Where the Water Flows From--June 25, 2021

Where the Water Flows From--June 25, 2021

"It is beyond dispute that the inferior is blessed by the superior. In the one case, tithes are received by those who are mortal; in the other, by one of whom it is testified that he lives. One might even say that Levi himself, who receives tithes, paid tithes through Abraham, for he was still in the loins of his ancestor when Melchizedek met him." [Hebrews 7:7-10]

Water flows downhill. Everybody knows that, right?  Everybody knows that water moves from the higher ground to the lower ground, just as part of the rules of physics.  So if you found yourself plopped down alongside a creek you had never seen before and someone asked you to figure out which way was the higher ground, even if the terrain looked roughly level to your eyes, you would be able to tell by the direction of the water flowing in the creek.  It always moves from the higher spot to the lower spot.  Once you know that, you can figure out your bearings.

Blessing is like that.  It flows like a river, from wellsprings of abundance to places where it is most needed.  It moves from a source toward the thirsty lowlands and parched souls that need it.  Blessing flows, in a manner of speaking, from high ground to wherever is downhill.  In other words, you never find a Bible story where God is all tired out and needs a recharge, like Popeye in search of a can of spinach, and then seeks out worshipers to offer blessings and to power the divine back up again.  God is not an internal combustion engine--God doesn't need to keep getting refueled by the piety or prayers of people.

So, much like our little thought experiment about an unfamiliar creek, if you happened upon a story where two unknown characters were present, and you didn't know their relative status or relationships to one another, but then one blessed the other, you could figure something out.  The "greater" offers blessing to the "lesser," as the writer of Hebrews frames it.  Blessing seeks the places where it is most needed, in other words--where it is most lacking.  You can't hoard blessing, and you can't hold it back as your personal possession, either.  It moves, like grace and like rain water, through your fingers when you try to control it.

With that in mind, the writer of Hebrews applies that same thinking to the story of Abraham and the mysterious figure of Melchizedek whom we've been talking about lately.  And in the one scene in the whole Bible where Melchizedek appears, he is named as a "priest of God Most High" who offers a blessing to Abraham, the patriarch of all the future tribes that would come to call themselves Israel. So, who's the "greater" of these two?  This passage from Hebrews says, basically, "Trace the flow of the blessing to its source--the greater blesses the lesser, like water flowing from high ground to the valley.  Melchizedek is the greater, and even our great ancestor father Abraham is aware that he himself is the one in the position to receive blessing from this curious figure who emerges for just one story.

All of this is part of our author's way of making it clear that we're not settling for something less by placing our faith--and all of our chips, so to speak--on Jesus.  For the early Christians who saw that following Jesus meant moving beyond the religious systems they were used to, and the way those systems helped them to make sense of their world, it was kind of scary to imagine leaving behind what they knew.  Confessing Jesus as Son of God and Messiah meant acknowledging that they could connect with God apart from the whole set-up of temples and sacrifices and priests who worked in the temples and offered the sacrifices... and if that's all you had known all your life, it would seem frightening and disorienting to think of leaving those things behind.  And quite likely, you'd be wrestling from time to time with doubts about whether the whole system of temples and sacrifices and priests was more solid, more dependable, and more reliable than the scandalous message of a God who saves the world by dying for it as one of us, without any of the usual accessories of religion.

These words from the author of Hebrews are meant to assure us that placing your trust in Jesus isn't somehow settling for some cheap knock-off of some true divinely-endorsed religion and all its priestly trappings.  Jesus can be a priest--an intermediary for us between God and human beings--without coming from the family line of Levi, the same way that Melchizedek was a priest without being in that family line either.  And in case anybody wondered whether that still meant settling for a counterfeit or a "lesser" intercessor, our author has gone to great lengths here to make the case for saying that Melchizedek was greater than Abraham, and therefore than Abe's great-grandson Levi, and also therefore all of the descendants of Levi who became generations of priests.  In other words, with Jesus, you're not settling for less--you're moving from the creek to the spring that feeds it.

For us, the question may look a little different, but it's still there.  You probably don't lose sleep at night worrying whether you should be presenting more goats or pigeons to a local levitical priest just to hedge your bets in case it turns out Jesus isn't the real McCoy.  But sometimes we do have to trust that Jesus is really enough, apart from our shows of piety or our practice of being respectably religious.  Sometimes we do have to trust that Jesus is enough, even without the trappings of institutions and liturgies and church-life.  Jesus, and not organs or praise bands, not candles or video screens, not bishops or councils or elders or committees, not vestments or altar calls, is enough.  If the idea of living in the way of Jesus without those other things seems scary, ok, fair enough, let's name that and own it.  But don't worry that you're settling for less if you only have Jesus and end up losing the rest.  Jesus is the spring where the rest of the water comes from.

Lord Jesus, help us to trust you... and to trust that you are enough.