SPRING
Have you ever drunk from a spring in the wilderness? Perhaps on a summer hike you discovered the cool water bubbling up from the sandy bottom of a clear pool or flowing out from among the rocks. Maybe after days of filtering your drinking water drawn from less pristine streams, you marveled at the simplicity and sweetness of drinking directly from a spring.
Springs have long been signs of the goodness
that mysteriously wells up in our world to sustain and refresh us. Springs flow freely without any human effort, but they can be polluted or forgotten. Lutherans have tended to view the work of reformation as less like repairing a malfunctioning water treatment system and more like rediscovering a life-giving spring. The Reformation called attention to the places
where God has promised a gushing spring of abundant life and grace. The Lutheran Confessions can be seen in part as maps written to guide the church back to these springs when they become neglected: • The incarnate, crucified and risen Christ with us in the world.
• God’s word and sacrament and the assembly around them.
• The forgiveness of sins and justification by grace through faith.
• The vocations of the royal priesthood of the baptized.
• The importance and goodness of the arts, especially music.
• The gift of mutually supportive and just human relationships, with special care and dignity for the least of these and those who especially share the sufferings of Christ. These are sources of renewal, promised by God
to be constantly flowing with new life. Clearing out the spring
Sometimes, however, the work of rediscovery
involves rehabilitation. Lutheran theologian Gordon Lathrop, who has introduced this spring imagery to many, recalls the old springhouse that used to stand on many American farms and the relatively frequent task of clearing out the weeds and junk—even the broken-down house itself—so the water could again flow clear and accessible. The farmer didn’t make the water. But the farmer
needed to clear out the spring. Our congregations always need to be clearing out the spring.
18 APRIL 2016
Lathrop suggests that the work of reformation
is not only about recalling the forgotten springs of God’s abundant life. Sometimes the springs are familiar but have become obstructed or polluted. Perhaps a church practice obscures the gospel. Or, as in Flint, Mich., a system of environmental racism poisons the water supply of nearly an entire city. The church is called to join the reforming work of dismantling systems and structures that pollute or impede access to the flowing springs of God’s mercy.
Creation itself is a spring Lutherans have clearly identified grace,
vocation, and word and sacrament as life-giving springs that flow to us from God. Today we may need at least equal vigor and clarity in confessing that the earth itself is a spring of grace. It constantly overflows with goodness from its source in God. Luther draws out the concept of the ongoing,
overflowing act of creation in his explanation of the first article of the creed in his Large Catechism: At every moment, God the creator “constantly sustains” and “makes all creation help provide the benefits and necessities of life—sun, moon, and stars in the heavens; day and night; air, fire, water, the earth and all that it yields and brings forth; birds, fish, animals, grain, and all sorts of produce.” I heard an elementary-school-age Lutheran
struggle to remember the name for what is typically known as the “The Big Bang.” He furrowed his brow and asked, “What do you call it … ‘The Great Overflowing’?” That may be a good scientific image for the
origin of our universe, and it is certainly an apt Lutheran image for the ongoing divine act of creation, overflowing continually, sustaining all things. This affirmation, sometimes known as creatio continua, predates Lutheranism, but it is given emphatic and ethical emphasis in the Reformation. Luther continues in the Large Catechism: “For if
we believed it (that the cosmos continually overflows with God’s gifts) with our whole heart, we would also act accordingly, and not swagger about and boast and
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