Rivers as sacred geography
Link to video: https://youtu.be/1jVGFakgD9Y
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
May 22, 2022—Easter 6C
Acts 16:9-15; Psalm 67; Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5; John 5:1-9
Geography matters. In the biblical narrative, geography is sacred. And not just at the level of locations like the Garden of Eden and the New Jerusalem, or the Promised Land and the various lands of exile. The shape of the land itself drives the story, telling us something about what’s going on, just by telling us whether things are happening on a hill or in a valley or at sea.
Today, we have rivers. One of which is a river of the water of life itself, flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb, through the center of the holy city: the New Jerusalem. And the other of which is simply a place where Paul and Timothy meet the women who will become the core of the church at Philippi.
Rivers are the source of so much, winding their way throughout the biblical narrative. Not as dramatic as all those mountaintops, perhaps, with the clouds and glorious light and manifestations and messages from God. And not quite as gut-level as the deserts: the wildernesses through which the people of God wander, seeking meaning and purpose, seeking shelter and a sense of connection, and finding it (somewhat paradoxically) in the realization that our only true home is an utter dependence on God.
The mountains and the deserts are the great landmarks of spiritual geography. But between them, there are the rivers.
Rivers, which are the source of life. In the prophets, their presence is the sign of God’s favor and desire for us to thrive, and their predicted absence (the rivers that dry up) is the threat of punishment, a warning of hard times to come. This, surely, is why the central element of the New Jerusalem is not a temple, but that life-giving river. With bountiful clean water, crops grow, herds are healthy, and all living creatures can flourish.
Every river in the bible contains this promise of sustenance.
For us, rivers are very much about motion. A river signifies the ability to transport yourself, or perhaps your goods, from one place to another. This is less true in the biblical narrative, where we don’t hear much about people traveling on rivers. Still, the infant Moses was saved by his mother when she placed him in a basket in the river, sending him from certain death in their midst to a whole new life in the household of the Pharaoh’s daughter.
It’s a foundational story, which means that every river in the bible contains this promise of rescue.
Still, in the Bible, rivers are far more frequently signs of a boundary. The people of Israel might not sail on rivers, but they do cross them, often in ways that are powerfully significant. In the story of Jacob at the Jabbok, we see him stop before fording the stream. He does so because he knows that, once he crosses, he will have to face his brother Esau and answer for the fact that he used trickery to steal Esau’s birthright and their father’s blessing. The momentousness of this is underscored by the mysterious figure who confronts and wrestles with Jacob all night, after which Jacob limps across the river to find that Esau has already forgiven him, welcoming him home with open arms.
Every river in the bible carries this story, reminding us that we sometimes need to confront our own pasts in order to move on in our lives.
Which brings us to the River Jordan. No other river in the bible carries so much weight in the spiritual geography, because it marks the entrance into the promised land. Having been brought out of slavery by their God, crossing the Red Sea at a point narrow enough to have perhaps been called a river, the ancient Hebrews soon lost the plot. Afraid and unsure about what kind of life they’d been liberated into, they began to worry and complain and have very serious doubts about God’s ability to lead and protect them. Thus began their wilderness journey, during which they stumbled and wandered and finally found a way to once again trust in their God.
At the end of this time in the desert, they came to a river. Of course they did. And they crossed over the river into the land that would once again be the center point of their spiritual geography. They washed off the dust of the wilderness, and entered the place in which they hoped to live out their relationship with God.
Every river in the Bible carries that significance: of a transition into a renewed relationship with God. But especially the Jordan, which is what brought John the Baptist out there, inviting the people to once again cross the river into a renewed relationship with God. Urging them to remember how their ancestors had acknowledged their dependence on God. Threading in the call of the prophets, and reminding the people of God (because we always ALWAYS need reminding), that God’s allegiance does not lie with powerful politicians and religious leaders, but with the vulnerable and the needy, the poor and the lonely.
Every river, for us, carries an echo of the voice of John the Baptist.
And so we are brought to the river outside the walls of Philippi, where Paul and Timothy have gone to spread the good news. “On the sabbath day,” Paul tells us, “we went outside the gate by the river, where we supposed there was a place of prayer; and we sat down and spoke to the women who had gathered there” (Acts 16:13).
What I found interesting, as I read this passage, was how immediate my image of women by the river was. When I hear of Paul and Timothy encountering them there, I see them washing clothes. I see the industry and the labor, the companionship and community of women doing what women have done for millennia and still do all over this world.
But that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening here. Lydia is a wealthy woman, with a household of her own, who likely has servants to wash her clothes. What then are these women doing by the river? Many sources I checked theorize that there must not have been enough Jewish men in Philippi to form an actual synagogue, and so the few Jews there were, and the Gentiles who were drawn to the Jewish God, met on the Sabbath out by the river. They met there, it’s suggested, because of all of the ways in which rivers connected them to their biblical identity: for its life-giving properties, and its echoes of rescue, transformation, and reconnection with God.
All of this is probably true, because the land is always speaking in the Bible. But I there are also scholars who suggest that the military colony of Philippi didn’t allow foreign religions within the walls. And the Jewish Annotated New Testament informs us that the word used here in Acts for a “place of prayer” (proseuche) is in fact “a term regularly used to designate synagogue buildings” (p. 257). Meaning it’s possible that Paul and Timothy didn’t come across a group of women talking as they washed clothes together, as I had imagined; nor the rag-tag core of an informal community. Perhaps, instead, they entered the buildings of the synagogue at Philippi and there they met a group of Gentiles who had been drawn to the God they learned about there. And when these women heard Paul tell the good news, they recognized how Jesus gathered up all that had drawn them to the river in the first place, and they asked to be baptized.
May we too be drawn to the river: drawn to its life-giving waters, its promise of rescue, its invitation to a new beginning and a deeper relationship with God. Amen.