Such a River

2 Samuel 23.13-17

Revelation 22.1-5

Some years ago a popular fishing program went by the title of “A River Somewhere”. The presenters wandered the country and the world confident that up a valley, around the bend there would always be ‘a river somewhere’. And their rivers were beautiful and fresh and photogenic. A peaceful, bubbling river of sweet water is one of the great blessings of creation. As one writer said:

“It has always been a happy thought that the creek runs on all night, new every minute whether I wish it or know it or care, just as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale. … I can hardly believe that this grace never flags, that the pouring from ever renewable resources is endless, impartial and free.” Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p 69)

In the words of Ecclesiastes, “All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they continue to flow.” (Eccl.1.7)

Rivers, oceans, lakes – there is something in water that calls to us all. Each of us, I suspect, has “a river somewhere” some favourite stretch of water which babbles over stones or lies deep and still in a lake, or crashes in great breakers on the sand. It is water that is sweet to the taste, or the touch and we revel in it. How often, like David of old, have we longed for that sweet water - to drink it, to swim in it, to sit by it and commune with the mystery of it all.

Perhaps this deep soulful connection with the fluid that makes up so much of our own bodies. is why water creeps in to the teaching of the New Testament. In Baptism we are plunged into the threatening power of water to choke and kill us - and rise to new life with Christ. “We have been buried with him by baptism into death so that, just as Christ was raised by the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” (Romans 6.3-4). “No one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and Spirit” (John 3.5) “The water I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4.14) “Whoever gives one of these little ones a cup of cold water because they are my disciple, will not lose their reward” Water is the symbol of our birth and our death, our service and our very life.

But water is more than friend to our souls. It is necessary to all life – fish and birds, plants and animals, even amoeba, all require water to live. So in our husbandry of earth – our agricultural and grazing activities – water is essential. We have stored it in dams, drawn it from rivers, drilled it from the deep aquifers under our feet. And herein lies the first of our problems. If you fly into Melbourne or into Canberra the final descent brings you low over the rural fringe of the cities. You will see glinting in the sunlight thousands of little dams on the smallholdings all holding precious water. If we could see the whole nation, we would see that amplified a thousand fold – water captured in dams, pumped from the ground, drawn from the rivers, until the very flow of the rivers themselves is threatened.

Now this is licensed and managed and its far too complicated to address the detail in a sermon, but let us not think it is necessarily well managed. In some river catchments in NSW the total amount of water licensed for extraction exceeds the amount of water that falls into the catchment by tens of thousands of megalitres each year. Groundwater licenses in some areas have been issued at up to 200% of sustainable levels. I asked one bureaucrat how this had happened and was told that in the 1970’s and 80’s it was government policy to issue licenses up to 30% beyond sustainable levels!

And around the world we find the same thing, pressure on rivers and water resources is growing. We have not begun to mention industrial and urban consumption. The thirst for water is growing world-wide and posing huge challenges.

And demand is growing in a world where global warming is likely to reduce rainfall in some parts of the world and raise it in others. In Australia we can expect less rainfall in the more southerly part of the country (the part below the tropics) and more rain in the tropical north. We are facing very significant issues with water into the future.

How shall we respond? We could always pray for rain – come to God with the proposition that, against all reasonable science and rational expectation, he deliver more rain upon the earth. ‘Praying for rain’ raises serious ethical issues: in praying for rain do we assume that God micro-manages the weather? Have we slipped back into the worship of the Baals, the weather and nature gods of the Canaanites which were such a temptation to ancient Israel? Do not think the Baals have disappeared: wherever people pray to a God who assures them of prosperity and worldly success we are drawing close to Baal.

What then of praying for rain? I prefer to be Biblical! The prophet Zechariah (10.1) preached “Ask rain of the Lord in the season of the spring rains.” This is eminently sensible advice. It also reflects a theology that says we are not passive victims of nature dependant on the blessing of a rain-sending deity. We are stewards of a planet that has rhythms and cycles and seasons and systems and we must care for it. Respecting the rhythm of river flow, the cycles the rains, all the interconnections that make up our Australian ecology is the heart of our stewardship. To be good stewards we need science and hydrology and meteorology, all ways in which God’s command to care for our earth can be observed. It means living within the limitations of the earth.

If we can’t pray for rain – if we can’t expect God to magically fix the environmental problems humankind is creating, what hope is there for our rivers, for our environment generally?

David hankered for water from the well at Bethlehem. Three of his key soldiers fought their way through a Philistine garrison to fetch him a bucket of water, the sort of derring-do that soldiers sometimes get up to. It was an act of military madness and real personal risk. It may have been driven by bravado or by genuine love, or just to prove that they could it. This unusual story may yet be quite prophetic: we are told that wars will be fought in the future over access to water!

But David showed great spiritual and moral insight. He took the bucket, or the skin or whatever it was that they brought him, and poured it out to the Lord. He said, “The Lord forbid that I do this. Can I drink the blood of the men who went at the risk of their lives?” David recognised that the water he longed for was the lifeblood of others and he sacrificed it.

At the heart of the water debate in this country is over-allocation and reducing supply and a growing thirst for a precious resource. Nobody wants to give it up. Yet what we cling to is the lifeblood of others, in some ways the very lifeblood of the land itself. Sacrifice is necessary if the issue is to be addressed, and sacrifice is never made without pain, and sometimes without shedding blood.
The turning point of human history was the Cross of Jesus Christ. Jesus offered himself as a sacrifice for all the selfishness and bitterness of humankind. He made his death the seal of a life that proclaimed the kingdom of God and taught us how to love one another and share the good things that God has given us. That always threatens the existing arrangements of power, whether it be the religio-political settlement of first century Jews and Romans, or the structure of water licensing in contemporary Australia. In the Cross we see the ritual action of David writ large for the world – the pouring out of the blood of the One who risked all.

The Cross is not just an ancient Christian symbol. It stands as a real challenge to the formation of policy not just in water but in so much of contemporary society. Jacques Derrida has said (The Gift of Death) that modern humans think we have left sacrifice behind, that it is ancient and primitive and belongs only to a world long gone. But, he reminds us, every decision, especially in public policy is a matter of who or what we will sacrifice? Will we sacrifice the rights of workers or the needs of the economy? Will we sacrifice agricultural water or urban water? Will we sacrifice farmers or the environment? What the Cross proclaims is that every such decision must be made in the light of the sacrifice of Jesus, who loved the little ones and called on the powerful and the rich to share what they have.

Of course, the Cross is only half the story. Jesus humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross (says Philippians 2.8). Therefore, (says the text) God also highly exalted him (2.9). The One who hung on a cross now sits on the throne. That throne is the source of the river of the water of life, flowing through the middle of the street of the holy city. On its banks stand the tree of life whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. This great vision of John is the culmination of the Bible, its closing chapter. What it says is that life, and grace, and healing and wholeness flow from the throne of God and of the Lamb of God, the one who was sacrificed. It is not the water of our rivers that will save us, it all that flows from the throne of God – all that the Cross of Christ teaches us about courage, and sacrifice, and love and wisdom. If these things are grasped in public and social life then we can save our rivers.

If we lay hold of these truths we will never look at a valley again, or the little brook that flows through it or lies still in the summer heat, we will never look at those brown trees affected by long drought, without remembering the promise of the river of the water of life and the trees of healing. We live in the driest continent and the state of our streams can worry and depress us as much as inspire us. But as the hymn writer said:

See the streams of living waters,

Springing from eternal love

Well supply your sons and daughters

And all fear of want remove:

Who can faint while such a river

Ever flows their thirst to assuage?

Grace which like Lord, the giver,

Never fails from age to age?

In a land where the rivers still run dry, and the stock do die, where the land will brown off in a few short weeks, remember the source of your life, and the health of our land, the river of life and grace and healing which flows from the throne of God and the Lamb to whom be glory, now and forever. Amen.

Preached Canberra Baptist Church 20^th November 2005