Come, All You Thirsty
By Rev. Mary Luti
February 04, 2007
Ordination of Kate Layzer
Lessons: Isaiah 55
What we’ve also got by now is the point. If today is about water, then for us biblical folks, it is also about grace. It’s about free gifts, torrents of them. Kate’s call is a gift, her ordination is a gift, the life-together we have in the church is a gift. Everything is a gift poured out on us from the waterfalls of God’s endless pleasure in us.
I’m delighted that Kate has focused the ordination service on grace, if for no other reason that it will help us get us over the worthiness hump right off the bat, just in case she or someone else here is hung up on it. Most of us are. Some of us think we are eminently worthy, which gets us into one kind of trouble; others think we aren’t worthy at all and never could be, which gets us into another.
God, of course, doesn’t give a flying-bull-pucky about our self-evaluations, because, as we read in today’s text from Isaiah, “God’s ways are not our ways.” In fact, God’s ways are so not our ways that God inspired Isaiah to begin the gorgeous chapter 55 of his book with the word, “Ho!” I doubt that we would have done that. But how could you not love a prophet or a bible chapter that begins with the word, “Ho”?
“Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come buy and eat!”
This is not merely a “religious” invitation; like all the invitations of the biblical God, it has political and economic import. Imagine a world where the basics cost nothing, and striving ceases; where people without money have access to the best things of life! That’s a vision some people fight tooth and nail to achieve and others fight to the death to prevent. It is not an indifferent possibility. We filter out the text’s sociopolitical overtones and spiritualize them at our human peril!
All the same, it is legitimate to hear in them an intimate invitation to—a call to our own poor hearts (that are so curved in on themselves) to stop trying so hard to be self-made and to relax into God’s freedom. The passage imagines a time when we will finally give up and come open-handed to God for everything we need to thrive—the water and wine of God’s presence, the bread of God’s mercy, the refreshment of God’s covenant of faithful love.
Isaiah, as you know, was an aristocrat from the southern half of the Jewish kingdom who adored religion—but he liked his creature comforts too. This morning in church, many of us read the dramatic story of his break with all that—the earth-shaking, temple-rattling vision he had that propelled him from a smooth and privileged path in life onto a far bumpier road that no could have predicted for him.
Now, when Isaiah encounters the Holy One who will change his life, he responds to the vision by acknowledging that holy is precisely what he himself is not. “Woe is me!” he says, and falls down trembling. Another preacher has noted wryly that God’s response to all Isaiah’s woe-is-me-ing is not to put him on the couch until he realizes that his guilt and repression come from his childhood, but simply to say to him, “You feel guilty? Sinful? Well, duh. Look, I forgive sins. I destroy guilt. Here, eat this burning coal. Now your sin is gone. Let’s get on with it.”
And so it was that Isaiah was free to go about a prophet’s business of causing apoplexy by telling the truth, in the serene knowledge that neither he nor anybody else has a right to put on all these fancy duds and stand before the altar of God. He knew that it is, as St. Paul says, only “by God’s grace that we have this ministry.”
And so later, when all of us are asked what we should do about Kate, and we respond, “Let’s ordain her!”, we will preface that response with a shout of “She is worthy!” but it will be balanced by the equally firm declaration that it is only by God’s grace that she is. And when she responds affirmatively to the ordination vows by saying “I will,” and “I do,” she will now and then add the crucial qualifier, “…relying on God’s grace.”
“Fathoms and fathoms. Sweeping and sweeping,” sings our anthem today. And happily for us, the first thing to be swept away in the torrent of grace is the question of worth. With that question settled, we can proceed now to contemplate something far more important, and much more interesting. We can contemplate the shape of the grace that Kate and all who respond to the call to be servants must cling to for dear life.
Because the grace of which we sing today is not a generic or an amorphous grace, but one with a body, a face, a voice, and a name. I am speaking of Jesus. And Kate has chosen to show him to us today at his baptism in the Jordan River.
This story caused the earliest Christians big Christological headaches. If John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance, and if Jesus was sinless and had nothing to repent, why was he in the sinners’ line? Lots of theologians, ancient and new, have given the church lots of opinions about this, and I find most of them persuasive, even when they completely contradict each other. (To be a Christian is to have a high tolerance for paradox and ambiguity.) But in view of today’s ordination, here’s a story that helps me make sense of it just as much as some of those theological ideas do. It’s from Paul Marshall, who taught at Yale and is now an Episcopal Bishop.
Elizabeth (he writes) was drowning. The rest of us kids at the youth event were terrified. It was the 1950’s. There were no safe church policies. The nearest grown-up was well out of earshot, reading in a lawn chair. I remember us, in our impotence, shouting things like, "Kick, Elizabeth!" My friend Mike added encouragingly, "You can make it!" I was shouting pointlessly, "Swim!"
Either terror or cramps made Elizabeth unable to act on this good advice. None of us was a strong swimmer or had a clue about lifesaving. We just kept shouting.
I knew I should get in the water and help her, but was paralyzed by the stories I'd heard of people who drowned trying to save others
This became my first experience of sickening terror and helplessness as I began to believe that we would lose he
Of course, I am telling you this story because we did not lose her. An older kid who was coming to get his boat saw the situation. He did not shout advice. He got into the water and towed her to the little dock from which we had been diving.
She had been only twenty feet from us, but we did not know how to help her. We could have given her good advice right up to the moment she died. The person who made the difference was the one who got into the water with her.
Many moments in life call for wisdom. There are other moments, however, when what we need, if things are really going to change, is somebody in the water with us.
I never had the nerve or the vocabulary to ask Elizabeth how it felt to be in the water, or what it felt like when the young man reached her. (I certainly never asked her what she thought of us standing on the dock yelling at her.) I do know, however, what it feels like to stand alone at certain crucial places in life where advice is pointless and companionship is everything.
One moment in the ordination service we all look forward to is the laying on of hands. It’s when we ask the Spirit to convey the gifts required for the way of life God has called her to. In our tradition, the whole assembly may lay on hands, as a way of acting out our Congregationalist conviction that the Spirit works through all the people.
Most of the time, candidates completely disappear under all the hands that touch them. When we lay many hands on them, it often looks like waters closing over their heads, and in that moment I am always reminded of baptism. That makes sense when you recall that ordination is a specific instance of the general call to ministry that every Christian receives when submerged in baptismal waters.
But there’s something more. I think it isn’t too far-fetched to say that underneath the sea of our hands today, a candidate for ordination like Kate is in a passel of trouble. The temple is shaking, the earth is trembling, smoke is rising, and the Holy One is about the business of being Holy, and asking—“Whom will I send?” No matter how much she’s wanted this moment to arrive, if Kate has half a brain, she is bound to be thinking, “I’m done for.”
But underneath the sea of our hands, something wonderful will happen. Jesus will be coming for Kate; and, unlike the rest of us who can only give her advice and instructions for being a minister, he won’t say anything. He will simply reach for her, be with her in the water, and take her to shore, which is his friendship, the companionship that changes everything. Under the sea of hands he will do again what he always does, act out the pattern of his solidarity—to go wherever we are, meet us where we are in trouble, which is almost everywhere and all the time, and raise us from the terror we have of God and God’s claim upon our lives. Jesus will raise us from the dead.
Now, it would be easy to moralize at this moment and say that getting into the water is also what ministers are called to do—to serve and help and save and care about everyone and everything all the time, and do it well. But that’s a trap for us, as most moralizing always is.
Ask any minister who thinks walking into every body of water to rescue every drowning soul is his job. Ask anyone who thinks she has to walk not only into water but also on water if she is to be considered a successful pastor. Ask anyone who exhausts himself this way. We will all confess that this is a denial of grace, and we will tell you that it is far easier to preach against works-righteousness than it is to halt the almost universal practice of it in the ranks of the ordained.
And this reality makes me wonder if enough of us ministers are thirsty. And if we are thirsty enough. I wonder if we are thirsty for the water of life. I wonder if we are drinking deeply enough from the sources that refresh. This is perhaps the most devastating occupational hazard known to pastors, to lose the thirst of the soul. To stop trying to quench our thirst for grace and for the God of grace.
“O God, you are my God,” says the psalmist, “I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you; as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” [Ps 63].
I used to make a nuisance of myself at Andover Newton, and occasionally on the Committee on Ministry, by asking seminarians whether they loved God. They would be happily describing their desire to help people, offering the catalogue of their gifts, credentials, accomplishments, visions and goals that they and everybody else, including me, believe are important for ministry, and I would stop them and ask, “But do you love God?” I wasn’t asking, “Will you do God’s will?”, although I recognize that to discern, follow, and persevere in God’s purposes, no matter what, is a form of love, and an excellent one at that. And I wasn’t asking, “Will you love God’s people?”, although I fully understand that John was right when he said we can’t say we love God if we hate other people, and in some sense love for God and neighbor are one.
No, I meant, “Do you love God?” Can you say with the psalmist that you look upon God in the sanctuary, that you think about God on your bed, that you sing for joy in the shadow of God’s wings, and that with God your soul is satisfied as with a rich feast?
Are we thirsty? Thirsty enough? And with so much living water everywhere, do we drink?
You may not have noticed, but being a trained professional, I did—there’s a water theme in this service today. Fathoms and fathoms. Sweeping and sweeping. Founts of blessing, streams of mercy, still water, living water, free water, forgiving water, renewing water, Jordan River water. You name it, we’ve got it.
And this has to be the last word for you Kate, on the ordination day you have longed for so many years. There is no shortage of water. Rushing water to sweep away all temptations to unworthiness. Deep water where Jesus will always come to you, companion and savior. Drinking water for an insatiable thirst. There is no shortage of water to bless and bathe, refresh and restore, drown and revive, delight and play. As you yourself have written, it runs cool and deep, calm and clear, sweet and wild. And it will always call you back where you belong.