“Down to the River”

Genesis 1:1-13 and Revelation 22:1-5

Sunday, June 4, 2023

Sermon by the Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

I feel certain I’ve never begun a sermon with a quote from St. Augustine of Hippo (which is now in Algeria), but I guess there’s a first time for everything.

Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Note it. Read it. God, whom you want to discover never wrote that book with ink. Instead, God set before your eyes the things that God had made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that? Why, heaven and earth shout to you: “God made me!” [1]

You may have heard Christians referred to as “people of the book.” It’s a friendly term that Muslims use to categorize us and several other religions, like Judaism. We share many things in common with other monotheistic religions like Islam and one of them is that many of us hold certain books as sacred, scripture.

As important as the Bible is to us, it’s critical for us to remember one very important thing: the Bible is not God. 

We can find God IN the Bible, of course. We can also find God in art, nature, the heart of a friend, and even in the eyes of our enemies. The Bible is one way that our Stillspeaking God is revealed to us, but not the only way. 

St. Augustine knew this way back in the 4th century. He invites us to consider “a great book” - the book of all created things. The earth in all her splendor - and the stars and spinning planets, too. 

Writing some 1600 years later, another theologian, Father Richard Rohr (of Kansas!), came to similar conclusions. Rohr is known for his emphasis on the Universal, Cosmic Christ. Now, don’t think Jesus - Jesus is simply one incarnation of the Cosmic Christ he’s talking about. This Christ is bigger than Jesus - a divine energy that has existed since before Creation, infused into every part of creation, and known to us in the person of Jesus, but also in many other ways. In fact, Rohr says that the person of Jesus is actually not the first incarnation of God in the world. Instead, the FIRST incarnation is the created world.  [2]

Honoring that “first incarnation,” that “great book” is what we’ll be focused on this summer. Half the summer we'll be in conversation with this lovely book by UCC pastor Daniel Cooperrider, Speak with the Earth and it Will Teach You. The other half of the summer we’ll be going to “Compassion Camp” together on Sunday mornings - this camp is for all ages and will feature interactive and wiggly activities along with quieter, contemplative options. In all of it, we’ll be looking to the great book of nature as our guide as we draw near to God together. 

Cooperrider says his “aim is to reread the Bible in a living, breathing, yearning, determined search for God from the perspective of nature.” [3] Instead of viewing the world through the lens of scripture, which Christian theologians often do, he flips it, reading the Bible through the lens of nature. His book has four sections: rivers, mountains, trees, and clouds. So we’ll get to explore all four.

It seems only fitting that we would begin with rivers, since the Bible both begins and ends with water. Cooperrider notes that in the account of creation in Genesis 1, nearly half of the verses are about water - especially living, flowing water. [4]. Which shouldn’t be a surprise given that just over 70% of the earth’s surface is covered in water. As our indigenous neighbors remind us, “water is life,” and we humans would quickly cease to exist without it. While a person can survive several months without food, our bodies typically fail in less than a week without water. In fact, our bodies are mostly water! 50-75% water for most adults. Water truly is life. 

Life begins in the water, not just in the Genesis account, but for mammals, too. Before we sip air, we are nurtured in the waters of the womb. In many parts of the world, people honor this maternal connection with water by calling rivers Mother. In India, the Ganges is personified as a feminine goddess of purification and forgiveness. The word used for river in some parts of India, lokmata, means “mother of the people.” And in China the mighty MeKong river means “mother of water.” 

Rivers spring up as if by magic - Cooperrider tells a great story about walking and walking to find the origin of his local river. And rivers empty into the sea, filling the oceans with a seemingly-unending supply of fresh, living water. Along the way they nurture crops, provide places for people and critters to call home. We use them for transportation and as sources of energy. I grew up in a river town and learned to tell directions by where the river was - drawing a map in my head, I knew that the river was always East. 

Civilizations have always followed the course of rivers. That’s why if you look at a map of Kansas you’ll see our little I-70 corridor of bigger cities - Junction City, Manhattan, Topeka, Lawrence, Kansas City - and you can follow the Kansas River all the way from Milford Lake to Westport. The older roads show it more clearly - notice how state road 24 hugs the river closely from Manhattan to Topeka. 

If we can still trace the power of rivers while cruising at 75 miles per hour in our air-conditioned cars, surely it’s no surprise that our ancient scriptures are filled with rivers! Baby Moses floating in a basket. Miriam with her tambourine at the river’s edge. Jacob wrestling with an angel on a riverbank. Elijah refreshed with water from a nearby wadi. Jesus and John dipping down into the Jordan. Just as you can trace the Kansas River on your map, you can trace the stories of our faith ancestors by floating from Genesis to Revelation on our sacred river stories. 

Cooperrider reflects on growing up in Wisconsin, hearing tall tales of Paul Bunyan’s puzzlement over the Round River there - a series of interconnected waterways that will take you in a circle if you stay on them long enough, used for centuries to transport goods and people. “Of course,” he says, “if you follow any trail of water far enough, all rivers eventually return, connected as a part of this planet’s complex hydraulic circuit. In the end, ‘all things merge into one,’ as Norman Maclean put it in his fly-fishing classic, ‘and a river runs through it.’” [5] 

Round and round we go. Not just in Wisconsin, but throughout the earth. Oceans into vapor into clouds into rain into streams into rivers and back again. And our faith ancestors, seeking to understand what it means to be human, seeking to put to words that mysterious connection with the Mother Source we call God, they spoke of Round Rivers, too. 

In Genesis: “A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches….”

And in Revelation: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city… Nothing accursed will be found there any more…. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign for ever and ever.”

A Round River holding it all. Will you sing with me if you know this song?

I went down to the river to pray

Studying about the good old way

And who shall wear the starry crown

Good Lord, show me the way. 

Oh, children, let’s go down.
Let’s go down. Come on down. 

Oh, children, let’s go down. 

Down to the river to pray. 

NOTES:

[1] Cooperrider, Daniel. Speak with the Earth and it Will Teach You, introductory material.

[2] https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the-first-incarnation-2019-02-21/ 

[3] Cooperrider, 11.

[4] Ibid., 18.

[5[ Ibid., 42