“A grain of wheat remains a solitary grain unless it falls to the ground and dies; but if it dies, it bears a rich harvest.”

Don’t we sometimes feel like that grain of wheat? Falling to the earth and dying, it is really only a promise of bountiful life in the future. So often we seem to be laboring in a field with a harvest beyond our imaginings… the potential of people, pastoring and parish mission only a holy hope, which we seek to coax from the hard shell of potency. That’s why I like to mow my lawn, till my garden, cut the hay, because I can see where I’ve been, know where I’m going, and know when I’m done. Yes, it is safe to remain the seed… apocryphal stories abound of seeds found in ancient tombs which still retain enough vitality to sprout even millennia later. But is that what God intended? Is there a point to encapsulating that vitality, like a frozen embryo in cryonic stasis? Do we then end up with a conundrum of our own devices? What are we to do with life’s potential, when the standard of relationship has been invested in futuristic fantasy?

The grain of wheat is a very agrarian symbol, not like the piscine and aquarian imagery I have been contemplating in the last two mediations. Yet in that seed, we see the same theme of life, death and rebirth that guides the rest of the created order, through the timely path from Creation to its final consummation at the Last Day. Jesus told the parable of the mustard seed… perhaps the quintessential parable – simple in its agency, and yet profound in its flowering into the very Kingdom of God. Once its integrity is released, (God knows only how) the plant begins to grow: “remember the seed in the little paper cup… first the root goes down, then the leaf sprouts up,” as the Kindergarten poem goes! Leaving behind the lifeless husk covering the germinating seed, there is something new and unique… something that is unlike anything ever brought into existence since the beginning of the world (clones excluded!) From that solitary grain emerges something vital and precious, especially to our God who knows each sparrow and all the hairs of our heads!

Think of Dame Julian, who spent uncounted hours contemplating the hickory nut, and gave us the revelation of God’s showing – at once mundane and yet profound - “What do you see?” “And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, 'What may this be?' And it was answered generally thus, 'It is all that is made.' I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nought for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.”

As the wonder of the universe is contained in the pondering of a hazel nut, so also we may see this subtle message in the living waters of a river. Think of the source, the melting snows or springs unseen, that combine with countless other sources to form the torrent held precariously between rocky and sandy banks on the slippery shore. There it grows in a lively, tumbling world overlooked and mostly unseen by the human world, flowing inexorably towards the sea. Yet within its confines exists a universe of sub-marine life that passes un-noticed by all but the most astute, the scientist and the angler. In his book, Sex, Death and Fly-fishing, John Gierach writes of the life cycle of the mayfly… mostly an annoyance to the land dwelling species homo-sapiens who must scrape their buggy remains off our windshields as the insects mortally mistake our shiny, rain-drenched roads for a river in their mating flights of early summer. The may-flies live most of their lives as river nymphs, camouflaged in a cocoon of sticks, twigs and pebbles and living hidden on the river bottom. But at some unseen, unheralded signal, they shed their temporary armor and emerge into the flow of rippled water, awkwardly swimming to the surface to spread their impulsively bulging wings and dry them on the dimpled surface. As they do so, they become mortally vulnerable, as the ever attentive fish, and the gathering birds-of-insect-prey intercept them on their pilgrimage to flight. The hatch may last for a few minutes or for a few days… it is the fortunate fly-fisher who happens to have time on the stream to observe and harvest the by-catch of this natural display of the creator’s fecundity: Our Prodigal God. Those that are not eaten on their maiden, mating flights, fall to the river surface depleted, food for the patient and hungry, who slurp them into their hungry mouths and continue the unseen drama of reproduction, mortality and renewed life.

Gierach writes, “Hatches and spinner falls are large links in the general food chain. The bugs are regularly eaten by creatures like swallows, nighthawks, bats, and of course, trout. Having the hatches and falls last for days or weeks ensures that the mayflies will survive into future generations, but it also means that trout and others can make dozens of meals out of them instead of just one… He continues, “It’s nothing short of elegant, and the mayfly/trout connection we fly-fishers look so hard for is just a thin slice of it. There are also the game animals that drink from the stream and the fishing birds that live on young trout, muskrats that eat the aquatic plants, and the swallows that eat the mayflies and live in the cliffs that were excavated by the stream itself.”

Around the world, there are reminders of this aquatic drama, revealing the natural, prodigal generosity of the Creator. I remember my first pilgrimage to the Holy Land, back in the spring of 1987, and a visit to the ruins of the ancient site of Caesarea Philippi. Several pools of water were there at the springs of Banias, one of the headwaters of the many sources of the Jordan River. As I looked through polarized sunglasses into the water, unmistakably I saw the silhouette of a “salmonid”… a trout. In the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 19th century Anglican poet and lyricist, I glimpsed the “rose moles all in stipple upon the trout that swim.” To deflate my poetic imagination, they were stocked fish, but it proved that the waters were cold and clean enough to sustain even a hatchery sub-species of my favorite angling quarry. Sure enough, the tourist restaurant on its banks boasted fresh-caught trout on its menu. I ordered falafel. Whether or not trout was on menu in Jesus’ time remains a mystery… perhaps better left unexamined and food for my imagination!

The Jordan River starts from the snowy recesses of Lebanon, the melt of Hermon and its mountainous brother-peaks bubbling up through the southern tails of its heights through the springs of Caesarea Philippi, the modern site of Taghba to the north of the fresh water Sea of Galilee. Referred to by the ancients as the Dan River , it was named for the tribe which settled to the northern extremes of what we now call modern Israel. A pilgrimage to that site sometimes reveals the age-old stones of a Roman road seeping the waters that pool and flow into what eventually becomes the Jordan River.
You’ll recall that the land of Israel encompasses two major bodies of water. In the northern part of the country is the Lake of Tiberias (also known as the Sea of Galilee, fed by rivers, springs and wadis that flow from the Syrian mountains southwards. Teeming with life, this lake is a symbol of the richness of the land… the source that makes the desert bloom. All around it as well are the signs of the rich blessing it offers to the land, lush green estates and pastureland with grass and trees in incredible abundance. The cool, fresh water is the gift of God to a thirsty country, and it enriches the whole area. Leaving the lake, the Jordan meanders on down the valley toward the southern end of the country, still fresh, still rich with life as it passes along.
But only sixty miles south the Jordan feeds into another lake, strangely opposite to the Galilean Lake in every way. In this one, nothing (except perhaps the tiny brine shrimp) lives at all. Around it there is no greenery, no growth of any kind. Even those trees that once grew close enough to be touched by the lake's influence are gaunt specters of life, stark skeletons encrusted and strangled by the salt that cakes everything.
What has happened to the water in a few short miles? How could it be so rich and full of life and yet so barren when it enters the Dead Sea? The answer is that nothing has happened to the water itself. Analysis of the Jordan just before it enters the Sea of Salt shows its water to be just as sweet as further north. The answer is found in the geography of the Jordan Rift. The lowest place on earth, the Dead Sea has no outlet. Its level is maintained only through evaporation. Everything it receives it keeps for itself, and the result is deadly. At its southern recesses, tradition tells us there are the remains of the faithless, inhospitable cities of Sodom and Gomorrah… and strange formations of evaporated salt remind the visitor of ancient stories of the end of life in that empty desert land. With nowhere to flow, the once life-giving waters become a stagnant repository of salt and other minerals… a briny soup, fit only for microscopic life, but death to any who drink of its toxic water.
The flow of the river is a symbol of human life, a journey along a course that is ever changing – the river is in flux, just as we are. As it travels from source to sea, it is constantly transformed. The river is a dynamic, evolving, constantly-changing entity… swelled by floods, shrunken by drought, never the same stream from moment to moment. Perhaps this is the rationale for the living water of baptism… the flowing of the Jordan, and the consequent move in our church architecture to include moving water in our liturgy. No more are we content to have, as our best symbol, the little engraved silver bowl and sterling scallop shell. More and more we are moving towards the living, moving, flowing, gurgling waters that are not stagnant and persevered into a saline brine. The Jordan River is again the inspiration for this essential Christian act… the living water of Christ, flowing over and through… dying to the old, yet giving new life. Jesus, baptized by John, was washed over and symbolically drowned in the Jordan; then raised to new life and ministry through the parting of the very waters that fulfilled the Passover promise to Israel. The cross and empty tomb are powerfully symbolized in baptismal imagery of drowning and rebirth… for Jesus and for each of us.

The life-death-rebirth cycle is connected with the wonder of water. The seed does not germinate in the dry earth until water swells its kernel and new life bursts forth. So we, whose bodies are more than seventy percent water, do not find release from the natural creaturely death and organic recycling until we grow through the baptismal renewal of spiritual death and resurrection. I believe that we cannot eat and drink in God’s promised realm until we have relieved ourselves of the burden of nature’s death through Living Water and the Holy Spirit. Open the kingdom to all who wish to enter; let the waters flow for all who want to share in the banquet of the heavenly kingdom!

Bishop Smith … in a rare deviation from the prayer book rubrics, changes the word “it” into “water, water, water”… in our liturgy of baptism . In it, by it, through it… in water we begin life in utero, through it we are born, and by it we are nourished and brought into the fullness of our humanity. In baptism we are drowned, raised, washed and saved… made a very part of the Body that is Christ Jesus incarnate… bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. Water, water, water. That which drowns, that which sustains, that which regenerates. In it is the very elixir of life; over it the Holy Spirit moves, by it and through it, we find eternal life. As the seed of grain dies, and in it we find the mystery of all creation, so too in the water we encounter the divine mystery… the very “stuff” of all that lives. It is blessing and miracle… bringing forth life, and giving growth. Holy Water. For the seas and that lives in them; for the reservoir of life in lakes and streams; and for the Living Water which is ours in Christ Jesus…Thanks be to God. Amen.