For the next few weeks, we are doing a worship series at my church on Summer Pastimes and how they speak to us of the life of faith. So each Friday I will turn from the lectionary to the gospel I’ve selected for worship that week.
The summer pastime we will explore at Christ the Healer this Sunday is swimming. It’s all the more fitting, as we also have a baptism that day. Swimming is one of my very favorite summer pastimes – especially going into the ocean on a hot day, feeling the rush of cold, cold water, being lifted and dropped by the swell, lost in the vastness. I think I may feel the most free when I am in the ocean, but lakes, ponds, even swimming pools will do.
The Christian life is water-life. We begin our God-Life in the waters of baptism and are sustained by the living water dwelling up inside us for eternity, which Jesus said was Holy Spirit. The prophet Ezekiel wrote of a vision he was shown of a river flowing from the altar of the temple that gradually got deeper, until it was “deep enough to swim in,” a river that brought life to stagnant places. All these images and more have given me the notion of the “healing stream” which flows in and through each of us, and around us, into which we can step for renewal and repair.
Being in the water also has its dangers, though, as Peter found in the passage we will read this week. That gospel story is about Peter’s little dip first onto, and then into the water after he sees Jesus walking on it. In this case, he doesn’t swim, but starts to sink, which is what happens when you’re in deep water and you can’t swim. He cries out for Jesus, who is right there, holding out his hand, bringing him back to the boat. “When they got into the boat, the wind ceased.”
It’s a story of a person of faith who finds himself in the water with Jesus – where he gets distracted by the circumstances around him and begins to sink. That is our story too, as followers of Christ, taking the risk of getting out of the boat and into the freedom and the danger of water-life. In fact, I think of the boat in this story as a symbol for the church – that place from which we jump, to which we return to regroup. Maybe part of the reason our churches don’t always have the vitality they might is that we are spending too much time in the boat with each other, and not enough in the water.
I can beat a metaphor to death better than anyone I know (and this Summer Pastimes series is going to give me lots of fodder!), so I will stop there, and simply invite you to think of living the life of faith as jumping into cool, refreshing water and swimming, entirely surrounded and supported by the water’s density, and yet also having to move forward in it to avoid sinking. We are held in the life of God, cleansed, refreshed and renewed, and yet we also propel ourselves forward in that life.
God is not a part of our life - God is the life in which we live. We have no life apart from God – and total freedom to swim in that living water for eternity. Think about that on your summer swims!
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