From Rachel Held Evans: Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding Church is arranged around seven sacraments—baptism, confession, holy orders, communion, confirmation, anointing the sick, and marriage—and I begin each section with a short reflection on an element associated with each sacrament. Those chapters are entitled “Water,” “Ash,” “Hands,” “Bread,” “Breath,” “Oil,” and “Crowns.”
Today I am pleased to enclose “Water,” which appears at the beginning of the Baptism section.
Water
. . . by God’s word the heavens came into being and the earth was formed out of water and by water.
—2 Peter 3:5
In the beginning, the Spirit of God hovered over water.
The water was dark and deep and everywhere, the ancients say, an endless primordial sea.
Then
God separated the water, pushing some of it below to make oceans,
rivers, dew drops, and springs, and vaulting the rest of the torrents
above to be locked behind a glassy firmament, complete with doors that
opened for the moon and windows to let out the rain. In ancient Near
Eastern cosmology, all of life hung suspended between these waters,
vulnerable as a fetus in the womb. With one sigh of the Spirit, the
waters could come crashing in and around the earth, drowning its
inhabitants in a moment. The story of Noah’s flood begins when “the
springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens
were opened” (Genesis 7:11). The God who had separated the waters in
the beginning wanted to start over, so God washed the world away.
For
people whose survival depended on the inscrutable moods of the Tigris,
Euphrates, and Nile, water represented both life and death. Oceans
teemed with monsters, unruly spirits, and giant fish that could swallow a
man whole. Rivers brimmed with fickle possibility—of yielding crops, of
boosting trade, of drying up. Into this world, God spoke the language
of water, turning the rivers of enemies into blood, calling forth
springs from desert rocks, playing matchmaker around wells, and
promising a future in which justice would roll down like water and
righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. And the people spoke back,
seeking purity of mind and body through ritualistic bathing after birth,
death, sex, menstruation, sacrifices, conflicts, and transgressions.
“Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean,” the poet-king David
wrote, “wash me, and I will be whiter than snow” (Psalm 51:7).
It
is naïve to think all of these ancient visions must be literal to be
true. We know, as our ancestors did, both the danger and necessity of
water. Water knits us together in our mothers’ wombs, our ghostlike
tissue inhaling and exhaling the embryonic fluid that grows our lungs
and bones and brains. Water courses through our bodies and makes our
planet blue. It is water that lifts cars like leaves when a tsunami
rages to shore, water that in a moment can swallow a ship and in eons
carve a canyon, water we trawl for like chimps for bugs with
billion-dollar equipment scavenging Mars, water we drop on the bald
heads of babies to name them children of God, water we torture with and
cry with, water that carries the invisible diseases that will kill four
thousand children today, water that if warmed just a few degrees more
will come crashing in and around the earth and wash us all away.
But
just as water carried Moses to his destiny down the Nile, so water
carried another baby from a woman’s body into an expectant world.
Wrapped now in flesh, the God who once hovered over the waters was
plunged beneath them at the hands of a wild-eyed wilderness preacher.
When God emerged, he spoke of living water that forever satisfies and of
being born again. He went fishing and washed his friends’ feet. He
touched the ceremonially unclean. He spit in the dirt, cast demons into
the ocean, and strolled across an angry sea. He got thirsty and he
wept.
After
the government washed its hands of him, God hung on a cross where blood
and water spewed from his side. Like Jonah, he got swallowed up for
three days.
Then
God beat death. God rose from the depths and breathed air once again.
When he found his friends on the shoreline, he told them not to be
afraid but to go out and baptize the whole world.
The Spirit that once hovered over the waters had inhabited them. Now every drop is holy.
***
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