John Thomas: 'Come to the Waters' - United Church of Christ (2024)

The streets of Accra, the capital city of Ghana in West Africa, are choked with traffic, cars, trucks, and busses often marking their progress in yards per minute rather than miles per hour. Taking advantage of this excruciatingly slow pace are legions of vendors who transform the city boulevards into one mass open air market. Entrepreneurs walk between the lanes of traffic selling food, souvenirs, clothing, automotive parts, cassettes and cd’s, bulk bags of toilet paper. Almost anything is available. One day I watched a man walking between the cars with two irons and an ironing board for sale! No need to drive to the store in Ghana. The store comes to you!

A young girl, perhaps ten years old, caught my attention one day last August during the General Council meeting of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. She was wearing a tattered dress and simple rubber sandals. On her head was an enormous plastic bowl filled to near overflowing with little bags of drinking water she was selling for a few coins. Her quest at the moment was an arm reaching out the window of a small, crowded bus ahead of her. She would jog toward it on the hot, dusty road, carefully balancing the bowl, just about reaching the outstretched hand only to have the bus lurch forward, the coins out of her reach, the water out of the grasp of the man on the bus. This pursuit went on and on, a frenetic and increasingly futile dance nearly ending in frustrated disappointment when, finally, after almost giving up, she caught the bus in one last dash, made the sale, and turned with a victorious smile on her face.

“Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters, and you that have no money, come buy and eat.” Like the clamor of modern day Accra, Isaiah’s prophetic voice echoes through the market place of ancient and alien Babylon, a word of hope to weary exiles thirsty for their homes, their heritage, their holy hill of Zion. Tired of singing the Lord’s song in a strange land, voices parched, the prophet’s cry blends metaphors of taste and sound: “Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live, that you may have abundant life.” Tonight is it too much for us to imagine the ancient prophet of Israel’s exile in the guise of a little girl offering the refreshment of a small bag of clean water in exchange for the few coins that might sustain her family? And might we even imagine ourselves jammed like weary travelers on a bus, waiting, waiting, waiting for a place, a destination called home?

There will be times in these next days when General Synod will feel like an endless bus ride, bumping along a jarring route through worship and committees and sponsored meals and community groups and plenaries with Jack at the wheel and Edith calling out the stops. You have already discovered that the seats are about as comfortable as the hard plastic on the commuter local, and sized for children rather than well fed UCC delegates! But a bus can be more than an amusing image for those who come to visit the Southeast Conference. Here the bus is a vivid memory of oppression, “back of the bus” a painful reminder for the children of exiles from places not far from Accra, and where sister Rosa’s ear, attuned to the prophet’s voice, simply sat down and refused to move, an act of resistance that ignited a pilgrimage as stirring as those Babylonian exiles’ journey home to Zion. Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters. Rosa and all your children. The prophet’s word chases us down, a word as persistent as a young girl selling water, a word that will not return empty, but accomplishing that which God promises, succeeding in the things for which God sends it. “Come to the waters. Come!”

So here we are on this UCC church bus, collected from Conferences and constituencies across the land, bound for the strangest Vacation Bible School you could ever imagine. The veterans on this bus, those who’ve been here Synod after Synod, will tell you they know exactly where we’re headed. They will predict the speeches and the votes, the victories and the defeats. The agenda is set in ways as ideological as those “other Christians” whose agendas we easily deride. This resolution will pass, this will fail. Listen they will tell you. This is the UCC bus, bound for our own version of glory. Get on board. Look through the windows: people all sitting politely, hands folded, heads forward. No talking out of turn. Got to get there.

Is there a prophet’s voice, a little girl to startle us out of our certainties. Listen carefully. Incline your ear. Come to me. Have you ever watched the people on a bus when it makes an unscheduled stop or turns off the established route? Sagging heads come alert, drooping eyelids open wide, a look of consternation, confusion, yet perhaps, dare we say, new possibility? “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways as my ways.” Rosa stopped a bus and started a movement in Montgomery. Listen for the prophet’s voice this week, the little girl with an outstretched gift of water we may not even know we need, teaching us thoughts we never thought before. “Come to the waters. Come!”

Some have arrived here in Atlanta convinced that we’re on a runaway bus. Like the movie “Speed,” this bus they tell us is perversely rigged with volatile explosives for almost inevitable destruction, its passengers trapped. This General Synod bus, they are convinced, has win-lose written on the rolling destination sign on the front and along the side. Marriage resolutions. Economic leverage resolutions. Ministry pronouncements. One man, one woman, marriage for all. Divest. Engage. Invest. Jewish neighbors? Palestinian partners? Who’s your best friend? Learned ministry? Multiple paths. Can both coexist? Rarely have we entered a General Synod with such high anxiety, the prophets of doom drowning out Second Isaiah’s words of “Comfort, comfort.” Remember how he began? “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of our God stands forever.” Listen for the prophet’s voice this week, the little girl chasing this careening bus like the hound of heaven with a word, a reminder: “See, I will make you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.” Covenant. Not just our word, our concept, our vexing polity with its bonds that appear so fragile, so ethereal. No, it is my covenant says the prophet, chasing us down with a love that is steadfast and sure when everything we hope for in this church threatens to wither and fade. “Come to the waters. Come!”

And lest we grow self-indulgent, let us remember how the world views our bus, our homeland, the nation whose birth we will celebrate here on Monday. The world sees us as a dangerous bus with imperial designs consuming the creation with its gas guzzling, resource hoarding, voracious appetite. Its no longer enough to tell our partners that we really didn’t know our national bus was taking this reckless and foolish route, that we didn’t really pick the driver. We speed along, tinted windows blurring the poverty outside, and the mayhem of our war on terror, the air conditioning up full so that we need not feel the heat of our oppressiveness. Cherished young men and women die, Christian, Jew, Muslim, American and Arab. Prisoners are abused, a nation is broken, another nation is shamed. Lies and arrogance are tolerated and in our fear and for our security ghastly things are done in our name. Some of us are old enough to remember another time, when Pete Seeger sang, “we’re waist deep in the muddy water, and the big fool says to push on.” Can this Synod crack the windows open enough to reach out into a teeming world where the prophet’s child-like hand, itself scorched by searing poverty, offers water to quench our despondent spirits and revive weary souls with courage, evangelical courage? Listen: “Seek the Lord while God may be found, call while God is near. Let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts, let them, let us return to the Lord, for mercy and abundant pardon.” “Come to the waters. Come!”

The girl was poor. She couldn’t afford school fees or even the ubiquitous brown school uniform. She spent her days chasing busses for a few coins rather than playing in the schoolyard. Second Isaiah puts it well in those haunting Servant Songs of his, songs hinting at another one to come as living water:

She had no form or majesty that we should look at her,
nothing in her appearance that we should desire her.
She was despised and rejected by others,
a girl of suffering and acquainted with infirmity.
She was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities;
upon her was the punishment that made us whole,
and by her bruises we are healed.

She is, this prophet, the image of the Christ, the Crucified, giving himself as living water to all who reach out to receive it. Rain and snow that does not return until it has watered the earth. A Word, stillspeaking, “that shall not return empty, but which shall accomplish God’s purpose and succeed in the thing for which God sent it.” Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters. Come.