The Grace of the Creek

The Grace of the Creek--September 12, 2016

"But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness." [Lamentations 3:21-23]

There is a creek that flows just alongside a road I often travel.  It is, on every occasion I see it, both always the same and never the same, simultaneously.

What I mean, on the one hand, is that the creek is a sort of landmark for me--I know its bends and falls, and how the road was cut once upon a time to follow the curve of its flow through the hollow.  Its familiarity to me is a comfort, like feeling you are home.  I know where I am when I see that modest run of water.  It is always the same that way, and whether I am at either end of the road that takes its name from that little Creek, whether I am following it out to a house I often visit or am coming back in toward town, it feels like a place I know in my bones. 

This is, by the way, one of the beautiful things about living in a place like this for enough years to get to know some of the landmarks--I know where, for example, I can expect to see bison grazing on the hillside, and where to look for horses behind a fence.  I have come to learn at which bends in the road will let me see distant hills popping up like islands from a sea of clouds on a foggy morning.  I have come to know locations and navigation in terms of who used to live at such and such a spot.  These things make for a sense of permanence, of belonging--a feeling that these hills and this creek will be always the same, like they are faithful, dependable, reliable, even.

And yet, at the very same time, I am fully aware that every time I drive along that road beside the creek, it is different water than the last time.  The rain that trickled down the slopes from somewhere off in the distance and emptied into this creek is not the same water that was in it yesterday, and in another five minutes, it will be all new water flowing through the bed of the creek.  It is, quite literally, as the old Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, no one ever steps in the same river twice. And just as true, no one ever drives along the same creek twice--it is different water every time.  So, like so many of the truly important things in life, both halves of the paradox are true: the same body of water is both ever-changing and always constant. 

And that's exactly what the hopeful voice from these few verses from Lamentations says about God as well: God is both always and forever constant, and at the same time God's mercies are "new every morning."  You cannot ever quite predict what the living God will do--the surprising curve balls of grace that welcome in the unexpected, that overturn old boundaries, that end old estrangements.  And yet, God is faithful through the surprise and through the newness, even when we couldn't see at first how God would turn out to have been faithful all along.  That means every morning, we start over in a sense.  The grace of God will be new--it will not be a duplicate of yesterday, not any more than the water that goes down a cascade resets to go down again tomorrow.  But the grace of God will be reliable, too, in a sense--God is never fickle or flighty.  And yet God's way of being reliable always leaves us thinking to ourselves, "Hmmm... I never saw that coming!"

Theologian Douglas John Hall puts it this way:

"God, as God is depicted in the continuity of the Testaments, is never quite predictable—or rather, only this is predictable about God: that God will be faithful. God's faithfulness, however, is not to be equated with our idea of consistent behavior!"  God is like the creek: always the same, and yet always doing something new that is likely to surprise us or catch us off guard if we are not watching.

Today, instead of expecting God to duplicate what yesterday was like, let's allow God to surprise us.  We will find comfort and encouragement in the awareness that God will keep being faithful, but we will also be ready for God to do something that is entirely new.

How can you and I be ready today for the surprises of God?

Lord God, be your own faithful self, and let us be drawn in to the new thing  you are doing today.