Water as a Sacrament

A sermon based on John 5:1-9. Acts 16:9-15, and Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5

Would you pray with me? 

God of living water, of seas and rivers and pools, we thank you for gathering us together. Remind us of your presence among us. Be with us here today and may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. 

You know, I'm finding that I understand Jesus better as I grow older, despite what I thought when I was twelve... or seventeen... or in my twenties. It's a cliché, but it's true. I thought I knew everything when I was younger. I thought everything was so clear. But now, as I age, I've realized that I'm never going to stop learning. I have so much spiritual growing left to do. And while I no longer think that I know everything there is to know, I do feel like I understand Jesus a little bit better the more trips around the sun I complete. 

Take, for instance, the beginning of Jesus' ministry, which is where our passage from John comes from this morning. Why did Jesus wait until he was thirty to start preaching and teaching and healing publicly? Or, if he was going to wait, why only wait until he was thirty? Surely he would have wanted more years with his friends, his family, his community before starting the path that would lead to the cross.

So I've always wondered, why thirty? Is there something important, something crucial about this decade of life? Well, as I said, now that I’m 33, I feel like I'm getting to understand Jesus a little better, and I'm pretty sure I get what happened, what triggered this new phase in Jesus' life. Jesus must have thrown his back out for the first time after he turned thirty and said, "Get me outta here! If this is what it's going to be like from here on out, I better get this show on the road!" 

Growing old is not for the faint of heart, as my parishioners would often say to me, and I believe it. I believe it all the way down to my vertebrae. 

Because your thirties, and those of you who have gone through them may remember this, your thirties are when your body starts telling you that you can't just do what you want anymore with no consequences. That hot dog is going to give you heartburn now. You really do have to lift with your knees when moving heavy boxes. And your body actually does need water. 

I say all this because recently my partner and I started intentionally drinking about 120oz of water a day and it has changed my life. It's not that I never used to drink water before, it's just that I didn't really think about it. But now that we've been taking these water breaks during our day, I've started to notice some changes. I'm more awake and alert. My body creaks less. I cough less. I even digest food better. But maybe most of all, I've started to notice that I actually get thirsty if I go too long without a drink. 

Turns out, when you start to give yourself what you truly need, you learn to want it more. When you know what it's like to be hydrated, you get thirsty. 

If I was honest with myself, I might not have needed to start drinking more than a gallon of water a day to notice that I was thirsty. It's common for us to feel thirsty and think that we're hungry instead, especially if we don't have a habit of drinking water. So all those times I reached for coffee or gum or sunflower seeds, thinking I just needed to tide myself over until the next meal, my body had actually been asking for water. I just didn't know what it needed. Or rather, I did know what I needed, I just didn't believe it. 

And I think this applies to spiritual thirst, too. After all, our bodies are our first teachers. Why wouldn't they have some insight into our souls? 

That's what I think we find in our three scripture passages this morning. In each passage, we find stories where God's action is intertwined with water. In these stories, we see how water can be sacramental for us as Christians-- it's an outward sign of inward grace, a visible reminder of the work that God is doing in our lives here, now, today, and always. Just as our bodies thirst for water no matter how much we try to distract them, our souls long for God, no matter how many distractions we put in their path. The more our souls drink in God’s presence, the more thirsty we are for it, the more we notice it. Water represents all of this for us, and more, so, let's turn to the scriptures and see what they have for us. 

First, let’s look at the man by the pool from our gospel passage this morning. Now, this man is someone who’s already familiar with the sacredness of water, specifically this water. Tradition holds that the water of the pool by the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem could heal people, no matter what their sickness was. The catch was that you had to wait for the water to be stirred up by an angel and you had to be the first person in the pool after the water was stirred up in order to be healed. 

It reminds me, and it might remind you, of the Easter story in John’s gospel, where Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved raced to the tomb. These people by the pool, sick in their bodies, and the disciples, sick in their souls, all racing toward what they hope will be a cure. But Jesus doesn’t come to the people who are racing ahead. Jesus appears to the ones who linger, to those who are left behind. Just as Jesus speaks to Mary, who’s stayed behind after the others have left, Jesus approaches the man who has been laying by the pool a long time. 

And he has indeed been there for a long time. He was sitting by this pool, waiting for his turn in the healing waters, since before Jesus was born, but he’s never been able to make it. 

Now, I’ve heard sermons about this man before, how he was lazy or hopeless, or how he makes excuses rather than responding to Jesus’ question. There is something to reflecting for ourselves about whether we want to be made well, whether we are ready to come to the living water and receive new life through Jesus, but I want us to remember that this man is already by the healing pool. He has been there for decades and he has endured. And Jesus, in his compassion, asks the obvious question, knowing the answer. Of course he wants to be made well. He just can’t do it on his own. 

If we understand this man by the pool to be a man of faith, and I think we can, then what does it mean for water to be a sacrament for him? To me, the presence of the pool, even if it’s out of the man’s reach, is a visible reminder of God’s perpetual presence with each of us, even if we can’t get to it. We too have a longing and a thirst that draws us to the waters of God’s healing presence, just as this man did. Some of us are those who can reach the water on their own, who have the capacity to stir themselves when they see God moving. And some of us can’t. We need an encounter with Jesus instead. When we can’t see God for ourselves, God comes to us. When we are struggling to encounter God, God sees us, and finds us, and heals us. When we see water as a sacrament, every pool and pond and puddle can remind us of God’s unfailing movement toward us, even when we’re unable to move toward God. 

We see this too in Lydia’s story in our reading from Acts. Paul and friends, fresh off their travels around the Mediterranean sea, find themselves down by the water on the Sabbath, down by the river. They had sought out a place of prayer, which, when combined with narrator’s note that Lydia was a worshiper of God, tells us that they were visiting a synagogue by the water, which was typical in the Jewish diaspora at the time. Paul was doing what he often does in Acts as he travels, connecting with the local Jewish community wherever he landed. 

Already, at the top of this passage, we see that everyone in this story knows that God and water are connected. They too know that water is a sacrament; that’s why they’ve made their place of prayer down by the river. It reminds me of Psalm 137, where the singers hang up their lyres by the rivers of Babylon, because they cannot sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land. Make no mistake, the members of the Jewish community in Macedonia were in a foreign land. So was Paul and everyone traveling with him. They all know, together, that down by the river is a place of prayer, a place for mourning and uncertainty, a place to take the hurts of this world to God and to listen for God’s reply. It is a sacred place, for sacred conversations, no matter what those conversations entail. 

At the river, Paul and those with him begin to talk about Jesus to the women gathered there. Lydia, a business woman, who deals in purple cloth, hears Paul’s words eagerly, because God has opened her heart. Why purple? Why give us such a specific detail? Well, just as the thirty-eight years the man spent by the pool tells us about the man by the pool’s character, this detail tells us something about Lydia. See, Thyatria was known for its dye industry and Lydia traded in the most highly valued dye: purple. It’s extracted from snails, thousands of them, and was incredibly labor-intensive. Lydia is wealthy. 

And yet, this wealthy woman, with a household at her command and room enough to spare at her house, has found herself down by the river, seeking out God. And God finds her. And through the words of Paul, Lydia and her whole household are baptized, a sacrament that shows us the outward sign of the new life God brings about inside each of us. After the baptism, Lydia insists that Paul and his friends stay with her, and so they do. 

Now, Lydia could bring herself to the waters. She was already connected to God. The sacrament of water in this story, the inward grace that the water is a visible sign of, is the movement of God through community. God’s grace invited Lydia into a new community, a community of new life and new connections. God is present to Lydia, just as God was present with the man by the pool, but Lydia meets God anew in the waters of Christian community. And not just her, but her whole household, because the first Christians understood, probably better than we do, the importance of belonging and togetherness to those walking in Jesus’ footsteps. 

We see this on a grand scale in our last passage this morning, the description of the City of God we read in the Revelation received by John of Patmos. 

The verses we skipped in the reading describe the gates and their associated precious gems, which are fun to dig into when you’ve got time, but what I love about this passage from Revelation is the centrality of the river of the water of life. Bright as crystal, it flows from the throne of God through the middle of the street of the City, where it feeds the tree of life, whose leaves are for the heal the nations. 

And everyone flocks to the City. People bring to it the glory and honor of the nations, the gates are always open, never needing to be closed against war or sickness, and God’s presence is everywhere. There’s no barrier as at the pool by the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem, and there’s no end to the community and life brought about by the river, as there must have been for Lydia and her household. There is light and life, growth and discovery, people from every place and every background, brought together rejoicing in God’s presence. The fullness of God is no longer hidden away, and in the middle of this joyous scene, there is a river. 

See, way back in Genesis, before there was evening and there was morning, before there were animals on the land and animals, before there were stars or the Sun or the Moon or us, there was God, hovering over the face of the deep waters. Before anything, there was God and there was water. And here, at the end of history on the earth, there is God and there is water. And there is us. 

There is something in us that understands the sacrament of water, something in us that understands that water reminds us of the unending presence of God among us, something that draws us together to experience God in community, something that renews within us the hope that God is indeed making all things new and won’t stop until the whole world has been remade, ready for the fullness of God to come among us. No matter what stands in our way, no matter how temporary our lives together, water represents for us the everlasting love of God, the living water that our souls thirst for, the love that will never stop pulling us toward the one who makes us, redeems us, and sustains us, and that is a beautiful thing. 

And so, when you go from this place today, this place where the presence of God to us is like water to a fish, when you go from here out into the world, I want you to notice the water around you. Drink more water, sure, because it is good for your body no matter what body you’re in, but think about the water in your life. What rivers do you fish on? What oceans or lakes do you visit? What ponds do you drive by? Keep your eyes out for water in unexpected places, little streams you might have missed, for water towers and clouds and pipes and lakes off in the distance. Think about water’s path in your home, brought up from the group through pipes into your taps and appliances. Notice water, wherever you go. 

Because water is a sacrament. It is a visible reminder of invisible grace, something that we can see every day to remind us of God’s work in the world. Let the water you drink and wash with and encounter remind you that God is calling you, every day. Let it bring you closer to God and to each other. And let water fill you with hope that God’s work isn’t done yet. There is more to see, more to do, and more to experience. Let water move you, delight you, and inspire you, all in the name of the one from whom all things come and to whom all things return. 

Amen.