River Road

Pastor's Page, November 13, 2007

When I was a child, we had a cabin near a river, the Nooksack by name. It was in Northern Washington, just shy of the Canadian border at a Baptist summer camp. There were private cabins on church property up above the camp, and my folks owned one, and leased the property at a nominal fee from the local Baptist association. The cabin was across the Mount Baker Highway from the Nooksack, and you had to walk through some bottom-land to get to it—millennially eroded rocks and gravel ground—but when you got to the river, it was worth it, a classic Northwest river, rushing headlong out of the Cascade Mountains toward the sea. In the Fall and Winter it runs shallow and clear; you can see the bottom, and wade across it if you dare, but in the Spring it’s a stream of a different color. In the Spring, the snow packs that feed it melt, and it turns a muddy green, and becomes dangerous and wild, its boulders grinding and cracking and tumbling downstream. Only the craziest would even think about wading it then; even so, most years it claims a life or two.

It was wild at the time I knew it, and it may be still: it hadn’t been dammed or rip-rapped or contained in any way, and every year when we went there it was different, because that’s the nature of a river. It pulverizes its banks with silt and sand and gravel and trees, and as it does, it moves, sometimes to the tune of feet per year. If you were to take satellite photos at the same time every year, and you string them back to back and run them in a loop, I’m sure you’d see the river, undulating like a snake within its valley, up- and down-stream, and from side to side. Because that’s the nature of a river, it changes from year to year, from decade to decade, from lifetime to lifetime.

And yet . . . it remains the same, as well. The water always tumbles toward the ocean, the Spring always brings floods and the Fall, hordes of steelhead fishermen. There is an overall rhythm to its change, an overall organizing principle. Jean Renoir’s The River makes that point beautifully, as it charts the lives of a several families on the banks of the Ganges River, sacred to the Hindu people. It’s overwhelmingly beautiful movie that views the river as a metaphor for life, changing yet ever-flowing, different and yet the same.

And of course, the Christian life is like that—the overall rhythm repeats, Sunday worship after Sunday worship. The Sundays in themselves are ordered by the seasons: Advent, Christmas and Lent . . . Easter, Pentecost and Ordinary time, over and over again. And yet, new challenges arise daily, in the lives of its members and the congregation as a whole. The community changes daily, the country changes daily, as does the world surrounding all of us. As this Advent approaches, may God bless you and keep you as we bob along on the river of life.