Let Justice Roll Down Like Waters

Amos 5:21-24;John 7:37,38

A sermon by Kathy Toivanen at EMUC, 3/19/2006

On this third Sunday in Lent, we continue with our theme "Living Waters". By now, all of us cannot help but grasp how essential water is to life. Although this is not a science class, let’s just for a minute ponder the nature of water. Water, as I mentioned last week covers 74.4% of the earth. Water is one of the basic materials of creation. The emergence of life and the presence of water are intimately bonded. All life is related to water. Mammals, including humans still emerge from water - the embryonic fluids.

Water exists in an ever moving cycle - delicately balanced - where the sun causes water to rise as vapour from the oceans, cool, and fall back on the Earth as fresh water, returning to the ocean. Through an intricate hydrologic system the circulation of water on this planet is as essential to life as is the circulation of blood in our veins. With a genius and creativity beyond any human imagining or capability, each life form relates to water in specific, and extremely diverse, ecosystems.

The relationships between forests and water are a staggering example of the awesome, miraculous life-giving system in our earth. Rain falls onto the trees and descends into the roots systems, the soil and organisms, and is then taken up into the trunk and leaves. The sophisticated photosynthesis process (one that took the Earth two billion years to fine-tune) releases oxygen and excess water vapour, now purified. Large forests are their own ecosystems, and demonstrate the purification systems, life-cycles and wonder of water.

The equilibrium of water systems everywhere is finely tuned. In our bodies sophisticated systems retain, eliminate or evaporate water. Water is in every part of our bodies - in every cell, blood, spinal fluid, and digestive workings. Most of the foods we eat are full of water.

Water can exist simultaneously as a liquid, a solid and as a vapour within a large temperature range. Water can absorb large amounts of energy without evaporating and it cools slowly. Oceans regulate the Earth’s temperature by storing heat in summer and releasing it in winter. Snow and ice prevent the Earth from warming too quickly. In early spring, the snow allows water to seep slowly into the ground rather than evaporating, and nourish plant roots. In the water circulation on the earth, water both absorbs heat and transports warm water through huge ocean currents to warm other parts of the earth.

The next time you get very cold or very hot - understand that it is the water in your body preventing you from dehydrating, freezing or boiling to death!

Even to ponder all of these qualities of water for a minute, gives us some perspective and some needed humility. The life-giving gift of water that flows through this entire planet is indeed sacred. With the flow of water, the entire earth, each and every creature and element is sustained, cleansed, and kept in a delicate life-giving balance. As people of faith, our only response is one of gratitude and reverence for both the creator and the creation.

(with notes from "Reflections on Water: Ecological, Political, Economic, and Theological" by Heather Eaton, KAIROS)

But sadly, as the prophets down through time can attest, gratitude and reverence are often replaced with greed and contempt. Rather than trying to live in harmony with the rhythms of life established by God, our creator, we mistakenly think that we have the wisdom and the right to redesign the creator’s work and the delicate balance of this earth. We even think that we have the right to own and control essential, life-giving resources of the earth. And so right now we are facing a global crisis because of what we have done to the water on this planet.

In response to this crisis, God’s earth and God’s peoples cry out for justice.

Like the prophet Amos of old, urge us to wake up and to listen to their call to truth and action. We need to respond to the call to act and live in ways that will restore the life-giving balance of God’s creation, so that justice is not just a few drops of water spilled here and there, but rather an ever-flowing stream that heals and restores life wherever it flows.

Now I must admit that as I have been reading and studying about water issues these last few weeks, I have sometimes felt as if I have been drowning. The number of water-related issues around the globe is so staggering that I began to feel a certain helplessness and paralysis.

I was reminded again that a deeply rooted faith, persistence in prayer, and a supportive faith community are essential to sustaining hope in the work of justice. We can only act justly through the grace of God and through the work of the Spirit that draws us into communities where we share the gifts of that same Spirit.

And we can only stay persistent and focused on the just use and sharing of water by maintaining and living in an abiding, respectful relationship with water and its creator. Two stories help to illustrate what I mean. The first story is from the Lenten book of daily reflections. (Living Waters, by Ian Macdonald)

Ian Macdonald tells the story of Henry Spence, a Cree whose first job was as a Community Development Worker at Nelson House, an Indian Reserve in Northern Manitoba. At the time, it was the 1960s, during a time when there was an effort to bring aboriginal people who were living on the land into town-sites where they could have modern services like electricity and water.

Henry was well-liked and respected and on the basis of conversation with him, a number of people had decided to move into town. Into the third week of his job, Henry went to visit his uncle to urge him to move to town. It took all day by canoe, for Henry to reach his uncle’s place up river. Once there, Henry had to climb 65 feet up the steep rocky trail to the clearing where his uncle’s home stood. After a good reunion, Henry told his uncle of the new town-site with all its amenities, including the new water system. "Just think, Uncle," he said, "you won’t have to get up in the morning, climb down that rocky trail to the river, and break the ice to draw water anymore. You’ll just wake up, go to the kitchen, and turn on the tap." There was a long silence. Henry’s uncle looked at him and took a long time before he answered: "If I do what you say, if I go to the town-site and get my water by turning on the tap, how long will it be before I quit praying to the Creator to say thanks for the gift of the river? The next day Henry paddled back and resigned from his position.

(excerpts from ‘God’s Own Dream for Us’, p. 36 in Living Waters)

The second story is an ongoing story. A group of Anishinabe women have made it their spiritual journey to walk around the perimeter of the Great Lakes with a copper bucket of water.  They walked around Lake Superior in Spring 2003, around Lake Michigan in 2004, and Lake Huron in 2005.  They plan to walk around the remaining great lakes to continue to learn about these lakes and to raise awareness of ways to care for these precious sources of water. Their walk has filled them with sorrow as they have seen around the great lakes, the destruction of the forests, the earth gouged by machines, the rivers and creeks dying from pollutants and more poisons flowing into the cleaner rivers. But through daily prayers of thanks for the waters, and through the majesty of the waters that still remains, they have also been strengthened to continue their work of justice and advocacy for the healing of these waters.

http://www.motherearthwaterwalk.com/about.htm

How well do any of us know the Credit River that flows through this city? How well do we know Lake Ontario, the source of our drinking water, place of recreation, power and life for so many in this region? When was the last time we walked the banks of the Credit, or stood at the shoreline of this great lake to the south?

Do we know what fish and animals depend upon these waters? Do we know what vegetation depends upon the waters? Are we aware of the other streams and ponds and aquifers that are part of their ecosystem? Do we know how healthy they are, the way they are in different seasons of the year?

Like Henry’s uncle and the Anishinabe women, we need to know and have a connection with the sources of water around us so that we will continue to give thanks for their gift of life, and in giving thanks, live justly and in harmony with them.

There is another issue concerning water that is right on our door step; an issue where we can right now start to take action to bring justice. It is the issue of bottled water.

Bottled water is just part of the much larger concern around the commodification and the privatization of water.

Gradually and dangerously, the understanding of water as a sacred gift and as a basic right for all life is being replaced with the understanding of water as a commodity, as something to be owned and then sold for profit.

Some say that as water scarcity grows, that the mass transport and selling of water is the only way to distribute water to the world’s thirsty. But over and over again, it has been shown that the selling of water intensifies the oppression and poverty of the poor in the world. For example in India, some households spend 25% of their income on water. In Lima, Peru, where Lorraine Brignall visited last year with OIKOCREDIT, the poor pay private vendors as much as $3 per cubic meter for buckets of often contaminated water while the more affluent only pay 30 cents for the same amount of treated municipal water.

In 2003, the African Women’s Policy Network did research into the effects of the privatization of water in Uganda. They found that with privatization of water, the people who live on less than a dollar a day have to choose water over school fees for their children or the purchase of water over the purchase of food, or they have to find alternative ways of getting water. Many resort to unprotected springs, boreholes or walk long distances to find a well. With this comes an increase in water related illnesses.

Here in North America and in other places of the western world, we have been seduced by advertising that would have us believe that bottled water is healthier, safer, purer and better tasting than water from the tap.

The bottled-water industry is one of the fastest growing and the least regulated industries of the world. Not only is bottled water expensive to the wallet - one litre of bottled water can cost as much as 5000 times as much as a litre of tap water – it is also being sold at great cost to the environment. Most water bottles end up in landfill sites, where tons of plastic slowly decomposes and seeps toxic substances into the soil that we know can affect the water table.

In rural areas around the world, corporate interests are buying up good farmland, indigenous lands, and fragile wilderness tracts in order to find new water supplies to fill the bottles. Local water tables are affected and the lives of the local people are at risk. In Rajasthan, India, for example, Coca-Cola trucks drive away, filled to the brim with bottled water pumped from the area. Because of the intensive pumping, the water table is declining, more wells are going dry and harvests are worsening because farmers have less water for irrigation.

Kairos, which is a justice and peace organization of eleven Canadian churches and church agencies, including the United Church of Canada has initiated a joint campaign with the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace. This is a three-year campaign on water to have water recognized as a fundamental human right. Since it was launched in 2003, over 70 municipalities have endorsed the water declaration that you have in the handout in your bulletin. It states that

• Water is a sacred gift that connects all life
• Access to clean water is a basic human right
• The value of the earth's fresh water to the common good takes priority over any possible commercial value
• Fresh water is a shared legacy, a public trust and a collective responsibility.

I invite you to take some steps today toward the care of water and the just sharing of water in our world. I invite you to sign the petition at the back of the church or email on line at http://www.devp.org/testA/current03.htm .

If you currently drink bottled water, I encourage you to stop, to drink tap water instead from a reusable bottle. I also invite you to learn more about bottled water by reading the information provided at the back.

I also invite you to learn more about the bodies of water and the water shed where we live and to regularly remember to give thanks to God for this water as we seek God’s guidance in caring for it.

May our actions today and in the days and weeks ahead fill us and God’s faithful people with hope so that together we can work together so that justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Amen.