“If we were logical, the future would be bleak, indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope.” (Jacques Cousteau)
“Deep waters call out to what is deeper still; at the roar of your waterfalls all your breakers and your waves swirl over me.” (Psalm 42:7)
"For You had cast me into the deep, Into the heart of the seas, And the current engulfed me. All Your breakers and billows passed over me.” (Jonah 2:3)
“When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, ‘Now go out where it is deeper, and let down your nets to catch some fish.’" (Luke 5:4)
“To know deep, lasting joy, we have to truly know Christ.” (1 John 1:1-4)
[Show moving photos or video footage of the undersea world. You could also begin by having people listen to the sound of a conch shell.]
[Hold up the conch shell to your ear.]
The sea. There’s something so calming and yet powerful about the sea.
One of my favorite places is the ocean. Any of you agree? How many of you just love to be at the ocean?
It’s one of those places that just seems to call us home, isn’t it? There’s a lure to the sea. Even if you are the fisherman or fisherwoman casting a lure of your own, there’s something about the sea that lures you in as well, that keeps you coming. British poet David Sutton puts the allure like this: “the music of not going anywhere,/that waves make against the sand.”
I want you to listen for a moment….you can almost hear it, can’t you? The tide of the sea? The music of the waves? It pulls you in, and then casts you forward again. Pulls you in, and casts you forth. The “music” of back and forth, the “music” of a swing or hammock.
Today, there are all kinds of shows about the sea. One of my favorite things to watch growing up was Jacques Cousteau. Does anyone remember Jacques Cousteau?
He was a Frenchman, an ocean pioneer, who loved the mysteries of the sea. He loved to dive down deep, exploring the terrain and the life down deep where no one else could see, taking film of those unreachable places, and bringing those visions back for all of us to see. He inspired his son, Jean-Michel Cousteau, who took his father’s mantle when he died in 1997.
It was always exciting when Jacques Cousteau went on yet another voyage. That meant soon there would be a tv special with those glorious moving pictures of the undersea world.
The sea looked like a landscape, a vast terrain much like ours above, with mountain ranges and valleys, foliage and creatures that roamed its vegetation. And yet, it was foreign, strange, an unknown, sometimes murky place, where anything could happen.
To dive that deep was at huge risk. But Cousteau loved every moment with a passion that was contagious.
He described it like this: “In the deep space of the sea I have found my moon.” One of those he inspired, contemporary film director James Cameron, also explores undersea worlds and dove to even deeper sites, including the deepest point on earth, the Mariana Trench Challenger Deep. Cameron says too that “the deepest valley of the sea looks as bleak and desolate as the lunar surface.” Cameron describes a strange feeling of being isolated from all humanity, and in a completely unknown place of solitude, and complete darkness. It was, he confesses, a foreign and unusual place.
The deep.
Lonely, somewhat frightening. The experience left Cameron off-kilter, and changed.
And yet, a voice inside him drove him downward, saying, “go deep, go deeper still.” Go to the deepest place. That lure, that powerful call of the sea….kept him coming back to go deeper still.
And to spend more time in that deepest place on earth.
The Deep has always fascinated us. For Jesus’ contemporaries too, and those before him, the deep was that mysterious, unnerving place, where sea monsters resided, where Leviathan waited, where the origin of all things could pull you into the never-ending void of existence. The depths of the sea were where ghosts of where shipwrecks lay, where the dead cried out, where there lurked creatures and places that only a primeval fish could reach, where God’s womb began.
The deep was a place where you didn’t want to go.
And yet the sea calls us.
The truth is, most of us never explore that undersea world. Decks and docks are about how far we are willing to go. We may step a foot into the shallows. But to take that dive into the deep feels life-threatening, a breath-taking experience we are not sure we want to take.
Sure, many of us try some undersea diving. But there’s a limit to how far we want to go.
Most of us are content to be splashers and waders, sand dwellers and sea surfers, people who live in the shallows.
You know by now, of course, we’re not talking about the sea anymore….
There’s a place God calls you, deep within. You’ve all heard that voice, beckoning and calling, “Come to me…” [you may invite them to finish the sentence…..”all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.”]
Jesus calls you….into relationship…..into love….into prayer….into discipleship. Go Deep, he calls you. Go deeper still.
Go to that place in prayer, in worship, in your heart, where only God resides, where Jesus waits. Go to that place where your mind stops racing, and your will stops fighting, and your doubt doubts itself to the point where you can’t argue the vastness of God’s presence and power.
Go to that place in your life where Jesus stands waiting, where your mistakes are drowned in mercy, where God’s love is more abundant than sand, and your faith multiplies faster than the fish in the sea.
Go deep, and deeper still…..where the calm washes over you like waves, where your burdens release and fall away like unnecessary clothing, where your soul sings in the vast richness that is God’s resonant Spirit.
Go deep into prayer. Go deep into faith. Go deeper still. Where you see God, and God sees you, and you know that “Your Redeemer Lives.”
It takes courage to go this deep. It takes daring to go into the depths --up to your neck and over your head, tumbling into the waves of uncharted faith. To let go of plans, to release your grip of anchors, to step off the rocks with your feet firmly on the shore, to trust the currents of the Spirit to carry you into the arms of God, the unknown depths of divine mystery, where nothing is certain but grace and your lifeboat is a person, the person of Jesus.
It takes both risk and trust to allow your fins to carry you far, farther than you’ve gone before into deep, deep faith.
And still that voice in your heart cries out for God: “Go Deep; Go Deeper Still.”
Deep faith requires deep prayer. Prayer is that vessel that takes you deeper into relationship with Jesus, deeper into a relationship that is based not in fact but in faith, not in curiosity but wonder, not in the knowledge of life but the unknown mysteries of God. Prayer drives you into the arms of God, into the depths where your mind is no longer in control, and your heart knows Jesus. Deep prayer is that whale’s belly of longing for God, the place in us that remembers…. God …… the spirit in us that needs….God.
And yet deep prayer requires deep faith, that driving courage to leave the known behind, to open your eyes to know those deep, deep places of the heart, to enter into an unknown place of no return.
For The Deep will change you. Once you enter The Deep, you can no longer be content to live in the shallows. From then on, that voice of Jesus will call you.
Go Deep. Jesus is calling you: Be with me, love with me, see me, hear me, touch me, know me. Go Deep. Go Deeper Still.
Today, we read in scripture about the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, marked by a baptism. And in that baptism of Jesus, as he went down into the water, and rose out of it again, a voice was heard…..a light, brilliant and white, was present….shimmering above him like a fluttering dove….speaking, affirming. “This is my son, who brings me great pleasure.”
Baptism for Jesus was not an initiation but a confirmation, an affirmation of His inexplicable, inexplorable, incarnational relationship with God. When Jesus rose from the deep, it was as though God’s voice spoke from that primal place, declaring His presence in the world, declaring His mission begun…..to call us to Him, to send us forth. To call us to Him. And to send us forth.
Baptism is that first dive into “deep faith,” a vastness of space into which we have no idea where we are going, and what we will become when we emerge. But this much we know --the act of submersion will change us. When we resurface, we will be a new creature, half of the sea, half of the land, a new kind of human with Spirit infused, the Holy Spirit of Jesus, who calls us in, and sends us forth –into the world.
To be the lure. To voice the music.
To call others….to go Deep.
And then . . .
Go Deeper Still.
[Optional Prayer]:
O God, who created the heavens and the earth, for whom nothing that is apart from you, and who mends all the tears in the canvas of creation, we bless you.
We thank you for the promise that nothing in all creation can keep us from your love, even while we confess that that love is so often a stranger to us and that our lives are more often characterized by anxiety than by the courage to enter the deep caverns of creation and of your love’s mysterious shadows.
We mostly live in the shallows, and for that we are relieved the burden of constant darkness – our greatest fear that the sense that our very being is under threat. And sometimes we find ourselves in water too deep, where your presence is marked by an absence, and our presence is marked by our own nightmares, the storehouses of forgotten memories and open wounds that recoil at your gracious promise of healing and redemption. Thank you that even the darkness is not dark to you.
Give us a candle of your Spirit, O God of the depths, as we encounter and are encountered by the deeps of creation’s being, that these might be for us the spring of new life, and that our service in your name might bear witness to the profound depths that you have traversed and continue to transverse in Jesus Christ. Amen.
--Theologian Catherine Keller
Based on the Story Lectionary
Major Text
The Story of Noah (Genesis 5-8)
Minor Text
The Story of Creation (Genesis 1)
The Song of Moses (Deuteronomy 32)
Psalm 1: The Two Ways
Psalm 2: The Father and the Son
Psalm 98: The Lord’s Salvation
Psalm 145: God the King
Psalm 148: Praise the Lord of the Heavens and Earth
The Joy of the Redeemed / The Lord Will Save Through His Servant Son (Isaiah 35; 40; 42; 43; 44)
God Will Redeem the Righteous (Isaiah 57)
The Righteous Branch Will Come, the Lord’s Salvation (Jeremiah 23; 31)
The Lord is Israel’s Shepherd (Ezekiel 34)
The Messenger of the Covenant is Coming (Malachi 3)
Jesus’ Baptism and the Sign of the Messiah (Matthew 3; Mark 1:1-11; John 1:1-34)
The Story of God’s Vision to Cornelius, Peter’s Vision of the Net, and the Holy Spirit’s Blessing of the Gentiles (Acts 10)
[Read Genesis 5-8: The Story of Noah. I will not print it here due to space. You may also in addition want to read the story of Jesus’ baptism from John.]
Image Exegesis: The Redemption Box / From Out of the Deep
The story of Noah is a story of water. Deep and pervading water. But it’s also a story of life. It’s a story of a kind of nesting within the watery deep in a life-saving coffin for an undetermined amount of time. It’s the story of rising out of the water, emerging from that cypress box, and into a new kind of life when the time comes to do so. It’s most of all a story of faith. Deep faith.
Springs of the deep and floodgates of heaven: these are the sources of the primal watery abyss that incubates creation. In the Noah story there are rains that fell and the earth was covered in the watery “deep” –all of this sounds much like God’s original creation plan, now Creation 2.0. In fact, we are given a kind of “review” of Genesis 2 in Genesis 5:2: “He named them “adamah.” Later, in Genesis 8, like adam and eve before him, Ham mocks his father’s “nakedness” and future generations are cursed (Canaan). Noah is a “man of the soil” and goes on to plant a vineyard (a metaphor for God’s people). Unlike Cain before him, Noah “walks with God” in God’s vineyard and does not pursue life for his own purposes.
God saves Noah and his family because of their trust in God and faith in God’s promise. In a sense, God saves the Noah family because of their “potential.” Pregnant potential, one might even say.
The Lord shut Noah and his family in the box for the duration. After that time, the ark’s passengers emerge from the watery deep ready to repopulate the earth with faith-bearing, life-bearing, God-fearing creatures. The animals collected, as well as Noah’s family step, into the ark two by two. But they emerge from the ark in “families” (Genesis 8:19).
Metamorphosis, growth, germination, coitus: The metaphor of the ark is one of womb, and one of tomb.
Like baptism, the metaphor of the sea in all of the scriptural stories is a death to life story, a metamorphosis story, in which you descend into the “deep” womb and emerge another kind of creature, to live a new life in a new way and in a new relationship with Jesus.
One of the best examples of this in archaic form is the story of Noah.
The word used in the Torah for ark is tebah (or tevah), a word so ancient that scholars really don’t know its exact derivation or to what language it originally belonged.**
What we do know is that the word seemed to represent an oblong kind of box, capable of floating (not used for sailing). Although the gopher wood (cypress most likely) was used in shipbuilding, it was also used for creating coffins (Athens) and sarcophagi (Egypt). It was a death box, but also a “life-saving box” for these cultures, particularly in Egypt.
The “rooms” within the ark were literally called “nests,” kinnim. The pitch (common especially in Assyria and in Egypt) made the box water tight and protected it from damage and mold as well. The cedar type wood would have kept out insects and guarded against the smell of decay and animal smells.
The most interesting and nearest examples of the ancient tebah seem to come from both Egyptian and Assyrian funerary boxes, which in their mind was a transport to life. The tebah therefore was a “life preserver.”
In fact, even in these funerary boxes, there was a “door” in the back of it, much as in the description of the ark Noah was commanded to build.
A similar description is found in Exodus in the building of the basket for Moses, in which it is also covered in pitch to keep out the water. Moses floats in a sense down river in a kind of “sarcophagus.” And yet this tomb will be his “lifesaver”….his transport to new life, ---and a new mission and relationship with God. This is also the word tebah.
The word tebah is found only one more place in scripture: in Exodus 2:3-5, in which Moses is placed into a box/basket which is then covered in protective pitch and cast into the Nile, later to be lifted out into a new life and new place by the Egyptian princess. This new life becomes not just a life but a mission for God. Moses was “born into” or commissioned, baptized if you will into God’s mission.***
Like Jonah, both Noah and Moses are “encased in God’s care,” folded within the arms of God if you will….and in the womb of God….within the deep (the primal seas of creation), out of which God’s creative incarnation emerges.
It is God who creates, and God who gives life. It is God who initiates for mission, and God who both calls in and casts out. These are all stories of the sovereignty of God –as is baptism.
Chasidic teaching emphasizes the metaphorical meaning of the ark. The pitch was said to “cover them” which represented a pardon for sins. The door inside of the ark symbolized repentance. One needs to pass through the narrow door in order to enter into God’s care. (See Luke 13:24-25) Likewise, pitch was used as a word for atonement (a sealing out of evil).
Most interesting is that in Rabbinic Hebrew, tebah also means “word.” Tevah or tebah therefore are the words of prayer which have the ability to keep one afloat, to raise one up above the waters of chaos.*** Like Jonah who is “encased” inside a womb-like whale of God’s doing, Moses and Noah too are encased inside of a “womb-like” box, which serves as an incubation kind of place. In time, they will all emerge in order to go forward into a new covenant relationship with God. But the Jonah story does not use the word “tebah,” but instead “belly” of a great fish, a symbol of the primal deep (the Leviathan).
The ”tevah” in Chasidic teaching is also equated with prayer, which has the ability to keep one afloat and to raise one up above the waters of chaos. The entering through “the narrow door” of repentance brings one into God’s holy place (note Luke 13:24-25: you strive to enter through the narrow door…..before it shuts).^
In early Egypt, the afterlife was also indicated by the building of a sarcophagus (and ark of safety from eternal destruction), which would transport one into life. The idea of tomb/life is an ancient one and may have influenced the idea too of the tebah. We are not meant to remain in the box, but to change within it, and to re-emerge. The word “sarcophagus” in fact is used in the Moses story as told in the Muslim scriptures.^^ Some Egyptian sarcophagi in fact in ancient times were floaters (kinds of floating boats) which would carry the king into the afterlife. This is the closest definition of “tebah.” For the Egyptians, death was a temporary interruption.
Like the hull of a seed which also protects the life-giving elements inside, this box is in a sense more organic than we imagine when we think of the ark.
Also inherent in this theology is the metaphor of the fish. Jonah son of Nun (meaning fish) and Noah (whose root means fish) are both experiencing the primal Creator God. The idea of procreation, sexuality, water, and birthing are inherent in this metaphor, as well as in baptism. The bearing of fruit……also in Jesus’ theology comes from this primal metaphor, this primal command to fill the earth with God’s people.
Baptism is a kind of regeneration. It is an invitation to incarnation through initiation.
Baptism is an ark of faith, a seal or promise of covenant.
And it confirms that dive into the deep, a new and deeper relationship within the “wings” of the shekinah, the Holy Spirit. In Baptism, we are permitted to stand within the presence of God, the living water (Jesus).
Jesus is your lifeboat.
Water, the deep is both friend and foe. When flood waters hit and you feel you’re over your head, and as you are drowning, Jesus, the “ark” of salvation saves you. You’d best grab on and hold onto Him.
At the same time, diving into the deep……is a way of deepening faith through the waters of baptism, which both affirm God’s sovereignty, and our willingness to mission.
But like the tides of the sea, we submerge, and then emerge…..we are called to the deep, and then sent out to emergence to proclaim His glory.
There are many “through the water” stories in scripture, many “birthing” stories. But “I am the resurrection and the life” cannot be disputed as the primal and yet new ark.
Creation’s dark and formless depths can indicate not mere chaos but deep prayer, deep Christology, deep faith. Like Jesus’ encounter with his disciples on the sea, Jesus is indicated as the “ark” of the deep.
---
+The wind (Spirit) causes the waters to recede. For more on the wind/voice/Holy Spirit, see the story sermons for Pentecost. Other interesting metaphors in this scripture are the lifeblood, rainbow, dove and raven, vineyard, and olive leaf, adama (earth), and living water, among others. For an interesting idea on the deep as “not a beast to be tamed but a mystery to be embraced,” see Catherine Keller: Face of the Deep.
++A second note: in marketing, “deep metaphor” is indicated as an emotionally and unconsciously powerful metaphor which becomes a powerful predictor of how customers react and think. It’s a transformative metaphor with the power to drive human behavior. In the scriptures, we might describe the ark and the deep as “deep metaphors” as well, especially as related to baptism.
*For more on the metaphor of the dove in Jesus’ baptism in the gospels as related to the Holy Spirit and God’s anointing guidance and with connections to Noah and Jonah (God’s messenger), see “The Sign of the Dove,” Story Sermon and Image Exegesis from May 24, 2015.
**Ellicott’s Commentary. Some attribute the word to the Chaldeans, a maritime people. Others think it is an Egyptian or Assyrian word, as these societies created such “boxes” with cypress and pitch (bitumen) and were skilled in carpentry. King Tut’s coffin was made of cypress in fact, adorned with olive leaves (remind you of Noah?), and covered with thick black pitch to preserve it. See also “Church of England Magazine,” vol 9 and “The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, and Assyrians” by Charles Rollins.
***Torah Club; chaimbentorah.com.
^Rabbi Yisroel Ben Eliezern an 18th century rabbi and master of Hebrew suggests this metaphorical reading of the ark as relational. See chaim ben torah.com. Likewise, we enter into Christ (our living tebah) through the Word (John), as our image of salvation. In John Noble Wilford, “Early Pharoah’s Ghostly Fleet” (Oct 3, 2000), archaologists excavate the hull of a boat from ancient Egypt, finding that a King has been entombed within the floating sarcophagus for his eternal journey into the afterlife, acknowledging that some of these early tombs were also floaters!
^^See Muslim’s Tales by F.M. Mossa in which he calls Moses Basket a “floating wooden sarcophagus.”