Lessons From Estuaries

Adapted from the sermon “Lessons From Estuaries” preached May 21, 2023 at First Presbyterian Church-Memphis.

I like to consider myself fairly adept at the art of persuasion. Anyone who goes into the field of ministry must have some gifts in the kind of storytelling and sales pitches that seek to show how the teachings of a man who lived over 2,000 years ago have important significance for us today. I must have some of these gifts if I am paid money to talk about how the words in a book compiled over thousands of years, with the most recent chapters added just 150 years or so after Jesus died, have strong relevance for you and me and our busy, high tech lives. You would think that someone who chooses to go into this line of work has some skills in persuasion. Helping others to believe something, to make good choices and do the “right” things.

Well, about 3 years ago, I knew I had met my match. An impenetrable person, who is resistant to any argument, fact, rationale, or plea I may offer. My middle child, Miriam, is 4 years old, and is perhaps the most strong-willed and defiant character I have met. Whether we are talking about her clothing, or her eating, or her imaginary play, she usually politely, or sometimes not so politely, declines my requests and my suggestions. One of the first complete sentences she mastered at age one was, “Leave me alone, OK?” She truly lives up to the strong, female tradition of her Biblical namesake.

So life with my beloved Miriam has me reflecting on the concept of tension – as tension appears frequently in my household with this little one. It’s not always conflict - sometimes it escalates there - but it’s usually just tension, as she struggles to assert her identity and understand the bounds of her own agency at 4 years old.

Tension is also what I feel when I read this scripture for today from the Book of Job. While most of Job is summarized as Job asking, “Why God? Why me? Why now?” as he endures tragedy and loss, in these verses today, God actually responds back – and not with answers, but with more questions. Questions posed intensely. Questions prefaced with “Gird your loins up like a man. I will question you and you shall declare to me.” Job finally hears from God directly after enduring hardship, and God is, well, not exactly pastoral and gentle in this response.         

There is a tension in these verses. A tension between a God who is trying to explain and reference just how awesome, how grand, how powerful and how BIG God actually is. And yet, also in these verses is a God who is illustrating the incredible intimate connection between God and all of creation. While not answering Job’s questions with explanations or reasoning, God is still telling Job something in this line of questioning. It’s almost as if God is saying, “Look at how connected I am with everything in creation. Everything you are aware of and everything that escapes your awareness. There is nothing that is outside of my touch. Nothing that escapes my attention.” It is powerful and yet almost shames Job for wondering if God has abandoned or forgotten him.

Hearing this text and situating yourself in the place of Job, how does this make you feel? I personally can feel my blood pressure climb with each question God poses. Job must have felt so very small. So very shamed. And yet, so very seen in his misery, by a God who even feeds the baby birds that cry out.

Tension. We don’t tend to like tension in our society, and we really don’t like it in our churches. How many of us were raised to not talk about religion or politics or money with others, because these would be likely points of tension? How many of us have parts of the Bible, like this infamous Book of Job, that give us feelings of tension and we don’t know quite what to do with them, so we just kind of pass them by in search of other parts of the Bible that seem more clear? How many of us have avoided someone because we don’t want to experience the tension of having a hard conversation? The leadership of a number of states including our own have even gone so far as to ban the teaching of some of the more unfavorable realities of American history in our schools because doing so causes tension.

We are so often acculturated in this society to believe that tension is bad, and that we should avoid it whenever possible. Avoid the topic. Unfollow. Unfriend. Get a massage. Find a new church….

But I want to take a moment this morning and note how God’s creation sometimes teaches us truths – truths that disrupt some of our most basic assumptions and most common practices. I want to look at one example of how God introduces tension as part of creation, and what happens as a result.

Twelve years ago, in the summer of 2011, I visited Charleston, South Carolina for the first time, and fell in love with so much of the region. Yes, I had the best shrimp and grits of my life on that trip, but what I remember most was taking an ecological boat excursion that began my fascination with estuaries. As we rode around the Charleston Harbor, behind the barrier islands that separate the mainland from Atlantic Ocean, and up into the mouths of the Cooper River, the Wando River and the Ashley River, I listened in amazement at all of the information that our scientist guide was sharing.

An estuary is a partially-enclosed, coastal water body where freshwater from rivers and streams mixes with salt water from the ocean. Estuaries are places of transition from land to sea - places where fresh water and saltwater collide and create water that is known as “brackish.” Brackish water is somewhat salty, and the levels of salt in the water change frequently with the tides and with rainfall.

At first, I assumed that an estuary has to be some kind of a “dead zone,” because as I understood it, some marine life lives in salt water, and other aquatic life in fresh water, so this mixing, middle zone probably wouldn’t work for sustaining life. However, estuaries are among the most productive ecological habitats on earth, creating more organic matter each year than comparably sized areas of forest, grassland, or agricultural land. This very special and distinct area of water also supports unique communities of plants and animals that have managed to specially adapt for life at the margin of land and sea, in an environment that is constantly changing.

Estuaries also offer a cradle for life, providing ideal areas for migratory birds to rest and refuel during their long journeys. They are also referred to as the “nurseries of the sea,” because so many species of fish and wildlife rely on their sheltered waters as protected spawning places.

My fascination with estuaries began in great part due to the fact that I was so incredibly wrong in my assumptions. What I had always assumed was a “dead zone,” was brimming with life. While I imagined a reality in which life is created to either be one way or the other, land or sea, freshwater or salt water, here right before my eyes, was an abundant and lively ecosystem living in the tension of the in-between – a space, which bends and flexes and causes the creatures and plants within to have to adjust to the shifting realities of tides and saline levels. This assumed dead zone was full of life.

So what are the lessons that estuaries, as part of God’s magnificent creation, have to teach us?

My initial assumption - the distinct divide between salt water life and freshwater life, and not much that goes between - feels like a reflection of how we so often view our world as a place of strict divisions. And this perspective of divisions feels even more vivid when I see the news on my various screens today. Are you salt water or freshwater? Land or sea? These questions sound an awful lot about questions about our politics, our vaccination status, our racial identities, and the assumption that being one way or another puts us in direct opposition to the “other.” Are a democrat or a republican? Conservative or liberal? Are you pro or anti-vaxx? Are you an evangelical or one of the “other” kinds of Christians? Pro choice or Pro life? Fox News or CNN? Are you white or BIPOC? Are you a patriot or a radical?

We like clear answers to our questions and so we like to think in binaries, even though most all of us know deep down that the world is far more complex that the choices with which we are usually presented. It’s almost as if our society has convinced us that if we simplify problems and issues into a binary, a choice between this or that, we relieve the tension that accompanies so many of the complexities of human life.

On my first day of divinity school, Dr. Alice Hunt, who was the Academic Dean at the time, stood up before us and said something along the lines of, “If you have come here to Divinity School because you want to find answers to your questions, I will go ahead and tell you know that you are likely to find yourselves very disappointed in a few years when it comes time to graduate.” Stunned, we all stared at her with wide eyes. Of course we came to divinity school because we have questions and seek answers. What does she mean?

But, oh, how right she was. As I came to learn, a deep study of our Christian faith seldom provides clear answers. It leads to more questions. Deeper questions. GOOD questions. It humbles you and gives you more comfort with living with the unanswerable. As part of the graduation ceremony at the same divinity school, the responsive litany towards the end of the service even has all of the graduates pray aloud for God to grant us “discomfort at easy answers.”

Some leaders try to convince us that our faith, and specifically our Bible, contain the answers to every complex question that we encounter in our lives, and therefore being a Christian means living a life with less tension. But if there is one thing that I take away from almost every engagement with our Bible, it is that God does not shy away from tension and mystery. Like in our Job text today, God usually doesn’t directly answer the questions we ask. Neither did Jesus. The way of God is to point us in the right direction, but often leave us in a place of working through some tension in our process of discovery. God so often leaves us with mystery, with more questions. The fact that in the Bible God usually doesn’t rescue us from places of tension suggests that perhaps there is a usefulness in the tension itself. In the grey areas. In finding ourselves in the in-between.

Maybe, just maybe, God has made us to be estuary people. Perhaps God sees the benefit for us in the in-between, in finding ourselves in the tension that the constant shifts of reality create in our lives. If we are estuary people we don’t always find ourselves firmly planted on the solid and certain ground that is dry land. But it also means we do not find ourselves completely adrift in an ocean of uncertainty.

Like estuaries, all of God’s creation is alive and free and constantly changing, which suggests that perhaps humanity is intended to be like the incredible creatures that make a home in this environment. Perhaps the lessons from estuaries remind us that God calls us to be adaptable to the world around us. To find ourselves in between the firm and certain ground and the wild and unpredictable abyss of the sea. Perhaps God calls us into lives in tension, the mixing of realities that sometimes takes us to the limits of our comfort but also bring forth life abundant. The life that emerges from the tension of estuaries offers a metaphor for the life that can also emerge from leaning into the tension of our own lives. Asking uncomfortable questions doesn’t always result in immediate and certain answers, but so often it does bring us to new levels of understanding, which in turn offers us great comfort.

So what about the daily tension of life with my 4 year-old Miriam? If I am a land person, the easy answer is that I am firm, unmoving and I insist on my way as the foundation for our parent-child relationship. If I am an ocean person, I guess I let her do whatever she wants or I put her on the front porch and say, “Live your life. You’ll figure it all out!.” But if I am an estuary person, as I find myself often in this parenting relationship, I lean in to the tension with this little one, as she works so hard to figure herself out. I ask her questions. And more questions. I give her choices at times, and I talk her through moments where she has none. Even as she yells. Just like an estuary, in this tension of emerging personhood, in these “brackish” childhood years, there is also abundant life emerging. And I pray daily for God to help me learn the wisdom of estuaries so that I do not stunt or stifle the incredible life that emerges from the tension of being her mom. Amen.