Sermon
delivered at All Saints’ Parish Church, Whiteparish – Sunday 7th July 2019 – Morning
Worship
Isaiah 66:10-14 “I
will extend prosperity to her like a river”
May
I speak in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost and may my words be a
blessing to all who hear them. Amen
When I was 12 I had two great passions and one great dislike – the thing which I
disliked most was sport in any form and
I can still hear the cries of my fellow pupils to the sadistic PT teacher
during the picking of football teams on a wet, muddy Wednesday morning – “Please sir, it’s not fair sir, we had to
have Barratt last week”!
I also hated having to endure horse racing on the TV when
we went to visit my grandfather (a failed jockey) in Norfolk – what-ever was
the point of watching horse run from one end of a track to another and seeing
my grandfather getting upset whenever his horse didn’t finish in the first
three!
My passions, back then, however were astronomy and
fishing. It is interesting though how
our passions might change as we mature – today I love horse-racing and
thoroughly enjoy a good day out at Salisbury or Goodwood or wherever and I
enjoy watching football and cricket being a member of both Hampshire County
Cricket Club and Southampton Football Club.
I still do still pursue my passion as an amateur astronomer and only the
other evening I recalled, as I looked through my telescope at the planets
Jupiter and Saturn how it had been on a very similar summer’s night that I had
first observed these planets through my school friends small telescope at age 12 and how unchanged they appeared after all these years. I think
one of the reasons for this passion remaining so strong is because once seen,
never forgotten, and the sheer beauty and mystery and seemingly, from a
distance, unchanging appearance of the heavenly bodies reminds us of the
unchanging love and beauty of the creative God.
What about my love of fishing then? Well that ended rather abruptly one late
morning on the banks of the River Witham in Lincolnshire when the river bank
gave way very suddenly plunging my father into the water but not before he had
managed to deposit the contents of the open bait box, our maggots, into the
equally open picnic basket containing my mother’s lovingly baked apple and
blackberry pie! On top of that I never
seemed to catch anything other than eels which destroyed my tackle. The passion soon waned.
Rivers, by comparison to many cosmic bodies, do
change. The only river I know which
doesn’t is the river in the sky, the constellation of Eridanus. All other rivers change their nature in
accordance with the seasons and as they flow from source to the sea. I think rivers are a really good metaphor for
life and we will find many biblical examples of where rivers have been used in
this way and as a source of life and cleansing. In our choice of hymns today you will find
references to rivers and the sea and I would like to take you on a short journey
of reflection on how rivers do indeed mirror our own lives.
For a start, without water there would be no life. I am extremely lucky to live in Downton very
close to the River Avon and on any day a short five-minute walk will take me to
its banks where I can observe a myriad of different types and species of
wildlife and flora. On most days the
river appears peaceful and beautiful but we also know of its power of
destruction when it floods and Downton now has in place a sophisticated
anti-flooding systems of banks and gullies along its water meadows.
I was brought up along the banks of a mighty river, an
estuary in fact, the Humber. At its
widest it is seven miles across as it enters the sea. In fact the Humber is not
a river at all – it is actually made up of three great tributary rivers – the
Ouse, the Aire and the Trent the latter being the third longest river in the
UK.
Let’s just think of that river for a moment. It starts as
a number of small springs of cool clear water on the Staffordshire moorlands
passing through Stoke- on-Trent and the Six Pottery Towns then on through
Burton-on-Trent – the great brewing town, and then through Derbyshire and
Nottinghamshire to pass alongside the city of Nottingham by the famous Trent
Bridge cricket ground and two Nottingham football grounds and on passed Newark
and into Lincolnshire joining the Ouse to form the Humber.
Likewise, we can trace our own lives like that
river. We are born pure and innocent
just like the Trent and as infants we are like that babbling brook which passes
over the Staffordshire uplands. As we
grow so we widen and mature - influencing and being influenced by those around
us – indeed, the word influence means to
be subjected to flowing and hence we also get the word “confluence” or flowing together. Our life,
as the river, starts to become polluted by its environment around it but at the
same time its usefulness increases – it becomes navigable, people will use us
and dare I say it also abuse us too. Our
life, like the river can bring life to others or it can be destructive. By our constant connectiveness to God,
through prayer, and an awareness of how we affect others we can, unlike the
river, have some control of our lives.
At some point, just as the Trent is joined by the Ouse to
form the Humber Estuary, so our lives will be joined by those of others – most
commonly in a marriage or long time partnership and together we become one -
strong, wide and something powerful as we journey ever forward to the vastness
of the unknown sea – to the place beyond.
I will let you ponder how much like a river your life has
been and what stage in your life you have reached. Sometimes to navigate a river you need to
build locks and canals to get you round those rough rapids and weirs which are
encountered. It is the same with our
river of life – God is our great pilot who steers us through those difficult
places. He knows them so is able to
build those locks and canals if we ask him.
In our Old Testament Reading, Isaiah is using the analogy
of a river in explaining to the Jewish Exiles that God will extend prosperity
to the Jewish Nation “like a river”.
So too will God prosper us and our lives in the same way.
We are told, in Revelation 22:1, that God showed John:
“a pure
River of Water of Life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the Throne of God
and of the Lamb” – a vision
very similar to that shown to Ezekiel (Chapter
47)
I would like to end with a short extract from a poem by
Robert Wadsworth Lowry called Beautiful
River based on the vision in Revelation 22:
Shall we
gather at the river
Where bright angel feet have trod;
With its crystal tide forever
Flowing by the throne of God?
Yes, we'll gather at the river,
The beautiful, the beautiful river --
Gather with the saints at the river
That flows by the throne of God.
Amen
MFB/06072019
