The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Pentecost A
“Out of the believer’s heart will flow rivers of living water.”
For us at Pentecost, we always go for the flashy flames of the Holy Spirit. We wear red, we celebrate the untamable fire of the Spirit as it descends upon the disciples of Jesus gathered in prayer. Sometimes, we’ll go with a different element. We think of the wild wind that rushes over the void in the beginning of creation, this powerful voice that brings into being order from chaos.
But Jesus in today’s Gospel points a different direction: to water.
Water is a blessing – we need it to drink, we need it for cooking, we need it for washing. We need clean water, water that is not contaminated with lead, not contaminated with chemicals or waste products from factories or data centers, not contaminated with sediment and sewage or pathogenic microbes. We need water that is fresh, not salt.
We also rightly fear water. Water that is rushing has a lot of power behind it. A flash flood can swell a river high above its banks and sweep away anything in its path. A glacial lake like Lake Bonneville 30,000 years ago could burst its boundary and flood down into the Snake River plain on its way down to the Pacific. The storm surge of a hurricane pulls seawater far inland, and a tsunami can strike from an earthquake far away on the globe.
Water is powerful. It is healing. It is not to be trifled with. As the Indigenous peoples remind us, water is life.
And so, too, is the Spirit. The Spirit is life. The Spirit is breathed into us in our creation. The Spirit is breathed into us in our baptism. The Spirit is called down upon us at confirmation, at ordination. The Spirit is life.
The Spirit, like water, flows in our veins. The Spirit gives us life to move and breathe and sing and dance. The Spirit gives us energy to serve, to understand, to preach and teach. The Spirit, who is Love, the Spirit moves in our souls to bring us to love like God loves.
This is not a comfortable truth, in a way. We might celebrate the gifts of the Spirit without fully understanding what we are asking for. We celebrate the tongues of flame and the gift of speaking the Gospel prophetically all throughout the world in every language. But what are we asking for? Are we asking for a gift that we get to possess and do nothing with? A gift that we hold without it holding us, without it molding us and forming us?
The water of the Spirit soaks down deep into our very being, into our own hearts and flows outward from there. It is alive, it is living water. It is water that might swell up and overflow the boundaries we put to it. We might be overwhelmed by water and find ourselves speaking words of prophecy, we might find ourselves preaching the Gospel (gasp! What are we introverts to do?), we might find ourselves healing others, we might find ourselves so overwhelmed by God’s love that all that is not love within us gets drowned in its depths.
Like fire and wind, water is wild, untamed and untamable. The Spirit is wild, untamed and untamable.
The water of the Spirit is alive and in our hearts. When we were baptized this water was poured over us to proclaim our re-birth in God. Reborn as a member of the Body of Christ, reborn into the body of the Resurrected Lord Jesus Christ.
Pentecost is the same living water that we celebrate at the Easter Vigil when we renew our baptismal vows. Pentecost is the baptismal font swelling up from the depths of our heart to overflow in abundant and eternal life. Jesus promised us life – and he gives it now as well as forever in the power of the Holy Spirit, the Living Water that springs up from our souls.
It is living water, full of the Spirit of Life. It is living water for a world parched and drying from desolation and despair. It is living water for a world aflame with fires of contempt, cruelty, and callousness. It is living water that threatens to drown us with life and to drown us in its love.
It can be scary to relinquish our control and let this living water flow up from us and flow throughout us and overflow from us. But the Holy Spirit loves us too much to let us stay the way we are. The Spirit is eager to give us deeper, better life.
The fire of the Spirit will thaw our icy hearts and frozen ways. The wind of the Spirit will fill our lungs with breath and song. And the waters of the Spirit will flow up from the depths of our souls to make, re-make, and renew what was dead and parched, and make it flourish like a watered garden, a fresh spring, the holy rhythm of the waves lapping on the shore. The water of the Spirit is poured out for you. Drink up. Amen.