Moon River

Genesis 1:1-10
Matthew 12:1-4


Rockville United Church
Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

September 2, 2007

Now I could, for example, say: “Imagine a world, our world, without Baptism and Communion.” I could say that: Imagine a world without our two sacraments. But the world without Baptism and Communion would look so much like the everyday world as we find it that most of us would be hard pressed to quickly see just how different that world might be.

When you pack up and move as Nancy and I have, you find there are a lot of things you don’t miss until you suddenly can’t find them again. Yet until that box is opened, those sacred objects go embarrassingly unnoticed; so, like a world without Communion, without Baptism, things might not seem all that different – at least right away. How long, then, would it be before we would notice our missing sacraments, packed away in boxes in our Protestant basement? A woman asked me recently about a church I know well, “Don’t they ever serve communion there!?” I said, “I think a couple of times a year.” But I also thought, “I never, ever, have been asked that question before!” Even though John Calvin once said even after the break with the Roman Catholic Church, that Sunday Worship without communion was “defective.”

Then again, I could start this way, I could say something else. I could say: “Imagine a world, our world, without rivers or the moon.” I could, instead, say that; and a world without rivers, a world without the moon, immediately – at least for me – pictures a world with great loss, great empty spaces.

Hence, the grace of our first scripture, the Genesis One creation story, when the earth was without form, void, with darkness over the face of the waters. In that beginning place, no sun, no moon, no rivers – just dark waters and the winds of God. And then the grace and beauty of our Genesis story: the things of this world, like water and land, like sun and moon and the dome called “sky,” are given, still so freshly from the hand of God that their sacredness is not yet lost.

It is our human longing to be back in a place so close to the words and hands of God – it is that yearning – that gives rise to our sacraments, our hope, and even forgotten need, for something sacred in our lives.

However, I wouldn’t trouble us in this sermon if it were just a nostalgic plea for the so-called good old days when supposedly what was sacred was sacred and nobody dared forget. Hence, the freedom and the gift of our Gospel reading – one of the stories of Jesus in which we get his “take” on what is really sacred and what is not, walking with his companions on the Sabbath through a field plucking heads of grain to eat. This is not Jesus’ idea of forgetting the sacred. Rather, it reminds Jesus of King David and his hungry companions entering the house of God and eating from the 12 loaves of the presence of God – which was the sacred symbol of everlasting communion with God. Now I used to help my father clean up after communion and he let me eat some of the left over bread squares. We felt, I guess, that “the presence” had gone out of that Bread of Presence – and for years since I’ve shared it with the birds after Sunday Communion.

So, while I’ll not wax nostalgic for a sacred world, now lost, I will point out how pale and wan is our world of waning sacraments. It sadly has become the standard joke line of our time to lament helplessly. “Is nothing sacred anymore?!” As one more sacred thing or place or act is broken, trashed, or betrayed – one more after another. It might be true that were I to say “What would our world be like without Baptism and Communion, our sacraments?” none of us would immediately break out in a sweat, all of us would feel that if I said “There is nothing sacred in the world and there are no sacraments to make the sacred present,” we would recognize the tragedy. Nothing sacred? Nothing Holy? Everything is anything, anything we might want it to be, a truly flat world!

The modern world has taken us as far as we dare to go without a sacred boundary to hold us from chaos and destruction. Ours is an apocalyptic time as was the time of Jesus. An entire old world is ending and a new belief in what is Sacred is needed in order to save us. And around the world, really in the last six months, a sea-change has occurred about one thing we all know and believe is sacred and that, of course, is the earth itself! We are back to Genesis. Back to the creation. Back to water, earth, and sky. Back to vegetation and to the sun and the moon and the stars. What was sacred at the beginning is now again sacred, ‘lest it be our end.

And our sacraments must bring us into the presence of the sacred once again and renew our experience of the Holy.

So I offer you this little vision I had. A vision of a river and of the moon. I offer it as a call to once again see and feel the presence of God in sacred things. Things like moon-light and river-water to help us see how our sacraments can be sacred.

Last week we were in a cottage built along a rock ledge on the coast of Maine. We were only a few miles from a camp in Damariscotta where Jean Gregory spent her childhood summers. One inlet over, Nancy and I were nestled along the estuary river called Sheepscot. I woke and saw a light shining on Nancy’s face. I know she glows, but in the dark, I wondered!? Through the open bedroom door I saw to my complete surprise a low-slung nearly full moon. It had been overcast all day and cloudy at night and so a completely clear sky filled with moonlight was a wonder. And to see the moon setting seemed a wonder, and seeing it just a little to the left of where we had been watching the red-ball sunsets for several days! I was drawn by the moon light out to the porch. There was mist along the far banks of the Sheepscot River and its silhouette line of pine trees. And in the thick dark ripples of the river lay the light of a second moon just about as bright as the first near full-moon, yet a little closer and a little rippled, but just as there. Two moons and a river, a dark skin of water. A slow wind across it and through a floating mist.

The moon was real. It was, of course, reflected sunlight as all moonlight is. And the moon in the river was real. It was, of course, reflected moonlight from the moon.

And so I saw and felt anew the great chain of being, from God to sun, from sun to moon, from moon to river moon, from river moon to me and to her face.

So it is with sacraments: Outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual realties made real and sacred once again by the external and eternal presence of God touching the things of this world, our bodies, our bread, our wine, and our rivers of water, bathing and filling them with light, and truth, with beauty and life, to cleanse and nourish us with strength. All the days and nights of this life until the next. Amen