sermon: Water for the Desert

ingathering and water communion, September 7, 2008

homily 1:

Every time my mother and I talk poetry it eventually boils down to meaning.  “What does it mean?” she’ll ask, “I don’t understand.”  Try as I might I cannot explain how the words wash over me, give me shapes and pictures and feelings for meanings I cannot articulate in plain English.  If I could say it in ordinary language, I tell her, I probably would.  Poetry is for things that are too big and complicated for grammar and logic, that have too many layers and too many feelings for which we don’t have names.

Ritual is the same way.  It is poetry made physical; it is psalms made flesh.  We pour our waters together here because no matter what I do, I cannot convey what it means to see our water mixed by molecule with other waters.  Knowing that we can be both the same and different, intimately mingled and unique; knowing that we each bring something to a richly laden table but that once we have mixed we can never be separated cleanly, that this time and this place leave an indelible mark on us–the symbols are rich and varied and I will try to explain a little, but when we watch our water go into the common bowl our hearts speak the wisdom we need if we let them.

We are the water.

This is us.

You are invited, after the service, to take a little piece of us home with you, to fill your vial with the mingled waters of your community and keep it, or boil it or freeze it or water your garden with it; you are invited to offer it as holy water on Samhain or Beltane; to bless your visitors, to cleanse your home.  Make with it symbol and ritual that means something to you, with deep roots in your heart and your theology.

And when you take the water, what does it mean?  Early communion was potluck, celebration of abundance, about combining the resources of community to find richness among us.  Later in Christian history the focus shifted from the loaves and fishes miracle to the Last Supper, where Jesus said, this is my body, and this is my blood; remember me when you eat and drink.  (from Saving Grace, Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock)

(What does it mean to take that of others and make it our own? )

We call this communion.

Remember me.  Absorb me.  Integrate me.  Transform me.

To immerse ourselves in the change that other people will bring into our lives we have to trust them, or we have to trust ourselves, or we have to trust the process.  By knowing each other we offer ourselves up–we will never be the same again.  By loving another we take a tremendous risk–we become vulnerable to loss and gain, joy and pain beyond measure.  By joining ourselves to this community–however brief the union–we open the possibility of connection with all these people.  All of them.  Flawed and funny and smart and serious and hopeful and grieving and just like us and nothing like us, all of them.  And our communion together today says yes, we are here, yes, we are present, yes, we make of ourselves what we can, yes we offer ourselves as we can, yes we will take the chance, yes, we will be open, yes, we will transform, yes we will be transformed.

If we only give, we come up empty.  It is when we complete the cycle that we are once again filled.

homily 2:

The world is a desert right now.  In the way that the tribes in the desert needed water and manna from heaven, we are starving, thirsty, wandering souls.  Our hearts and our spirits cry out for some relief as our minds despair, and what can we do?

These, friends, are the days of religion.  These are the days of faith.  If religion in this country is declining, then we people of religion are failing not just ourselves, but the whole world.  I don’t mean that we should have an unthinking faith or a false hope.  We do not have that to offer.  But we are the water in the desert.  We are not empty-handed supplicants, and we are not a mir[...]