Across the Jordan
The waters cut off again
The Jordan is at flood stage, brown and swollen and moving fast, the kind of water no one fords on foot. And the order is to cross. The priests carrying the ark walk down to the bank and keep walking, and here is the thing easy to miss: the water does not part to make room for them. They have to step into it first. The moment the soles of their feet touch the edge of the river, far upstream the water piles into a heap and the channel below them empties out, and where a flooded river ran there is suddenly only mud and stones. A whole nation walks across on the riverbed. Forty years of wandering, every false start and buried generation, and it ends in a single crossing on dry ground. On the far bank Joshua has twelve men carry up twelve stones out of the middle of the river and stack them where everyone can see. They are not decoration. They are for the children not yet born, who will one day point and ask what these stones mean, so that someone can tell them the river was cut off and the people passed over.
“The priests who bore the ark stood firm on dry ground in the midst of the Jordan, and all Israel passed over on dry ground.”
— Of Israel crossing into Canaan — Joshua 3:17 (WEB)
“The waters of the Jordan were cut off before the ark of the LORD; and these stones shall be a memorial to the children of Israel forever.”
Disorientation has a far side, and this is it: the crossing out. The phase that lost your bearings does not last forever; it ends at a riverbank you step across. What it asks now is that you move toward the opening before you can see it part, and that you mark the place you came through so the crossing is not forgotten.
You may be standing at your own flooded Jordan, waiting for the water to drop before you will move. It tends to part the other way. The priests had to step into the flood before it opened, and so will you. Step toward the thing, and watch the road clear under feet already wet, the parting coming only after you commit. And when you are across, do not just hurry on. The wilderness does end. That is worth hearing plainly if you have begun to suspect it never will. There is a far bank, and there is a day you step onto it, and the same God who opened a sea to bring you in is able to open a river to bring you out.
But notice how the way opened. So often the road out of disorientation does not clear ahead of you and then invite you forward; it clears as you move toward it, one wet step at a time, the parting coming only after the feet are already in the water. And mark the crossing when it comes. Build something. Stop and stack your stones. Name the day, write it down, keep some proof you cannot argue away, because a harder day is coming when you will need it. The memorial is not sentiment.
Write the date, tell the story, set down some marker you cannot argue away later, because there will be harder days when you will need to remember that God once dried up a river to bring you through. Memory is not sentiment here. It is fuel, set on the bank so the next fear has something solid to run into. He dried the river once.
When the whole Church crosses out of a long wilderness, its task is to raise the stones and tell the story so plainly that generations not yet born will ask what they mean. The Body has a long memory and a short one at once: it keeps creeds for centuries, yet a movement can forget within a lifetime the very river God once dried up to bring it through, and a people who forget their crossings lose heart at the next flood. The recurring rummage sale Phyllis Tickle traced does not erase what God has done; it clears the way forward. Before a watching world, the Church keeps its feasts and testimonies to say one thing: the waters were cut off, and we passed over.
What cannot be shaken is the long record of a God who brings His people through. He opened the sea on the way in and the river on the way out, and the floods of forty years could not keep them. That record stands when the next water rises. He has done it before, and the stones prove it.
- What flooded river am I waiting to see part before I am willing to step in?
- Where might the way out of my wilderness open only as I move toward it?
- What stones can I stack to remember the crossings God has already brought me through?
Lord, the water is high and I keep waiting for it to drop. Teach me to step in, trusting You to part it once my feet are wet. When I am across, help me stack the stones, so the next time I am afraid I remember the river You dried up for me. Amen.