Tim Fleck’s 2/24/2008 Sermon WATER

Third Sunday in Lent, Year A – Exodus 17:1-7; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42; Psalm 95
St. David’s Episcopal Church, Bean Blossom, Indiana, February 24, 2008
Timothy R. Fleck

Many years ago, Bob and I visited a small island in the Caribbean. The island had no source of fresh water, and so the cabins where we stayed were designed to be water-efficient, using seawater in the toilets and collected rainwater in the showers. The bathroom sink, however, used bottled purified water shipped in from the mainland, and over the taps was a little sign reading, “Water is precious. Please conserve it.” That little message and the reality it represented made a big impression on us at the time, and it has become a sort of short-hand we use to remind each other to be faithful stewards.

The human body is over 65% water, and an adult needs at least three quarts of water a day just to survive. (1) Next to oxygen, water is the most basic requirement to life, and should be the birthright of every living creature. Water is a limited resource; we do not have ways to make significantly more of it than what we have been given.

Water is also a radically communal resource. Surface water and groundwater do not respect property lines or political boundaries, so that if each of us is to have access to clean water, each must be responsible for conserving and maintaining the purity of our watersheds and aquifers for everyone else who uses them. The nature of water is that it flows, and it carries with it whatever we dump into it, for good or ill. If I pollute the water in my backyard, I not only foul my own nest but the water supply of everyone who lives downstream. This is a fact of which we are all too uncomfortably aware here in the Beanblossom watershed.

Not surprisingly, the United States uses more water per capita than any other nation in the world – something like 1,700 gallons per person per day for all purposes, about twice the world average. Even when we cancel out industrial and agricultural uses and look just at our domestic water use – what comes out of our taps at home – Americans use almost 160 gallons per person per day: four times the world average, and eight times as much as our brothers and sisters in Sudan. (2)

Until recently, it has been easy for us here in the United States to assume that there will always be enough water. We’ve been blessed with seemingly inexhaustible rivers and lakes, and we have not hesitated to divert and domesticate them for our own use. Over the last few decades, though, we have begun to see water supplies dwindle dangerously in the American Southwest, and recently even in swampy and humid Georgia. This week our own state entered into the Great Lakes Compact, an agreement among eight states and two Canadian provinces to preserve the largest reservoir of freshwater in the world, and to resist the temptation to draw it down for short-term uses.
Limited water resources have been a source of conflict among humans and other living creatures for as long as there have been living creatures, and continue to be today. Struggles between settled farmers and nomadic herders in Darfur have at least some of their roots in conflict over the use of water, made more urgent by climate change and the encroachment of the Sahara.

It is not surprising that such an essential, elemental and yet uncertain part of life would become a powerful symbol in the human psyche. In the Bible, water is what scholars call a polyvalent symbol – it can have many meanings, and sometimes several at once. The first creation story in Genesis 1 begins with the waters of chaos over which God’s spirit moves. After the evocation of light, God’s task for the second and third days is to divide and order the waters, to harness the primeval forces of death and destruction, setting its boundaries and allowing it to bring life to the dry land. The alternate creation story in Genesis 2, however, begins with a stream that rises up from the earth to water the land and bring the garden to life. Two different views of water: primordial chaos or river of life.

This ambivalence about water continues throughout the scriptures. Many Psalms speak of a sense of drowning in troubles, overtopped by waves of distress, but also of water as restoring life like watercourses in the desert, of our shepherd teaching us to lie down by still waters. For a people with no history of seafaring, water is terrifying. For a desert people, water is life; lack of water can mean death within a few hours.

In commentaries on the story of Moses and the Israelites in the desert, much is made of the Israelites’ grumbling, of their lack of faith. But I think this misses the fact that their situation was truly desperate. It was not just a matter of wanting a drink to wash down their manna – stranded in the desert with their children and livestock, unable to go back to Egypt, they were in serious danger of death by dehydration. They can be forgiven for begging for their lives.

And despite the spin that our Psalm puts on the story, God does not blame the people, does not “detest” them for daring to ask of God what they needed to survive. Moses is the one who is frustrated with the people, asking them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” But look at what God does. God does not rebuke them for grumbling, but simply gives them water, gives them what they need to survive, gives them life.

Water transforms what it touches, whether dry land, a parched body, or a thirsty soul. Water brings new life, but rushing water can also destroy and overturn those things that we cling to for safety and security, drawing us into the current, stripping us of any illusion of being in control.

Water resists boundaries, taking the shape of whatever holds it, but at the same time finding its own level and seeking out any cracks or weaknesses in the vessels and channels we have fashioned to try to contain it, as any plumber or civil engineer will tell you. The living water that Jesus promises to the Samaritan woman at the well flows out from its source, spilling over the dikes and levees we have built between those who are insiders and those who are outsiders, between Jew and Samaritan, between powerful men like Nicodemus and powerless women like the nameless one at the well. This is water in a desert flash flood: terrifying, destructive to the status quo, but ultimately irresistible. The pull of living water is so strong that this woman leaves her water jar and the errand she came for, trusting in God and letting herself be swept away in the torrent of Good News, to be a vessel and conduit to bring that news to those around her, to draw them into the same rushing current that had taken hold of her.

Some models of creation understand God as a sort of clockmaker, who built the universe, ordained its laws, set it spinning, and then wandered off. But this is not the God we meet in the Bible. The God of the Israelites is there before us to preserve and restore life at every step of the journey, to provide strength and refreshment from deep reservoirs that we cannot even see, to give us what we need: water in the desert. The God that Jesus preached to the Samaritan woman is a fount of living water that spreads over the whole world, overtopping its banks, knocking down barriers and bringing abundant life and salvation wherever it goes, transforming everything it touches.

In a world where we can turn on the taps and get water whenever we want, it is easy to forget how precious it is. Sadly, we only notice it when it becomes scarce and hard to find. But God promises us that wherever we are, no matter how dry and cracked our surroundings may seem to us, we have an inexhaustible source of living water, of abundant life. When we are wandering in the desert, perhaps wondering like the Israelites whether God is among us or not, the living water is there. It is there at the well, under the noonday sun, whenever we may feel isolated and walled off from one another.

Water is precious. Living water is precious, more precious than life itself. That is why God’s promise is so bracing, so startling, so disorienting; God promises that all we have to do is ask and the torrent will be unleashed, the spring will bubble forth, bathing, cleansing, refreshing, satisfying us, like a rush of cool water in the desert.
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(1) Steve Coffel, But Not a Drop to Drink: The Lifesaving Guide to Good Water (New York: Rawson Associates, 1989), p. 16.
(2) This information is from www.waterfootprint.org/

You are welcome to leave a comment on Tim’s sermon!