Water on Thirsty Ground

In the summer of 2012 ninety percent of USA counties declared a state of emergency due to drought conditions. Corn crops shriveled and grain prices soared. 2013 doesn't look any more promising - at least in the West with low winter snowfall in the Rockies and projections that river-flows across the western states will be below average in 2013, as they have been for ten of the last 13 years.

Some ecologists today feel it is too late to talk about ‘sustainable’ strategies and focus instead on being ‘resilient’ as the earth's environment moves into deepening crisis.

Chronic drought can be debilitating, not just on the landscape, but in every area of life. Drought comes in many forms – when inspiration fails, when customers, job prospects or funding sources dry up … when marriage turns sour or brittle, or a daughter no longer calls home. Droughts like these cry out for relief just as desperately as farmers scan the sky for signs of rain.

That’s where some lines from the prophet Isaiah sing out to us with glistening hope:

I will pour water out on the thirsty land.
I will make streams flow on the dry ground.
I will pour out my Spirit on your children.
I will pour out my blessing on their children after them.
They will spring up like grass in a meadow.
They will grow like poplar trees near flowing streams.
Isaiah 44:3-4

Isaiah’s words came to the Jewish exiles in ancient Babylon as they wilted in ghetto communities and labor camps along the Euphrates. They were surrounded by physical water, but their souls were dry, their faith was parched, the future looked barren. Their children felt rootless with fading interest in the old traditions, culture and faith.

A 2012 study of church drop-out rates among young adults in Canada called Hemorrhaging Faith paints a similarly bleak picture. The landscape looks dry and unpromising and the status quo is surely unsustainable.

But barren landscapes don't tell the whole story. Isaiah invites us to embrace his song about rain and renewal, about God’s life-giving Spirit breaking into a new generation, about grass springing up in parched woodlots and poplars lining the riverbank – pictures of growth, vitality and a promising future.

This song – God’s song – counters the fear of the exiles – and the fears that paralyze us today. And parents, pastors and youth workers around the world can hear this song between the lines of Hemorrhaging Faith.

The larger context of Isaiah's song is about God as Creator and Redeemer, a God who calls us by name, who exposes the pipe-dream vanities, the contradictions and chaos that undermine our lives, a God who invites us instead into relationship and partnership in his mission to transform the dry and thirsty world.

That's a powerful song for today - the first day of Spring 2013. And Friday is World Water Day.  Until then, sing!

Image Credits:
Drought Map - Circle of Blue
Fresh Grass - Vanashree
Hemorrhaging Faith - James Penner & Asociates

Getting Carried Away

Guest Writer – Kathy Legg

His voice was like the roar of rushing waters

 and the land was radiant with his glory. Ezekiel 43:2

The Singapore afternoon hung hot and muggy. But the green tangled rainforest where Kevin and I walked was refreshingly cool and full of moist, earthy smells. This 3 hour trek around McRitchie Reservoir was a favorite hike of his. We carried day packs with provisions: bottled water, dried mangoes, sketch books, money for the tea hut at the journey’s end. But long before the journey’s end we learned firsthand about rushing waters: the roar and the glory.

A Psalm of Water for Thanksgiving

This week-end I will be in New England to celebrate an early Christmas with my three children and six grand-children.

We will have turkey and potatoes and an abundance of food – and, no doubt, a glass of wine to mark the occasion. And we will pause before we eat to do something very important.

Partnering with the Creator

The Garden of Eden story in Genesis 2:5-15 illustrates how we human beings were created to serve our Creator as partners-in residence.

The narrator notes two critical agents necessary for sustaining a fruitful landscape – the human and the divine, the gift of rain and the effort of grounds-keepers. Ecology is a partnership in which the Creator initiates and the human creature responds and both depend on the other. The Creator won’t initiate the process until his partner is ready.

Contentment

It can probably be argued that the wealthy King Solomon was a victim of his own success. His capacity to produce fed an almost bottomless craving for more. But at least he had the insight to recognize the power of greed. His collections of proverbs includes this gem:

"There are three things that are never satisfied, four that never say, 'Enough!':
the grave, the barren womb,
land which is never satisfied with water, and fire, which never says, 'Enough!'
Proverbs 30:15-16

Think about these four places in Nature where demand is fierce and insistent with an insatiable craving for more:

Drinking It In

Thanksgiving Gratitude Edition

Guest Writer - Kathy Legg

Land that drinks in rain often falling on it and produces a crop useful to those for whom it is farmed receives the blessing of God. Hebrews 6:7

I live in a semi-arid zone, where rain does not often fall. And when it does the hard dry clay soil may not be well able to drink it in! It pools and puddles on the surface, or runs off in rivulets.

Drip, Drip, Drip

That’s not the sound of early morning coffee, it’s the slow eroding of a marriage.

There’s lots of ways to wreck a marriage - infidelity, booze, sloth and indifference are a few of the standard poisons, but the Book of Proverbs has a choice little evocative analogy for another form of domestic vice guaranteed to breed discontent - 'a quarrelsome spouse is like a constant dripping on a rainy day' Proverbs 27:15.

Selling the Poor for a Pair of Shoes

Ranchers take a pretty good read of the land – and when grazing lands grow dry they think hard about the implications. Amos was a rancher who thought hard and prayed hard. In his day, 200 years after King David, Israel was a fractured nation, split into north and south. Both were prosperous and religious, and they credited God with their prosperity.

But Amos recognized that their religion had very little effect on their ethics. While the wealthy were making money hand over fist, it was largely at the expense of the poor. They would “sell the needy for a pair of sandals” Amos 2:6.

Desperate Drought

The drought in Jeremiah’s day was fierce. Rich and poor were equally frantic trying to fill empty water-jars. Cisterns were bone-dry; farmers were helpless and dismayed; the ground cracked under the heat of the sun and the next generation of wild-life hung in the balance.

Even the doe in the field deserts her newborn fawn

because there is no grass.

Wild donkeys stand on the barren heights and

 pant like jackals. Jeremiah 14:5 

Drought is a terrible thing and Jeremiah pleads with God - “do something – for God’s sake Jeremiah 14:7.”

Landscape of Life

In the previous two posts, Water Cycle and Never Empty-Handed, we explored two wonders of the hydrologic cycle.

First is the wide array of effects that rain and snow have on the natural environment, both directly and multiplied through inter-action with other processes. The second is the parallel impact that God’s communiques have on the landscape of our hearts.

Like rain and snow, the Bible is designed by God to have a transforming effect on our lives.

Never Empty-handed

In my previous post we looked at the marvelous gift of rain and that showers down on the earth every hour of the day and night, achieving a vast array of benefits in the environment. It augments alpine and arctic snow-packs, refreshes rainforests and woodlands, nourishes meadows and grain-fields and then by returns by evapo-transpiration into the skies to do it all again.

It’s the original re-use and re-cycle process built into the universe.

Water Cycle

Round and around it goes, steaming up as vapor and then falling as rain or snow. It’s the hydrologic cycle and it goes on endlessly day after day, night after night all over the world. A billion tons of water every minute - up and down. Every day about 12% of the vapor in the atmosphere falls to the earth and is replaced by a fresh supply.

And everywhere this enormous gift of rain or snowfall accomplishes a variety of essential services for our earth by cleansing the air, moderating the temperature and, most obviously, nourishing the plants and animals on the earth.

Downpour

Three years with no rain had left the land depleted and dry.

The showdown on Mount Carmel between Yahweh and Baal had confirmed which god deserved worship.  "Yahweh is God," the people had chorused.  But Yahweh's purpose was not self-aggrandisement or public acclaim.  Yahweh was - and is - intensely passionate about people and their well-being. He cared too much for the land and its people to leave the soil dusty and dead.  Rain was desperately needed - and that was to be the next demonstration of the character of the true Rain-maker God.  Read the story in 1 Kings 18:41-46 

Showdown

The drought grew more intolerable by the day. Streams ran dry; crops failed. The king was frantic for grazing land for his herds while peasants ached with hunger. Disaster stalked the land. Something had to break.

In the third year of the drought, 1 Kings 18, Elijah went to confront King Ahab. When they met, Ahab cursed Elijah - 'you trouble-maker' he sneered. ‘On the contrary’, Elijah countered, "you and your family are Israel's trouble-makers by abandoning the Lord's commands and following the Baals" (I Kings 18:17-18). Elijah called for a spiritual show-down on Mount Carmel, a sort of religious duel between Yahweh and Baal.

Elijah's Dew-Free Zone

It had been a grim three years in Israel’s northern region. Ahab was one of the bad kings. In fact, it was said that he ‘did more to provoke the LORD, the God of Israel, to anger than did all the kings of Israel before him’ 2 Kings 16:32-33.

One of his vices was his foreign wife Jezebel who had a special fondness for the sexually explicit Baal cult. ‘Human orgies lead to fertile fields’, she told them, and far and wide, Ahab’s people gave it a try. Her influence was pervasive; Asherah poles, Baal idols and hundreds of Baal priests filled the land.

So God sent the prophet Elijah with a message to Ahab. "As the LORD, the God of Israel, lives, whom I serve, there will be neither dew nor rain in the next few years except at my word" 1 Kings 17:1.

This was not good news. In northern Israel rain is usually plentiful and agriculture flourishes. No rain or dew was a death sentence for thousands of people. It was a serious ultimatum - abandon Baal worship or face the consequences.

Baca - You Can't Skirt This Valley

Life is a journey. For some it's an exciting adventure, for others a plodding task, lonely and futile. For people of faith like the singer of Psalm 84, life is a pilgrimage, a journey towards God.

How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord Almighty ...

My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God (v2).

The singer yearns to be in God’s presence and can’t wait to arrive at her destination, but her song is about the journey itself – the rigors and rewards of the road.

Thirst-Quencher

It is one of the high-water marks of the Bible’s entire witness to water and the grace of God. It happened during the annual Jewish Festival of Tabernacles.

This late-summer festival looked back in history to Israel's exodus and God’s provision of water in the desert, and it looked ahead to the dream of Israel’s restored honor among the nations as predicted in Zechariah 14:16. Every year pilgrims came to Jerusalem from every direction in what Josephus called as “a most holy and most eminent feast.”
- Antiquities of the Jews, VIII, iv, 1.

* * * Feast of Tabernacles painting - Valerie R Jackson

Darwin Awards - The Jesus Edition

Since 1994, the Darwin Awards have held up a mirror to human folly. Their tongue-in-cheek books and web-site tell true stories of people who, as they say, ‘live in the shallow end of the gene pool’, people who 'show an astounding lack of judgment and cause their own demise'.

'Terminal stupidity', they call it, with lethal personal consequences. They cite these stories not to laugh at calamity, but as cautionary tales.

Jesus used a different metaphor, but his insight into disastrous human stupidity is just as clear. His story about the foolish carpenter and the raging river seems the perfect parable for April Fools Day!

As a carpenter Jesus knew the consequences of shoddy house-building. He probably knew peasants in the hills around Nazareth who skimped on the foundations of hasty summer-built houses only to see their investment collapse in ruins when the winter rains fell and the wadis swelled with torrential floods that tore the earth away from their doorsteps.

Radical Equality

Here’s a wonder of water – sunrise and rainfall support democracy!

Your Father in heaven causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Matthew 5:45

Jesus says that God is a large-hearted, even-handed Giver. He points out that God is generous to us regardless of our degree of virtue or vice. Sunshine and rain are gifts from the Creator to his creatures with no moral pre-conditions. Jesus echoed the Psalmist a thousand years earlier who said “The Lord is good to all; he has compassion on all that he has made.” Psalm 145:9.

Noah Part 3 - The Rainbow Connection

Photo Credit: Marcheta Gibson

My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky.  William Wordsworth

I remember waking up the morning after a rain-storm aboard a yacht in Desolation Sound, British Columbia. My wife had died seven months earlier and despite the majestic beauty of the scenery, the name Desolation Sound echoed the recent deluge of loss in my life.

As I raised the deck hatch that morning I stared up at a magnificent double rainbow arched across the sky above the shrouds and mast of our boat. My heart leapt as those rainbows silently but eloquently proclaimed promise and hope to my soul.

The ancient story of Noah and the Flood is crowned with a rainbow.  By sheer mercy and grace the ark and its inhabitants survived the devastating flood. And by sheer mercy God does this over and over again in our lives. There are experiences in life that overwhelm us and change our world forever. But God is a master of new beginnings.