extractions on the mug metaphor

Today in chapel a speaker had a coffee mug resting on a saucer on a circular table. He lightly spoke about how we are the mug always being filled up. “Maybe a disaster in your life has tipped you over,” he said, gently placing the mug on its side, causing a slight ting from the contact between the two porcelain fixtures. A common verse with the metaphor is John 7.38, “out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.” So the basic picture is that God fills our cup with water or love and we pour it out to others. I have a few questions for the metaphor. Are we the cup? Or do we just hold the cup? If we are the cup, then we must be nudged or knocked over in order to do any pouring, for we all know that a cup can do no pouring of its own. If everyone is a cup and if we want to be able to pour into people, then logically shouldn’t the other cups have to beneath our cup in order for the water to fall into them? If someone is below us, then aren’t they inferior to us? The metaphor of us being cups and trying to pour into people by design enthrones our mug with superiority, especially if a table is involved. Is everyone else is on the tile floor of our coffee shop theology, just waiting for a random force to push our full mug over and spread water over the table and wait for the living water to slowly drip, leaving the cups on the floor with only a meager portion of God’s love? Instead, all the cups are on the divine earthly table, and God is above us filling us with each other’s flowing waters of his own love. He has an ocean of water overflowing from his vast cisterns of love that fills the coffee mugs of humanity.

The true metaphorical implications that we are filled by God and then poured into others need a different picture. Let’s say that everyone else in the world is a cup full of coffee. They are just a plain mug with plain black coffee. If we want to follow the ‘salt of the earth’ metaphor, then should we, the believers be creamer, or milk, or sugar or something? Shouldn’t we be changing the world for good? Straight black coffee tastes the bottom of a rubber soul-ed shoe, shouldn’t we be the milk, creamer or sugar that makes it taste sweet, smooth, or just plain good? The divine barista in the great celestial Starbucks fills the earth’s coffee cup with sweet honey from us, his vessels of love.

I probably thought too much into this metaphor, but I just thought it was fun. Any comments on the range of metaphors that we should use for God?