Green Blades Preaching Roundtable

            The Ecofaith imagery of the “green blade rising” draws our focus to the land, the solid earth from which our own bodies spring, the land we live on.  With the Baptism Gospel, during the season of Epiphany, we have Word that more naturally calls us to focus on water, the flowing waters from which we emerge as Baptized beloved children of God.  While our identity, who we see ourselves to be, seems to be more easily connected to the land from which we and our ancestors arose, let us take a look at our identities as beloved children of God flowing from the Baptism of Jesus through the lens of water.

            In the book “Healing Haunted Histories, A Settler Discipleship of Decolonization,” Enns and Myers, 2021, the authors speak of “landlines, bloodlines and songlines” as they trace family history of immigrant Mennonite ancestors from Ukraine to Canada, yet when referencing the land locations, “landlines,” they speak not of nations but of watersheds.  They speak of ancestors who came from the Dnieper River Watershed and settled in the Saskatchewan River Watershed to farm on land where Indigenous First Nations people had lived for thousands of years.  This use of the term “watershed” transcends national boundaries and focuses on the water flowages that have been present everywhere since the dawn of the Creation, even before humans lived there.  They speak of these watersheds as “landlines, … geographies and landscapes of memory, struggle and contestation, affection, sustenance and identity – and hold deep stories of peoples’ placement and displacement.”  They acknowledge how, while “Indigenous communities have long understood the most primal ‘Songline’ is nature herself, settler colonial culture, with its commodification of land and exploitation of nature, has been largely deaf to the earth’s voice.”

              For most ELCA Lutherans the stories of haunted settler history should ring true, as most of us could trace our ancestral landlines, bloodlines and songlines back to European watersheds from which our people migrated as settlers to the watersheds of the “New World” already inhabited by Native Americans.

            The watershed of the Jordan River, where the Baptismal Gospel happened, is located in the “Holy Land.”  The Jordan River Watershed flows from north to south, including land of present-day nations named Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine.  This Watershed, present since the dawn of Creation, does not know nor care nor acknowledge the nation states currently located within its flowage, nor those presuming to claim the land at any previous time in human history, including those named nations occurring throughout the Biblical stories of the Jewish people.  This Holy watershed, flowing below the great Jerusalem, is where our Lord submerged his body as Jesus and emerged as the Christ, the beloved child of God.

            Let us contemplate the waters of Jesus’ Baptism, and the waters of your baptism as well.  Have you ever sat on a riverbank watching the flowage?  I have, and so has Bob Dylan.  I know for me it was the Mississippi in St. Paul during college, around 1970-ish.  For Bob, who knows, but I’d like to think it was also the Mississippi near the U. of M. when he was there about 60 years ago in the early 1960s. 

            Here’s Bob, “Watching the River Flow”:

                        … Oh, this ol’ river keeps on rollin’, though

                        No matter what gets in the way and which way the wind does blow

                        And as long as it does I’ll just sit here

                        And watch the river flow

            Here’s me, about 40 years ago, “Everflow”:

                        The reflection of the sunlight as it sparkles on the water

                        Is more brilliant than a diamond in its glow

                        And the wind lifting the waves is bringing water back to heaven

                        Captured instant in eternal everlow

                        Everflow, rain is flowing to the river

                        Everflow, river’s flowing to the sea

                        Everflow, sea is flowing up to heaven

                        Everflow the spirit moves inside of me.

            So what does the flow of a watershed have to do with Baptism?  Maybe you have an idea.  Maybe some things are too sacred to attempt to explicate.  Maybe we should simply ask the river, ask the watersheds of nature, and accept the mystery in the musings.  Ps. 29:3, “The voice of the Lord is over the waters.”  Yet I would suggest that as the river speaks from its source, even so does truth, emet, as living water, “spring from the ground,” Ps. 85:11.

            We know that water takes many forms and we can find beauty in all.  In Northern Minnesota in January, there is solid water, aka snow and ice, and always the liquid flow of the rivers, and also the humidity in the air as water in invisible (apart from fog and sundogs) form.  Yet in all its forms, it remains water.  Water is also the greater part of our bodies, as well as that green blade rising, the greater part of what sustains all life on the planet.  Yet in each unique, individual manifestation, it is still part of the one, the universal waters of creation.  Buddhists say, all is one.  We followers of the Way of Christ can say that the unique individual human named Jesus submerged into the Jordan Watershed and then emerged not only as the Beloved Child, but as the Universal Christ, Mashiach, the Lord of the Universe, the embodiment of the Church.

            The Sufi poet Rumi, from ¾ a millennium ago, said, “you are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop.”

John Duns Scotus, Franciscan friar from ¾ a millennium ago, spoke of “haecceity,” and “univocity;” haecceity, or thisness, as the uniqueness of each individual part of creation, the beloved child we each claim in ourselves as the fruit of our Baptisms; and “univocity,” the oneness that binds all creation with one voice to Creator God.  We can contemplate the uniqueness or thisness of Jesus; and also the univocity or universality of the Christ.

            About 140 years ago, Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins articulated the Scotus philosophy in “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”:

                        As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

                        As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

                        Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

                        Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

                        Each mortal thing does one thing and the same;

                        Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

                        Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

                        Crying What I do is me; for that I came. 

                        I say more: the just (person) justices;

                        Keeps grace: that keeps all (their) goings graces;

                        Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye (they are) –

                        Christ – for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

                        Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his,

                        To the Father through the features of (people’s) faces.

Hopkins says, “the just person justices.”  Jesus says to the Baptizer, the very beginning of his ministry, the very first words he speaks in Matthew’s Gospel, “Let it be so now, for it is proper in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”  Now we know Jesus didn’t actually speak those words in English, and the phrase “fulfill all righteousness” can be and has been construed by scholars to support whatever shades of theology they prefer, i.e. perhaps the “righteousness” of atonement for original sin, or in some way “right” or moral conduct conforming with God’s will for the salvation of mankind.  Etcetera.  But Jesus’ Aramaic was probably “tzedek,”  close to the Hebrew “sedeq”, and simply means “justice” in a restorative, universal sense, just like in Hopkins’ poem.  Even the Greek “dikaios” connotes this sort of “justice.”  By fulfilling universal justice, sedeq, Jesus was pronouncing God’s judgment or “mishpat”, the unique action defining him as an individual person: per Hopkins, “What I do is me; for that I came.”  Jesus also therefore invites each of us to claim our own unique thisness as Hopkins beautifully articulates, “act in God’s eye what in God’s eye we are, Christ—“, each of us just one of the playings in ten thousand places, these places of baptisms we can call watersheds. 

            From sedeq comes mishpat.  The prophet Amos said it well, with the plumb line vision, Amos 7:7-15; and this is the vision of justice Jesus fulfilled with his Baptism.  In the  flow of the Jordan Watershed.  Amos 5:24: “But let mishpat roll down like waters, and sedeq like an ever-flowing stream.”

            We, each of us, can look at our own Baptisms through this lens of the justice of water flow: the uniqueness and the univocity, the mishpat and the sedeq.  For those of us Lutherans with European roots who are “native” to Northern Minnesota, i.e. whose ancestors dropped us off here within the last 100 – 150 years, what does our current adopted watershed look like?  Fairly unique for sure.  The land on which we live is near the apex of a rare “Triple Divide” that from the Ojibwe has been named “The Hill of Three Waters.”  The exact spot is a few miles north of downtown Hibbing, preserved in the middle of Hibbing Taconite mining operations, a rock as big as a house and some acres of hardwoods.  A mural by artist John Cook, 6 feet by 18 feet, hangs at Hibbing Community College.  An inscription with the mural was written by noted Native author Linda LeGarde Grover, Bois Forte Ojibwe.  She writes:

The Anishinaabeg of northern Minnesota have passed cultural teachings

 of history and worldviews down through many generations by way

 of the oral tradition.  Because life and the world were created by the

Great Spirit, there is a sacredness to all life and all places.  That sacredness

intertwines with the geological and environmental mystery of the

Hill of Three Waters site.  This place where the sky is connected to Mother

Earth through precipitation – through her life’s blood, water – showcases

an ongoing cycle of the sacredness of creation.

            From the base of the large rock that was tumbled to the site by glacial activity during the last ice age, the Hill of Three Waters springs forth the interconnection of flowage for three large watersheds that drain a great part of North America, to Hudson Bay, the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.  From the rock flowing north is the Shannon River, to the Sturgeon, to the Littlefork, to the Rainy River, into Canada and on up to Hudson Bay.  Flowing south and west is the Prairie River, to the Mississippi in Grand Rapids, and on south to the Gulf of Mexico.  Flowing south and east is Penobscot Creek to the St. Louis River, to Lake Superior and east through the Great Lakes.  Think of it: all of that living water springing forth from the depths of the earth of Northern Minnesota, everflowing on down to the sea!  John 7:38, John 4:14.

            Indigenous humans would most often travel on or along the waters, leaving pictographs as well as pottery and arrowhead evidence thousands of years old.  Ojibwe stories speak of the tribes traveling upstream from all around a large radius to meet for councils at this place of the Hill of Three Waters.  Today we acknowledge that there are remnants of the great Anishinaabeg peoples living in the traditional Three Waters Watershed, including those on the various “reservations” of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe:  Red Lake, White Earth, Leech Lake, Bois Forte, Fond du Lac, Grand Portage; and in Wisconsin: Red Cliff, Bad River, Lac du Flambeau, Lac Courte Oreilles, St. Croix; and North Dakota: Turtle Mountain; and Canada: many First Nations reserves in the northern flowing watershed.  From all of these places, the Anishinaabeg ancestors could travel upstream to the point of the sacred Triple Divide of the Hill of Three Waters. 

Today, those many springs of living water in the flowage of these watersheds have been substantially disturbed by white settler activities, including not just clear cutting of the majestic white pines, but also mining, and, in the western Missouri River flowage into the Mississippi, by oil drilling and fracking, with spills and destruction.  The Minnesota Mesabi Iron Range, the “Sleeping Giant” was disturbed from its slumber over 100 years ago.

            So now let us Upper Midwest ELCA Lutherans consider the sacrament of Baptism in the context of our story line, and to use the language of Ennes and Myers, in our landlines, bloodlines and songlines.  Let it be so now, as may be proper in this way to fulfill all sedeq.  Matt. 3:15. 

Sacrament, means of grace, Baptism of not only water for repentance but baptism by the Christ with the Holy Spirit and fire, Matt. 3:11.  Martin Luther is said to have used a mantra: “Remember Your Baptism” and put the words on a plaque in his room.  This was 500 years ago, in chronos, in chronological time.  Yet in terms of kairos, or the time of “Holy Spirit and Fire,” Luther’s words become sacramental for our present time and journey.  Luther was not merely reminding himself that he was a baptized person in the same way as the Jewish leaders of the time of the Baptizer and Jesus would seem to like to remind everyone that Abraham was their father.  In contemporary terms, one might be heard to say, “I’m baptized, I’m saved, I’m a Christian, so leave me alone.”  Luther was saying much more.  Our baptisms are not merely in chronos, but in kairos: the baptism of repentance is a full re-configuration, changing our very identity as a child of God, a child of The Way.  Through the Christ this comes with sacrament: Holy Spirit and Fire.

            We not only remember the past chronos fact that we have been baptized and therefore, yes, we in fact are “saved”; moreover, also may we join the dance, jump in the water, as we re-member the kairos future of the Way; as we re-configure who we are in the Church, the Body of Christ the Mashiach.  So, my baptism is not some sort of crystalline ball of watery chronos that I can hang from the Christmas Tree of my life’s journey, and say, “yeah, you betcha, I’m a child of Abraham, I’m a ‘Christian’ and the Church is part of my Way.”  My baptism is more: it is a captured instance of eternal kairos everflow wherein I as a member of the Body of Christ, the Way, do my part to re-member the future, put back together the univocity of my thisness, of our “thisnesses,” if you will.  This is sacrament, this is the Holy Spirit and Fire, so the Church is not part of my Way, it is The Way.  It is not a way that we find or manage, it is a Way that finds us.  We do not choose this Way; the Way chooses us.  We can only then say “yes, bring on the Holy Spirit, bring on the Fire,” and, Luke 1:28, with Mary, “let it be with us according to your word.”   

            We often tend today to participate in the Way as spectators.  We have many devices and ways to turn on and plug in and just watch.  Even with Bob Dylan, you might be inclined to say he was just sitting on the bank watching the river flow, didn’t really jump in.  Yet he really did what was his to do: he wrote about it, sang about it, allowed the Creator to create a beautiful piece of art that keeps shining light to show us the Way.  Likewise, it then is up to each of us to heed the call and jump into that river flow ourselves as it is ours to do, and to each say, “what I do is me, for this I came.”

Brothers and sisters, let us stand together in the flowing stream of our identified watershed, the

flowing stream of our own baptisms by our Lord, with not only transfiguration (repentance), but with

Holy Spirit and Fire: as Way, as Church, as Body of Christ. Let us feel the flow from that spring of living

water all around our mortal bodies, flowing from chronos to kairos; from mishpat to sedeq; from

haecceity to univocity; from remembering the fact of our baptisms to re-membering, re-membrance of

our future together as Church, as Way, as we journey together and flow towards that great shining City

of God. Amen.