SERMON 6 September 2026 “Where Life Flows”

When was the last time you really listened to the sound of water? And I don’t mean the water running from the tap this morning. I mean the sound of real water. Rain falling, a river flowing, waves rolling in along the shore.

For some of us, that sound might bring back memories of home. For some, it’s a childhood memory, falling asleep to rain on the roof. But just days ago, we saw water on the news in a very different way. A glacier gave way in the mountains of Nepal. A mass of ice, water, mud and rock came rushing down the valley, and it swept away villages, bridges, everything in its path.

Water is strange like that. Nothing lives without it. Our bodies need water. Trees need water. The earth needs it. So, water is life. And yet, that same water can sometimes become more than we can bear. Too much, or too little, and life becomes fragile.

And this is the image that the Season of Creation gives us this year. The theme is “Living Water.” Look at Genesis 2, our reading for today. There’s something interesting here. Before the human story really begins, we meet water first.

No shrub of the field had yet appeared. No plant had sprung up. No rain had fallen. No one was there to work the ground. This is not the green, flourishing garden we picture when we hear the word Eden. It’s the earth just before life begins. And then, something moves. Water rises from the ground, and it waters the whole ground.

After the water comes, God forms a human from the dust of that ground and breathes life into the human. God plants a garden, and trees grow from the ground, pleasant to look at and good for food. And a river flows through the middle of the garden. It waters Eden, and it doesn’t stop there. It divides into four and flows on, beyond the garden.

So what place did the human have in this garden? Genesis 2:15 tells us God put the human in the garden to till it and keep it. The human doesn’t come in as the owner. God had already made this garden. Life was already there. The human’s task was to tend it, to care for it.

We ourselves were formed from that same ground. We drink its water, we live by what it gives. We are not managers standing outside creation. We belong inside it.

The story of water in the Bible does not end in Eden. Much later in the Bible, we meet flowing water again. But this time, it’s not a place where everything starts fresh, like Eden. It’s a place where so much has been broken.

Ezekiel lived at a time when his people had lost their nation and their home. Everything they knew had fallen apart. And it’s right there, in that moment, that God shows Ezekiel a vision. Water starts flowing out from the temple. At first, just a trickle. But it keeps flowing, and it keeps getting deeper. Past his ankles, then his knees, then his waist, until finally it becomes a river too deep to cross on foot.

And that river was not just a river. It was living water. It didn’t stay in one place. It flowed to the dry places, the damaged places. And wherever it went, something changed. Fish filled the water again. Trees grew on both banks. Their leaves never withered, their fruit never failed. The fruit became food. The leaves brought healing.

And Ezekiel sums up this whole vision in one sentence: “Everything will live where the river goes.” But there’s one more thing to notice here. Where did this water start? The water Ezekiel saw flowed out from the temple. Life didn’t begin in the dry and damaged land itself. Life began with God and flowed out towards every place that needed it.

And John’s gospel, our other reading today, takes us back to that same source of life. John opens with words we know well: “In the beginning was the Word.” It echoes the very first scene of Genesis. And John tells us that all things came into being through the Word. Not one thing came into being without him.

And the next line especially lands on us today: “In him was life.” The life we have been following through these stories has its source in God. The life in the earth, the life in the garden, the life carried by the river, all one life, from him.

This life doesn’t stay still. It moves. John goes on, “That life was the light of all people.” Watch sunlight land on flowing water. It doesn’t stay in one spot. It spreads across every ripple. Life moves the same way. And here, I hear our theme, Living Water, a little differently. It’s not only about water we need to protect. It’s first about life given to us. God’s own life, the life that keeps us alive.

And the invitation is not just to stand back and watch that life flow. It is to step into it, just as Ezekiel did. At first, the water may only reach our ankles. We can still feel the ground beneath our feet. We can still choose where we want to go.

But as we go deeper, there comes a point when we can no longer control everything. We have to let the water carry us. Maybe faith works the same way. It’s not standing at a distance, nodding along, saying yes, that sounds right. It’s stepping into that life. Not holding on to control, but trusting ourselves to God, and moving with God, toward life.

It means looking again at the life we take for granted. The water we drink. The food we eat. The air we breathe. The trees and birds around our homes. We can’t live a single day without any of it.

And once we start looking that way, we start seeing what we missed before. We share the same water, the same earth, but we do not live under the same conditions. Think again of Nepal. For us, water is something we get by turning a tap. For the people there, water, mixed with ice and mud, swept their homes away in a single moment.

So this flow reaches people too. People losing their homes to a changing climate. People without clean water, without enough food. And people closer to us, tired and losing hope. God’s life doesn’t let us stay only where we’re comfortable. It helps us see where life is needed and take a step towards it.

We are people who receive life from God and let that life flow on into the world. Living Water doesn’t begin with us. It begins with God. But God doesn’t want that life to stop with us. God wants it to flow through us, out into the world.