“The Fountain of Life”
God as a cure for the barrenness of life
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, January 25, 2004
Text: Psalm 36
Very often, over a period of time your memory becomes so clouded that you forget certain things that hitherto were important - images that struck you in the past, but are forgotten in the present.
Last week I was in Sloane Square in London, somewhere I hadn't been for a long, long time. As I was sitting on a bench with Marial in the middle of the square, I looked at the wonderful fountain and watched all the birds come to bathe in it, and at lunchtime people brought out their sandwiches and enjoyed sitting by it in the plus-10 degree weather - a nice, crisp winter day.
While gazing at that fountain, I remembered that when I'd gone on school trips as a young boy, we used to visit many of the places that had great architecture, and one of the central features of so many cities was the fountain. There's something about fountains. They are not only beautiful adornments, they also have a social role to play. They reflect the culture of the city around them. Who, for example, could go to Rome and not see any of Bernini's great fountains: the del Tritone or the delle Api or perhaps the most powerful and memorable of all, the Trevi fountain, immortalized in Fellini's La Dolce Vita? Who could not think of that fountain after having seen the movie? It is indeed synonymous with Rome.
Who could think of St. Petersburg without thinking of Samson's magnificent fountain in the Peterhoff - a city that has more than 150 fountains and has become an example of what fountains can do to create a sense of awe, majesty and history. Even in our own city, does not the fact that Nathan Phillips Square has a fountain transform it from a barren, cold and austere place into a place where people gather, where they will take their sandwiches, where they will take their families, a place of warmth?
Fountains have an important impact on cities. They have a cultural role to play. A fountain is more than what the dictionary says: a spring of water. Who would call the Trevi a tap? It's a fountain! And because it's a fountain it speaks of the power of being unique and special. What really makes fountains so glorious is that they bring beauty to a city. They are a place around which people gather, share a meal, meet other people. A fountain can be a place that is a the centre of things, a place that draws others in. A fountain is a place that reminds us of the power of water and the energy and the life that comes from flowing water - something that has intrigued human beings from the dawn of time.
Fountains, then, have a profound symbolism. In our psalm this morning there is a wonderful phrase in the middle: “For with you is the fountain of life...” The psalmist, in other words, is thinking of God as being synonymous with a fountain. Now, of course, hundreds of years before the birth of Christ the psalmist was probably not thinking of something as elaborate as Trevi or something as powerful as what we have in Nathan Phillips Square, but they were thinking of something that was a source of life, something that brought people together. What the psalmist is really saying is that God can be thought of as a place where people come together. God is the centre of things. God is the source of life.
William Robinson, a famous Australian artist, painted a magnificent, modern picture of the “Creation landscape of the world.” You will find it in the Art Gallery of Australia. Seeing it in a magazine, I was astonished by the centre of the painting: a glorious fountain with water pouring out, and from that source, all other aspects of creation are nourished. The fountain is the source of life. Water is the very thing that gives it energy. Without the fountain of life, creation itself would not exist.
The psalmist is thinking about God in such terms: that God is not only the centre but is also the fountain of life from which all good things come and through which creation is sustained. What we find in Psalm 36 is more than just a statement that God is the fountain of life. It also makes a contrast on one hand between the barrenness of life without God, and on the other hand the river, the flowing power of God that gives energy and life.
But the psalmist begins with very dark words, very dry, arid words, words that speak of the barrenness of life if there is no sense of God.
In many ways what the psalmist is doing is reflecting the reality that many people experience in their lives, the barrenness of existence if there is no God at the heart of it. He begins by speaking of an attitude in general towards God that is the source of the dryness and barrenness. The psalmist says that the first characteristic of people with barren lives is that they have no fear of God. Now, as you know, many times I have spoken on the fear of God from this pulpit and it is not fear defined by terror but awe.
In other words, the barren life has no sense of awe before God, no sense of God's presence, no understanding or appreciation for God's reality - simply living life as if God is not a part of it. But the barren life manifests that sense of rejecting God in people who are self-flatterers (I love that term in the King James version). Those people who strut around thinking that they are better than they really are. Self-flatterers who wake up in the morning and say, “My gosh, it's good to be me.” Self-flatterers who cannot see the sin they commit because they're always telling themselves that they are perfect. The self-flatterer wakes up and says not only aren't I great, but also that I'm not going to do anything wrong.
Self-flatterers however, are so consumed with themselves, so dry and unaware of the realities of life that they also become hateful. They become spiteful. The psalmist tells us, and it sounds like something from a Shakespearean play, that the self-flatterer lies in bed planning evil, planning deceit, planning how to make life miserable for others. The dry person, the barren person lies awake at night not worried about the state of the world, not consumed by the problems of humanity, not beset by poverty, but fulfilled only in their desire to climb above every other rotten person that exists.
The barren life plots and schemes. The barren life also - and this is the heart of it - does not understand evil and is not frightened by it. The barren life then, has no perspective. People with barren lives live as if there is no command on them, no demand by God for them to live a richer, better or purer life. They are consumed, self-flattering, hateful, lying awake at night seeking the destruction of others, with no concept of good or evil. They are barren and dry in their hearts and they are dust - and they're deadly. The person who has no fear of God, who has no worries about evil, is dangerous.
I always like to read statistics about what is happening in our environment. As you know, I've said many times that I'm worried about the state of the natural world, and we all should be. But one statistic stood out in the light of what has been going on in Africa over the last 10 years. On top of all the starvation and problems that Africa has been having, particularly in sub-Sahara Africa, in Mozambique and in Zimbabwe and Botswana there have been terrible droughts. I was reading that from 1991 to 2001, 11 per cent of all natural disasters were a result of drought. More than 280,000 people have died directly as a result of starvation due to drought. Never mind all of those who have contracted illnesses because of a lack of water, this is simply those who have died because of drought.
Drought has become very serious. The deserts in Africa are growing. The water levels in many places around the world are rising but there is an imbalance in the ecosystem and droughts are going to occur more frequently as deserts grown over the next 50 to 100 years. Droughts are going to get worse. Droughts kill, dryness destroys. That is not only the case in the natural order but in the spiritual order as well.
If we are so barren, if we are so dry that we live as those barren people then we bring death not only on ourselves but those around us. We do not have then, the flowing fountain of life. But the psalmist will not leave us in despair. He will not allow us to only think about the negative. He says: “For with you is the fountain of life,” but just before that is this glorious phrase: “They feast on the abundance of your house; and you give them drink from your river of delights.”
Here is the picture of a gracious God moving across the landscape of the world, ensuring that the living waters of the creator God are brought into our lives. The language is powerful. It suggests that this living God, this fountain of life, wants to take us under the cover, the pinion of God's wings to protect us when we face difficulties or challenges in life. This is a God who wants us to eat at the banquet table that He has set before us in order that we are not starved. But the most beautiful thing about it is that it is by the fountain of God that we gain a perspective on life. I think the greatest phrase in the psalm is: “In your light we see light.”
In other words, we see the good that we should do, we see who we really are ourselves, we see the needs of our brothers and sisters in the world when we look at those in the light of God. Not when we are consumed with ourselves, not when we're full of self-flattery, not when we're full of deceit or plotting, only when we have opened our hearts and minds and souls to the power of the living God - the fountain of life.
But sometimes, my friends, because of the virtue of the life that we lead we do not see the need for the fountain. We do not see our own dryness and barrenness because we are so wrapped up in a cocoon that tells us that our barrenness is all there is, that this is all that really matters. We do not see the need for the fountain.
Two weeks ago in this very church I was privileged to conduct a funeral service for a member. Very rarely is one afforded the opportunity to read something that an individual has actually written - to let the deceased speak. The person whom I buried that day was David Philpott who is known to many of you and whose family is here today. I thought about David this last week as I sat by the fountain in Sloane Square. I thought about how the life-giving waters of God transform our lives and barrenness into something beautiful.
What made me think about him was what I had read at his funeral. David was a man who had sought to sail around the world single-handedly, and had made it a third of the way. But what was interesting was that as he was about to be shipwrecked, as he lost control of his boat in the south Atlantic, David drifted for two weeks with no means of directing himself. He was awaiting almost certain death. As the cold winds of the south Atlantic began to freeze the deck, he realized that his days were numbered and he was trying to conserve the little food that he had to keep him alive. In his diary, while he was going through that and as his boat was bobbing and weaving on the Atlantic and he was thinking about his imminent demise, he wrote:
Once the land has disappeared over the horizon it is just me, my boat and the sea. It's a microcosm of life and the complexities removed. For me this has had a purging effect. It has because of the necessity of staying alive. It erased all extraneous matters from my life and forced me to concentrate on the exercise at hand. On Bay Street, in New York or London I'm playing the game according to the rules and the conventions of established society. Out here I go through the cleansing process which rids both the mind and the soul of things of questionable value and brings into sharp focus those parts of my life that are important and dear to me. After clearing away the debris of my 53 years of programmed thinking and values I have come to a very simple conclusion. Success, accolades, pride, material and sensual satisfaction are worth striving for, but in more than 30 years in the business community and family life, I have gradually put these and other objectives ahead of the two essential ingredients of my life from which all forms of gratification are born: God and love.
Although I have been aware of the existence of God all my life, I now know that He is the very fibre, essence and reason for my being. For me it has been impossible to separate this world of the sea, His private world, from my presence in it. Of equal and related importance is love. I don't mean sexual love, although that form is a part of it, I mean the honest, deep, tender ability to care and be cared for. To be loved merely put me under an obligation that interfered with the progress of those important matters and preoccupations that have molded me into what I am today. I wanted to love and to be loved but there were too many important things going on. My life was filled to the brim with meaningless activities that provided neither food nor satisfaction for my inner being. Through this complex and devious route I have distilled my motives down to a deep and sincere hope that this experience will provide, through God, the ability, willingness and power to love and be loved.
Here was a man who had come face to face with death at sea looking back on his life and realizing it had been dry - it had been unfulfilled in many ways. But putting God and love at the centre of his life gave him a new sense of priorities.
Well, my friends, so many of our lives are like that. They are dry and barren and need the fountain of life. But what is essential, I believe, for us to experience that fountain of life, is for us to take the time and communicate with the God who wants us to experience it.
This time last week I was visiting my family in Ascot, England and some of them I hadn't seen for years. It was a very strange experience as we sat in my aunt's living room and talked to one another. It was as if we had been apart for decades rather than years. We really didn't know how to talk to one another anymore. We talked only about the past. My cousins reminisced about what a miserable little boy I used to be (which, of course, thrilled me having Marial there. There are certain things I'd rather she not know, actually). We talked about the past and moments that we had shared, but we realized that they were a very long, long time ago.
We didn't know how to talk about the present. I tried to talk about Eaton Memorial, about how beautiful this church is, but they have never visited it. I tried to tell them how terrible my congregation, is but they didn't have an opportunity to meet you in person to confirm it. They had no idea of the things that I was talking about. It was as if I was talking to myself. They were talking about individuals I had never met, experiences I had never shared. We loved one another but we weren't connecting. We were talking but we were not communicating. It was barren. It was a weird experience and we all felt it.
Sometimes, my friends, our relationship with God is just like our relationship with family - we don't communicate. And when we don't communicate and when we're not in touch we are separated from one another. It is as if there is a barrenness or a dryness to our existence, and that is why there is a need for us, on a regular basis, to communicate with God in prayer, to get in touch again with the fountain of life, to renew our sense of priorities, to become cognizant of the things that we are missing, to recognize our own sinfulness, to confess those things that make for a barren life in order that we might regain our sense of what really is the fountain of life and the meaning and purpose of our existence. To renew our appreciation for the concerns of the world around us, that by His light we may see light and therefore be motivated to make the world a better place, rather than just a place in which we survive at anyone else's expense.
Hadden Robinson, the great preacher and teacher of Homiletics at Gordon Conwell Seminary, tells the story of how when he had young children he used to put coins in his hand and play a game with them. He would invite the children to pry open his hands, one finger at a time and if they were able to pry his fingers apart, they could have the coins that were in his hand. He said that he had never witnessed children work so hard for something in all his life. They were literally hanging on with every sinew and muscle that they had, every ounce of will, to get to the money that was in his grasp. The rule was, however, that if they had pulled one finger open he could never close it again. It had to remain open until they went through the other finger, and the other finger until finally they could grab the coins. Once they did, they ran away, thrilled with themselves.
My friends, Hadden Robinson likens prayer to those children with the coins. We grab those coins from God and our prayers are very much like this: “Help me with this problem. Give me this particular thing. Save me from this. Make this better.” We go after all the pennies and we have our single requests, and only when we feel the need to have those requests fulfilled do we come to God in prayer. Hadden Robinson says that the problem is, “When you do that you forget the hand. It's that hand that gives the things.” What you need to do is not grab the pennies but hold onto the hand. That's what prayer is about. It is recognizing that God is indeed the fountain of life - the source from which all good things come, and it's only when you grab the hand that you get the pennies. It's the giver. It's the fountain. It's the centre that really makes life not barren but glorious.
And so I say to you, my friends, whatever opportunities you have to come to God in prayer, take them. If it is to walk the labyrinth this afternoon, take it. If it is to pray in your bed at night, seize it. If it is to get up early in the morning and commune with the Lord on a new day, do it. If it is to take a break at lunch and sit by a fountain and have a sandwich and connect again with the Lord of creation, do it. If it is to get on your knees in a prayer of confession at a church like this, take it, seize it, use it. It is a great gift, a gift to be in touch with, to speak to, to listen to and to be loved by - the fountain of life. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.