“An Ever-Flowing Stream”

“An Ever-Flowing Stream”

Amos 5:18-24      1 Thessalonians 4:13-18         Matthew 25:1-13

Year A, Twenty Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

November 12, 2023

Pastor Andy Kennaly, Sandpoint, Idaho

          Those who are too heavenly minded are often of no Earthly good. There are many who subscribe to religion and culture that promotes the sweet and by, while demoting the experience of life on Earth as one that is judged and condemned to destruction. Like I say, those who are too heavenly minded are of no Earthly good.

Amos says something similar as he cries out with that voice of God in a prophetic critique of religious hypocrisy. He slams those calling for God to come judge the Earth, and he mocks devoted people going about religious practices such as festivals, solemn assemblies, and even when people make offerings and grain offerings, or animal sacrifice to atone for sin, God is not impressed, and even gets annoyed by the noise of their songs, refusing to listen to their music.

This righteous indignation leads to the prophet’s punch line. What God is really interested in, what God is calling for, what God desires is for people to “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

At the grade school I work at for an after-school program, one of the girls in the group had a pink sweatshirt the other day that read, “Justice” across the front in flashy, stylized letters. I asked her, “You know what justice depends on don’t you?” She looked at me funny, like it was a trick question, and said, “Huh?”

Again, I asked, “You know what justice depends on don’t you?”

She said, “No.”

I answered, “Love. Justice depends on love. Justice and love are like a coin, one on each side. You cannot have justice without love, and you cannot have love without justice.”

Then she walked away. Maybe she’ll think about it. More likely, she shrugged it off, didn’t get it. And not everyone does. Our culture of meritocracy and systems of reward/punishment prefer retribution and revenge over restoration and restorative justice.

And yet justice rolls down like water. We all know water flows downhill. If there is water, and a slope, with gravity, water goes down. Water seeks the lowest place. But did you know water also goes up? It flows uphill too. Surface tension of water in relationship with whatever it is that is holding the water wicks the water uphill. The water, for example, at the center of a lake is at a slightly lower elevation than water at the shoreline, along the margin of interaction with the lakebed as it emerges as the beach. To our eyes, it all looks the same. This reality is very subtle. Justice, can roll down and up, which means it is all-pervasive. In a restorative sense, justice is relentless. Water flows, so does justice. Righteousness is like an ever-flowing stream because it is the true nature of reality. Righteousness, everything working in relation, with God’s pull toward wholeness and blessing.

Of course, life is also a mix of struggle. Do you remember Leonard Cohen? He was a singer, perhaps you know his song, Hallelujah. But along with being a singer he was very poetic. One of his good friends, Leon Wieseltier, a dear friend of Cohen’s, “describes Cohen’s response when Wieseltier’s fifth-grade son (for a project he was doing at school) asked him: “Dear Uncle Leonard, did anything inspire you to create ‘Hallelujah’?”

Cohen wrote back – “I wanted to stand with those who clearly see G-d’s holy broken world for what it is, and still find the courage or the heart to praise it.”  “I wanted to stand with those who clearly see G-d’s holy broken world for what it is, and still find the courage or the heart to praise it.”

(https://parabola.org/2017/01/31/the-poet-and-the-shepherd-by-joshua-boettiger/)

Holy. Broken. Holy. Broken. This is the biblical message. That the world is holy, and broken. That people find courage to face fear and in their hearts even have the ability for praise. Holy. Broken. What a mess, what a divine mix, what a calling.

In our own time, in the context of modern life and the many struggles we see and experience in each day’s news cycles, the Center for Wild Spirituality shares a brief reflection, saying, “The circumstances of the world are not becoming easier to bear. The ancient cycles of violence and oppression of people and land continues, and so many of us are left feeling powerless and heartbroken. If you are such a one that feels the call of the Earth, this grief can be especially strong and overwhelming. How do we respond? How do we tend to the healing of the world? How can we heal our own hearts, when hope for peace and reconnection in our time often seems lost?”

Aren’t those great questions? How do we respond when we’re dealing with strong, even overwhelming grief as the Earth suffers because human consciousness is at a tipping point, on the verge of breakthrough toward the unfolding of a new dimension, yet caught in the deficiencies of outdated practices, such as violence and war, concentrated wealth, and environmental destruction? How do we lean into God’s creative process, like that wedding as the bridegroom come calling, yet only half of the people are ready to respond? How do we respond? How do we tend to the healing of the world? How do we heal our own hearts that have lost hope?

These are existential questions, felt at experiential levels by people who are sensitive, and yet not naïve, like Leonard Cohen, recognizing the pain of the world, yet the mix of glory and the invitation to wonder and amazement.

Victoria Loorz of the Wild Church Network reminds us that “This time of year we are called to remember what we are most grateful for. […] Yet to be truly grateful, we must first let ourselves fully see and fall in love with what is here and what is real, even (and perhaps especially) if what we love is in pain or threatened. True gratitude extends not only to what we think we possess, but to what we truly belong to — this interwoven, deeply beautiful, speaking and living world, with our human and more-than-human kin.”

Then she also asks some questions. She asks, “What does it take to allow yourself to fall deeply in love with a world full of pain, uncertainty, beauty, and heartbreak? How does gratitude arise in your love for the more-than-human world?”

This morning’s scriptures have a lot to say about heaven and God’s judging, which means to say that there have been countless ways these texts have been manipulated and abused, used as proof to push someone’s perspective, or a particular group’s doctrine, and their view of reality, which is limited. People have a tremendous capacity to miss the point when it comes to God’s love and justice.

Remember, she asks, “What does it take to allow yourself to fall deeply in love with a world full of pain, uncertainty, beauty, and heartbreak?” And in Amos, God’s voice cries out, “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (https://www.wildspirituality.earth/so/b3Ol043Vj?languageTag=en&cid=69053fec-1a27-4ec8-a2e6-ce14d92e43de)

Those questions hinge on a couple of very small, subtle details, a couple of words that point to the entire crux of the matter. “What does it take to allow yourself to fall deeply in love…” To allow yourself. Allow. And that other, even smaller word in Amos, “Let.” “But let justice roll down like waters.” We can easily ignore the word “Let” and the word, “allow” and become dam people. People that act like dams. A dam blocks the flow of water. We can block justice, we can block love. We can resist, dam up the love, the justice, the two sides of the coin and try to stop the flow.

But this is the flow: Jesus and God partner with the Spirit to enable and unfold a new thing, a great leap, a channel to allow the flow of grace and freedom and Christ’s cosmic glory that connects with Earthly goodness to reveal Reality, the Incarnation is the reality of the divine, the wholeness of holiness that declares that matter maters. Christ is in all things, and all things are in Christ.

Spiritual disciplines have many expressions. Some like meditation, or silent prayer. Others find nature a helpful partner in staying grounded, rooted in God’s love and the interconnectedness of all things in Christ. Spiritual reading of scripture or other inspirations expressions of what’s known as Perennial Wisdom traditions have a way of showing not only words, but the space between the words, and the spaciousness that holds the words and the spirit of the words as our hearts open to God. There are many ways we can heed the message of this morning’s texts to pay attention, to stay awake, to seek awareness, and be responsive as life unfolds in all shades of reality.

Thanks be to God for stories that get us thinking in our hearts. And as we fall into God, Christ is glorified, now, even as forever. Amen.