It’s Alive!

AM Psalm 30, 32 • PM Psalm 42, 43
Exod. 25:1-22 • Col. 3:1-17 • Matt. 4:18-25

In today’s evening psalm, the Psalmist once again cries out for help:

I cry aloud to God,
aloud to God, that he may hear me.

In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord;
in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying;
my soul refuses to be comforted.

I think of God, and I moan;
I meditate, and my spirit faints. Selah

Though it may seem as if God does not hear, the Psalmist finally remembers that these waters themselves fear God:

When the waters saw you, O God,
when the waters saw you, they were afraid;
the very deep trembled.

And the Psalmist remembers that God has come through these very waters to redeem the nation of Israel.

Your way was through the sea,
your path through the mighty waters,
yet your footprints were unseen.

You led your people like a flock
by the hand of Moses and Aaron.

God’s way “through the mighty waters” is doubtless a reference to God parting the waters of the Red Sea. But if the waters were “afraid,” perhaps God did not simply part them: it is almost as if they decided by themselves to get out of the way of those mighty, albeit unseen feet.

Some of the best times I’ve had with my family have been in lakes in New York State and Canada, and in ocean waters off the coast of Maine, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Hawai’i. Perhaps most memorable was in 1991, when a dear friend took me on a raft float down the Green River in Utah.

Yet on only a few of these occasions did it occur to me to thank God for His creation of water. Nor has it often occurred to me that the waters and I are part of the same creation.

I have never seen waters part as did the waters of the Red Sea, though I have witnessed dramatic tide changes in Maine, Ireland, and most remarkably in the Bay of Fundy in Atlantic Canada.

It was as if these waters had lives of their own. Yet if God has created both the living waters and living human beings, then we and the waters must be related. We must be members of the same family. Biologists tell us, after all, that we humans came out of the sea.

When I taught courses in world literature and mythology, an essay question on a mid-term or final exam would invariably be: “Write about water.”

And write they did. About how water figured in the belief systems of so many religions and mythologies. Gilgamesh journeying across the sea to find the world’s oldest man, and then finding and losing the secret to eternal life. The Ganges being sacred to Hindus. Aphrodite emerging, fully formed, from the waves. Yahweh creating the waters of the world. John the Baptist baptizing Jesus in the River Jordan. And not long after that, Jesus and his disciples fishing for men—and women—in the Sea of Galilee.

Genesis tells us that an angry God flooded the world, killing every human being except Noah and his family. Once that water was set loose, perhaps it, too, had a mind of its own. More recently, more than a few people wondered whether God set loose Hurricane Katrina.

However, I have not heard too many people wonder if it was God who caused the building of such poorly engineered levees.

The waters of the earth are indeed alive—with seaweed and coral, plankton and fish, dolphins and whales. I am not convinced that natural disasters and attendant death and destruction are “God’s will”, though I could be convinced that God wants us to take better care of ourselves and each other—in other words, to take better care of all the members of our family.

When the world’s waters cry out to God for help from oil spills and plastics, they are really crying out to us. Perhaps the way we respond to those cries is a measure of our faith.

Written by James Gamble

...who hopes to one day travel again and make it back one more time to Atlantic Canada.