The Blessing and Curse of Water: The Rev. Dr. Frank Kirkpatrick

May 1, 2016 Sixth Sunday of Easter: Rogation Sunday

Trinity Church, Hartford

The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick

 

Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5

John 5:1-9

 

The Blessing and Curse of Water

 

Today is the sixth Sunday of Easter. It is also May 1, or as it is known in many places, May Day, celebrating the emergence of spring with festivals welcoming May flowers which were prepared for by April showers. It is also what the Anglican tradition has called Rogation Sunday, a day set aside in the Christian calendar in mainly agricultural communities for asking God for help in growing healthy crops and sustaining plentiful agricultural life. 

There is, I think, a common theme connecting all these meanings associated with May 1. And that theme is the imperative for all of God’s people to reflect upon the importance, but also the ambiguity, of the one thing on which all life depends and which, if mishandled, creates injustice and potential catastrophe for the human race. And that one thing is water. Water is absolutely necessary for life. Without it all living things die. Our scripture readings this morning testify to the centrality of water in God’s original creation and in God’s subsequent recreation of the world. The seer in the book of Revelation says in describing the city of God to which all the saints aspire:

“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 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, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more.” Water here is a blessing, a fundamental resource necessary for both growth and for healing. It’s important to remember that the first thing God created after light, was water, in the midst of which he created the firmament. Water in the creation story is a primordial reality. It can both replenish the earth but it can also flood the people who have abandoned the God who created them. 

 

Our gospel story this morning also reminds us of the power of water, in this case the power to heal. An invalid is hoping to be able to enter the waters of the pool of Bethsaida (meaning house of mercy or grace) believing that he will be cured if he can only immerse his body while the waters are stirred up in it. But Jesus intervenes and cures him by simply commanding him to get up and walk. Nevertheless Jesus’ miraculous healing doesn’t deny the curative power of the water itself, it just overrides it in this instance.

 

Now we don’t have the power of Jesus to miraculously alter the course of nature just by commanding it. Instead we need to appreciate our complicated and often ambiguous relationship to the forces of nature. And we need to figure out what we can do with our limited and fallible power to respond to both the promise and the peril of too much or too little access to water, access which is too often unequally distributed across our globe and even within our own nation. In the Middle East access to water is as important as access to oil and that access is controlled by geo-political forces which feed on fear of and hostility to others all of whom require access to water. Israel depends on access to the water of the Jordan River whose headwaters are controlled by Syria with whom they co-exist in a  tenuous and fraught relationship. War over access to water is always a real possibility in that part of the world. This means that the politics of water use is ambiguous. It is both life-giving but also life-threatening if it is choked off by geo-political considerations. Today over a billion people world-wide do not have adequate access to water often because the nations that have abundant water refuse to share it with their political enemies. Water can be given to the prisoner who is thirsty and it can be used as an instrument of torture when he is subject to water-boarding.

 

The ambiguity of our relationship to water is also amusingly but tellingly reflected in two historic prayers. The 1928 book of common prayer had two Rogation day appropriate prayers that reflected our vulnerability to the forces of nature as they manifested themselves in rain, our most abundant source of water but a source which can sometimes give us too little or too much. The first prayer, uttered in a time of drought, implored:

“O GOD, heavenly Father, Send us, we beseech thee, in this our necessity, such moderate rain and showers, that we may receive the fruits of the earth to our comfort, and to thy honour.”

The second prayer, immediately following what was apparently an overly effective first prayer, said:

“ALMIGHTY and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech thee, of thy great goodness, to restrain those immoderate rains, wherewith thou hast afflicted us.”

 

These prayers reflect the ambiguous results of different situations in which we ask for water but get either less or more than we really want. This should remind us that we don’t always control the outcome we desire.

Today, of course, thanks to modern science, many people are trying to find ways to exercise responsible dominion over the flow and distribution of water and our access to it. We have found through the science of engineering successful ways to irrigate fields that don’t have natural channels supplying them with water.

 

We are also trying to find ways to build homes along shorelines that will not collapse when strong tidal waves threaten them. Some are even trying to find ways to discourage building in such vulnerable areas altogether though our much-vaunted freedom to do as we wish if we have the money to do so often leads us to resist such proposals for limiting our freedom to build wherever we want. We are trying to find ways to desalinate ocean waters so that they will become available for safe drinking water. We are coming up with proposed anti-pollution solutions to the toxic chemicals that are being dumped by acid rain across parts of our country. We are even trying to negotiate legal arrangements among the populations of the western part of our country as to who should have access to the scarce waters of the increasingly depleted rivers that flow unevenly through the various states there. 

 

The irresponsible politics of water use can also have devastating effects on some of the most vulnerable members of our population: our children. We know that corrupt political considerations played a role in the catastrophic effects of the decision to pipe lead-filled water through the Flint, Michigan water supply system. At the very least the danger of lead-poisoning was covered up and remedial efforts to correct the problem were delayed because it would have been costly to the taxation phobic citizens of the city and the state to spend the money necessary to address the problem effectively. 

 

Perhaps most important in the list of responses to the ambiguity of water are the many wise and conscientious scientists and citizens who are trying to alert us to the dangers of climate change. This may be the most challenging issue we face and at its heart is the effect of climate change upon water. If we don’t acknowledge the warming of the earth’s waters we will not be willing to do those costly and long-term things that can reduce the chances of the melting of the polar ice caps and the consequent rise in the sea levels around the globe. That rise threatens to inundate low-lying parts of our country. This is another case of too much water in the wrong place at the wrong time. The lack of reliable rainfall in parts of Africa is driving large segments of that continent’s population into migrating elsewhere which inevitably has snowballing effects on world-wide migration, the results of which we are seeing in Europe and the Mediterranean. 

 

Acknowledging the reality of climate change may also have ambiguous consequences: on the one hand it may lead us to believe that we don’t need to limit our current life-styles because we can trust our entrepreneurial ingenuity and scientific wisdom to find a way around the problem before it’s too late. On the other hand it may lead us into a fatalistic resignation to the forces of nature trusting that God will, like Jesus at the pool of Bethsaida, miraculously intervene to save us from at least a partially humanly created disaster. 

 

I would suggest that we cannot afford either of these two extreme options: we have to acknowledge the degree to which we are dependent on and intertwined with the forces of nature, from which no clever science can completely liberate us. In the perennial game of humanity versus nature, we must remember that nature bats last. But we also have to acknowledge that God has given us reason and science so that if we use them responsibly, humbly, and cautiously we might just do something to avert extreme catastrophe to our planet. The dominion over nature which God granted to Adam and Eve did not extend to irresponsible and self-centered mindless exploitation of those forces of nature which God created and called good. We must learn to temper our demands upon nature and its water supply in order to meet basic human needs, not excessive wants to consume however much we desire simply because we have the money to do so.

 

God has given us the vital ingredients for a morally responsible approach to the societal dimension of environmental ethics. We know in our moral bones that we have to share the water to which we have access, especially with the poor and disadvantaged.  We also know that we have to think globally and long-term if we are to handle the issue of water responsibly. Water is global and dealing with it requires international long-term thinking and long-term investment of our resources now, not waiting until our grandchildren are grown and leaving it to them to deal with. 

 

On this Rogation Day, therefore, let’s think about the ambiguous gift of water to our planet and its living populations: plant, animal, and human. It can heal and it can destroy: it can unite and it can divide: it can be both blessing and curse. But above all, its multiple manifestations can call us to new sense of our oneness with all of God’s creation. From that oneness we can take on our responsibility in providing a moral foundation for sharing with equity and justice all the good things of the earth, especially water, with all our brothers and sisters no matter where they live.