The practice of praying next to water is older than most religions. It seems easy to pray when we stand at spectacular waterfalls such as Niagara Falls or Iguaza Falls between Argentina and Uruguay. Or when we walk on the beach of the ocean, it is easy to find ourselves connected to the largeness of the ocean and praying. These natural wonders inspire awe and beauty, two keys for experiencing God in the world. We can understand Psalm 104 that praises God for a seascape, teeming with abundant life and creatures. Prayer besides water may be easy for humans to give God thanks for life and beauty of our oceans. But is still easy for us who have distance ourselves from water?

Today’s gospel speaks of Jesus’ entrance into the waters of the Jordan River. John the Baptist lived on the edges of civilization at the Jordan River, with the desert and wilderness close by. To be baptized by John the Baptist meant to travel from civilization, whether from a city or a rural village, to the river and the edge of wilderness. The four gospels introduce us to the wild baptizer, John the Baptist at the edges of civilization. He eats locusts and wild honey, and he drapes his body with the furs and leather skins.

Jesus travels to John the Baptist from Nazareth in Galilee because he hears of John’s ministry and is drawn to his ministry of renewal and repentance. Jesus enters the waters at the edge of the wilderness where the wild baptizer will immerse him the flowing currents of the Jordan River. He enters the wildness of the waters.

His baptism is not just a ritual cleansing for sin; it is a unique conversion moment whereby Jesus connects with the Earth Spirit and experiences what it means to be a beloved child of Abba God. It is a baptismal or water covenant in Abba God’s recognition of Jesus as beloved child. The sensible world of natural elements places us in touch with the higher mystery of God. And it did this for Jesus as he entered unclothed into the waters of the Jordan. The life-giving waters bathe the body of Jesus in the radiance of God’s abundant life, and water surrounding his body form an earth covenant.

Water is an important symbol in all of the world religions because every living creature depends upon water to live. Our bodies contain 60 -70% water. Hydration of our bodies is essential to life. We cannot survive five days without water. Water is a richly complex substance without which there would be no life on Earth as we know it. Water is the Earth’s blood, its vitality, and water then becomes literally part of our blood flowing through our bodies and most of other life.

Water falls down in rain, it flows in streams and rivers, enters the ground, and it can bubble forth from the water table. Life was born in the oceans 3.2 billion years ago. There is an intimate connection with water and life. Without water, there is no life, yet water has the power to destroy as well as to create. How many people drown each year from flooding?

Water is the means of cleansing, spiritual and physical. We bathe or shower in water, we wash ourselves in water. We swim in water. We play in water. Water not only purifies objects for ritual use, but can make a person clean, externally or spiritually, ready to come into the presence of God. Catholics bless themselves with holy water from fonts when they enter a place of worship and prayer. They renew a water covenant with God.

In his book, A Watered Garden, Benjamin Stewart details four ecological characteristics of water for baptism: waters of life as a oasis, living water as pouring and flowing, pooled waters as mysterious depths, and a place that welcomes what might call the untamed or wild nature of water.
Jesus reminds us of the mystery of living water and its connection to Earth Spirit in conversation with the Samaritan woman. Jesus speaks in John’s Gospel of the living water from God’s abundance that is able to renew and sanctify all of creation. Jesus said,

Everyone who drinks this water will become thirsty again. Anyone, who drinks the water, I give will never become thirsty again. The water I give him will become a spring of water, springing up to eternal life.

Jesus uses the image of water as indispensable to life, then he points to himself as the ‘living water’ which he offers eternal life. Water is vital to human and all life, and in dry or desert climates, water becomes an oasis of life. Baptismal waters give life to us. Jesus becomes an oasis of water. In fact, water becomes a sacrament of li from God, or to use Jesus words in John’s Gospel , “eternal life.” We need to have plants and stones in areas when we baptize anyone. That might mean our garden oasis becomes a more appropriate place for baptism–with its water and plant features a natural sanctuary for initiation into God’s baptismal waters.

The second ecological feature is the symbol of living waters as flowing. That day as Jesus entered the flowing waters of the Jordan, he understood the action that John performed upon himself, not as repentance for sin, but as entering into the waters of God’s life. Environmentally, his immersion under flowing waters of the Jordan River signified a new birth of consciousness. Stewart observes that pouring and flowing of waters express a rich mystery:

When new Christians are made in flowing baptismal, all of those associations –the overflowing blessings of God, the nourishing water over landscape, the always new quality of flowing water, and the life-giving power that flows to us from beyond our control—wash over the newly baptized and deepen our significance of baptism.

The baptism of Jesus, and our own baptism into God as Creator, Beloved Child, and Spirit as Sustainer of Life, communicates vividly the goodness and power of God in this world. We are baptized into living grace. And just as the rainbow became a sign of God’s covenant, flowing water becomes another covenant with us.

The third ecological characteristic is the mysterious depths of pooled waters, great lakes, and oceans. Deeply pooled waters hold mysteries, and we cannot the full depth of the dangers and the euphoric experience of connecting with life infinitely greater than ourselves but intimately weaves all life together in a grace-filled ecology on interrelatedness. Such deep and great pools remind us that the Holy Spirit hovered over the primal oceans of the earth billions of years to create a spark of cellular life. Above the waters of the Jordan, God appeared to Jesus in the form of a dove, the Holy Spirit, the Earth Spirit. Earth Spirit is my translation of an early title of the Holy Spirit as the Sustainer of life. Many early Christian writers understood the baptism of Jesus had ecological significance. They recognized that water as the bearer of the Spirit. Maybe we should recapture this notion that as Jesus was immersed in the Jordan waters and surfaced that he was linked to the Spirit as the beloved child of God and child of the earth. He was led by the Spirit into the wilderness for 40 days in prayer and living with wild animals as the gospels tell us. There was an intimate bond between Jesus and the Earth Spirit, and he grew closer to life on Earth.

Both God and the Spirit were present in the natural elements of the river, and the dove brought Jesus into the wilderness for forty days. There he experienced his identity in the wilderness, and he was surrounded by untamed wild life and the beauty of the stars in the clear skies. In the forge of the baptismal waters and time spent in the wilderness, God transformed the Jesus into the beloved child and the prophet of compassion, leading back to begin the ministry to preach the good news to the poor, the sick, and the oppressed.

Stewart speaks of the fourth characteristic as the welcoming the nature of water as untamed . When Jesus was immersed into the Jordan River, his hair was messed us. Many clergy will tell you stories how messy baptisms are; you splash or pour water on someone, whether adult or infant. You get wet, it messes you up. Stewart writes,

…baptism into Christ is a radical thing; it profoundly rearranges your life. The water, poured out, disrupted the careful grooming and neatness of the baptismal party as if something of the wilderness baptism of John had flowed…

The waters of the river Jordan represented death of an old self and new birth from the waters of the Spirit. It was a moment of revelation, disrupt Jesus with a profound personal transformation: He was the beloved child of the earth, the beloved child of God.

In a former life as a Catholic priest, I was asked to baptize an infant girl of a single mother. I asked the mother the name of her child as I cupped waters with my hand from the baptismal font to pour on her. The mother answered, “Tangerine Cotton” and I splashed water on the infant, causing her to cry. As a newly ordained priest and too unconsciously white, I instructed the mother that you had to have a saint’s name. So we compromised with the name of Anne, the mother of Mary, so her name became “Cotton Tangerine Anne…” The wildness of grace disrupts life as we know it. It gets messy for baptizer and his notions of white Christian hegemony and the baptized alike. There is a disruptive quality to baptism, and it expresses the wild grace of God who transforms us and messes up our lives.

Yet becoming a baptized Christian is a messy thing, our ordinariness is disrupted. But there is a truth here. When we are welcome the living waters of the earth, the wildness or untamed Spirit, that led Christ to the Jordan and into the wilderness, will also create great mischief or disruption in our lives as we try to follow Christ as a disciple. It is flourishing and the disruption of transformation by the welcoming waters of Christ’s baptism.

We have become distant with water and nature. Somehow we need to regain those natural elements into out initiations in Christ’s path of compassionate love. Many Churches have unfortunately moved baptism from its natural environments outdoors into indoors in the church as repentance for sin or ritual initiation into church membership. We have lost something natural and valuable in the process by removing baptism from its natural surroundings in nature.

Maybe it reinforces our alienation and distance from the natural world. We are less mindful of the importance of water as we busy ourselves with life and forgetting our connections to other life.

Water is a human right, despite what anyone otherwise claims. People can survive without food longer than they can without water. Our baptism into the waters of Christ is baptism into the experience that Jesus had the Jordan River, stressing his ministerial and incarnational responsibility towards God’s creation.

We are linked by baptism to the body of Christ and that body of Christ is linked to the elements of the Earth, water, clean air. Our baptism stresses that we are entrusted with mission to protect and co-live with the Earth, the waters of the Earth, the air we breathe. The Earth Spirit who appeared at the baptism of Jesus continues to baptize into the waters of the earth and call us explicitly to work for water justice and water rights. What does this water covenant with God mean to us today?

In our modern world, we carelessly pollute water tables with toxic chemicals and waste so much water. Fracking uses carcinogenic chemicals and chemicals that cause infertility to break up congealed oil in rocks to mine for our greed in consuming fossil fuels. California State is considering fracking in a state where water is so valuable. Can we afford to pollute our water sources by pumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of water with toxic chemical into underground shale to extract oil and gas. Are we not contaminating the Earth Spirit who is present the waters of the Earth? We pollute the oceans with our garbage and sanitary waste and radiation.

Sea-level risings will change the shape of the land maps of the world and displaced hundreds of millions, if not billions of climate refugees. These are only a few of the water events that will impact life on planet Earth.

We know that water is essential to life. Here are some statistics. Global water quality is impacted by lack sanitation facilities, and over a million children died in 2013 because of poor sanitation.

UN data indicates that one billion people globally have no access to drinking water. 1/7 of the people on this planet!

We talk about the commoditization of water as something corporations can own and sell. We charge for water, when water is freely bestowed upon us by the Creator God as the Creator bestows grace upon all life. What will a bottle of water like this cost us in 30 years?

We don’t have enough water to support the population of the greater Los Angeles County without taking some steps to conserve water. Water shortages will increase as we change the climate of the planet.

The Christian Church, including our own, has a God given covenant towards creation, and we are invited to exercise Earth care in public life, in order to protect earth, to appreciate water and air as gifts of the Creator intended for everyone. Let me end with a line from the prophet Amos about our baptismal or water covenant with God: “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness as an ever-flowing stream.” Amos 5:4