Liturgies

HOMILY
April 18, 2015
The Impact of Water
John 4:1-15
Amos 5 : 10-15, 21 – 24
I wonder if I could have a glass of water please?
How long did that take, how far did someone have to go and how good is it?
We do not have water scarcity here in Brisbane in normal times but that is not the case everywhere. We only have to drive for half a day west to find that part of our country is in drought.
Water scarcity is the lack of sufficient available water resources to meet the demands of water usage within a region. It already affects every continent and around 2.8 billion people around the world at least one month out of every year. More than 1.2 billion people lack access to clean drinking water.[1]
The reduction of water scarcity is a goal of many countries and governments. The UN recognizes the importance of reducing the number of people without sustainable access to clean water and sanitation. The Millennium Development Goals within the United Nations Millennium Declaration state that by 2015 they resolve to "halve the proportion of people who are unable to reach or to afford safe drinking water."[7]
Over the past Lenten period I set aside quiet times to reflect on a series of daily readings prepared by a Baptist friend of mine in Auckland.
On the 5th Sunday in Lent and on Day 29 [The World Day of Water] I read this:
The UN estimates that the people [mostly women] of the countries of sub-saharan Africa alone spend 40 billion hours a year collecting water. This is the same as a year’s labour by France’s entire workforce.
My meditation practice for the 40 days [and Sundays] was to make small responsive paintings to each reading and so here they are for the 5thSunday and Day 29. The impact of the readings for these two days that I have attempted to portray here are: The supply of good potable drinking water is easy in my world.

We go to our taps,
We put our glass under, drink,
We are satisfied.
We wash our clothes, cars,
We water our gardens, plants,
We are satisfied.

We take our showers,
We celebrate summer rains,
We are satisfied.

The world is not fair,
Brothers and sisters, water poor.
Satisfaction lost.

I have had to own my complacency about water, about the sense and reality of privilege that I have and, my lack of gratitude.
There are two other stories that I want to briefly tell that both expose my complacency about water and give me hope.

The first is the plight of asylum seekers who, fleeing war and persecution attempt to come to Australia by boat.I am familiar with the news bites with the constant debates, with the cruelty. I read Julian Burnside’s constant Facebook posts and Twitter feeds about it and sign petitions and write letters.
But it is only as I have come to know Sha Sarwari a former Hazara refugee, now professional artist and Australian citizen that my awareness, my knowing, my understanding has deepened.
His recent newspaper boat sculpture made as part of his Bachelor of Fine Art at Griffith University gives context to his escape and renewal in Australia post detention with the actual story crafted in beautiful Persian calligraphic script over the top of the Murdoch press stories on newsprint used as the skin of his sculpture. [You saw this boat as the key centre art piece in the short White Silence video]. Sha’s water story is a story of hope and as he would say, luck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoQSZP5my-s

I long for the day when it is not the Gross Domestic Product or our consumer spending or our wealth that is the measure of our well being but our compassion and generous welcoming, when it is how good we are with asylum seekers, refugees, aboriginal people, homeless people and victims of domestic violence. I long for the day when all these values that are good are the values that are imbedded in our souls and the soul of our nation - not only by those of us who have tried to be less complacent but in those who are violent and vindictive. The ancient words of the prophet Amos should be our national anthem:

“…let justice roll on like a river,
and righteousness like a never-failing stream!”

The last water story is one about a very thirsty tired and human Jesus meeting an attractive single woman at an isolated drinking spot. Despite the erotically charged situation Jesus made a mysterious and appealing offer to this woman that completely disarmed her and gave her hope and confusion all at the same time. It was not anything like what she expected and what she had probably grown to expect from a young Jewish itinerant teacher:
“Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

This is the life source, the eternal well spring, the flow that runs silently in through and in us all and in all that we know and see and sense in all the natural order.
This is what carried him and that he carried so well and so mysteriously.
This water, this spirit is not a moralistic, legalistic, judging, negative, domain of fear.
This water, this spirit is not behavioural and culturally constructed behavioural holiness.
This water, this spirit is the energy and source of passionate justice, kindness, welcome, grace, forgiveness, dance, beauty, eroticism, love, music and all creativity. It is the thing that unites us to all and that unites all to us.
There are not two realities but one and this is its mysterious and beautiful source.
Occasionally we are carried by this,
occasionally we experience a rush of this,
occasionally we experience a call to wait as this water, this spirit takes us somewhere else, and we are educated in our souls and then in our minds about how to be in the world, how to act, how to react.
We find ourselves moved to give more than we planned,
to dance like a three year old or write some poetry.
We are carried along by the injustice of government action and find ourselves taking action on fairer policies or are moved by the beauty of the naked human form or a composition by JS Bach or a sunset.
We find ourselves compelled to keep caring despite our exhaustion and cynicism and we find ourselves laughing at ourselves for taking ourselves too seriously.
A well of water gushing,
a rolling river flowing
The mystery is darkness
The light is in the shadows
The rolling water gushing
has lit the fuse of hope.
My last painting for Lent was this commentary on the restrictions of time – the original by Salvatore Dali.

As we live aware of and out of and immersed in this water, this spirit, we are inside and outside of time. We live in the material world in real bodies with real minds and with imminent death but we also live in another world or as David Lynch says we are between two worlds.
The Jesus person lived in that other world and in the material world most easily and invites us to journey through the fog to where we do the same.

NOTES:
*Water scarcity involves water stress, water shortage or deficits, and water crisis. While the concept of water stress is relatively new, it is the difficulty of obtaining sources of fresh water for use during a period of time and may result in further depletion and deterioration of available water resources.[2] Water shortages may be caused by climate change, such as altered weather patterns including droughts or floods, increased pollution, and increased human demand and overuse of water.[3] A water crisis is a situation where the available potable, unpolluted water within a region is less than that region's demand.[4]Water scarcity is being driven by two converging phenomena: growing freshwater use and depletion of usable freshwater resources.[5]
Water scarcity can be a result of two mechanisms: physical and economic water scarcity, where physical water scarcity is a result of inadequate natural water resources to supply a region's demand, and economic water scarcity is a result of poor management of the sufficient available water resources. According to the United Nations Development Program , the latter is found more often to be the cause of countries or regions experiencing water scarcity, as most countries or regions have enough water to meet household, industrial, agricultural, and environmental needs, but lack the means to provide it in an accessible manner.[6]