Isaiah 55:10-11; Isaiah 58:9-11
Rev. Dr. Deborah L. Clark
March 13, 2022
This week I learned about hydrology—the study of the origin, distribution and properties of water on our planet. It is an interdisciplinary science, drawing on meteorology, climatology, geology, biology, ecology, and forestry. I found myself wishing I had paid more attention in 9th grade earth science.
My first foray into hydrology was a two-minute kids’ video I found on google. With cute animation, it depicts a three-part water cycle. It rains; water evaporates; vapor condenses to form clouds; and it rains again. Simple and clear.
I scrolled down the google page and discovered it’s more complicated. A much less animated website described 9 parts to the water cycle—including multiple ways a molecule of water might move through it. The more I read, the more enthusiastic I became about the water cycle—the resilient complexity of water as it moves through the earth and our atmosphere.
One of the nine parts, of course, is what we experienced in abundance yesterday: precipitation. It rains. It snows.
From there, as I understand it, there are six different processes that might happen, in various combinations, to the water that has fallen to earth. One is interception. Droplets of rain and flakes of snow land on leaves or other organic material. Eventually that moisture—or most of it—falls to the earth; interception makes the process more gradual.
Then there’s infiltration. Water reaches the surface of the earth and begins to seep into the soil.
Next is percolation. Water is drawn downward by gravity, moving through the layers of earth. Sometimes it moves horizontally, through geological formations that create underground reservoirs and conduits—through pores and cracks and spaces in the rock.
Another way water moves through the system is transpiration. Moisture in the ground is absorbed by plant roots and drawn upward as the plant moves nutrients from the soil to branches and leaves. Leaves release moisture to the atmosphere as vapor through tiny, pore-like structures.
There’s run-off—as some of the rain runs off the surface of the soil directly into a stream or river that flows into a lake or eventually the ocean.
And there’s storage. Water is stored on the surface of the earth—in rivers and lakes and oceans. Water is stored in the ground—in the soil, in aquifers, in crevices in rock formations. Water is stored in the atmosphere—as vapor or clouds.
Eventually, the water moves to the next stage of the cycle: evaporation. The sun supplies the energy needed to change water from liquid to vapor where it rises into the atmosphere.
The next step is condensation. Water vapor attaches to small airborne particles, forming fog or mist or clouds. When the air cools or reaches a saturation point, the water vapor condenses back into liquid state.
And the cycle repeats itself. Water drops coalesce, until they are big enough that gravity causes them to fall. As that larger drop falls, it creates a wake that allows smaller drops to follow. The journey continues. More interception, infiltration, percolation, transpiration, run off and storage. More evaporation and condensation. More rain and snow.
I’m glad I scrolled past the cartoon videos to this more detailed description. It highlights the life-giving nature of the water cycle. Along the journey from liquid to vapor and back again, water nourishes the soil, creates reservoirs for dry times, enables plants to grow, fish to swim, animals to drink. This nine-part cycle also points to the impact human carelessness and greed can have. Nothing we do stops the water cycle; water will keep precipitating, evaporating and condensing. When we destroy the rainforests and pave the wetlands, though, we limit the paths the water can take on its journey. Less interception and infiltration, less percolation and transpiration. More run-off. The cycle becomes less complex, more extreme, less able to support life. That’s a sermon for another time.
For today, I want to come back to our reading from Isaiah 55. Twenty-five hundred years ago, the prophet Isaiah used the water cycle as a metaphor for how God’s word—the promise of God’s love—is showered upon us. “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” God’s word—God’s grace—is a never-ending cycle of love, flowing through our lives and our world, always moving, always changing form, always present.
As I read about the rich complexity of the water cycle, I found myself thinking about the rich complexity of this grace cycle. I invite you to join me for a few minutes as I play with this metaphor.
There are times when God’s grace pours down upon us like rain—wondrous moments when it feels as though beauty and peace and love are showered upon us. When those moments are over, what happens? If we are fortunate—if we are blessed—some of that shower has been intercepted by the metaphorical equivalent of leaves, which allow love to continue to trickle gently into our lives. Maybe those leaves are friends who remind us of our belovedness. Maybe they are spiritual practices that help us remember the shower: a gratitude journal, a bedtime prayer that reflects on the day.
There’s infiltration. When God’s love rains down on your life, how does it seep in and nourish the soil, or maybe your soul? Too often we fear we don’t deserve to be loved, and so we try to deflect the shower, building concrete barriers so it will run off without touching our lives. But God’s grace is not constrained by our definitions of deserving and undeserving. God’s grace is poured out like rain. Can we absorb it and allow it to change us?
Then there’s percolation, as the rain—God’s grace—soaks deep into our lives and forms underground pools and aquifers to quench our thirst during dry times. In the physical water cycle, subterranean water collects in and around rock—especially where it is porous or cracked. We need the metaphorical equivalent of rock in our lives—solid ground, strong values, determination. And we need that rock to be porous, even cracked, in order to create space for reservoirs of grace. I imagine those reservoirs deep within each us, formed in the places where loss and struggle have created empty space and cracks. I imagine the church as a reservoir, an aquifer of love, with springs and wells bringing grace to the surface.
There’s transpiration. When we have allowed God’s grace to infiltrate the soil of our lives, when we have drunk from the aquifer of love, we draw nourishment up from our roots, and we breathe out love through our leaves, through our words, our actions, our presence. Transpiration is not a dramatic act; it is a steady, daily process that happens as we allow God’s grace to shape our lives.
There’s run-off. For the purpose of my metaphor, I’m going to call it overflow—when we have so absorbed God’s love that it just flows out of our lives for neighbors and strangers to drink. I think of the love poured into the quilts we are making. I think of overflowing baskets of cookies blessed for veterans’ dinners and toiletries blessed for Church World Service health kits. I imagine the overflowing towels to dry off our spring splashers and the overflowing donations to support our siblings in Ukraine.
There’s storage—streams and lakes and oceans of love. Warmed by the sun, some of that love evaporates into vapor to form clouds that are blown by the winds of the spirit to rain love in places we cannot even imagine. The air we breathe is infused with the vapor of love. Clouds remind us that God’s love is especially present in times we cannot see the sun.
God’s grace, like the water cycle, is always with us, always moving through our lives. As Ruth Carney likes to say, “You are a child of God and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Diving into the complexities of the water cycle gives me a fresh perspective on what we can do. Just as human efforts to plant trees and restore wetlands contributes to the resilience of the physical water cycle, so we play a role in how the grace cycle can transform our lives.
As we root ourselves in community, we can create a rich overstory of leaves to intercept some of the grace God pours out, so it can keep trickling down to nourish our soil. We can remove unnecessary barriers that keep the soil of our lives from absorbing God’s love, choosing to trust that God’s grace is meant for us just as we are. We can create reservoirs—aquifers of love—in our community and our world, allowing God’s love to pool in the cracks and empty spaces of our lives. As a church, we seek to create a strong, solid foundation that is porous and spacious enough to hold God’s grace. Through worship and prayer and community caring, we are nourished by the rich soil of our faith so that our leaves and our lives breathe love out into a world that so desperately needs it.
In our second reading from Isaiah—from chapter 58—the prophet uses a different set of water metaphors to describe community life that participates in the rich complexity of the grace cycle: “If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. God will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail.”
May God’s grace rain down in our lives, dripping from the leaves, infiltrating our souls, percolating deep within, that we may breathe out grace, that we may overflow with love for our world. Amen.