Clouds and Rain - Reverend Amy Zucker

Water covers two-thirds of our planet. Most of it is in the oceans. As the sun warms the surface of the ocean, water evaporates and rises into the air: countless millions of gallons every day. At first it is invisible vapor, then as it rises high in the atmosphere, where the air is much colder, it condenses like fog on a windowpane and becomes visible liquid water again. We look up into the sky and see it in the form of clouds.

Clouds look very light and fluffy, but they are made of tons of water. Cumulonimbus clouds, the kind that bring rain or snow, may contain as much water as a lake, and if you could jump into one the effect would be pretty much the same as jumping into a lake. In The Silver Chair, one of the books about the magical land of Narnia, a girl named Jill finds out what the inside of a cloud is like when she flies right through one. “Suddenly . . . a great white cloud came rushing toward her . . . . And before she knew where she was, she had shot right into the middle of its cold, wet fogginess. That took her breath away, but she was in it only for a moment. She came out blinking in the sunlight and found her clothes wet.” All that water travels hundreds of miles, billions of tiny droplets floating through the atmosphere, until they grow heavier and heavier and become great drops that fall back to earth.

We call this service a Water Communion because through the water, we feel how we are all one community. We are like the water in the air: even when we are far away from each other, even when we’re invisible to each other, we’re creating this community. That’s because when we’re apart, some of us go to camp, and some of us go to work, and some of us travel to other countries, and some of us go to family reunions, and all of us have new experiences that we bring back to this church here at our ingathering. We’re each a drop of water that’s gotten heavier and heavier on its journey, and when we all come together again, we make one big single body. So we pour our water together to symbolize our unity, and we talk and sing and learn together here to bring each other the selves that have been getting larger from all these experiences, so that we can all learn from what has been gathering in everyone all summer.

When a cloud becomes heavy enough with water, it releases the rain that makes the cracked earth soft, and the brown grass green. The sleeping seeds start to move, everything grows very fast, and the dry streambeds rush with rain. The animals come to the river and quench their thirst.

We’re like rain that way, too. When we all come together into this spiritual community, we work to make the world a better place, where people treat each other with fairness and kindness, and war gives way to peace, and understanding grows where there had been confusion. Let’s now bring ourselves, each and all of us, and pool all our energy and our good intentions and make them a mighty force like a thundercloud. Each droplet is very small, but when they all come together, they make a crash of thunder and a tremendous flash of light and heat, and they bless the world with good, sweet water.

And so we begin our Water Communion. The water we bring today will be purified and used for child dedications throughout the year, so that our whole community blesses every child. If you would like to take some away with you to have at home, or to bring with you to special places or other congregations, you are welcome to do so after the service. In each “gathering waters” section, those of us who brought water from that source—rain, then rivers, then the water we drink, then oceans—will form two lines, one in each side aisle, and come up to pour our water into the communal bowl.

So if you brought water that you gathered from the rain or the dew, or that fell into a rain barrel, please come forward now. If you did not bring any water but would like to participate, please come up and use one of the pitchers on the table, which are filled with water that symbolizes your presence in this community. If you like, when you have poured your water, tell us in a phrase or a sentence where it came from.

Rivers - Reverend Darcey Laine

A river is water with someplace to be. Water on a mission. A river is water moving from the rainwater runoff, from melting mountain snow, from creeks, water moving mile after mile down to the ocean. Some of you have seen the Sacramento River that moves water all the way from beyond the valley beyond the hills beyond these hills, moves it into the San Francisco Bay, into the ocean. Sometimes just being alive feels like being swept up in a giant river, moving sometimes smoothly, sometimes like white water rapids.

One time I got to go white water rafting with my youth group when I was a youth adviser. I knew something about how to help teenagers run a youth group meeting, and fun games to play at sleepovers, but I didn’t know anything about white water rafting. One of the teenagers came to me that morning and said she was afraid to go rafting. What if we headed out on the raft and she had a panic attack? Maybe, she said, she should stay back at the campsite alone all day reading. I told her that I was scared too (which was the truth) and that we would stick together. We would go to the rivers edge with the group, at least that far even if we had to turn back.

Fortunately we had a guide who knew a lot about rivers and about rafting. So before we put on our life vests and climbed into the huge inflatable rubber raft, we had a lesson on safety. The very first thing we learned was what to do if you are thrown off the raft into the rapids. They demonstrated how to show that we were okay [wave arms], to grab onto the paddle our leader would hold out to us, and how to help one another back onto the raft. Then we paddled around in the shallow still water, practicing how to turn left when our guide said left, and right when our guide said right.

Sometimes the water was so smooth that our guide would let people jump into the river and swim. But the Sacramento River also has class 2 and class 3 rapids. When the water is white, and the river moves in quick bends around rocks, the whole crew in your raft has to pay attention and listen closely to your guide. I was so terrified and excited I could hardly figure out what we were supposed to be doing, and sometimes even took one hand off the paddle to hold onto the raft, which our leader said was okay if we were really scared.

Thankfully no one from our raft ever did fall in, but one of the other guides, who had been riding the river for years and years, was paddling a kayak along side the other boats and got flipped upside down and sucked under one of the rafts. A lot of people worked to help him, and when we stopped to eat our lunch he told us the story of how he just let the river carry him until he came up right.

All of us made it safe and sound back to the campsite. It was one of the coolest and most exciting things I’ve ever done.

Life feels a lot like a river to me. It flows sometimes so slowly you wish something would happen, and sometimes it rushes so quickly I am afraid I’ll be thrown headfirst into the rocks. If this church is like one big raft, I offer the following advice as we push off into life’s river together:

• Look out in case someone falls overboard
• Hold out your oar
• Help them back into the raft
• Enjoy the swim when things are slow
• It’s okay to hold on tight if you get scared
• And sometimes there’s nothing to do but let the river carry you

If the water your brought today is from a stream or a river or other moving water, please bring it forward now.

The Water We Drink - Reverend Amy Zucker

Probably a lot of us brought water this morning that’s from our tap. I’ve been in many water communion services, and there’s a pattern with tap water. A few people will come up and have water from really exotic places, like Niagara Falls or the River Jordan And then other people get up with kind of sheepish looks and say “this water is just plain ordinary water from my kitchen tap.”

But as we know from the water cycle, there’s nothing ordinary about tap water at all. It’s from the same place as the exotic water—city tap water is water that once fell in rain and ran in rivers, and most recently has collected in a reservoir and been piped to our houses. And although it might seem as common as dirt, water is a very precious commodity.

We know something about that here in California, where there are really too many people for the local climate to sustain. The question of who has the right to use which stream or lake is a very touchy question, because none of us is sure we’re going to have enough. Down in Los Angeles, ten million people are living in a desert, and the only way they manage that is by piping water all the way from here, hundreds of miles north, and all the way from the Colorado River hundreds of miles east, and that’s a problem because even mighty rivers and huge reservoirs will run dry if too many people draw water from them, and that’s what’s happening. Water once seemed very simple: if you lived on a piece of land, you could use the water that flowed through it in streams, or dig a well and get the water that lay below it in the ground. But in a land where there is not enough water for everyone to water their crops, much less fill their swimming pools, water rights become a very sensitive issue.

Where my husband Matt and I lived in Vermont, like most people in the state we got our water from a well dug right under our yard, with an electric pump that brought it up from the ground and into the house so that we could just turn on the tap. There it was, whenever we wanted to make a pot of soup or water the plants. Nothing we had to think about at all.

But one day about a year and a half ago, the pipe between the well and our house broke, and with one technical problem and another, it was ten days before it got repaired. And all of a sudden water was on our minds all the time. The dishes piled up in the sink and we’d have to go get a bucket of water from the outside tap to wash them, and boy was that water cold, unless we took the time to heat it up in pots on the stove. I kept forgetting—I would be thirsty, get a glass and turn on the tap, and nothing would come out. All of a sudden, water was a rare commodity. I realized just how precious it was, and how lucky I was to live in a place where I could usually rely on getting not only the water I needed, but as much water as I wanted just to play in. I thought about the millions, maybe billions of people around the world who have to walk far away to get to a well and carry it back by hand. And even then, many of them don’t have clean water, but since no one can live without water for more than a few days, they have to drink what’s available anyway and risk getting very sick. I wondered whether I would remember them even when my water came back on and I could take it for granted again.

There’s a good side and a bad side to taking things for granted. On the one hand, every human being needs certain things to live and we ought to be able to take them for granted: clean air to breathe, enough food to eat, a loving family, a safe place to live, nurses and doctors to take care of us when we’re sick, and clean water whenever we need it. On the other hand, very few of us actually have all of these things, and if we don’t work to make them available to everyone, they won’t be.

That’s how I hope everyone here feels about this congregation. I want it to be so reliable and so much a presence in our lives that we feel like it will never run out. Anytime any one of us needs someone to lean on, or a safe place to talk about our spiritual questions, or a community to worship with, or teachers to guide us, we should be able to just turn to our church and find those things, as simple as turning on the tap. And I also hope our congregation will be something we never take for granted, because like water it is so precious and so essential to our daily lives, and like water, it takes hard work and sacrifice to keep it flowing.

If the water you brought is from your house, or from a reservoir where people get their drinking water, please bring it forward now and, if you like, share where it came from.

Ocean - Reverend Darcey Laine

All the water in the world, from high in the mountains, from the rivers and the swamps, from the rain and the snow all eventually ends up in the ocean. More than 2/3 of our plant is covered by oceans! And the oceans themselves are also connected. So all the water on this planet is part of the same system, is connected in a great cycle.

In some towns around the bay you will see a little sign painted on the sidewalk near the drain that says “water drains to bay.” This is because we realize that if we are cleaning our car with soap and the soapy water runs down the driveway into this gutter, or if we dump out a bucket of paint or oil, or some other chemical, it will go into the bay where it will become part of the ocean. It will flow to places sea lions swim, and evaporate and become part of the raindrops that fall on your face each winter. We all try to keep the water that flows into the ocean clean, because we share that water with every living thing on this planet.

This bowl right here, where everyone has been pooling their waters is a little like the ocean. Water came from all over the world, and was joined together in this one bowl. Now, because water is the way it is, all the water is mixed together, can’t ever be separated again into the little bits of water we brought with us today in our film canisters or special jars. The water your brought from your sink at home, mixes with and changes the water brought by someone from far away rivers or streams. This community is a little like the ocean, because we each are touched by, changed by, transformed by, one another.

Because we live so close to the ocean I bet most of you have stood on the shore looking out at that giant blue-green water that goes as far as your eyes can see. I remember watching a segment on Sesame Street once where children were running up and down the shore to illustrate a song about happiness. I understand why the chose the ocean to sing about happiness: there’s something about being in the presence of the ocean, the combination of sun, and wind, sand and water that just makes me feel good. I can’t explain it, but sometimes after I go to visit the ocean, I feel cleaned out, rested, renewed.

May this community be like that for you. May it renew you when you are feeling drained, give you rest when you are feeling tired, may it clean you when you are overcome by the messy confusion of this world.

Out on the lawn there is a wading pool. It is the same pool we used last spring when we celebrated all 5 elements together. Please take a moment after the service to play in the water, touch the water, hear the sounds it makes. We touch, taste, hear water every day. We can’t live without it. It is a symbol that has been important to every culture throughout the life of our earth. Take some time this week, as you are washing your hands, or popping the top on your sports bottle, to reflect on the meaning of water in your life, and to enjoy.

If you have brought water from an ocean, or anyplace we haven’t yet mentioned, please bring it forward now.

What is your reaction to this sermon? Please send comments to
Reverend Darcey Laine or
Reverend Amy Zucker