Alive In The River

We trace the Jordan as a living river of memory and mercy, connect baptism to movement and mission, and reflect on being “rivered” people whose bodies and lives carry God’s promise. Macfarlane’s vision of rivers as relationships reframes faith, vocation, and belonging.

Chapters

• 0:00 Gospel Reading: Jesus At The Jordan
• 0:57 Is A River Alive
• 2:31 Rights Of Nature And River Pilgrimages
• 4:51 Reimagining Rivers As Relationships
• 6:40 The Jordan’s History And Meaning
• 9:13 Jesus Enters A Living River

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

The Holy Gospel according to Matthew. Glory to you, O Lord. Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me? But Jesus answered him, Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness. Then John consented. And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were open to Jesus, and he saw God's Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from the heavens said, This is my son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased. The Gospel of the Lord. Praise to you, O Christ. Please be seated. Grace and peace to you from our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. Is a river alive? Is a river alive? That is the curious title and the animating question of a book that I was given for Christmas this year. It's written by Robert McFarlane, a British author who writes beautifully, stunningly, about the natural world. I don't know how I've never encountered his work before, but I am glad that he's in my life now. Not just as a guide to the landscapes of earth and water, but the landscapes of the heart. And in this book, Is A River Alive, McFarlane ponders the aliveness of rivers. He explains the growing global rights of nature movement, which seeks legal protections for rivers. And in order to demonstrate or to evoke their aliveness, he leads the reader on a kind of pilgrimage to three rivers in particular: the Los Cedros River in Ecuador, the Adiar River in India, and the Mutesha Kauchipu or Magpie River in Quebec. It's impossible to do justice to his descriptions of these places and the people that he explored them with and their ecosystems and histories, but what emerges from the book is a profound sense of interconnectedness, of life, brimming, abundant, extravagant, resilient life. And one of his central observations, and one of the reasons he wrote the book, was that many of us have become deeply disconnected from rivers and their meanings. He says we have become waterproofed, sealed off, not just physically but imaginatively. He writes, meaning as well as water can be impounded, can still and settle behind dam walls of thought. The impounded meaning of river is now one of service provider, an identity held in place by structures of the imagination as well as the land. We become increasingly waterproofed, conceptually sealed against subtle and various relations with rivers, even as they continue to irrigate our bodies, thoughts, songs, and stories. Rivers run through people as surely as they run through places. And he says that when we attend to rivers not as utilities, but as relationships, our understanding shifts. He says, how we imagine the matter of water matters. To recognize its ceaseless movement is to recognize that we live in a fundamentally decentralized world, engaged always in multitude forms of relation. The aliveness of a river is a process within the flux of which, at best, we understand ourselves to be extended generously outward into a vast community of others. To be extended generously outwards and a vast community of others. And I think this perspective, this way of seeing the aliveness of water, opens us up to today's readings in a new way and bring us to another river, the river Jordan. The river Jordan is ancient. Its waters begin as springs and snow melt near Mount Hermon, gather and flow into the Sea of Galilee, and then wind south through the Jordan Valley until finally emptying into the Dead Sea. It is not wide or mighty. In places it is narrow and muddy and slow. And yet no river in all of Scripture carries more meaning. This is the river that Israel crossed to enter the promised land after the exodus and wandering in the desert for forty years, the river they crossed when they came out of exile from Babylon and returned home. This is the river that the prophet Elijah struck before ascending into heaven, the river where his prophetic protege Elisha healed Naaman the leper. The Jordan is alive with memory, alive with longing, alive with God's repeated act of promise and mercy. It is a river shaped by centuries of relationship between God and God's people. And so when John the Baptist appears in the wilderness calling people to repentance and renewal, he goes to the Jordan. He brings people back to the river where God has acted before because God is about to act again. And then Jesus appears. When Jesus steps into the river, then he does not step into a neutral pool. He enters a living river, already saturated with history and memory and hope. He is baptized into Israel's story, into humanity's longing, into the muddy, complicated, and beloved world as it actually is. And he rises, when he rises from the water, everything opens. The heavens are torn apart. The spirit descends like a dove, and a voice speaks This is my son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased. The river becomes a place of revelation. And notice what happens next. After his baptism, Jesus doesn't linger at the water's edge. As Peter later says in Acts, he went about doing good, healing, restoring, and freeing. The living water releases him, propels him into the world, extended generously outwards into a vast community of others. In our tradition, we describe the waters of baptism as living waters. These waters are made alive in a new way by Jesus' own baptism, by his death and resurrection, by the word of God, which we say is in with and under the waters, by all the ways in Scripture that God has brought salvation through water, and by the faith of this community. Here at this font, extraordinary water, river water, tap water, font water, is made extraordinary because God promises to meet us here. Just as the Jordan carried Jesus into his ministry, so baptism carries us into life in Jesus, into a life lived for others. And here, McFarland makes a remarkable observation that we ourselves are water bodies. He writes, for every human is, of course, a water body. Water flows in and through us. Running, we are rivers. Seated, we are pools. Our brains and our hearts are three-quarters water. Our skin is two-thirds water. Even our bones are watery. We were swimmers before we were walkers, slow turning like breath divers in the dark flotation tank of the womb. We are all bodies of water, receiving, circulating, giving onwards, all participants in the hydrosphere, with the flow of the wet world running through us. And if that is true, then baptism does not remain outside of us. The living waters of baptism become living waters within us. God's promise flows through our very bodies. The Spirit moves through us the way that water moves through a riverbed, shaping and expanding us. McFarlane uses a phrase to describe this feeling. He says, I am rivered. And so are we. We are rivered. For the voice that named Jesus the Beloved names us beloved too. The spirit that descended upon him is poured into us, and the river that carried him into the world carries us to love and serve our neighbor. And so in a world replete with suffering and death, we bear witness to God's life. In a world that normalizes violence, we walk in the way of peace. In a world of despair, we are ambassadors of hope. In a world of hate, we recognize and honor each person's belovedness. Here at the Fawn and in this community through Word and the Spirit, we are formed into a different way of being, and we carry that with us wherever we go to bless, transform, and to heal. And to close, I'll share one final insight from the book. McFarland notes that in Maori culture, the native people of New Zealand, one might greet someone new by asking Ko Wai Khoi, which is translated, who are your waters? Who are your waters? At what waters do you make your home? From what waters do you come? And today the gospel gives us an answer. We are the people of the Jordan River, people of the Fawn, people of living water. We are baptized bodies of water, extended generously into a vast community of others, carried by grace and moved by the Spirit, set about to doing good in the name of the beloved. Amen.