Water - taking steps to stewarding and claiming our sacred element
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you our Lord and saviour - Amen
Our readings today have a common thread through-out - did you catch it?
… Well if didn’t our bulletin gives it away
water
In Isaiah we are instructed that “everyone who thirsts, come to the waters” AND
“as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth”
From James we hear that “the farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains.”
And from our Gospel reading from John today where water is the key metaphor - used as almost as a language itself.
Where a Samaritan women encountered Jesus when she came to draw water at a historical well, a deep well in which Jacob established
Little did she know that this slightly pathetic daily quest for water,
alone - without the company of the other women of the village,
in the mid-day heat
- would provide an offer for living waters of eternal life from our traveling Lord
Water…
The most basic of all elements
The most important thing in the world to sustaining life
· I need to tell you that Parts and Facts of the this sermon have been borrowed from an article written by Dr. Irené Novaczek
Water is the source of life, and is a living element
Water is a sacred symbol in all religions,
used in images, prayers, teachings, rituals, and religious texts - as illustrated by our texts today.
Water teaches about the sacred, about the divine milieu in which we live.
Water teaches about cleansing and nourishing our spirit, about peace and justice, and about social change.
But what happens when our key metaphor is in peril
What happens when a language of communicating God’s message has been corrupted - polluted…
For much of the world this has happened
For much of the world our illustrations using water don’t speak with the same clarity
Today 1.1 billion people lack access to clean drinking water,
and 2.4 billion lack access to sanitation, mostly in Africa and Asia.
Today 1/3 world’s people live in areas that are water stressed,
and 50 % of countries have experienced water shortages.
The World Health Organization, the United Nations, and the World Bank predict that within 20 years over 2/3 of the world’s people will experience severe potable water shortages.
This does not include animals and plants.
Water consumption far exceeds renewable water resources in industrialized countries,
and water sources are diminishing by overuse, misuse, and pollution.
Clean water is becoming scarce.
Moreover, precious little of the planet’s water is fresh and therefore potable.
Of all the water on earth, more than 97% is salty.
Just over 2% is bound up in the polar ice caps,
and 0.6% lies in the earth, half of which we can reach and extract with wells.
A mere 0.009% is fresh water that lies on the surface of the earth in ponds, lakes and rivers.
We in Canada with our rich heritage and resources in water - in lakes and rivers and ponds have no sense of the problems of the rest of the world
The water we have in circulation on the surface and in the shallow soils of the planet
is all we will ever have.
There are no new sources of water; it does not rain down from outer space,
nor can it spring anew from any natural process on earth.
Often, the industrial activities that destroy fresh water seem profoundly shortsighted and unethical as well as unnecessary.
Are you aware that in western Canada, oil companies use water for steam extraction of oil from the massive western Canadian oil sands.
Between 2 and 4.5 barrels of water is consumed for every barrel of oil produced.
For decades, lakes all across eastern Canada have been dying from mounting acidity, their crystal clarity signaling not some pristine condition - but an absence of life.
Pregnant women are warned not to eat Canadian freshwater fish because it will harm their unborn children.
But what of all those other mothers? The mothers of mink, beaver, heron, sparrow
all of God’s creatures who cannot dig a deeper well or buy clean water encased in a plastic bottle?
Already our Great Lakes – repository of a full 20% of the planet’s fresh surface water – are shrinking.
We can only expect that people in rural Canada who depend on forestry, fisheries and farming will suffer first and most,
together with the wild things that share this space.
Urban Canadians may be somewhat buffered but over time will also suffer impacts of climate change, water shortages and in-migration of environmental refugees from within and beyond Canada’s boundaries.
…Think about it - a new bread of people - environmental refugees…
Each billions-year old molecule of water circulates endlessly, through the bodies of saints and sinners, mosses and mushrooms, fishes and fowl.
This is the water that is within and around each of us.
We are all part of what we call the planet’s water cycle.
So we are called to stewardship
stewardship is about caring for God’s creation.
Humanity joins with God as a co-creator, and jointly we care for creation.
The Earth needs prophets who will speak of its beauty, elegance, ingenuity, sacredness and suffering, including but not limited to human concerns.
Simply put - we need we need to reclaim God’s creation
We can start with the most basic of all elements - water
Our scripture today was chosen to put the focus on Water and draw our attention to the important role that we all could play
But as vitally important as all that is - our scripture calls on us to move from the metaphor to the message
From the language of water to communicate something - spiritual, theologically essential
And it is most clearly and beautifully shown in our Gospel passage today
The Samaritan women, a women with a checkered past - who has had 5 husbands and is presently not married to the one she is with now
Has come alone to get water, not during the cool of the day but at the midday heat
And Jesus meets her there
He sends his disciples on ahead to buy food - why didn’t he simply join them
…Because Jesus, our Lord, seeks out the lost and lonely and meets us there
and He knows who she is, knows her past and what her life has come to be
…there is no hiding from God…
He talks to her,
in this patriarchal society where a men would not speak to a women in public
and racial society where Jews generally traveled extra long journeys to avoid traveling the direct route through Samaria because they saw the Samaritans people as half breeds, ritually unclean because Jews and non-Jews have co-mixed
Jesus breaks down the societal boundaries and talks to her
…our Lord ignores the ways of this world
In the language of water - Jesus offers her living water - spring of water gushing up to eternal life
This is not the messiah figure of the Jews only - a military leader to triumph with power and might
But a humble Messiah that is thirsty on a hot dusty day of traveling
And offers eternal life - salvation - to this lonely, unclean, other
Our Lord
- knows us
- meets us where we are
- seeks us out
- breaks down the barriers
and offers us living water
May you do your part to reclaim your role God has given you in the stewardship of His creation with water - May we help to keep this sacred element of life pure and clear through-out the world And May you accept and drink of the Living Water that He freely offers - Amen