Water is Life – 2 July 2017 – Fourth Sunday after Pentecost/ Lectionary 13

Healing vs. breaking, welcome vs. enslavement, freedom vs. sin, life vs. death––all matters that consume the Apostle Paul and are addressed simply by Jesus who tells us to make sure the thirsty get some water. Today, clean and available water is jeopardized in many places. We see it being purchased by private businesses and made expensive. We watch governments making changes that pollute municipal water (Flint, Michigan) or threaten to do so (Standing Rock). We also see peace workers digging wells to save women from hours of hauling heavy buckets, engineers figuring out how to corral oil spills, and advocates for environmental sensibility writing and speaking on behalf of plants and animals.

Christians are commanded to make water available for all the “little ones” who might either be new disciples or simply people without the means to insist on clean and affordable water.

The water that is life is baptismal water as well as good drinking water. In his own baptism, Jesus blessed all the waters of Earth.

Matthew 10:40-42

Just prior to today’s Gospel reading in Matthew, Jesus tells his followers that they are to love him more than they love their own families, more than they love their own lives. These are harsh warnings that are immediately countered by today’s reading on the comfort of welcome into the community for all people.

Whoever extends hospitality to Jesus' disciples also welcomes Jesus and the One who sent him. Jewish law considered that one's agent is like oneself. Jesus goes beyond this: to welcome a disciple is to welcome both him and the Father. Then verse 42: one who, “in the name of a disciple” (and through the disciple, of God), helps someone on the fringe of society (or the church) even in a simple, kindly way will be rewarded in heaven. “Little ones” are disciples of Jesus, whom he calls “children” or “infants” (11:25). The Gospel of Matthew displays a special solicitude toward Jesus' “little ones,” those we would call catechumens. – Frank C. Senn

Jeremiah 28:5-9

Speaking to a devastated people who yearned for the return of exiles and the worship vessels from the Temple that had been carted away, the prophet assures that peace will come.

[The prophet Jeremiah’s words anticipate] Jesus' words to his disciples that he has not come to bring peace. . . [raising] the question of what constitutes true prophecy. The exact historical setting early in King Zedekiah's reign (594 B.C.) was a moment of crisis for Judah. Hananiah had prophesied that the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar would be broken in two years and the vessels returned to the Temple, breaking Jeremiah's yoke for emphasis. Hauling away vessels from the temple was the Babylonians' way of showing the powerlessness of Judah's God. Jeremiah had used the symbol of an iron yoke to demonstrate that the Babylonian exile would continue. – Frank C. Senn

Romans 6:12-23

[Paul admonishes us] to lead a life free from sin. . .  That personified active force that came into human history through Adam has reigned over human beings until Jesus' death and resurrection and seeks to continue to reign even in those who are justified by faith in the atoning sacrifice of Christ. Because sin is an enemy that refuses to be defeated, Christians need to erect a study defense against its onslaught. There sedeq (uprightness) is closely linked to observance of the law, whereas for Paul it assumes all the connotations of the new Christian life.

Because Christians can still be tempted and can succumb to the “passions” of their “bodies,” care must be taken to avoid using any of our faculties and functions (“members,” v 13) to advance the cause of evil. In verse 15 Paul asks again the rhetorical question he posed in verse 1: are we now free to behave as we like, no longer being subject to the Law? Again, he answers no!

In verses 16–19, he uses the analogy of slavery to explain the two ways of sin and righteousness. You cannot serve two masters (v 16). If sin is your master, you will face spiritual (as well as physical) death; if you serve God, your end is oneness with him (“righteousness”). Through baptism the believer has ceased to be enslaved to sin; the baptized have been set free. God's gift is pro gratia, without expectation of repayment. – Frank C. Senn

Frank C. Senn, an ELCA pastor who served Immanuel Lutheran Church in Evanston, Illinois, from 1990-2013, has also taught liturgy courses at a number of seminaries and divinity schools and published thirteen books mostly on the history of the liturgy.

Homily Service 41, no. 3 (2008): 75-89.

Earth’s Water and Baptismal Implications

Again, as with our posting on March 3, we take from Liturgy 31, no. 2 (2016) some of Peter McGrail’s essay on environmental issues related to Christian Initiation. McGrail’s essay deals with Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ on the environment. Here is his analysis of how water, jeopardized by environmental degradation, may be seen through the lens of the incarnation.

As soon as we draw on Pope Francis’ consideration of water, that element’s potential symbolic ambiguity becomes evident. His primary concern is access to fresh drinking water, which he underscores as “a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights. Our world has a grave social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water because they are denied the right to a life consistent to their unalienable dignity” (no. 30). The use and misuse of water serves as a potent reality that points up global inequality. . . 

 This reality of exclusion contrasts with the lavish exuberance with which the gift of water is celebrated in the Easter Vigil. For example, the fifth reading opens with the cry of invitation, “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters” (Is 55:1, NRSV) and closes with the comparison of the efficaciousness of God’s life-giving word to the life-giving winter rain and snow (Is 55:10–11). Water is portrayed here as a freely given gift from the heavens that satisfies a thirsty humanity and brings fruitfulness to creation. So lavish, so fruitful is it that it serves as an image for God’s word, God’s very will. 

 In the light of Laudato Si’, we are invited to ask what it might mean to proclaim those words in a location of desertification or to hear them as a member of a community with little or no access to clean drinking water. The words may, indeed, express profound hope in such contexts, but perhaps they do so precisely because they also tie into anxieties, evoke painful memories, and reflect present realities. The ambiguities of a symbol soiled by human activity interact subversively with the liturgical proclamation of a scriptural passage such as this. And the tensions thus set up have the potential to generate dissonance on the lips of assemblies in a more affluent part of the world. . . Thus, one of the most joyous sections of the Easter Vigil can plunge us into a discomforting recognition of the meanings that our core symbol of baptism can hold in tension. 

 What, then, does this say to us of baptism itself? Surely there must be more going on here at the level of sign than just an immersion into a compromised symbol of pollution. . . . 

McGrail calls for a careful reading of the Pope’s concern for Earth’s gifts so that we appropriately locate the incarnation of Christ in the midst of both sacraments and creation. We benefit from knowing more deeply the key relationship of the paschal mystery to God-with-us in this finite world and its fulfillment eschatologically.

The renewal of humanity, and indeed the transformation of the whole of creation, is caught up in the dynamism of Christ’s own victory over death and the captivity of the material world to decay and destruction. Baptism is a plunging into Christ’s paschal mystery by which women and men “die with him, are buried with him, and rise with him” (Sacrosanctum Concilium 6). In celebrating baptism, therefore, we are indeed and necessarily acknowledging the extent to which the material world is caught up in systems of death, but are also proclaiming and celebrating union with Christ in his transforming death and resurrection.

Peter McGrail is a priest of the Liverpool Roman Catholic Archdiocese and is head of the Department of Theology, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at Liverpool Hope University, UK.

Peter McGrail, “Initiation and Ecology: Becoming a Christian in the Light of Laudato Si’,” Liturgy 31, no. 2 (2016), 55-62.