died. I felt when he died that some of the light and love had gone out of the universe. I’ve been sorrowing over losing him today, even though if he were still alive, he’d be 102 and not that happy about it. Perhaps my heart is softer this year because I’ve been listening to Morning Prayer from Canterbury Cathedral since Easter, and it always ends with “Our Father,” the prayer our Lord taught us (Matthew 6).

I know my local congregation has worked to avoid giving God a particular gender, so we’ve avoided “father”-language. We avoid calling God “Father” because too many fathers have acted like they were God or like their authority, however they use it, is approved by God.

But I realized, after several weeks of saying “Our Father, who art in heaven” that my congregation’s commitment also incorporates a loss as well. One of the amazing things Jesus taught us in this prayer was that we have an intimate family relationship with God Almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth.

This changes everything for people whose main access to God is through priests or pastors. This involves God personally in our lives as a parent is inextricably involved in a child’s life.

St. Paul in Ephesians 3 says, “I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ from whom the whole family on heaven and earth is named…that he would grant you to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” He emphasizes inclusiveness and love and being filled up with God, rooting it in God’s fatherhood. We are all family because we have the same father.

The story of the prodigal son paints a father who sets his child free to explore the world and who welcomes his child home from failure with a party. This is the kind of father God is. (Luke 15)

Dad was a good person and a loving father. Because I projected him onto my
understanding of God, I trusted that I could explore ideas and ask questions without fear. Dad always liked a good discussion and seemed curious about a lot of things and willing to entertain odd ideas. At the same time, he was flawed. Some of those flaws hurt me and made it hard for me to trust God’s love for me. I thought I could embarrass God by my behavior, I thought God would send me away if I was too much trouble, and I thought God would not be with me when I was most needy.

George MacDonald, nineteenth-century Scottish writer and preacher, encouraged his readers to believe that God was better than they could imagine—to imagine the best father ever and then believe that God was better than that. When I pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven,” that’s who I am praying to: The God who is Father to all, with none of my dad’s flaws and with all his good qualities and more, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Running Ahead of God

Exodus 17:1-7, Numbers 20:1-13; Matthew 17:1-8

Preached at Tigard Community Friends Church

Oct. 6, 2019

            I mentioned last week that we have dug 80+ holes for trees, shrubs and plants, and some of those holes were into rocks. We did have enough sense to wait until rain softened the top 4 inches of soil, but nothing softened the rocks.

            I really enjoyed the work, to be honest. I watched my spouse use the 26-pound prybar to evict sizable rocks and break up the hard clay, and I used it myself (though I thought I might lose my balance on the sloping surface, fall on prybar and break out my front teeth). One day, I felt a decided burning in my tricep and thought, “Well, that’s enough for the day.” So I waited a day or two before using that prybar again. And I congratulated myself on paying attention to my body.

            A couple of weeks into heavy digging, I noticed my hands were really sore in the morning. They got better as I used them during the day, and when I really got going, endorphins took all the pain away. Then my middle fingers on both sides started catching in the phenomenon known as trigger finger. Now I get them caught in the shape of claws and they stick there for a bit until I can pry them open. They wake me up in the night to complain. So I warm them up, massage them with various liniments, and continue digging. 

            The amount of work I did made me proud of myself, and I wanted to impress my spouse when he got home each day. Also, I just love planting things. So I pressed on, until a little voice whispered, “You might want to get those hands looked at.” I made an appointment and got referred to physical therapy. Where my therapist “congratulated” me on doing so much hard work as a happy way to transition into telling me I’d better take it easy if I want my hands to improve. This is annoying. I could, of course, ignore her warning and persist with my shoveling and raking and digging. But I’m going to try to listen and obey.

            The significance of my story is that all the work I was doing was positive, and I enjoyed doing it despite all the aches and pains that ensued from it. But I didn’t quickly listen to when to ease up, and now I owe my body some rest. I pressed on when I should have put my feet up. Maybe some of you can relate. 

            On a day off from work at the yearly meeting (denominational) office, I thought about what things I should get done, and I asked God, “What do you want me to do today?” And, to my surprise, God said, in my inner self, “It’s a nice sunny day; get outside and enjoy it.” So I went and sat in my swing. Another time, after the career disappointment I mentioned, I said, probably angrily, to God, “Now what? What am I supposed to do now?” And God said, “You don’t have to achieve another thing in your whole remaining life. I’m fine with that.” Notice God didn’t say, “I forbid you to achieve” or “you better not try another job.” Just that God didn’t require me to continue to be ambitious and aspirational, God isn’t pushing me to fulfill my potential, God is just happy for me to be.

            I’ll add, right up front, that my whole spiritual life took a turn for the better when, as a young adult, I heard Bill Vaswig at Newberg Friends Church say, “Jesus promised that the Spirit would guide us into truth, so why not ask what the Spirit of truth would have you do, take some time and space to listen, and then do what you hear.” St. Augustine said, “Love God and do what you will, acting always out of love.” (No law but the law of love: Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.) This sounds enormously free and a little scary if we aren’t accustomed to working without a net of rules and guidelines, without expectations we are trying to meet.

            (Just a word about what I “hear” when I say I hear God. Some of what I hear are mental impressions, metaphors, ideas about things I’m turning over in my mind. George MacDonald said that God sits in the darkness where the light of our consciousness goes out and sends us up beautiful things. Sometimes also, when I’m working on a course of action, I receive in my mind a simply factual statement about what I need to do next, such as “take the day off,” or “take the next step in forgiveness,” or, in the middle of an argument with my spouse, “you know you’re going to have to get over this, so watch what you say.” God’s word doesn’t come clad in shaming, guilt-producing, manipulative language. I’ve never had God thunder at me, despite my various wayward tendencies.)

            And look at the arrangement in the garden, before humans took their fate into their own hands. Every evening, after the humans doing anything they wanted to (except that one thing of eating the fruit of the Tree of Death), God showed up to walk and talk with them. This sounds like a golden age to me, and we do keep trying, on our own steam, to get back to the garden.

Last week I mentioned the problem of running ahead of God. God wants humans to live in ongoing conversation and responsiveness to God’s leading. The temptation in the garden speaks to us of human beings running ahead of where God leads, putting our own ideas of how we want things to be in the place of listening to God, pushing forward because that’s what we know how to do.

            So today, I want us to look at the story of Moses, who led the Hebrews out of Egyptian slavery to the edge of the promised land. I am going to simplify the story, leaving out huge portions to focus on three incidents in Moses’s life.

            To recap, for those who are unfamiliar. Moses was born a Hebrew in Egypt at a time when all Hebrew boy babies were supposed to be killed at birth. His midwives disobeyed this law, and his mother nursed him up until she felt he could survive, then put him into a little boat on the river, where he was rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter. She brought him up as a prince in Egypt, and she employed his mother to be his nanny.

            One day Moses saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave, and he flew into a rage and killed the Egyptian. (This is Moses acting on his own, by the way.) He fled the country and went to work as a shepherd at the back of beyond. After decades, God got in touch with Moses via a miraculous burning bush, and God told Moses to  use what was in his hand, which was his shepherd’s rod. This rod became imbued with powers that looked magical: it could turn into a snake and then back, for instance. God sent Moses back to Egypt, saying, “I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall say.” So Moses went.

 After a lengthy negotiation period between Moses, Pharaoh and God, Pharaoh let the Hebrews go into the wilderness to worship God. When Pharaoh saw that they had escaped, he and his army pursued them, thinking them trapped by the Red Sea. But God told Moses to lift up his shepherd’s rod over the water, and it parted so that the Hebrews could escape.

Now I’m going to take you to three times when the Hebrews murmured against God and complained to Moses about having no water. The first time was not long after their escape across the bed of the Red Sea. Three days into the wilderness they ran out of water.  The only water was a stream called “Bitter” (Hebrew: Marah) because of its nasty taste. They couldn’t drink the water. And God said to Moses, “Take the tree I’m pointing out and throw it into the stream.” Moses did exactly that, and the water became sweet and drinkable. Moses took the opportunity to point out to the Hebrews how important it was to listen to God and do what God says.

Some time later, the people arrived in another place in the wilderness where there was no water. Keep in mind that they had livestock as well as families along, so there was a lot at stake in having an adequate source of water. Moses asked God for help, saying “Help! They are about to stone me to death!” and God replied, “Take the elders of the people with you, and bring your shepherd’s rod that struck the sea. I will go with you to the rock, and you will smite the rock with your shepherd’s rod, and water will come out of it.” So Moses obeyed God’s word, and indeed, water flowed out of the rock.

Much later, after the Hebrews have reached the promised land and denied themselves entrance by their cowardice and then disobedience, they arrive again at the place in the wilderness where there is no water. They complain against Moses and God, saying, “Why have you brought us up into the wilderness to die of thirst? Why have you taken us out of Egypt, a place of figs and pomegranates, to this evil place?”

So Moses went to seek God’s face and will. And the Lord spoke to Moses, and said, “Take your shepherd’s rod, bring your brother Aaron along, and gather the people together. Then speak to the rock, and water will gush out of it right before their eyes.” Moses got Aaron, picked up his shepherd’s rod, and gathered the people together.

And he said to them, “Listen up, you rebels! Must we fetch you water out of this rock?” Then he smote the rock with his shepherd’s rod. Nothing happened. So he struck it again. Uh-oh.

Moses does not follow God’s leading. Moses takes the rod into his own hands and does what worked in the past, rather than trusting that this time, it will be enough to be simply obedient and speak to the rock. Now, God is kind and the people are thirsty, and God still provides water gushing from the rock. But there will be consequences for Moses.

Some here may have a hard time believing the miraculous parts of this story, thinking of wizard’s wands, and magic spells, and so on. And certainly, in Egypt Pharaoh’s sorcerers were able to match Moses miracle for miracle up to a point (which, somewhat amusingly, was the plague of lice. They could make frogs but not lice. Perhaps once you’ve hidden a louse up your sleeve, it sticks around.) And I don’t want to worry about defending whether these things did or did not happen exactly as written in the Bible. What is written is for our correction, encouragement and instruction in right living, so that’s how we’ll use it.

What I want us to focus on is that the Bible faithfully recounts both Moses’s obedience and Moses’s disobedience. The Bible tells that this man, who talked “mouth to mouth” with God, chose, after decades of obedience, to take matters into his own hands and do what worked in the past.  And God took note of this break in relationship. Moses did not live to enter the promised land after all his wandering through the wilderness with the wayward Hebrews. Instead, God took Moses up on a mountain to see the promised land, and said, “Because you rebelled (the Hebrew word is Marah, like the bitter stream) against my commandment in the strife of the congregation and did not honor my name and word as holy at the water before the congregation, you may not enter the promised land.”

This is instructive to us. The life of the Christian is a life lived in obedience to the living Word, God’s Holy Spirit, a daily and ordinary obedience. We are always likely to let the clatter and conflict around us rattle us so that we can’t trust what God is saying to us. We are likely instead to do what worked before. When we disobey, our actions have consequences. Otherwise, our actions do not have any meaning. But God is not harsh with us. I notice that God allowed Moses to draw water from the rock because God is kind and gracious. And as an important side note, God promises Moses that he will be gathered unto his people, which seems positive, perhaps even more positive than entering the physical promised land. So though Moses didn’t get to fulfill his hope of entering the promised land, he moved on into a dimension of unbroken and unbreakable conversation and relationship with God.

Jesus showed us what it looks like to be a human being in living, continual, responsive conversation with God. He said that he did nothing but what his Father told him to do, and that we could see God by looking at Jesus. If you have questions about why Jesus did one thing with a particular person and something else with another, perhaps here is your answer. He was and is responding to the guidance of his Father in his responses to individual human beings.

One day toward the end of the three years Jesus ministered publicly, he took Peter, James and John up a mountain (reminding us of all those mountains Moses climbed to be with God). On that mountain, Jesus was transfigured: he lit up from within and his clothing glowed with light (reminding us of how Moses’s face glowed with light). He looked for once like the Son of God might be expected to look.  And importantly, Jesus had visitors on the mount where he was transfigured. Here is Moses, along with the prophet Elijah, signifying that Jesus fulfills the Law and the Prophets.

And because humans want to memorialize big events like this one, Peter says, “Let us build three tabernacles here for you, Moses, and Elijah.” You see, if there are tabernacles there, people can make pilgrimages, people can hope to capture some of that experience again. People like to have a place of worship that holds still so they can find it whenever they want.

But God says in response to Peter’s suggestion: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.” And isn’t that the way of following Jesus? We tend to pray at Jesus, telling Jesus what should happen next. Like Peter, we find it challenging to be quiet so we can hear Jesus, so we know what our next act of worshipful obedience will be. God doesn’t give us a nice shrine we can revisit every year or every week. We get an ongoing, intimate, personal, instructive, loving relationship with the Son of God.

Jesus promised us a relationship to God like his Father/Son relationship. Like Moses, like Jesus, we too can have an intimate (if usually invisible) mouth to mouth conversation with God, and our part in life is to enjoy that relationship and do what God tells us.

Hope and Living Water

Jeremiah 17:13, 50:7,  John 1:25

The Pharisees came to John in the Jordan River and asked him, “If you are not the Christ, the Messiah, or Elijah, or the foretold prophet, why are you baptizing?”

There is so much to unpack in this single question.

To understand the full import of what the Pharisees asked, we need to return to Israel before the forced exile to Babylon and the voluntary exile to Egypt, namely the time of Jeremiah the prophet.

During a time of famine, the Word of God came to Jeremiah.

Judah mourns

The cry of Jerusalem has gone up

The nobles have sent their little children to the watersprings

They find no water

They return with their bowls empty

Ashamed and confused

They cover their heads

The ground is beaten down, afraid

There is no rain

The plowmen are ashamed and confused

They cover their heads

The deer calve but find no grass

The wild asses snuff up the air like dragons

Their eyes search to the end but there is no grass

Oh Lord, our sins witness against us

We have turned away, turned back from You many times

For Your own Name’s sake,

Israel’s Hope and Pool of Living Water,

Rescuer and Savior in time of anguish and adversity,

Why are you a stranger and a wayfarer in the land,

One who stays only for the night?

Why are you stunned and confused

Like a champion who cannot rescue or save?

                                                                        From Jeremiah 14:1-9

And again:

Oh YHWH, LORD,

Israel’s Hope and Pool of Living Water,

All who forsake you shall be ashamed and confused

Those who revolt from my words shall be recorded in the earth

Because they have forsaken YHWH, the LORD,

The wellspring of living water.

                                                                        From Jeremiah 17:7

Following the time when Jeremiah spoke and wrote these words, Israel’s people were divided and exiled. After their return to their homeland, they took great care to do whatever they could to avoid another exile and dispersal of their people. From this context, the Pharisees arose.

The Pharisees took Torah seriously and often literally. They followed its teachings in matters of belief and behavior. They were careful to observe religious rites and to perform acts of piety. They eagerly awaited Messiah, more so after their national humiliation first at the hands of the Greeks, defeated by the Maccabees, and now, in the time of John, at the hands of the Romans. They had not been exiled, but they were not the autonomous theocracy they believed God intended. So they were looking for the one God would send to rescue and save them, in part from sin, but in larger part from the Romans. They were the true believers, the true patriots.

One aspect of their belief is the necessity of ritual washing. Torah teaches that many life events cause uncleanness in the individual, who has then to wash and remain unclean until nightfall (see Leviticus, many places).  (It can be noted that these life events often have to do with the death of potential life or actual death, ultimately connected with sin by way of the Fall.) After the Babylonian exile, the devout constructed mikveh for this purpose, sacred individual baths, fed by “living water”—water from springs. Rainwater from a cistern that flowed by gravity into this mikveh was acceptable, but flowing rainwater cannot purify. Then as well as today, converts to Judaism must wash in a mikveh.[1]

The Jordan River, sourced by three smaller rivers all rising from springs, is living water for the purposes of washing away uncleanness. Thus it is the perfect spot for John to immerse those who are repenting of living wrongly.

The Pharisees who came hopefully to ask John his calling had already been through their daily washing, very likely. They wanted to please God so that their nation would be free from oppressors. They also wanted a Messiah who would help turn the nation toward God so that God would free them from Rome.

The Messiah Who Actually Came

The story is familiar about how Jesus arrived at the Jordan, John spoke prophetically of the Lamb of God who carries away the sins of the whole world, and then Jesus enters the purifying water and John baptizes him. John sees the Spirit of God descend on Jesus and witnesses that “this is the Son of God.” By the end of John 1, Jesus has identified himself as the same ladder Jacob saw between earth and heaven, with God’s messengers ascending and descending on it. In John 3, Jesus tells Nicodemus that the natural birth and the water bath must be followed and superseded by a spiritual birth. In John 4, by Jacob’s Well, Jesus offers the Samaritan woman living water, even a well of water springing up in her to everlasting life. In John 5, Jesus heals a man waiting by healing waters, but the man does not, in fact, bathe either literally or figuratively in living water, and he turns Jesus in as a Sabbath-breaker.

In John 6, Jesus walks over the waters of the Sea of Galilee to join the fearful disciples in their boat.

In John 7, Jesus stands in the Temple and shouts,

All who thirst,

Come to me and drink

All who trust in me

Will have streams of living water

Within them

(He spoke thus of the Spirit of God)

                                                                        John 7:37-39

It would not have escaped the Pharisees in the crowd that Jesus was echoing the prophet Isaiah:

All who thirst

Come to the watersprings

                                                                        Isaiah 55:1

John 9 tells of Jesus healing a blind man by spitting in the dust, making a mud poultice, and then sending him to wash in the pool fed by the fountain of Siloam. This washing revisits the whole idea of the mikveh, the purifying bath that prepares for worship. Indeed, when the man sees Jesus again, he worships him.

By John 10, Jesus has completed a circle and returned to the spot where John baptized him. In John 13, Jesus washes feet, saying to Peter, “If I don’t wash you, you hold no part in me….Whoever has bathed is clean, and needs only to wash the feet. And you are clean.” Jesus himself is the living water that purifies, and to be part of him requires immersion in that mikveh as well as the specific washing of whatever is dusty. This becomes more vivid when the Roman soldier pierces Jesus’s side and blood and water flow out (John 19:34)—blood symbolizing life, human life, and water symbolizing the living water of spirit, first referenced in John 1:12-13:

But to as many who held onto him,

Who committed themselves to his character and authority,

To them he gave the strength and freedom

To become children of God:

Born not of human blood nor human pleasure nor human will,

But of God’s blood, God’s pleasure and God’s will.

John identifies Jesus with the purifying and healing water of the mikveh, and this is not entirely new information. But the most exciting insight comes out of the passages in Jeremiah, where the mikveh bath is a sacred pun for hope, one of the three central Christian virtues.

When Jesus is our cleansing bath, we enter into his being, we take hold of him and become one with him and one like him. This is our ground for hope. Hope is not an insubstantial wish for things to improve, but our hope, who is Jesus, anchors us. We may need daily to have Jesus clean us, but no one can take away from us that immersion in the water of life, which Jesus has also placed within us and provided for us. As the apostle says in 1 John 3:2-3:

Beloved, we are now the children of God

What we will be has not yet appeared

But we do know that when God appears

We will be like God

For God will allow us to see God

As God really is

And all who have this hope in God

Cleanse themselves

Even as God is clean

Here is a picture of that cleansing, healing bath from the fiction of George MacDonald. In The Princess and Curdie, Irene has had a terrifying adventure underground in goblins’ tunnels, and has found her way back to her magical grandmother. Here is the scene:

“You are very tired, my child,” the lady went on. “Your hands are hurt with the stones, and I have counted nine bruises on you. Just look what you are like.”

And she held up to her a little mirror which she had brought from the cabinet. The princess burst into a merry laugh at the sight. She was so draggled with the stream, and dirty with creeping through narrow places…The lady laughed too, and lifting her again upon her knee, took off her cloak and night-gown. Then she carried her to the side of the room. Irene…[started] a little when she found that she was going to lay her in the large silver bath; for as she looked into it, again she saw no bottom, but the stars shining miles away…in a great blue gulf. Her hands closed involuntarily on the beautiful arms that held her, and that was all.

The lady pressed her once more to her bosom, saying: “Do not be afraid, my child.”

“No, grandmother,” answered [Irene], with a little gasp: and the next instant she sank in the clear cool water.

When she opened her eyes, she saw nothing but a strange lovely blue over and beneath and all about her. … she seemed nearly alone. But instead of being afraid, she felt more than happy—perfectly blissful. And from somewhere came the voice of the lady singing…

How long she lay in the water she did not know. It seemed a long time—not from weariness but from pleasure. But at last she felt the beautiful hands lay hold of her, and through the gurgling water she was lifted out into the lovely room. …When she stood up on the floor she felt as if she had been made over again. Every bruise and all weariness were gone, and her hands were soft and whole as ever.

And here is another lovely picture of the truth of this living water:

And he showed me a clean river

Of the water of life

Crystal clear

Proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb

And on either side of the river was the Tree of Life

Yielding twelve kinds of fruit

One each month

And its leaves were for the healing of the nations

                                                                        Rev. 21:1-2

The first gathering of water referred to as mikveh is Genesis 1:10, where God gathers together the waters called Seas. The mikveh bath is a place where drops of water collect together. Many small drops of water springing from the earth or falling from the sky gather together in one significant community of water. This occurs because the separate drops abide together, or in the case of a river, they are continuous with one another.

Let us take to heart these truths. Jesus washes us clean, Jesus is the living water which springs up in us, Jesus is the living water in which we bathe ourselves, Jesus is our hope. As we gather together, we too can be living water for each other, and our hope bonds us together to be living water and hope—mikveh—for the healing of whole world.

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[1] Much of this information comes from the Wikipedia article on mikveh.