What the river teaches…
In times of uncertainty, our human impulse is to grasp for control. Part of us yearns for a firmer grounding, yet there is also the Spirit’s call to dive into the deep waters and be saturated by a grace that we can trust. How do we nurture a deeper awareness that learns from water’s wisdom, a wisdom that reminds us of the promise of change, adaptation, and growth?
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Transcript
When through the deep waters I call thee to go,
The rivers of woe shall not thee overflow;
For I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless,
And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.
Amen.
I had written this out, but it seems more fitting to do it this way. So if this goes off the rails…
It’s really good to be back. It’s good to see your faces, and it’s good to know on a much deeper level just how strong that this parish is.
We spent some of these Sundays when we were gone, the three of us would go to see different friends in their parishes, and pop in on them and spend time there. And it was always good to go and see Laura, to be in touch with Edgar, to go down and visit Brian at St. Benedict’s and the group there, to go see Katie at Emmanuel, to go see Nikki at St. Gregory’s, and to go see those wonderfully strange Irish people.
But it’s good to be back. It’s good to be here.
We are stepping into this wonderful season. We did this last year, and it meant so much to us that we’re going to do it once more. To take what would be our normal lectionary cycle and shift that to the side just a bit and bring in this wonderful resource that the church encourages us to use, which is a creation-based text series to say, during this summer season, this season of growth—and for those of you who are keeping notes at home, this is actually the ancient Celtic feast of Lughnasadh, which marks the shift to starting harvest time.
So if you’re watching how the wheel of time, if you will, spins throughout, noticing how the light now will start to shift just a little bit more each day headed toward that wonderful equinox moment and then onward, always turning.
So the series of texts that we’ll use from now through Labor Day offer us a series of glimpses, if you will, lenses that we can focus-in each week just a little bit more and discern together just how God is present within creation.
Shifting our own consciousness, if you will, and rather than seeing creation as just a backdrop on the stage in which we perform whatever life that we think we want to, moving from that framework to actually honoring and recognizing creation as an interconnected web of subjects.
All having worth, all having dignity, all having purpose, and all being infused with God’s presence.
So that’s the shift that we will do in the next few weeks. And this Sunday’s our first step into that, if you will, and it gives us this wonderful opportunity to focus-in on water.
That’s what we’re called to really look at more deeply this morning is water. How we discern God’s presence within water, and what water as an element and a symbol teaches us about ourselves and about how the Spirit is alive and moving within creation.
You should know the first thing that I did on my break was actually to go with my dear friends Mike, Meg, Mallory, and Brandon—we went to a Florence and the Machine concert. Absolute best way to start sabbatical. We put flower wreaths in our hair. Yes, we did! We drove down to the city, we went to eat dinner, and we loved when people would walk up and say, ‘Are you going to the Florence concert?’ and we’d go, ‘No. We’re just here having dinner at this very bad Caribbean place with flowers in our hair, as one does on a Friday.’
But there was one of my favorite Florence songs—I’m not going to sing it for you, but I am going to read part of it—was this wonderful line that became a mantra for me all the way through these three months. She sings—I’ll say this:
Through bramble and briar
Under ash and oak
I went to find the hidden folk
They gave me gowns and riches
Cut gold thread with their teeth
Every night I went to see them
No, I did not sleep
And every cup they brought to me
Oh, you know I did
Drink Deep
So that became this wonderful kind of initiation in a way, as I stepped into this reflection, this deep dive time, was to ask myself: Am I willing to do that? Am I really willing to drink deep, or would I rather just continue taking the polite sips that perhaps I had taken up until that moment? What would it be like if I stepped into a risky soul space of my own and actually opened myself up and let my guard down just a little bit to actually pay attention to some of these threads that would present themselves, and be curious about those, follow them, see where they led? And then at the end of that time to actually reflect back and notice how those threads had woven into something that might be pretty meaningful, that might be pretty important for me, for us, going forward.
And it was—that very much was the case.
I learned a lot. I learned a lot, as I sent the note out, about my own tendency to preemptively absorb anxiety out of a system. I’m not doing that anymore. I’m going to try not to.
It always looks like this: ‘I’m sorry that you’re uncomfortable. Let me do something proactively to smooth that over.’ When the truth that I learned about myself is: that sign of discomfort might actually be the Spirit at work. And who am I to take away that opportunity for the Spirit to do some deeper soul work? How dare I step in and preemptively smooth something over when the truth is that the Spirit—if you turn to page four, look at the collect. The collect has this in it, has this deep truth in it. The Spirit constantly reminds us of what our true and deeper purpose is: that in wisdom God has brought forth all that is to participate in God’s divine being.
And here’s how we do that, here’s the flavor of what that looks like: to change, adapt, and grow in freedom. To change, adapt, and grow in freedom. Nowhere in that does it say to cling on to the way that things have always been so that we feel slightly more in control and more comfortable.
Like I told the first group this morning, find me a text in the Bible—here’s your dare—find me a text in our sacred stories where God comes to visit someone and says this: “You know, I just wanted to come and tell you, I really think you have this figured out. I just had to come down and tell you, you have it figured out, there’s nothing you need to change, there’s nothing you need to do. You’re doing a swell job. Keep it up. And by all means, don’t let me make you uncomfortable.” Find me the story in the Bible that says that.
That’s not our story. Our story is one that constantly calls us to be transformed, and that’s the lesson of water. Water flows, water moves, water holds memory. It carves through something that we thought was impossible to get through. May take time, but it will do it if we’re patient and allow water, the Spirit, to do its work.
We struggle sometimes, I think, maybe oftentimes, because there’s a detachment, a distance, if you will, between what we do on a Sunday morning, what we say, the prayers that we say, and how we actually live our lives. We come on Sunday, we have a certain set of expectations, we want things to look a certain way, be a certain way, so that we can always just be told you’re doing a great job. Don’t let me do anything that upsets you or makes you uncomfortable, just ‘attaboy,’ ‘attagirl.’
Our practice of faith is meant to transform the way we actually live in the world. We should be uncomfortable—not poked in the eye, but not complacent. That sign of discomfort—here’s what I learned about myself—is actually a sign of being convicted. That there’s something in my life that is out of alignment, out of attunement with what the Gospel actually calls me to do. And that is why we say that our practice of faith is political. It is not partisan, but it is political because it deals with how we live our lives. Or it should. It deals with what it means, how it challenges us to live together in community, as our baptismal prayers call us to respect the dignity of every human being. Full stop.
And to be aware in ourselves when we say those prayers, that impulse in ourselves where we want to supply the footnotes, we want to put the asterisk there and say, “Yes, but if they just worked harder…” whatever the ‘yes, but’ might be. But the Gospel says that we don’t get to do that.
I thought about this at one point: If the Gospel’s message to us was not political in that deepest and most authentic sense, then Jesus would have lived out the rest of his life as a dutiful citizen in occupied Judea and Palestine, and he would have died of old age, and people would have remembered quaint stories that he told about mustard seeds.
But that’s not the story that we have, friends. The way that Jesus lived his life, who he was, what he taught, what he did, challenged the status quo, challenged complacency and comfort, so much so that they killed him for it. And then, he crossed through the river and conquered death, and invites us to do the same. To dare to trust the Spirit’s movement and flow in our lives to say: This does not have the last word. This is not all that there is. This is not the only way that we have to be. We can live transformed lives. As we say in our prayers: Behold who we are, the body of Christ; may we become what we receive.
What does that look like? It’s messy. It’s messy. It makes us squirm, especially in uncertain times when that most human part of ourselves wants something that’s a little more certain, something to make us feel a little more stable. The last thing we want—that human sense of ours, our ego self—is to be told we have to change.
But is that not the call of the Spirit? To always be transformed, as Saint Paul says, by the renewing of our minds—not just our thoughts, but the deepest essence of who we are.
I had a memory from childhood at one point when we went back—you all know how strange of a place that that is on the other side of the Mississippi Delta. When we went back, we were driving through my old hometown, and Lisa’s, and I thought about when we were children, there wasn’t much to do. So the local fire department, which was all volunteer-based, and my dad was one of them, they would find old derelict houses and they would burn them down to practice. They still do that some.
So, we would find out where they were going to be, and we would gather our lawn chairs as children, and we would go out to watch the show. And we would line ourselves up on the edge of the road in the ditch there and wait for them to come out with the torches and light this house on fire, and then they would come and they would go through the whole drill. And it was the hottest part of summer, and we would stand there in the ditch and wait.
And they would see us all standing there with our swim trunks on, and then they would turn the hoses on us and blast us into the ditch! We would flail, arms flailing, they would shoot us, we would land in the ditch, and they would just soak us. And we would lie there, soaked in the grass in this ditch, looking up at the sky.
And it came to me: many times in my own life—I don’t know about you—that’s exactly what it feels like to encounter God. I’d like to stay flat-footed and sure-footed and stand there and just observe something that I think has caught my eye. But then suddenly, I get knocked down, drenched, saturated by something that has changed the way that I view the world.
That’s how it is for me a lot. If it’s not for you, then keep that to yourself.
So we find ourselves still, as we’ve been saying in this season, of just uncertainty. Not knowing what to do, feeling unsure, feeling that so much around us is swirling. And in the midst of all of this, we have an opportunity always to practice our faith, to ground ourselves in something that’s more substantial, that’s more true, that’s more real than any of the noise around us.
And to go back to that image, we find ourselves always standing on the banks of the river, wondering what it might be to cross to the other side to a new way of living, a new way of being. And we hear the Spirit’s voice come across the waters telling us: You can trust this. Take a step.
We take a step and begin to walk into the river, and it gets deeper and deeper, higher and higher on our bodies, and we feel the coolness of it. And we reach down and cup our hand and bring it to our mouth, because we’re so thirsty. And we drink deep, as Florence says.
And we keep walking into the water, deeper and deeper, and we realize that we’re swimming. We’re being held in the water, suspended in it. We feel the weight of it all across our bodies, across our skin. And we dive down.
And then maybe we realize suddenly—it’s never dawned on us—that we’re dissolving in it. That it turns out this whole time that the river that we thought we were crossing has been flowing within us. It’s been flowing in our veins just as it’s been flowing across the face of the earth.
And we trust it. And we allow it to carry us where the Spirit wants to carry us. And we realize… that there really is truth and a reality beyond what we can grasp.
And we find ourselves flowing. Always flowing.
Amen.
Rev. Dr. Stuart Higginbotham
August 2, 2026