February 26, 2012 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Life-Saving Waters

Judith L. Watt
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 25:1–10
Genesis 9:8–17
1 Peter 3:18–22

Little child, for you Jesus Christ came into the world, he did battle in the world, he suffered; for you he went through the agony of Gethsemane and the darkness of Calvary; for you he cried, “It is fulfilled”; for you he triumphed over death. . . .You, little child, do not yet know anything about this. But thus is the statement of the apostle confirmed, “We love God because he first loved us.”

Baptismal Service of the French Reformed Liturgy

This past Wednesday evening, Ash Wednesday, our service ended with the opportunity for people to receive ashes, either on their foreheads or their hands. Ashes are offered at this service as a reminder of our mortality, a reminder that life is short, a reminder that there is an urgency to turn our lives toward God—again.

When the pastor places the ashes on someone’s forehead or on the back of someone’s hand, the pastor says, “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” For every one of the last eighteen years, I’ve been involved as a pastor in some aspect of an Ash Wednesday service and have said these words every single year. This last Wednesday, for the life of me, I couldn’t recall the exact words. I hadn’t checked with my colleagues. I hadn’t checked in the Book of Common Worship. And so instead of saying, “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return,” I said, “From dust you have come and to dust you shall return.” I kept thinking, something is wrong with these words, but they were all I could come up with.

I messed up. It was minor. I know that. No harm done. And I’m exaggerating to make a point. But I messed up on Ash Wednesday and that is the point, isn’t it? It is what Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent are meant to focus us on—that we do mess up, that we aren’t perfect, that we aren’t God, and because we aren’t God, that’s exactly why we need God.

This last Ash Wednesday we received a stark reminder of something we already know: that our world is messed up, too. On Ash Wednesday, two journalists lost their lives in Syria: a war correspondent who wrote for the Sunday Times of London, Marie Colvin, and a noted photojournalist, Remi Ochlik. They were killed in the horror of the Syrian government having turned on its own people. They were using their gifts and their talents to reveal a truth to the world—that a travesty is taking place. They risked their lives and lost them. And so we learned on Wednesday something we’d known already: the world is messed up, in so many ways.

According to the account in Genesis, God looked at the world and saw a mess, too—a messed up idea of the original intention, an Eden that had gone awry. We know this story of the great flood, and we know the story of the ark that Noah built, and we know the story of the ark’s harrowing trip through raging waters. God saw a mess and decided to eradicate almost everything of it, with the exception of these few creatures in the ark, and start completely over.

Haven’t there been times in your own life when you just simply wanted to start over? There’s been something you’ve done that you wish you could erase—crumple up like a bad first draft and just toss away so that you could start again? Or something that was done to you—a calamity or a crime or an abuse or an illness over which you had little or no control, but which left you with a deep sense of shame and unworthiness? On some days, it would feel like a relief to be able to start over from scratch.

The people who heard Peter’s letter, written thousands of years after the time of Noah, were a discouraged people, too. Peter calls them the exiles of the Dispersion. They were some of the earliest Christians, spread out over all of Asia Minor. They were early believers who were trying to live in obedience to Jesus Christ, to be the best people they knew how to be, in a culture that wasn’t supportive. They must have been a people who were also lagging in hope—discouraged, maybe because of what they were witnessing in the world around them, perhaps because the world hadn’t ended as they thought would happen and Jesus hadn’t come a seond time as soon as they expected. Maybe their discouragement was the realization that it is just pretty hard to live a life of faith without messing up here and there.

I’m reading a book called Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand. It is the story of Louis Zamperini and other World War II pilots and their survival after their plane went down in the Pacific. For days, Louie and two of his buddies floated on a small raft, with few rations, scorched by the relentless rays of the sun, and with little to live on. Eventually all food and water was gone. They were surrounded by this entire ocean, but they couldn’t drink the salt water. There was nothing for them to drink. Days went by. One of the most striking scenes in the book is the story of the day it finally rained and the vision of these three men lifting their faces to the sky with their mouths wide open, drinking in the water that was coming from the heavens. For as long as it rained, that’s what they did. They found a container to try to capture more of the fresh water, the whole while they continued to let the rains pour into their mouths.

I think of that vision and I see all of us positioned the same way—looking to the heavens, mouths wide open like little baby birds in a nest, waiting to be fed, desperate for life-giving waters. Today’s two biblical texts—the story of the flood and the text from Peter—both are filled with the hope that comes from God’s promise of grace, unmerited grace for us. It is that hope that provides life-giving waters into our thirsty mouths.

The profound hope that comes from the story of the flood is the ever-surprising promise God makes. The ark arrives on dry ground, and God makes a covenant with Noah and all humanity. And the message is that God is passionately devoted to us—so much so that God promises that there will never again be a flood to destroy the earth. And then God goes a step further and says, “I’ll put a sign in the heavens to remind myself of this promise. I’ll hang my bow in the sky.” The striking and surprising thing about this promise is God puts all of the demands on God’s self. All of the restraints are self-imposed. Nothing in this covenant story is demanded of Noah or of the rest of humanity. God says, “I promise—never again.” The rainbow we see is a reminder of so much more than simply the beauty of the earth after a rainstorm. It is a reminder of God’s refusal ever again to take up the divine bow, in the ancient world the warrior’s weapon, against humanity or the world. The covenant promise in the flood story is an immense declaration of self-restraint on God’s part and an immense declaration of God’s investment—forever—in this creation. Unmerited. Regardless of how we mess up.

The text from Peter’s letter gives the same kind of hope, but the text is harder to understand on first reading. I don’t pretend to understand all of it. Scholars have spilled gallons of ink on this piece of scripture. It reminds those early Christians and us that we are saved by a God who is willing to go the distance for us, even when we don’t deserve it. It reminds us of Jesus’ suffering and death.

I’m not a person who easily feels better when someone says to me, “You are saved by Jesus’ death and resurrection.” I can’t grapple with exactly how that all works, and when it is stated like a formula, I can’t relate. But I do relate to the reminder that God, that Jesus, goes the distance for us, for me, for you.

The text from Peter includes these strange couple of verses that talk about Christ going to the spirits in prison making a proclamation. These are the verses that have caused scholars to spill ink. Who are the spirits? What does this mean? Some have said that the whole text of Peter is reminiscent of the structure of the Apostles’ Creed—and have seen these verses as Jesus’ descent to hell, going to the spirits in prison. The study of the original language doesn’t support the idea of Jesus descending anywhere. But I see these verses as a statement that our God goes to the most hellish places of our lives and proclaims victory, even when we don’t see victory. That in the most messed up places we experience personally, God is there, in love. That in the mess in Syria, God is there. That in the deaths of those two journalists, there is still victory, because God loves and is passionately committed to the enterprise of this creation. That in the places in our families where things aren’t exactly just right, Jesus is there, somehow, going the distance for us, making a proclamation.

In a sermon, Scott Black Johnson, pastor of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, speaks of Picasso’s painting Guernica, which shows all of the distortion of war, in Picasso’s cubist style. It’s an unpleasant and unsettling work. Johnson recounts a discussion he had with a man who simply rejected the idea that Jesus descended into hell. “My Jesus isn’t in those evil places,” the man said to Johnson. And Scott Black Johnson writes, “I can understand his thinking, because when I look at Guernica, the painting, I don’t want to put my Jesus in the middle of it, either.”

Picasso’s painting is based on a 1937 attack on a little Spanish village in northern Spain. The attack happened because Hitler made a deal with his friend, Franco. Franco had asked for a favor from Hitler, and Hitler complied. For almost four hours, Hitler’s German Air Force “practiced” dropping bombs on a city that was a source of resistance to Franco, much like Homs in Syria is a source of resistance to the current Syrian government.

But Johnson concludes and Peter states that God is in those places too, that God is passionately committed to the endeavor of this creation, to you and to me. So committed that the God we know in Jesus Christ goes the distance for us, even to the most hellish places of our lives and the most hellish places in the world. This story of God’s self-giving covenant with Noah and this reminder from Peter are both reminders to us of the saving grace of God, and both are connected in our tradition to baptism. What could be more appropriate? For in baptism what we proclaim is that before a child or before any of us is aware of God, God has claimed us for his own. In that promise is the hope—the life saving-waters of hope given so that we can live.

Alleluia! Amen!