NOTE: I am putting my weekly sermons on the church website. It will be on for two weeks (usually posted on Friday) and then placed in the Archives area by date. You can download in a matter of seconds.
Let me know what you think. The church Email is: slumc@direcway.com, Phone: 480.895.8766
Sunday, May 29, 2005
Sermon: “Come to the Water”
Scripture: Genesis 6: 9-22
Reverend Larry Gerber
A Japanese pseudo-scientist believes that water crystals have meaningful messages for us. Water had a meaningful message for Noah, too. Help!. Get me outta here!
In the beginning, God had an idea. About water.
With just a word from God, a dome appeared, separating the waters from the waters. The waters above the dome were separated from waters under the dome. God called the dome Sky. And it was good.
A little later, God created humankind, and that was a good day, too.
A long time later humankind wasn’t so good; in fact, humankind was behaving in an ugly fashion. Then God had another idea about water and with another word, water came, floods of it.
It fell from the sky, it rose high on the earth, and God’s simmering anger drenched everything everywhere, and only those few animals and humans aboard the boat survived. The earth was purified.
A long, long, long time later, it was a good night for Dr. Masaru Emoto, who likewise wants to purify us, albeit differently, and who had traveled from Japan to Minnesota to do so, by spouting words about water.
One thousand curious listeners poured into the pews of that suburban Minnesota, lakeside church to hear his lecture titled, “The hidden messages of water.” The overflow crowd, having shelled out $25 each, was bubbling in anticipation to hear the conventionally dressed Dr. Emoto emote.
Dr. Emoto, a half-scientist/half-evangelist, whose books have sold a half-million copies, received his title of Doctor in Alternative Medicines in 1992 from The Open International University in India, which opened in 1991, and bestows such degrees for less than $500.
First, and as an aside, let’s understand why it was a good night for the doc to talk about his ideas about water. Here’s the math — 1,000 in the audience times $25 each equals $25,000 for one night’s work. Good pay, no sweat.
Last week, Pastor Jim gave a demonstration of a glass of water. Just, think, if he had charged you $25 each, he would have raised over $10,000 for the church, for simply demonstrating how one can spill a glass of water, announce that he did, and continue on with the message as if nothing happened. And to top it off, he didn’t have to come to the water, the water came to him.
The overflow crowd heard all about Emoto’s ideas. His work involves filling empty bottles with water, exposing those water-filled bottles to written or spoken words, music or prayer, then freezing the water at minus 5 degrees Celsius, and finally photographing the resulting crystals through a microscope.
Emoto asserts that his work proves ugly words and ugly music create ugly ice crystals, and beautiful words and beautiful music create beautiful ice crystals. A PowerPoint presentation of his pretty pictures was a smashing success.
As a disclaimer, Emoto says that pure water creates a purer crystal and contaminated water may not crystallize as beautifully. Furthermore, he states that water is unstable and changes quickly. To get an example of an average crystal, many samples had to be photographed under many conditions, and he says it is impossible to obtain two identical crystal pictures.
The question remains whether Dr. Emoto’s work constitutes empirical science, or if is he just all wet.
Well, no, the question doesn’t remain. He’s a quack, trying to get some dumb ducks to quack with him.
How water understands or responds to basic English, i.e., a bad word in English, as opposed to a nice word in Japanese, eludes our understanding.
His basic stream of thought for the audience, and for us, is this — our thoughts and feelings affect physical reality at a molecular level. He calls this thought energy Hado, which rhymes with shadow, and literally means wave or move in Japanese. Hado, Emoto claims, is the innate vibrational pattern of energy at the atomic level of all matter. It is the most minuscule unit of energy in the universe, and is also the basic energy of human consciousness. Our thoughts affect our reality on a molecular level.
Beautiful words create beautiful crystals, and by extension a beautiful world on a molecular level, and ugly words create ugly crystals, and again by extension, an ugly world on a molecular level. The hidden message of water is that our thoughts and words impact reality on a molecular level.
In other words, we are what we think.
According to Emoto, to purify ourselves we need to follow these three easy steps, which he believes will lead to personal and global health — (1) drink good water, (2) listen to good music, and (3) “keep a positive consciousness.”
Oooooo-kay.
God has another idea about the message of water, and it doesn’t have to do with any speculative atomic vibrational levels.
It does, however, have to do with beauty and ugliness. God’s message about the flood is a beautiful message which came in a time of great ugliness.
Why?
It’s like this: At the time of Noah, human consciousness and the resulting behavior had become quite ugly. The society and culture created by the humans of the world did and does reflect the inner workings of the human mind, not because our vibrational Hado patterns make it so, but because our words and actions reflect the peace, or lack of peace, the beauty or ugliness, in our hearts. What we think affects our behavior, and our behavior affects the world we live in.
Long after the world was first created by God’s word and pronounced good, the world had indeed become an ugly place. The descendants of Cain and Seth had multiplied greatly and spread broadly across the land, and life and everything had become a mess. The thoughts and hearts of the children of Seth and Cain turned continuously to evil, and so naturally the world reflected their thoughts and hearts, and it became an ugly, awful, and evil place. God wasn’t pleased (Genesis 6:1-6).
Therefore, God had a thought to destroy all of it except for Noah’s family and the animals who went aboard the ark. God had this thought, said the word, and the waters became ugly, and began to fall, and to rain, and rain, and flood the earth, until all living creatures were blotted out, purifying the earth, washing it clean (Genesis 6:7-8).
As terrible as it sounds, God used water to purify the earth, to cleanse it from human thought, from human behavior, and from human life. The true message of water has little to do with Dr. Emoto’s ideas, and everything to do with God’s ongoing desire to purify us. Even though God may have regretted making humans, even though God saw that humans had made a mess of everything, even though God sought to wash the earth free of the parasite that had no favor in his sight, even though all of that happened, God decided to give all of humanity a second chance at getting it right.
We can be thankful that we are made in the image and likeness of God. Human beings may have behaved badly, we may have had ugly ideas, and sometimes live ugly lives, but we were — and we are — innately, intrinsically well made, and deeply good.
To put it in terms of Hado, the vibrational imprint of God’s originally spoken word that created us still vibrates within us. God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness” (Genesis 1:26).
However, given the early misbehavior of our first parents, we still need purifying. Is there a way to purify us, or a purifying drink we can swallow to make us mentally and spiritually beautiful, and to wash us clean?
Of course there is. Dr. Emoto was somewhat right when he encouraged his audience to follow those three steps to personal and global health:(1) drink good water, (2) listen to good music, and (3) keep a positive consciousness.
Drink good water. The good water of second chances is the Living Water of Christ, the Word of God, who is the ever-flowing aquifer of the soul that can spring up within us, causing us to be flooded with a heavenly Holy Spirit, causing us to never thirst spiritually again. The Word of God, the Living Water, is our second chance (John 4:4-26).
Listen to good music. We should make efforts to fill our minds and hearts with good things, not just good music, but with the goodness of God. We move from “Garbage in, garbage out” to “Good things in, good things out.” God “give[s] good things to those who ask him.” “The good person brings good things out of a good treasure, and the evil person brings evil things out of an evil treasure.” If we seek the good treasure for our hearts, then naturally good will come out of our lives, and the world will be a better place (Matthew 7:11; 12:35).
Keep a positive consciousness. This is Emoto’s version of hakuna matata. “Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything.” Stay in touch with God, spend time in prayer, keep drinking from the well of life, keep your mind open to God’s presence in all that surrounds us.
In Noah’s day, when God was frustrated with the way humans behaved, and with the way things turned out, God gave all of creation a thorough washing and a second chance.
If God could give such second chances to all of earth and humanity back then, then certainly God, who continues to wish to purify us, who lived among us as The Logos, The Living Word, can give each of us, who were washed in the purifying waters of baptism and the Holy Spirit, who seek to sip from the Living Water of Life, a second chance, too. It's your choice, but God beckons us to come to the water: for purification.
Say hado.
Say Hallelujah!
They’re
words that may or may not produce beautiful water crystals. But God’s hidden
message of water means a beautiful life! Come to the Water!
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Participation Pointers:
• Dr. Masara Emoto’s Web site, Hado.net, includes lots of material and photographs, hado.net/lecture.html. According to Dr. Emoto’s Web site, he’ll test your own tap water at his laboratory for $300 plus $20 for shipping and handling of each sample. (I do not recommend that you send him any money, or any water for testing either!)
Sources:
Dr. Emoto’s Web Site, hado.net/lecture.html.
Gordon, Sari. “He talks to water.” Utne. September/October 2004.
Let me know what you think. The church Email is: slumc@direcway.com, Phone: 480.895.8766