A River Runs Through It

“NOVEL SERMONS: The Gospel in Literature and Life”

4. A River Runs Through It

Revelation 22:1-7

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

July 19, 2009

Sacrament of Holy Baptism

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As this week progressed, I began to wonder if it had been a mistake to choose A River Runs Through It as one of the novels for our sermon series, not because it is second-rate or wanting in any way, but because it is so powerful it almost has to be experienced for oneself. The book, by Norman Maclean, was published in 1976 and a movie based on it came out in 1992, but, as fine as the movie is, it does not compare to the book’s spare, austere, and restrained telling of the story of the Maclean family, especially sons Norman, the narrator of the story, and his slightly younger brother, Paul. Norman invites us to look beneath and beyond the surface of our lives in order to see the river of God ’s grace that runs through our lives.

Dick Slater and I had a chance conversation about the book this week and he rightly suggested that though most readers and reviewers look to the story’s concluding paragraphs, about which I shall say more later, as the key to the story, its central point really is made before the first page is finished, which reads as follows:

“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana , and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.”

“It is true that one day a week was given over wholly to religion. On Sunday mornings my brother, Paul, and I went to Sunday School and then to ‘morning services’ to hear our father preach and in the evenings to Christian Endeavor and afterwards to ‘evening services’ to hear our father preach again. In between on Sunday afternoons we had to study ‘The Westminster Shorter Catechism’ for an hour and then recite before we could walk the hills with him while he unwound between services. (I love this next part.) But he never asked us more than the first question in the catechism, ‘What is the chief end of man?’ And we answered together so one of us could carry on if the other forgot. ‘Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.’ This always seemed to satisfy him, as indeed such a beautiful answer should have…” (Maclean Norman , A River Runs Through It (25^th Anniversary Edition. Chicago; The University of Chicago Press, 2001, p.1).

With life as busy and involved as it gets for most of us, that is such a good reminder of the purpose of life and our lives. The Shorter Catechism has one hundred seven questions and originally was devised by the Westminster divines to educate church members in matters of doctrine and belief. But the Reverend Maclean believed in the encompassing sufficiency of the first question and answer as the key for leading a contented, faithful life, and well-lived life. Glorify God in everything you do and enjoy God. If you are not enjoying God, he would say, you do not know God well enough. Your conception of God is too small or mistaken. When I think of enjoying God, I recall the way Jesus answered the early questions the disciples asked of him by saying, “Come and see!” We are invited to discover and to plumb for ourselves the depths and heights of the mysteries and wonders of God.

To glorify God and to enjoy him forever is to rejoice in the beauty of God’s world and to learn to live in accord with the rhythms of God’s grace. Norman says,

“As a Scot and a Presbyterian, my father believed that man by nature was a mess and had fallen from an original state of grace. Somehow I early developed the notion that he had done this by falling from a tree. As for my father, I never knew whether he believed that God was a mathematician, but he certainly believed God could count and that only by picking up God’s rhythms were we able to regain power and beauty.

So it was that the father taught his two sons to fly-fish Presbyterian style – by first mastering the disciplined art of casting. With their mother’s metronome he taught them to cast using a four count rhythm. Norman recalls that “My brother and I would have preferred to start learning how to fish by going out and catching a few, omitting entirely anything difficult or technical…that would take away from the fun. But it wasn’t by way of fun that we were introduced to our father’s art. If our father had had his say, nobody who did not properly know how to fish would be allowed to disgrace a fish by catching it.”

All through the story, sly-fishing is a metaphor for the mastery of an art that requires discipline and grace. Norman tells us that “My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things – trout as well as eternal salvation – come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.” One does not easily master the art of anything of beauty or worth. A long obedience in the same direction, to use Frederick Nietzche’s great phrase, is required. To the Reverend Maclean, fly-fishing and religion are both arts of self-control and, being so, religion is the antidote to that spurious claim that so many moderns make of “being spiritual but not religious” as if that is a good thing. Both fly-fishing and religion teach us to use the powers given to us in disciplined ways to enter into the rhythms, beauty, compassion, and humility of God’s grace.

There is irony in A River Runs Through It in the sense that younger son Paul masters so beautifully the art of fly-fishing but cannot seem to master his own life. Paul is a Rembrandt with a fly rod, but not with his life. Like an angry river, Paul’s life rages toward ruin. From early in the story, Norman is frustrated by his inability to understand his brother or to know how to help him. Norman finds, in part because of his brother’s ability to deflect what he does not want to hear, that he cannot even really talk to Paul about his concern for him that he feels so deeply.

That seems to be the way it often is, doesn’t it? It sometimes is easier to speak to strangers than those with whom we live day by day. Why is it so often that it is those with whom we are the closest and love the most that we understand the least, and often are least able to help in a good way?

Before their last fishing trip together, while Paul is out drinking with some old buddies, Norman and his father talk about their fears for Paul. The father exposes the delusion that it is easy to help people because, he says, we understand so little of what goes on under the surface of someone else’s life. Norman ’s father puts the lie to any glib or easy talk about helping others, saying, “You are too young to help anybody and I am too old. By help I don’t mean a courtesy like serving chokecherry jelly or giving money. Help is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly. So it is that we seldom can help anybody. Either we don’t know what part to give or maybe we don’t like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed.”

Near the end of the story, Paul is killed in a fight and his body is dumped in an alley, and Norman is summoned by the police to be told the news. Later, the father asks Norman , “Are you sure you have told me everything you know about his death?” “Everything,” says Norman . “It’s not much, is it?” the father says. “No,” Norman replies, “but you can love completely without complete understanding.”

Norman says, “Once my father asked me a series of questions that suddenly made me wonder whether I understood even my father to whom I felt closer than any man I ever have known.” He said to me, “You like to tell true stories, don’t you?” “Yes, I like to tell stories that are true,” I answered. “Well, after you have finished your true stories sometime, why don’t you make up a story and the people to go with it? Only then will you understand what happened and why. It is those with whom we live and love and should know about that elude us.” How little we understand about what really goes on in the depth of anyone’s soul, even those closest to us, maybe even our own.

Still, Norman Maclean wants us to know that through it all, through us all, through life itself, there runs without end a river of grace. It is grace sufficient for us to love completely even when we do not completely understand. Through all the mirth and mourning of our lives, all the grief and gladness, runs the river of grace. Sometimes it seems only a trickle and, at others, a flood. But it, the deep river of God’s grace, never dries up.

Scripture confirms it. The river of grace, into and by which we are baptized, as Abby will be baptized here today, flows from its first pages through to the last. In Genesis, we are told that “a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden.” It is the same river that, the psalmist says, waters the trees planted beside it so that they, we, yield our fruit in its season. It is also, “the river that makes glad the city of God , the holy habitation of the Most High.” It is river about which we read earlier, the river that John sees in his wondrous vision of the loving fulfillment of God’s dream for life on earth: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, and the river was running through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, sufficient for each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”

Norman Maclean concludes his story like this. He says, “Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.” And then his final words: “I am haunted by waters.” Me, too…haunted in a good and grateful way by the river of God ’s eternal grace that, beyond all deserving, bears me along, and you, too, throughout all of our days.

Amen.

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