Stones Across The Creek

Every June, Reba carried her father's canvas coat down to the creek.

She had a place she used, a flat rock at the edge of the shallows below the spring, worn smooth on top from all the summers she had knelt on it. She would soak the coat and lay the collar out and work at it with a bar of soap and a stiff brush, and the water would go brown around her knees and carry off downstream and come back clear.

There was a stain on that collar. It had been there since before she took the coat down off the nail, and it was not coming out. Everybody in that family knew it was not coming out. Reba knew it better than any of them, because she was the one who had been at it for eleven summers with her sleeves rolled and her hair coming down.

She could not have told you exactly why it mattered. A person does not always know what they are scrubbing.

Six feet upstream from her flat rock, five slabs of sandstone went across the creek in a line. Her grandfather had set them with a mule and a log chain the year her father was born. They were wide enough to take a grown man's boot and they had not shifted in seventy years, and on the far side of them was the orchard, and the level place under the apple trees where the family used to carry supper out in September.

Reba had not been across in eleven years.

That is the part to hold on to, because it is the strange part. She was in the water. She was in that creek up to her elbows every June and some Julys, and she had not once gone over.

Cole came down the bank that morning the way a twelve year old comes down a bank, which is mostly falling with confidence. He watched her work the brush for a while.

"Aunt Reba," he said, "why don't you just go across?"

"I'm not done here."

He looked at the coat. He looked at the water going brown and coming clear. Then he walked out on the stones in four steps with his shoes on, because he was twelve and shoes are not a consideration, and stood on the far bank in the sun with the apple trees behind him.

"Nobody's checking," he hollered back.

She laughed at him. She did not go.

That evening she hung the coat on the line, still damp, still marked, and stood on the back porch with her arms folded, looking down the hill at five flat rocks going across the water in the last of the light.

Washing is not crossing

Two different things happen with water in Scripture and almost nobody is ever told the difference.

The first is washing. There is a great deal of it. Leviticus and Numbers are full of washings, and the thing to notice about every single one of them is that they repeat. A washing is a thing you do again next week. That is not a criticism of it, that is what it is for, the way scrubbing a collar is for a collar. Maintenance is honest work.

The second is a crossing, and a crossing happens once and changes your address.

And the priests that bare the ark of the covenant of the LORD stood firm on dry ground in the midst of Jordan, and all the Israelites passed over on dry ground, until all the people were passed clean over Jordan.Joshua 3:17

Read the last four words slowly. Passed clean over. Not passed over and then got clean. Not cleaned up on the near bank and then permitted across. Over, and clean is what the word does to the sentence, not a fee at the ford.

You are looking at a crossing that was never priced at your cleanliness, and the priests standing in the middle of that riverbed are the proof of it. Joshua 3:17 has them holding the ground for everyone else to walk on, and it is the Holy Spirit, not my arrangement of the verse, who takes an old riverbed and lays it under your own feet this morning.

Go back further. The very first thing water does in the Bible is get gathered. God gathers the waters into one place and calls them Seas, and from that page on, water in Scripture is a gathered thing, something that has been collected and set somewhere by somebody else. Nobody in the story ever manufactures it.

That is not a small point. It is most of the point.

The one who promises the water is the one who pours it. Ezekiel says it in the plainest sentence in the book: then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean. The sprinkling is His verb. The being clean is what happens on the other end of His verb. There is no clause in there about the condition of the person standing under it.

You have clean water promised over you by name, and you were never asked to produce a drop of it. Ezekiel 36:25 puts the pouring in His hands, and His Spirit will not let that settle down into a nice idea about somebody else.

Then a man stands in the Jordan, at the same river, generations later, and people come out to him from the whole country. Not clean people. That was the point of the line. They came out to the water the way they were, and the water was not a reward for having sorted themselves out first, and when Jesus Himself came down to that river the sky opened over Him.

And on the day the church started, when three thousand people asked what on earth they were supposed to do now, Peter did not hand them a program. He said repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ.

Every one of you. He did not sort the crowd.

You are one of the every one of you, and there is no shorter list you failed to make. Acts 2:38 has no filter on it, and the same Spirit who was poured out on that crowd is the one reading this over your shoulder.

Now hear the thing Reba could not hear with a brush in her hand.

The crossing was never held up by the stain. She thought she was working her way toward the stones. She was not. She was doing something honest and useful and endless at the edge of a creek that had five sandstone slabs going the whole way across it, set by somebody who loved her, seventy years before she ever knelt down.

A washing repeats because it is meant to. A crossing does not repeat because it does not need to. And if you have spent years assuming the second one was waiting on the first one to finish, that assumption is not a sin and it is not stupidity. Somebody handed it to you, most likely without meaning any harm at all, and it has kept you kneeling on a flat rock in six inches of water for eleven summers.

That has no right to stay in your hands. What is written is that He does the sprinkling and He does the cleaning, and it is His Spirit, not the force of my saying it, who takes that out of the category of theory.