Choosing Paths

We’ve been inundated with water these past few weeks.  The Athabasca River has been rising, Edmonton has seen severe flooding that has flooded basements and freeways.  Our Pastoral Relations Minister at Northern Spirit Region, Rev. Adam Hall, has been on the news as the mayor of Tofield, when he declared a state of emergency.  Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.

We in Canada are blessed with an abundance of water.  In the 2020 novel “Watershed”, Calgary author Doreen Vanderstoop wrote of what Alberta might be like in 2058.  She imagined the province losing glaciers and the southern part of the province becoming a dry desert worse than the Dirty 30’s. Up in Fort McMurray, there are lush green forests and crops, because it still has water.  The politics and quality of life is impacted in a Mad Max scenario where survival and vigilante behavior is unchecked.  All because of a change in water.

It’s easy to take water for granted.  Living in the arid lands of the middle east, Jesus knew how precious it was.  Rivers were few and far between, wells were the centre of a community, and Abraham and Sarah, travelling through the wilderness, depended upon finding springs for their survival.  Living Water was water that moved.  Water that was still and stagnant, like a certain reflecting pool in Washington, would grow algae and be unsafe to drink.  Water is essential to life, and everyone following Jesus knew it.  Offering water was more than playing nice and being welcoming.  It was the gift of survival. It was radical hospitality.

Hospitality can be as simple as offering a glass of water.  Hospitality is something that can lay the groundwork for community and friendships.  Hospitality can be an invitation to a new way of life.  One of our challenges in the United Church is that we struggle with how to invite.  We think we should invite people to church, but what we are really called to do is invite people to this odd and wonderful lifestyle and philosophy that we call Christianity.

Inviting is not easy if we are unsure of what Christianity is, or why it makes a difference.  It is not easy when the brand of Christianity that gets the most attention is seen as full of judgement and hypocrisy.  When the bible is used to oppress people, we have a difficult time selling it.  When Christian leaders meet with politicians to support legislation that discriminates against people, we have a problem.  The trends that start in the US trickle into Alberta rapidly, fueled by social media that knows no borders.  The Southern Baptist Convention backed away this month from officially ordaining women preachers, and many tictoc influencers, even women, are promoting the idea that women don’t need to vote.  That they can let their men decide on politics for the household.  And this is justified in the name of being a good Christian.

It’s an uphill battle.  No wonder so many people are cautious of churches.  When we develop a culture of invitation and hospitality, we need to be aware of that.  We need to be aware that some people are rejecting Christianity for strong reasons.  Lillian Daniel talks about how people who say they have no religion tend to have four attitudes.  There are the “No ways”, “No Longers”, “Not Yets” and the “Never Haves”. She describes them this way:

The No Longers have drifted from church. Sometimes they return for a big life event like a wedding or a funeral, but not until they feel a lack in their lives.

The No Ways made a conscious choice to leave, often after being seriously hurt by a religious community. Sometimes they find a different kind of church...  When we do welcome newcomers, we do a pretty good job with the No Ways. We're good at telling people what kind of church we are not, and sometimes they like what they hear.

But the Never Haves and the Not Yets have never experienced religious community before. Never Haves are often the grown children of the No Ways, inheriting their parent's anger or pain, nervous about showing up to any church.

The Not Yets are open and curious, and may wander in. Unfortunately, we often treat them like No Longers or No Ways, by answering questions they are not asking. "We're not like this or that kind of church," we say. Meanwhile the Never Haves and Not Yets are simply wondering who we think we think we are talking to during all those prayers.

How we talk about our faith needs to keep these different kinds of folks in mind.  And the translation we heard of the Romans passage is helpful.  It takes the word ‘sin’ and translates it as ‘the path of broken ways’.  Sin has become a weaponized word, full of judgement and condemnation, used to justify taking away human rights, especially for the 2sLGTBQIA community.  Sin is the word that many churches use to try to recruit newcomers, it is a word that pushes fear as the motivation to join their communities of faith.  But the original meaning of the word was “missing the mark”.  A path of broken ways is a fresh original way to think of what keeps us from full life.  A path of addictions to all kinds of things that block us from beauty and harmony. 

We still struggle with our addictions to everything from drugs to temper tantrums.  But our faith and our community help us with that struggle.   We thirst for peace and love and joy and hope.  We are blessed with an abundance of water to quench our thirst, not just water we physically drink, but spiritual water that helps us on our right path to beauty, peace and love.  God’s love has quenched our thirsts for community, thirst for acceptance, thirst for justice, thirst to make a difference.  May God inspire us to listen for the thirsts of our neighbors so that we can offer them living water. 

Thirsty anyone?

In the ruins of the ancient City of Rome a few short blocks from the Colosseum, there is a small drinking fountain that dribbles out a thin stream of water.

In Rome on a hot day in September of 2017, the street vendors brought out bottles of water to unsuspecting tourists who paid upward of 8 dollars for a bottle, which can mean a hefty profit for the vendors.  Unbeknownst to the tourists, the fountain on the Paladine Hill was a short walk away from the Colosseum and brings fresh water through a Roman aqueduct built before Christ was born.  Getting a drink of water was as simple as filling up water bottles at this ancient tap.  It was free too.  The tour guide didn't push the water at us like the street vendors loudly did, just gave a gentle invitation to fill up our water bottles and be quenched.

This month we have become very sensitive to the importance of water to our existence.  One moment we were struggling with the smoke of forest fires and praying for rain, the next we were facing flood warnings. Last week in Athabasca, the downtown gazebo had its own moat and the skate park looked like a small swimming pool.  The Athabasca River was filled with large trees speeding down to the Arctic Ocean in a great hurry.  There are still communities in the north hoping and praying for more rain to end the forest fire season for good this year.

Water is easy to take for granted in our climate where snow is plentiful, the glaciers are clean, and the rivers and lakes abundant.  For Jesus, it was another matter entirely. So much of Israel is surrounded by harsh dry land.  A group of United Church friends went on a tour of Egypt, Petra and Israel some 20 years ago, and came back with stories of small towns having their water systems bought up by large corporations.  The corporations would bottle all the water and then sell it back to the townsfolk.  They lost their access to their water supply, and not only that, watched the growth of plastic pollution accumulate in the town as there was no recycling plant for the empty bottles.  Water became a political weapon, and the Jordan River became a source of wealth that everyone wanted to control.

In our own country, clean drinking water is not a given for many Canadians. As of two weeks ago, the Government of Canada reported that 142 long term drinking water advisories had been lifted since 2015, but there are still 28 long term drinking water advisories in effect in 26 communities across Canada.  And as anyone knows who has been to Banff or Jasper lately, the great glaciers that feed the Athabasca and North Saskatchewan rivers, are receding rapidly.  We cannot presume that our water supply is secure and unchanging. Nor should we assume that our experience with water is universal.

According to the World Health Authority, in 2020, 5.8 billion people used safe drinking-water. The remaining 2 billion people had to travel at least 30 minutes or more to get water that was safe or drank untreated water, or even had deliveries of a few cups of water once or twice a week.

Jesus knew the value of water in a way that we who have taps don’t.  He knew that a gift of water was more than a nice thing to do, it could mean the difference between life and death.  Interesting that in this scripture, Jesus is giving instructions to his followers on how they will need to depend on others to survive.  This is part of his long lecture in Matthew on how to be a disciple preaching to an indifferent world.  In some ways, this is not about what we should do, ie give hospitality, although I would never suggest we shouldn’t give hospitality, but more about how we should receive hospitality when we are working on sharing God’s mission.  We like to think that we are the ones to hand out the water and give people what they are thirsty for, but do we ever think what it takes to receive the water we need so we can continue to carry out God’s mission?

In a world where someone thinks its okay to stab a professor and students in broad daylight for the ‘sin’ if I can use that word, for discussing the complexities of sexuality, in a world where we are afraid to go to a party celebrating the courage of youth asking to paint a crosswalk, in a world where for a moment it looked like Russia would have another civil war, we need to take care of ourselves and not be too proud to accept offers of hospitality.  I have seen too many people post online that they are struggling with depression and anxiety and fear.  We hear too many stories of overdoses in Alberta.  There are a lot of thirsty people looking for something they can trust, but who will they hear it from?  If we don’t take care of ourselves, how will we help others?  Being brave enough to look at our lives with the honesty that Paul demands is not easy.  Are we living in the freedom of God?  Are we able to look at what we do and whether it waters our souls or not?  A purposeful life that brings meaning and hope and healing to others.  Living a purposeful life takes time and wisdom and prayer and the humbleness to accept hospitality when it is offered.  To be both aware of our thirst and humble enough to accept help when we need it means that we are able to continue to be disciples and messengers that carry good news into the world.  We can also offer living water like the street vendors, pushing prices ever higher, yelling to all around them, or we can simply and kindly point out a free fountain of unending water to those in need.

Now more than ever, people need to know that there is a freedom from the tyranny of despair, a freedom from the tyranny of the many addictions that our consumer society offers up.  Whether we are addicted to dangerous habits like street drugs or small habits like too many computer games, we can hear the invitation to live lives of freedom.  We can accept God’s gift of whole-hearted, brave lives.  That is what Jesus showed us, and is the life we are called to.  May we know the wisdom and the humbleness to accept the living waters that keep our mission and ministry alive and thriving.

Lost and found

I have a guilty secret! I love movies, and not just any movies, but kids’ movies, especially Disney movies.  These folks seem to have big hearts for the human condition, and they are brazen in their exploration of tough issues.  Want your 8-year-old to learn how to manage their feelings and talk about what bugs them, try Inside Out. Want them to be educated on techniques to combat racism? Sit them down to watch Zootopia.  All kinds of topics that we adults might hesitate to discuss because we’re feeling discomfort, they have worked on.  They even have worked on environmental commentary.  I was fascinated by the latest Pixar Disney movie, Finding Dory.  It tackles several topics, dealing with everything from physical disabilities, like Nemo’s fin to mental challenges, like Dory’s lack of short term memory, which causes her and her friends no end of problems.  Dory says, “nothing in my noggin” to explain her disability, which is quite untrue of course.  There is more than meets the eye in Dory, and more than meets the eye in the movie of a quest for family through the wide ocean from the Great Barrier Reef to the California coastline. 

This movie shows three fish on their adventure through the ocean stumbling repeatedly through a sea floor littered with cars, garbage, plastic and so on.  It’s subtly done, and the fish characters never make a big deal of it except when Dory gets tangled up in plastic and has to be rescued by a marine biologist.  It’s sad that we have known about the giant island of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for years and no one has done anything about it.  It’s sad that Victoria still dumps raw sewage into the ocean, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia online.  CBC reported last year that Montreal dumps untreated sewage into the St. Lawrence, and that roughly 185-million litres of raw sewage have been dumped into Winnipeg's rivers since 2004. 

That’s about 74 Olympic sized swimming pools.  I don’t know how that compares to our town pool here across the street, but that’s a lot of water.  And when Toronto has a big storm or Halifax’s aging pipes break down, well, let’s just say that it’s not pretty.

Water is a part of us, and a part of our world.  It is changing faster than we realize, and it shouldn’t take a cruise ship sailing the North West Passage to get our attention, and to encourage us to encourage the politicians to do something.

We’ve lost our way.  We’ve forgotten that we are what we drink and that if we completely mess up our water systems, it’s going to make Jeremiah’s description of desolation come true.  The devastation of the fruitful earth is a desecration and a reversal of Genesis 1 when God’s breathe, Ruach, blew over the world and God saw that it was good.  Jeremiah reports God seeing what foolish humans have done, and it is definitely not good.   Is this what God wants for creation? Is this what we call good stewardship?

Jesus talked about going after and rescuing the insignificant, the least and the littlest.  Making an effort to hunt for that tiny coin, abandoning the herd of sheep to go looking for a lost lamb, the 1 percent.  The tiny insignificant things do matter.  When we monitor the quality of water in the Athabasca River, when we invest in a low-flow shower head or a dual flush toilet, when we change the way we brush our teeth to conserve the water more carefully, when we drink water straight from the tap to remind ourselves that water should be clean and potable and not controlled by multinational corporations, when we keep asking our politicians, when will first nations children in Canada all be guaranteed clean drinking water, when we remember to not take for granted what we pump up from our wells, when we remember to be careful when we clean up after an oil change or a painting project, it does make a difference.  It may be a drop in the bucket, but it matters, folks!  Those little actions, those attitudes and questions will add up over time.  A drop of water, millions of times over, can carve out the Drumheller river valley, or even the Grand Canyon.

We in the United Church like to preach about a God who loves us, and I do believe in that God.  But there were times when my children were small that I got exasperated with them.  Sometimes they wandered off in the store when I was trying to shop for something.  A few seconds later, I would be searching for them frantically until I would hear ‘would the mother of the little child please come to the jewelry counter’.  I would feel frustrated that they hadn’t listened, that I hadn’t watched closely enough over them, that it took only a moment for them to move so fast.  If God is the creator of this beautiful blue planet, surely there is a need to honor that creation by whatever little steps we can take to cherish it.  Because from all accounts, there isn’t a lot of water nearby and even if we harvested clean water on Mars and brought it back here, I’m not sure we could get it here fast enough to help the fish and the whales and other creatures in the ocean and rivers.  They don’t have a voice, unlike Dory and Nemo and Marlin, and we do.  May we do our best to keep doing our best to speak up for this beautiful world before it is lost into the vision Jeremiah painted so bleakly many centuries ago.  God help us find the vision, the words and the backbone to speak for the lost ones, confront the foolish ones and challenge the complacent ones, especially when we are the lost, foolish and complacent ones.  God have mercy on us all.  Amen.