Biblical reflection for World Water Day 2010

Prepared for morning prayer at the Ecumenical Center in Geneva, Switzerland,
by Maike Gorsboth, coordinator of the Ecumenical Water Network

The following reflection is based on and refers in many places to the paper by the late Steve de Gruchy: "Dealing with our own sewage: Spirituality and Ethics in the Sustainability Agenda".

Readings: Isaiah 41,17-20, Luke 4,14-21

The passage from Luke which we have just heard summarizes the mission with which Jesus has been sent to us. It is the poor, the oppressed, the imprisoned who are at its center; their liberation is the promise associated with the coming of Christ.

Now, you might ask, why talk about liberation on World Water Day? Especially on a World Water Day that is dedicated to the theme of pollution, calling for "clean water for a healthy world"? Shouldn't we rather reflect on our responsibility for Creation on this occasion, remembering how the spirit of God hovered over the waters at the beginning of creation, and how Adam and Eve were given the task to cultivate the land entrusted to them?

Here we have a text that mentions neither water nor creation, but speaks of liberation. There are many ways in which water and liberation are connected. I think so especially after having re-read some of the things Steve de Gruchy - our good colleague and friend from South Africa who passed away only last month - had written on this subject, for example, his thoughts about the River Jordan motif.

When we think about the story of the exodus from Egypt, it begins with the parting and the crossing of the Red Sea. Crossing these waters meant to leave behind slavery and oppression. At the end, the people of Israel then crossed the river Jordan – this time leaving behind the desert; a place devoid of water, a place of thirst, and of disorientation. Leaving this behind, the people of Israel cross the Jordan to enter the promised land, where "milk and honey flow". Steve reminded us that the River Jordan also flows from the living waters of the Sea of Galilee to the "dead waters" of the Dead Sea; connecting life and death.

Later in the New Testament, the waters of baptism also symbolize both our death, our drowning, and our resurrection in Christ. And what is more liberating than our fear of death, and likewise our fears in life, being washed away in baptism?

Similarly, the "living water" that Jesus offers the Samaritan woman is not at all the "ordinary" water from the well. He says so himself "If you drink from this water, you will thirst again...", but if she accepts the living water, she will be free from, she will be liberated, from her spiritual thirst forever more.

It is really not very surprising that water is used as a symbol in this way. Water is, after all, the source of life for all living things on earth.

But water is more than a symbol... Water being the source of life makes it much more than "just" a sacramental symbol or a symbol of liberation. It also makes it a means of liberation.

When we read in Isaiah that God will open rivers on the arid hill tops, fountains in the midst of the valleys, that he will make the wilderness a pool of water for the poor and needy who are thirsty, this was not ‚just’ a promise for their spiritual well-being. After having let his people wander once before in the desert for 40 years before letting them enter the promised land, this text can be seen as a very real and practical reassurance for those in Babylonian exile who are now supposed to once more leave and cross the desert to return home.

The poor and needy of today, we would rather call them the socially and economically disadvantaged and marginalized - they also are longing for water, for freedom from thirst, from hunger, from social and economic slavery and oppression.

From India we hear stories of communities protesting against the depletion and pollution of water against companies like Coca-Cola and others; from our brothers and sisters in Guatemala and Brazil we hear about the struggle of churches alongside indigenous communities for land and water.

In Palestine, water has become a means of oppression.

There is a potential conflict between what Steve de Gruchy called the "creation motif" on  the one hand and the "liberation motif" on the other. It is no longer just the spirit of the Lord hovering over the water, it is no longer just Adam and Eve tending to the garden of Eden. There are almost 7 billion of us, more than 1 billion continually hungry and thirsty, more than 2 billion without sanitation. One eighth of the world's freshwater resources are severely polluted, in China more than half of all rivers and lakes.

Steve de Gruchy summarized the challenge very well when he wrote that "the creation motif is a motif of beauty and goodness, of innocence and wonder." Yet, he said, that what we need today is an ethic of sustainability  for earth "after the fall, in the face of sin, and labour, and enmity, and cholera." Steve challenged us to think about "how (to) hear both the cry of the poor, and the cry of the earth and not play these off against each other, to the detriment of both."

One approach to finding an answer to this question is to start realizing that "we all live downstream". We cannot escape our waste, cannot escape the consequences of environmental degradation. If we reduce our understanding of liberation to economic and political liberation, freedom from poverty and slavery, we ignore that there is no liberation, no escape from the waste and environmental damage we produce.

This is particularly true for those living in poverty. In the end, we may all live downstream. But in the short run – there are a lot of people living further downstream than the rest of us. They are the ones hardest hit by depletion of water, by climate change and what it does to their harvests, by the unjust distribution of water and by its pollution.

Steve asked us to bear in mind that before being allowed to enter the promised land where milk and honey flow, the people of Israel were also reminded that they were but "tenants" on the land given to them, that they had to keep their faith and follow the laws about how to treat one another, how to regulate their economic system, etc. Only then they they would "live long on the land...". Here the "creation motif"  shimmers through – speaking of our rootedness, of our connectedness with the land, which includes its water.

Steve had a vision of an "olive agenda" that would reconcile the green agenda of caring for creation with the agenda of liberation from poverty, including from disease caused by lack of sanitation, which Steve called the "brown" agenda. This agenda would attempt to re-align our economic systems with the ecological rythms of earth.

Steve highlighted that liberation also meant taking responsibility for the land that one is entering.

At the moment, as the rivers and lakes in the world are depleted and polluted, as the glaciers that give birth to them disappear, we increasingly turn to groundwater to still our ever-growing thirst, depleting it faster than it can be renewed. It reminds me of the Egyptians who, when God turned the Nile into blood, dug for water in the ground. Both cases, it seems to me, speak of how we tend to evade tackling the underlying problems.

The water crisis is a symptom of our "unjust", our "polluted" relations with one another and with the rest of creation. The two are interconnected. And water, the bloodstream of the earth, is one of the elements that makes this connection visible and felt.

When you leave the chapel today, I would like to invite you to consciously walk through, or on, the waters laid into the floor by the entrance. The waves on the floor that have their source in the mosaic of Christ's baptism. Let them remind you of your own baptism. Let them remind you of the Gospel of Mathew, where walking on water  is a symbol for the fearlessness and hope that comes with faith.

Let us then without fear dare to walk on water and work for water justice for all the world's people.