(105) Water

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Water”, originally shared on April 8, 2021. It was the 105th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   You only feel wet when you get out of the water. What does this have to do with the Christian life? Everything.

   You probably learned in grade school how important water is for life. We can go between 1 and 2 months without food, but only about 3 days without water.

   Our bodies are about 60% water. Every cell in our bodies needs water; it carries nutrients and oxygen to them. It helps flush out waste products and helps to regulate our body temperature. Our brain and heart are 73% water, our lungs are about 83% water. Our bones, bones are 31% water.

   What happens when we get thirsty? We are finding out that water moistens the tissues in our eyes, nose and mouth, and without it they get dry.

   Do you know how much water you should drink every day for optimum health? Take your body weight in pounds and divide that number in half. That number is the number of ounces of water you should drink every day.

   Water is one of the most common things on earth. About 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered with water. The oceans hold about 96.5% of the world’s water. Do you see what a big deal practical desalinization would be?

   People are baptized with water. It’s one of the most common things on earth, yet it is the means, with God’s Word, by which God’s grace is made manifest in us.

   Martin Luther, the 16^th century Church reformer, wrote in his Small Catechism, a little pamphlet he wrote for teaching the basics of the Christian faith and which he read from every day, this about Holy Baptism:

What is Baptism?

Baptism is not water only, but it is water used together with God’s Word and by his command.

What is this Word?

In Matthew 28 our Lord Jesus Christ says: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

What benefits does God give in Baptism?

In Baptism God forgives sin, delivers from death and the devil, and gives everlasting salvation to all who believe what he has promised.

What is God’s promise?

In Mark 16 our Lord Jesus Christ says: “He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned.”

(I’ll put a link in the “Show More” or “Comments” section below to a site where you can download the rest of Luther’s explanation of Baptism in a free digital copy of the Small Catechism.)

   Baptism means that we have died. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, the 6^th chapter, starting with the 3^rd verse:

*Romans 6:3-5

   I once read about the first missionaries to the Figi Islands. At that time, Figi wasn’t a site for destination weddings. The occupants were cannibals. No ship would go there. They would only drop anchor long enough for people to bring boats out to the ships with fresh water to trade for consumer goods.

   The missionaries had to buy tickets to Japan, and when they got to Figi they asked the captain to drop them off there. The Captain said, “You can’t stay here. If you go there they’ll eat you. If you go there you’ll die.”

   The leader of the group said, “We died before we came.”

   “We died before we came”. Death is a past tense experience for us because of the water of Baptism and the Word of God.  The Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ that we celebrate in this Easter season, means that we will be with him and all baptized believers forever, starting from the hour of our belief and our baptism.

   Danish philosopher and theologian Soren Kierkegaard once remarked that the hardest kind of Christian to be is a Christian in a Christian land. It’s hard to see the radical transformation that Jesus brings to our lives in the power of the Holy Spirit through Baptism if we see so many other transformed lives around us, or even just their influence or behavior.

   But it’s there. Even when you don’t feel it.

   We walk wet in those baptisms every day. But we don’t feel wet.

   We walk by faith every day. But sometimes we don’t feel faithful.

   You don’t feel wet until you get out of the water.

   We often don’t feel our faith until we are out of an environment of faith, or of a country that has been shaped by Christians values even as it becomes increasingly secular.

   Here in California, it looks like we’re moving from another year of insufficient rain into another year of drought.

   It looks like we’re moving into another spiritual dry spell as well. We are continuing the secularization that we’ve seen happening for years.

   A new Gallup poll, published at the end of March, indicated that for the first time in the history of the United States fewer than 50% of adults, at 47%, say they belong to a religious congregation. In 1999, that figure was 70%. In 1939, when the survey started, that figure was 73%. The decline has grown exponentially over just the past few decades, and it has happened among all age groups. It continued, but by only a few percentage points, through the pandemic. Interestingly, college-educated people show a lower rate of decline than those without a college education.

   What the survey doesn’t tell us is what it means. Church membership does not necessarily mean religiosity. It’s possible, as some have observed, that as our culture makes it more and more possible to feel good about oneself, our chief secular value, without being a member of a religious congregation, we are merely losing people who needed a social organization, a family, a place to experience personal power, or to be engaged in a tradition of social service, without any interest in repentance and a new life defined completely by a living relationship with the one true living God that produces all those things.

   What do we have to offer a world that is increasingly less interested in church membership but Streams of Living Water? What do we have to offer but the power of the Holy Spirit to bring hydration to spiritually dehydrated people who often can’t even put a name to their thirst?

   A Pew Research Center survey found that 3 in 10 Americans reported a stronger religious faith when the pandemic was growing last summer.

   Timothy Keller, a widely respected Presbyterian pastor and author, who developed a growing church approaching mega-church status, I think, in Manhattan recently tweeted, “Both secularism and devout faith are growing. What's going away is the mushy middle of everyday religiosity.” Maybe that’s true.

   We in Southern California depend upon water from other places. The history of Los Angeles is the history of water wars and the redirection of the Colorado River to the thirsty cisterns of LA.

   Likewise, we can’t be spiritually hydrated under our own power; we’ve seen people engaged the empty struggle of trying that in hundreds of forms all over LA, including in many of our churches. We’re known for it.

   It never truly satisfies us to our core. Augustine of Hippo said, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”

   But the water that comes from God puts an end to the search for God with the gifts of the living water of the Holy Spirit.

   At the end of Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan Woman at the well, he said, “

*John 4:10-14

     How do we receive that, “living water”, that “spring of water gushing up to eternal life” within us?

   What can we do? God does it all. All we can do is to open our hearts and receive the gift.

   Repent and believe. Turn away from the life that kills and toward God who gives eternal life. Speak your belief to God and ask that God would open your heart, give you the gift of faith, a living relationship with the living God, and that you would live in response to God’s sacrificial love for you. Get baptized in a Christian community. The gift of baptism is yours; it’s once and forever and no one, no one can take it away from you.

   You belong to Christ, in whom you have been baptized with water, the means by which, with God’s word, and the belief that is likewise the gift of faith, God frees us and gives eternal life. Live in the Holy Spirit, in the living water of God.