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Some of you will recall that in June of 2010 I attended what proved to be an excellent conference called Water and a Baptismal Life. The setting was rather unlikely, the parched high desert of New Mexico in the American Southwest, but the speakers were more than I could have hoped for as they explored the importance of the imagery of water in our Christian faith.

I had to fly in a day early because I’m...like...Canadian eh? There just isn’t a straightforward way to get to the desert of New Mexico from Toronto, but the time wasn’t wasted. One of the things I did was take a bus tour of the capital city of Sante Fe which is very beautiful, especially the older and historic part of town.

At one point the guide told us that we were driving down Acequia Madre Street which because it is Spanish has a nice sound to it. He pointed out the window as he told us about the waterway, more than two hundred years old, running alongside the road and which gives it the name Acequia Madre. As pleasant as it sounds the name means Mother Ditch and it is one of many lined ditches in this parched land. When humans live in a region where there is very little water they are inclined to persuade it which way to go. In these southwestern states they are used for irrigation and in another time as a source of household water. So our bus actually slowed down for the roadside plaque honouring Mother Ditch.

It struck me that we are so accustomed to abundant water here in Canada we don’t give much thought to the rivers and streams which are all around us, let alone our ditches. We assume they will run all year long except when they are frozen, although most of our waterways are still alive beneath the surface of the ice even then. At the conference centre called Ghost Ranch most of the streams simply dry up to dust in summer as though they had never existed.

The music leader for our week together was Marty Haugen whose hymn Let Us Build a House was our opening song today. Marty came to me at one point and said David, you’re the only Canadian here, I want to include some Canadian rivers in the hymn we’ll be singing tonight – name some. The pressure was on! Well, there’s the St. John and the St. Lawrence, I sputtered, except that the St. Lawrence was no good for Marty because we share that one with the US. I offered the Ottawa and the Assiniboine and the Fraser. I was just getting warmed up but “good enough!” he said and off he went. There are of course dozens of major rivers in this great country of ours which I just recall in the moment.

We are continuing in this brief season which is called Creation Time, a few weeks in which we ponder our relationship with both the Creator and the created world of which we are part. Last week the theme was Forests, and this week it is Rivers. Not just water in the general sense, please note, but rivers which are the source of both physical life and spiritual life.

There are a surprising number of references to rivers in the bible. I say surprising because what we often call the Holy Land is a lot like the desert regions of the American Southwest. The waterways are few and far between and most of them have a cyclical life, filling up, often dramatically, during the brief rainy season then virtually disappearing.

In the book of Genesis we discover that in the mythical Garden of Eden, there is a river which has four branches. Two of the rivers, the Gihon and the Pishon, may be symbolic rather than actual rivers – Gihon translates as “gushing forth.” The other two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, are definitely real and we still hear about in the news from Iraq. There is a combination in these verses of the spiritual and the practical, which continues to be our reality today when we speak of rivers.

We’re told that the prophet Amos preached justice and judgement to God’s people, Israel, and offered a vision of that justice flowing not like a seasonal river, “here today and gone tomorrow” but as an ever-flowing stream. He scolds the people for acting religious without any passion for the way of God, which is the way of justice. Once again I share with you a paraphrase from The Message and remember that it is the voice of God we are hearing in these verses:

I can't stand your religious meetings.
I'm fed up with your conferences and conventions.
I want nothing to do with your religion projects,
your pretentious slogans and goals...
Do you know what I want?
I want justice—oceans of it.
I want fairness—rivers of it.
That's what I want. That's all I want.

Rivers and streams of justice. You may have had the experience at some time in your life of trying to wade across a fast flowing stream or river and you know that there can be tremendous power in the rushing waters. You may have actually been afraid of being swept away by the force of the water. Even with smaller streams the rapids and waterfalls convey that energy. It is that sort of power that God wants demonstrated in our thirst for justice, including justice for Creation.

What would that forceful, ever-flowing justice look like in our world of real rivers and real creatures?

I recently attended another Christian conference on creation care issues and one of the many excellent presenters was professor Tyrone Hayes from Berkeley University in California. To be honest when I saw on the agenda that a biologist was going to speak about frogs and toads I thought that I didn’t give a ribbet, and almost played hooky from his presentation. He proved to be entertaining and thought-provoking and disturbing. He told us about a chemical called Atrazine which is used in agriculture in the US – eighty million pounds a year even though it is banned in the European Union. Atrazine doesn’t stay in the fields. It runs off into the streams and rivers, including the mighty Mississippi which transports two million pounds into the Gulf of Mexico. Atrazine changes the hormonal structure of frogs, so that males become females, or something in between and when they don’t reproduce they disappear.

He quoted from the novel called East of Eden by John Steinbeck which speaks of the frogs of the Salinas River valley in California where the frogs sang loudly in the night. Professor Hayes told us that sixty years later the frogs are all but gone in the Salinas river because of the run-off from industrial farming. He also wanted us to know that the hormones of frogs are very similar to human hormones and there is growing evidence that the chemicals in our drinking water are connected to the increased rates of breast and prostate and other cancers. He also pointed out that the company which produces Atrazine also produces one of the leading drugs prescribed to women with breast cancer. Where’s the justice?

We don’t have to go to the United States to hear of contaminated river systems. Scientists studying the Athabaska River in Alberta, along with its tributaries, say that the massive oil sands project is the source of heavy metals pollution. The aboriginal peoples who live in this watershed have been claiming for years that there health has been compromised by water polluted by the byproducts of the refining process, although they have been largely ignored. Our United Church has been part of a coalition of Canadian denominations attempting to bring attention to these issues in solidarity with these Native peoples.

While we would never do so deliberately, it’s as though we are injecting poison into the veins of the planet and then wondering why the patient is wasting away.

Can we choose a different course in the way we do justice for the streams and rivers of our planet home,? Of course we are often tempted to feel that we are helpless to do anything in response to these dire situations. How can we choose not to act responsibly for our sake, the sake of our children, and the sake of all of the created order? It was Albert Einstein who observed that ``those who have the privilege to know, have the duty to act.`` As people of faith who are called to be stewards of creation in the book of Genesis, this is our duty and our privilege.

We can appreciate the waterways close at hand and the creatures that inhabit them. Every Spring and Fall salmon and rainbow trout make their way up Bowmanville Creek and that migration and watching them leap at the old dam I one of the wonders of creation. We don’t have major rivers in Clarington but there are now walking paths along Bowmanville Creek and Soper Creek and Wilmot Creek for our enjoyment.

In some municipalities the manhole covers and storm drains have stencilled fish alongside them to remind people that what they put down those drains, as well as the ones in our own homes, can eventually find its way into streams and lakes. So as individuals, as regular folk who want to make a difference, we can take conscious care of what might otherwise be thoughtless choices.

And we can thank God that we are members of a denomination which continues to address the larger issues of justice for generations to come, including the care we take with our waterways and wetlands. In recent years it has been suggested that human beings may be biologically programmed to live in the moment, that we are genetically selfish. We choose a different way. Because we love God, first and foremost, we will love our neighbour as ourselves, even if that neighbour will live a hundred years from now, and even if that neighbour is a fish or a frog.

I’ll leave you today with some of the thoughts from a novella called A River Runs Through It by Norman McLean. It was made into a motion picture which starred Brad Pitt – he keeps showing up doesn’t he? The first sentences of that novella tell us that “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister...”

The concluding sentences bring us back to the rivers:

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.

We can be haunted and inspired by the rivers and streams and brooks and “cricks” around us and care for them as Christ’s people who respect creation. Thank God!