Church on Morgan
July 26, 2015 | Ezekiel 47:1-12
The scripture reading for today is Ezekiel 47 1 through 12. Then he brought me back to the entrance of the temple. There, water was flowing from below the threshold of the temple toward the east, for the temple faced east. And the water was flowing down from below the south end of the threshold of the temple, south of the altar. Then he brought me out by way of the north gate. And he led me around on the outside to the outer gate that faces toward the east. And the water was coming out of the south side. Going on eastward with a cord in his hand, the man measured 1,000 qubits. And then he led me through the water, and it was angled deep. Again, he measured 1,000 and led me through the water, and it was knee deep. Again, he measured 1,000 and led me through the water, and it was up to the waist. Again, he measured 1,000, and it was a river that I could not cross, for the water had risen. It was deep enough to swim in a river that could not be crossed. And he said to me, mortal, have you seen this? Then he led me back along the bank of the river. As I came back, I saw on the bank of the river a great many trees on the one side and on the other. He said to me, this water flows toward the eastern region and goes down into the arabath. And when it enters the sea, the sea of stagnant waters, the water will become fresh. Wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be very many fish. Once these waters reach there, it will become fresh, and everything will live there where the water grows. People will stand fishing beside the sea from in Getty to in Lamb. It will be a place for the spreading of nets. Its fish will be of a great many kinds, like the fish of the great sea. But its swamps and marshes will not become fresh. They are to be left for salt. On the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food and their leaves for healing. This is the word of God for us, the people of God. Thanks be to God. So we'll get to that passage here in a second. But if you're kind of trying to keep up and pay attention, what we had painted for us was this scene of a river that begins in a temple and flows all over the earth. And we'll say a little bit more about that. I will in a few moments to come. But if you're new with us, or if you haven't been around this summer, we've been in a sermon series called Beautiful Things. And we've been looking at what we believe to be God's good earth. There's this, in the Psalmist, it says that the creation, the stars, the firmament, is all the handy work of God, that all that we see that's been made has been made by God. And then in Romans, this letter that was written to the early church in Rome, the Apostle Paul wrote that since creation took place, ever since that moment, all of humanity has been able to have access to what God is like just by looking at the things that God has made, which is a really simple kind of idea, right, that you can get a sense of who I am or who you are based on the things that you make, or you pull together. We get a sense of who each other is by what we wear, what our homes are like, or the art that we give ourselves to. And in the same way, if creation is God's art, then there are some messages in all of the created order for us about the character and nature of God. And so in this summer season, where so many of us are off and traveling and outdoors, we thought this would be a great time for us to just sort of slow down and to pay attention to creation and see what we might learn. And so for the last few weeks, we've looked at things like rocks and what a rock might have to teach us about the nature of God. We've looked at the rain. We've looked at flowers, and this morning, we're going to spend some time thinking about rivers and what rivers might have to teach us about God. And I think, you know, each week as we continue to sort of rehash this idea and why it's worth asking, every once in a while I'll bump into something new. And this week I was reading, flipping through an old book, that I've loved but struggled with for many years. I know it's great, but it's sometimes hard for me to sort of enjoy it, but I know that I'm supposed to enjoy it. So have any of y'all ever read anything by Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek? So if you haven't, it's a classic, it's great. She's an unbelievable writer, and she's kind of a modern day Saint Francis. Like she really is in tune with what all of creation is saying about who God is. And so she wrote this book called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It's probably three or 400 pages long. It feels like it's 1,500 pages long. But it's that kind of like, if you've ever read like a novel and there's like a novelist starts to get too deep into the detail of what the room smelled like and looked like and you're like, dude, just get on with the plot, this would be like the worst book you've ever read, right? It's 500 pages, it's growing even as I stand here. It's 500 pages just full of descriptive, flowery language only about our environment and creation. She calls yourself a pilgrim at this creek. And there's this line in the book that is always sort of haunting me. And this is what she says. She says that the real and the proper question is why is it beautiful? You know, she gets you into this for 100 pages deep. And finally, she says something that you're like, yes, why are you writing all of this, right? And she says the real and the proper question, whenever we look at life in general or the things that God has made or creation, the real question, the really proper question, the question that deserves our attention is why? Why is it beautiful? I think there's a lot that can be said about this. On one hand, I'm convinced that part of the reason the world is beautiful is because God is beautiful. I think part of the reason the world is beautiful is because God loves us and just longs to sort of dazzle us, right? That this just reflects the heart of God, a God who wants us to enjoy this place. But she goes on to say, well, the answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace, and I love that she puts those two together, the beauty and grace are performed, whether we will it, whether we want it to happen or not, beauty and grace are there, and whether we sense it or not, beauty and grace is there. And so the least we can do is try to be here, is try to be here. So this book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, it's her great attempt to just be here. If this world is overflowing with beauty and it's overflowing with grace, the very least we can do is try and show up and pay attention. And that's what we've been about all summer, is trying to be here. And this morning, we're going to try and be on the side of a river. And, oh man, did I, here we are. We're going to try and be on the side of a river. This is a beautiful river. I imagine it's on the western coast of our country. I found it online this week, and I thought, yes, that's what a river's supposed to look like. But here's the hard truth about us Raleighites, folks. We are one of the few cities in America that is not situated on a body of water. In many ways, our city should not exist. From antiquity, cities have been built on bodies of water. For commerce, for trade, for life, for all of these things. And you start to think through all the major cities in the world that you know. And they all find themselves on a river or in a bay or on the coast. And here we are in the middle of just land. It's like, how did anybody decide that this would be a worthy place to set up shop and be a city? And I don't know about you, but every other place I've lived in my life, that's been true. I grew up on a lake. I moved to a city that was on a river. Then I moved to a city that was on the coast on a bay. Everywhere that I've been, most of the places that you've been, cities are on rivers. But for us, this is not sort of our reality. And so we kind of have to stretch our imagination a little bit more this morning, especially if you've grown up in Raleigh your whole life. But here's what's fascinating. Somebody told me this a couple of weeks ago, and I didn't even know this. But the truth is Raleigh, we're not void of rivers and creeks. Not even here downtown, but about 100 years ago, as automobiles started to make their way, we found the rivers to be a great inconvenience to our driving. And so we re-routed those rivers under our city so that we wouldn't be bothered by them. And so in Raleigh, there actually are rivers that run through our city right through downtown, off Person Street, a long capital boulevard, and down the other side is called Pigeon Branch. And this is, you can sort of see on Google Maps that little blue faint line that runs along the yellow, and then the blue faint line that runs down there by con elementary. Those are rivers. They're underground. You can't see them, but they're there. And then here's what it looks like, right? Which, you know, anybody up for going swimming in the Raleigh River this afternoon. This is our great, beautiful river that we could maybe get down beside and think deep thoughts about who God is. And for over 100 years, we have rerouted the water so that we wouldn't be bothered by it. But in the last couple years, as developments happen in Raleigh, and lots of things are starting to get moved around, there's been this real surge in enthusiasm to bring this river back on surface, back on land. And part of what folks have recognized and said is that there's this ache in humanity for somewhere to escape, somewhere to get next to quiet, somewhere to be reminded of that life is a gift, right? And that people in downtown Raleigh and the many people who live here have no such place to go. There's nowhere to go for five minutes to escape and be near running water. There's something that just in our, after 100 years, we've kind of realized this was a mistake. We shouldn't have rerouted the rivers underneath our city. And so this is called daylighting, which is what it means when they take a river that's been underground and they put it back up on ground. And there's a big push to do this. And so we are a people right now who have, we are a city with no water, right? We are a city without a river. We are a people who, though our vegetation is lush, you could even say we're a people who live in a dry land. There's no place for us to go and to be by the water's edge, to be by the river. And this morning, this passage that Anna read for us is from the book of Ezekiel. He's a prophet in the Old Testament about 600 BC. And many of you have probably never read anything by Ezekiel. The one sort of, it's 47 chapters, that book. The one sort of story that gets some play is the dry bones, right? And because we kind of have a song, so that sort of helps. But he has this vision of dry bones in a valley that God speaks to and they start to get up and walk around and flesh comes on them. And it's this prophetic image that Ezekiel gives of what it would look like to go from death to life. But Ezekiel is a prophet who is among a people who, while they may live in a land at that time that's got water, they're spiritually very, very dry. They're incredibly spiritually dry. And so he has this very interesting prophet. He was kind of part-profit, part-performance artist. Kind of imagine if Lady Gaga was a prophet, that's sort of what he was up to. And some of the performance art he put on was for adults only. And so Jewish tradition has it that no one was allowed to read Ezekiel until they were 30 or older because some of the stuff was just so explicit. And part of this was in the beginning, the book of Ezekiel is a book of warning, that God's people are not listening to God, they're not doing the things that they ought to be. And so Ezekiel tries to get their attention about the kind of vile lives that they're living by doing some very vile things. And eventually what happens is because of their sin and their idolatry and the rest, they lose their land, they lose their temple, they're exiled, they're ruled over by the Babylonians, and they're spread across this empire as servants and slaves. And so now Ezekiel changes his tone from a prophet who is warning to a prophet who now has to bring hope to these people who are sort of living in a very spiritually dry place. And so if you read the first half of Ezekiel, there is some really dark performance art he puts on. But at the very end of Ezekiel, which is the past as it was read this morning, he gives one of the most beautiful, refreshing sort of profound visions of hope. And if you didn't catch it, basically what he said is, and I think part of this is that Ezekiel, we know from the scriptures that he's actually living alongside an irrigation channel. So he's in somebody else's land, he's under somebody else's thumb, he feels like his whole people have lost their way, their land, their everything, they've got no future in front of them, and as he sits alongside of this irrigation channel, he has this vision come to him, this dream. And in the dream, he says that he sees the temple restored, the place of their great identity, and at the beginning of the temple, he hears this babbling brook, this little trickle of water. And there's this guide in this vision, and it takes Ezekiel out of the temple and to the front of the courtyard, and there this little trickle has become a stream. And then he walks this guy out, all those thousand cubits, right, which is about five football fields. So he walks Ezekiel five football fields out in this little stream, and Ezekiel sees that it's now up to his ankle, and then he walks him another five football fields, and it's now the stream's up to his knee, and another five, and it's to his waist. Another five, and it's about over his head, and he realizes, "I can't even walk anymore, or swim in this. This river has gotten too big, and it's too rushing." And the guide says, "Well, we'll stop here, and I'll tell you where it goes from here." And he tells him, "From here it goes off this river, it goes over Araba, which was the driest part of the land there. In fact, Araba's Hebrew, it just means "waste land." He says, "This great river, it runs over the wasteland." And then after the wasteland, it makes it to the lowest part on our planet, the Dead Sea, a place that is so salty, the sea there, if you've ever been there, nothing can live in it, right? So the deadest, deadest place on our planet says, "This great river, it makes its way from where you're standing here, all the way across all of the earth, down even to the Dead Sea." And as it goes, it is just full of life, and it's teeming with fish, and with animals, and people come out, and he says, "You know what? This river on the Dead Sea, it will change that salty sea into a thing teeming with life, and people will come from all over to stand on its bank in the fish." And Ezekiel's point to Israel to the people of God is that while it's a very dry, desperate, desolate place right now, there is a river of life that is running through this world, and though it may seem like a little trickle from where you stand, it will cover everything, and it will bring back to life even the most dead and desperate places on the planet. And so what's fascinating about this to me is that this image is from the Old Testament, from one of the many prophets, it grabs the attention of the Apostle John, and he picks it up and reworks it over and over again, and the gospel of John, he talks about it, he picks it up again in the book of Revelation, in fact, the very last chapter in the Bible Revelation 22 is him remixing, kind of revisiting this great vision and saying, "There's coming a day when we will all gather around this beautiful river of life," on which the trees will grow on either side, and the fruit will bring healing for all people, that the river is so central to our idea, our story. It's a reminder that there is life to be had in this world, and there's a source behind it, and that this life is such that it can conquer even death in the driest parts that we find. And so John, in his gospel, and this is the line I love from Ezekiel, by the way, in the middle of all that description, he sort of takes a time out halfway through like it's knee deep, it's waist deep, it's neck deep, right, and he goes, "Listen, here's the deal, wherever the river goes, everything will live." It's just one of the most beautiful kind of statements in Scripture, incredible promise, wherever this river goes, everything will live. Where this river finds itself in your life, in our life, in our communities, in our city, wherever it shows up, wherever this river makes its way, everything will live. And so John, he picks up on this about 600 years later, like I said, in his gospel, and here's what he says, he says, "On the last day of the festival," this was a festival of tabernacles, a Jewish feast, Jesus was participating in, "and on the last day there were these rituals they did that involved water," and it says, "On that great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, "Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink, and as the Scripture has said, out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water." So he kind of mixes it, right, he's reworking it, he's sort of flexing on this metaphor some, but the point that John's making is he says that river that we've all been waiting for, as we've lived in desperate places, as we've seen sort of what it's like to live in an arid way, spiritually, physically, that river that we've all been hoping for and waiting out for, it's here, that river that Ezekiel talked about, and that river, the source of that river is Jesus. The Jesus is the river of life, that wherever he finds himself in this world, everything comes to life. And that trickle that started 2,000 years ago with this Messiah who was crucified and 12 random followers, that it has become a river that is covering the entire globe, that this is the river of life, Jesus is the source of that. And what I love about this is he says that this great river, this great stream of life that it's available to all of us, he says let anyone who is thirsty come to me, the only condition here is that you be thirsty, the only condition for having this river of life flow through you and through your communities is that you recognize a thirst. And I would just say that for any of us in the room, if you feel dry, if you feel unsatisfied, if you are discontent with your life, if you have been in a season of restlessness or more often than not, you find yourself unhappy, that is the thirst that Jesus is talking about. Says everybody who is dissatisfied, who's discontent, who's empty and restless and searching and unhappy, if you can recognize that you're thirsty, you can step into this river. And I think for many of us, we have seasons of this in our lives where we feel very discontent, where we feel very unfulfilled, where our life seems dead and desperate and dry, and we know that there's got to be water somewhere, right? Much like here in Raleigh, folks would probably wander the city for a while, just assume there's got to be water here somewhere, right? And we search everywhere and spiritually we do the same thing. We recognize this discontent can't be how we were intended to live. So we search for water, we search for satisfaction, and simply put, kind of sin, that word we kind of use in the church sin, is simply trying to quench that thirst with anything but Jesus. It's looking for water that doesn't fully satisfy. Then a couple chapters earlier, Jesus says this water that I give you, if you have this water, you'll never thirst again. You can go to this well again and again and draw drinking water, but you'll come back the next day. But there's a water that I bring, there's a river that I'm a part of that will quench your thirst forever. This is the river of life that we're invited into. And your hunch that there's got to be water somewhere is confirmed here. There is. There is a river that is teeming with life. And ultimately I think more than for myself, more than success, more than power, more than money, more than fame, what we all really want is to be alive, is to be here. To live in the ways that we're intended to live. In this river of life, or in the Greek the word is zoe, which is, it's not just like I'm alive, it's like I'm alive, it's vibrant, overflowing kind of life. The life we were intended for, Jesus says later in John, I've come to give you life and life abundantly. This is the same life, not just existence, but life. That life that we crave and we want, Ezekiel foretold there'd be a river that we could step into. And John says that river is Jesus and wherever it goes. It turns everything alive. So the one unexpected deal about John's passage here is that I think anybody would have expected him to say and let anyone who's thirsty come to me and let the one who believes in me drink. And as the scripture has said, "Into the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water." But instead he says this really controversial thing, he says, "Out of the believer's heart shall flow living water." It's this reminder that this water that's in us, when he calls it living water, there's a double kind of meaning going on there. On one, it's full of life. But living water also means that it's moving. That was like shorthand for saying water that's moving. There's stagnant water and there's a living water. There's water that doesn't move and there's water that moves. In this river of life that Jesus has sort of created in the entire world, it's on the move. And it's water that not only will satisfy you, but through you will lead to the satisfaction of others. It's water that won't only fill your cup, but as it fills your cup, it will overflow and fill others. It's water that not only will lead to your own flourishing, but through your flourishing will lead others to flourish. This is sort of the water. This is the living water that we're able to step into. This is what it's like. This is the mission of God when the Spirit gets ahold of our lives and not only quenches but our thirst begins to use us to quench others. I think that ultimately is kind of the vision for our church. That's the thing we're most passionate about, is not that we all would come and have some grand experience here at Church on Morgan and feel refreshed and restored, but that somehow we would know the refreshing that comes when God works through us to bring others into refreshment. That's why the things that we celebrate are, like for instance, this week, there's probably four or five moments that we've had as a church that I'm just like, man, that was magic. We got it. That has to happen again. One of them just happened this week and it was really unexpected. We had a week where we didn't have anything really planned on the calendar and I just thought everybody's been in and out. Let's find a way to connect. Without asking permission, sort of like forgiveness over permission thing, I just sent out an email and started tweeting that we were going to have happy hour. We'll see how this goes. The day of Thursday, I had sent some emails out and said, guys, we're going to gather a person's free bar at five o'clock for happy hour, come, bring friends, I hope to see you there. At four o'clock, I'm sending Ashley texts, like, I'm really nervous, it's going to be me and like one really awkward person. And she's like, no, this would be great, this is great, this is great. And sure enough, I get to the bar a little bit early, there's like nobody in there, really just a couple people and over the next hour or two, just like probably 20, maybe even 30 of us came in at the end of a work day and this beautiful life that we experience in here, seeing it take place out in the world, was so refreshing. And not only that, but while we were there, so many of the people that we've prayed about and thought about and started conversations with who don't go to church, they just like all happened to be there on the same time, same bar, right? And I watched as our community just sort of intermingled with all of these folks. And it was this scene of that there is a river of life and that it flows through us. I mean, it's just an unbelievable image of watching us kind of hang out and extend grace and joy and true life and give that off to the bartender who's serving and to the many people who gathered there for a meeting. And we just made all these really interesting connections and I thought that was it. We need more of that. Like, I'm not sure if anybody else knows we did a happy hour how that's going to go, but we got to do more, you know? And even folks who have been kind of a little bit skeptics of the church and critics, I got an email this morning said, "There's a guy here in town I know who's not necessarily huge on the idea of church, but he wondered when your next happy hour is going to be because that was really interesting to him, right? I'm sure it was, you know? But that's kind of what I think it looks like. I mean, that's one clear sign. This happens in our community groups when we gather and we love and serve and care for each other so well and we invite our friends and they go, "What was that? Like, yeah, I'll come to these meals, right? This is the water. This is the river of life and it runs through us." And I've been so encouraged by that, but I also kind of want to warn you that this little babbling brook, the prophet said, "It will take over the whole world." And what that means is you can't stop it. So this river, it will either run through us or it will run around us, right? We've got a river that we've just sort of rerouted through Raleigh, but that water's still coming through. It's just a matter of whether we get to enjoy it and be a part of it or not. And some of us, I think, we've stepped out of that river. We've sort of opted to reroute ourselves. And others of us have, maybe at times we've risked cutting off the flow, turning this moving, moving water into a stagnant pond. And it will only last for so long before that river will just reroute itself around us. And so not only for the sake of our community, but outside of these walls, but for the sake of those of us inside of them, we have got to continue to participate in the living water that moves through us, that not only quenches our own souls, but quenches those around us. And the good news is it's really just one simple step. This is the whole Christian life, by the way, is what one of the New Testament writers called walking in step with the spirit, which is to say, the one thing you don't do is quench the spirit. Wherever that river pops up, wherever that life is, you stay in that flow. And there's times where we step out of it, we do something hateful or unforgiving or unmerciful or we ignore our neighbors and we find ourselves out of that flow of life, out of that river that just brings about all of the goodness in the world. And the invitation is, if that's you, to step back in, right? And maybe you've been kind of creating, you've been damming this up. You've been drinking your fill, but not letting it run through you, and I'll tell you very quickly, you will develop some nasty algae and live a very mucky kind of life. It doesn't work that way. We are people who step into the river and let it flow through us. It's an unbelievable thing. It's a great mission that we have that in a city where there is no water, where so many people are spiritually thirsty, there's a promise of a river of life. And not only that, as if that wasn't good news enough, but that God has chosen to route that river right through us. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]