The summer pastime we will explore at the Christ Churches this Sunday is swimming. 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 of water. I may feel the most free in the ocean, but lakes, ponds, even swimming pools will do just fine.
The Christian life is water-life. We begin our God-Life in the waters of baptism and are sustained by the living water welling 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, a flow which gradually got deeper until it was “deep enough to swim in,” a river that brought life to the stagnant places. These images and others 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. Jesus likened the Holy Spirit to the river of God – we literally jump into the Spirit-life and let it heal and carry us instead of trying to make it all happen ourselves.
Our gospel story this Sunday reminds us that we move through water to get to Jesus, as Peter hops out of the fishing boat (taking care to put on clothes before he gets wet…) to swim to shore when he realizes the resurrected Jesus stands on the beach. It’s not the first time Peter hops out of a boat to get to Jesus – the first time is when he sees Jesus walking on the water and decides to join him, which he does for a few moments until he realizes what he’s doing and begins to sink. This time, he swims. What if we thought of the life of faith as swimming to Jesus, who awaits us with breakfast on the beach? Isn’t that much more fun than our often dry and dusty church patterns?
As followers of Christ, we are invited to jump into the baptismal waters and swim, taking the risk of getting out of the boat and into the freedom and the danger of water-life. The boat might be 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 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 offers 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. We have no life apart from God – and total freedom to swim in that life for eternity.
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