‘Coming to the Water’
‘Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters! Come, you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not food? Why work for what does not satisfy you? Listen closely to me, and eat what is good. Then you will enjoy the richest food.’
This has to be one of the most inviting and hopeful and positive and lifegiving passages in all of Scripture. I have loved this passage. It is so invitational and inclusive – come to the waters, everyone, no matter what your background or income – whether you have money or not, whether you are rich or poor, young or old, liberal or conservative, able bodied or disabled, straight or queer, urban or rural. All of us are thirsty, and all of us are invited to drink deeply from God’s provisions, grace, and love. Why do anything else? Why pursue the things in life that do not satisfy? Listen closely, good is all around you – eat what is good, take in what is good, live life in the goodness of God! Satisfaction, goodness, welcome, abundance! Isaiah paints us quite the vision! It is this Isaiah 55 vision that will guide our early Fall worship series on God’s Shalom, God’s peace, for our Common Home, as we mark the Season of Creation.
I want to stop right there and take it all in, to linger there. With this vision. With this promise. And yet, I know that our world is not so perfect, and my life is not so perfect, and the created world around me is in so much trouble. Environmental destruction, pollution, loss of species and bio-diversity, climate change and climate disasters are a very present reality. So too are divisions and conflict and exclusion… scarcity, tariffs and war, and a rhetoric that does not allow for imagination, goodness, shalom and abundance.
This summer I was on a canoe trip to Killarney with friends from my Welcome Inn Voluntary Service days, and some of their adult children, from both Canada and the US. We were staying at a stunning campsite on David Lake. We had hiked Silver Peak the one day, and then we had a perfect relaxed gorgeous day just hanging out together at our huge rock covered campsite. We played games. We swam in the crystal-clear northern waters. We had deep conversations. We had a campfire. We ate very well. We watched sunrises and sunsets. We basked in the sun, without any rain. We listened to the eerie sounds of the loons and geese and the barred owl echoing all around us. We saw stars. We looked out at the absolute beauty of God’s Creation all around us, taking it all in. Talk about abundance and the goodness of creation! Come to the waters! My good friend Arlan Preheim, from Lititz, Pennsylvania, was trying to capture the experience and how good it was, but it came out rather funny. He quipped, ‘I could think of all sorts of ways for this day to be worse.’ We all laughed out loud. He was trying to say how perfect this day and location and experience was, and how satisfied and at peace he was, but it came out sounding like all he was doing was imagining worse things, and what could go wrong. It became our running joke the rest of the canoe trip.
Arlan’s funny twist on what he really wanted to say, gets at this dilemma we all have, especially as we think about our Environment, the Created World we live in. Do we respond to the beauty and abundance of Creation, or do we think of all the ways this has become worse? Or is it holding both? What is our mindset? Do we think first of scarcity or abundance? Despair or hope? How do we balance the very challenging things going on in our world and with our environment, with the possibilities of hope and action and a response that makes a difference.
It was a writing team from Canada that put together the worship resources in the Leader Magazine that we will be using in these weeks as we mark the Season of Creation, a time more recently marked and celebrated in the church year each Fall by many different denominations. They chose the theme of ‘God’s Shalom for our Common Home.’ They ground it in the very creation of the world. They write, ‘God made an intricately connected world filled with life and abundance and then pronounced it very good… scripture after scripture testify to a universe “called into being as an expression of God’s love.” As followers of Jesus, we are called to live in shalom with God, with each other, and with all creation in our common home.‘ (Leader, Summer 2026, p.51). They invite us to renew our relationship with our Creator and Creation through prayer, celebration, conversion, commitment, and action, all grounded in worship. The writing team also shaped the whole worship series around Isaiah 55, of which we will focus on two verses each Sunday, and various passages from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel. As they write about the prophet, Isaiah ‘not only calls people to repentance but shows them a way out of their current predicament. It offers them a way back to God – a way back home.’ (Ibid, p.52) This will be a spiritual journey as much as a journey about how we care for our earth. The wheel barrel of dirt in front of us will keep reminding us of the very tangible physical realities of the earth, of our created world – to get our hands dirty in worship, and in our lives – even as we think about our ecological response, our actions, and our very rooting within God’s story and God’s love. By the way, this wheel barrel was originally owned by Glenn Brubacher, former pastor here at SJMC in the 60’s and 70’s. I happened upon their garage sale when they moved out of their house in Kitchener and I needed a wheel barrel. You can still see the homemade repairs he did to hold it together!
Today we start with water, and with thirst. Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters! The Leader materials suggest two key invitations for this Sunday (Ibid, p.56). First, we are invited to know our thirst, to acknowledge that we are thirsty. Everyone is thirsty. We deceive ourselves if we don’t admit that. Yes, there is that physical thirst of the human body for clean water, but we thirst for so much more – we thirst for justice; we thirst for purpose and meaning in life; we thirst for good relationships with the people we love; we thirst for a clean healthy world and environment in which to live and thrive. We thirst for peace, for shalom. As the Leader puts it ‘God is the wellspring of life, the source of shalom, but we cannot experience this abundance unless we recognize that we are thirsty for God’s shalom.’ (Ibid, p.56). This is a spiritual thirst.TO name your own thirst is to recognize that we are not ultimately in control – that our lives our dependant, on others and on God. Maybe the key phrase in the Isaiah passage is this – ‘Why work for what does not satisfy?’ So much of why we get into trouble is searching for things that do not satisfy – the quick fixes, the single use items, the simple answers, the throw away society we have that has subsequently caused so much long-term harm. This is not abundance. This is not recognizing our deeper thirsts.
The second invitation is ‘to come to the water and be satisfied.’ It is that inclusive invitation to come and drink deeply, and to drink and eat what is good, to be satisfied with what is sustainable, to look for God’s presence in creation, to see the good in our world and in other people. It is working for change and living sustainably. It is reduce, reuse, recycle, with an emphasis on reduce. It is making changes to our lifestyles. It is advocacy. It is the asking and searching and knocking in the Matthew passage – giving a child good bread and fish, rather than a stone or snake – in other words, leaving good gifts for the next generation, leaving a world that is clean and unpolluted, making healthy choices. It is shifting our perspective and our consumerist lifestyle. It is an attitude of abundance and sharing, rather than scarcity and hoarding, and accumulating and extracting just for its own sake. The Leader magazine phrases it ‘This work of shifting our perspective and lifestyle is reflected in Matthew 7:7 when Jesus calls us to ‘ask’ and ‘seek’ so that resources may abound and relationships may be restored.’ (Ibid, p. 56)
I love that so many of you took time this week to be outside in God’s creation and to visit a local water source, gathering up water. You took time to ‘come to the water,’ to slow down and take in a little corner of God’s Creation. You also touched the water, gathering the water in little containers. Some of you did this from further away (Shirley from Lake Huron, etc). I brought a water bottle back, filtered and everything, from David Lake in Killarney. But I suspect for most of you, the water came from somewhere in the Grand River Watershed, the water system that sustains so much of our lives here in Woolwich and Waterloo County, and well beyond. Kristine already talked about the Grand River Watershed and showed some maps. It is the largest watershed in Southern Ontario, stretching from its source in the Dufferin Highlands near Luther Marsh, 310 kilometers to its mouth in Lake Erie, covering 6,800 square kilometers, about the same size as Prince Edward Island. Over a million people live within the watershed, which includes 39 municipalities, and the larger urban areas of Kitchener-Waterloo, Cambridge, Guelph and Brantford, even as 70 percentage of the land is rural and agricultural. 4 major rivers feed into the Grand – the Conestogo River, which we see right here in St Jacobs, the Nith, the Speed and the Eramosa rivers. There are more than 90 species of fish in the river system … and 80 species of life at risk. I have kayaked a few times over the years at Luther Marsh, which has had close to 250 bird species reported, and canoed and biked along many local sections of the Grand, and as of Monday I have been to all 12 Grand River Conservation Areas. You see, Rachel and I decided to take a drive to the mouth of the river on Labour Day, where the river empties into Lake Erie at Port Maitland. It’s a long drive. There were people fishing all along the pier, and the river was wide, and just melded and mixed with the waters of Lake Erie. I collected this water from the mouth of the Grand to add this morning, recognizing the great distance this water had already travelled, before it would flow through the Great Lakes, the St Lawrence and out to the Atlanta Ocean. (go and dump it) We then stopped at both Byng Island and Brant Conservation areas, the only ones I had never been to, as we meandered our way home, which is what so much of the Grand River does, it meanders.
I am so stuck by the grandeur and size of the Grand River Watershed. It is truly a place of abundance. It is tended to by the Grand River Conservation Authority, and a whole system of seven dams and reservoirs that keep water levels stable, mitigate flooding, and protect water quality. There are more than 15 wastewater treatments plants and 49 drinking water systems along the watershed. I worry what might happen when the Ontario Government amalgamates the existing 39 conservation authorities into 9 regional bodies.
The Grand River watershed is also home to the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and then the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, which Rachel and I drove through parts of as well on Monday. We began this service with a land acknowledgment, and are familiar with the Haldimand Treaty of 1784, affirmed in the Two Row Wampum, which granted Six Nations land for six miles on both sides of the Grand River from source to mouth. Would the care and health of the watershed be much healthier had a covenantal spirit of respect and shared stewardship been followed? There is much to learn here, and much still to be resolved. Beth Metzger and others at SJMC will be providing a healthy breakfast on September 23 to the All Nations Grand River Water Walk as a group walks the entire distance of the Grand River, drawing global attention to the sacredness and value of water. (https://www.grandriverwaterwalk.com/)
Overall, what strikes me is how interconnected the whole watershed is, and how dependant we are on it. In the last year, we have all become more aware of our drinking water. The Region of Waterloo draws about 20 percent of its supply from the Grand River via the Mannheim Water Treatment Plant and 80 percent from deep groundwater wells. With fears of a water shortage in the system, aging infrastructure and rapid population growth, there has been a pause on new development. There are complicated factors here, both systemically and politically, but it points to both the importance and the fragility of the watershed. Here in Woolwich – Elmira and St Jacobs, the drinking water is piped in from Waterloo because of the earlier contamination of Canagagigue Creek and the local ground water after earlier chemical leakage of DTD and Agent Orange from Uniroyal/Chemtura. This is a long, complicated story I won’t go into fully. ( see https://www.therecord.com/news/waterloo-region/the-long-cleanup-in-elmira/article_db58d71f-11fb-5beb-9f05-663c53c414d3.html) I did talk to my son Micah who worked for 3 years with Aquatox, and he waded into the water each year to check cages for the bio accumulation in clams and leeches, a marker of health, as part of the company’s monitoring the return to more health and wildlife for the Creek itself over the last 20 years. But they still can’t draw groundwater.
Speaking of my son Micah, he now works for the Region of Waterloo as an Environmental Officer in water sampling and spills. I had a fascinating conversation with him about his work, especially on the spills side. They get called to all sorts of spills, about 200-250 a year in the Region – of oils, diesel, hydraulic fluids, coolants, concrete rinses, truck leaks, restaurant grease overflows, sewage back ups and so on. Often spills are caused by a vehicle crash or equipment malfunction. Most are accidental or through ignorance; rarely is it malicious. Their job is to observe and report and try to find the source, while others are tasked with the clean up – with boons, like long socks, that absorb oil, or vacuum trucks or absorbent pads. Sometimes there is nothing you can do, especially if the rain water dilutes the product. The phrase is sometimes used, ‘dilution is the solution to pollution,’ which of course is a fallacy. It is still there. Micah reminded me that all these spills, if not contained and mitigated, do not go through the sanitary system and get treated, but rather go through the storm water sewars, underground pipes, and catch basins and outfalls that collect all the water run off and feed straight into the Grand River. Spills get escalated! Now’s its Brantford’s problem. The late Wendell Berry, who died the last day of August, has said ‘Do unto those downstream as you would have those downstream do unto you.’
Micah talked about Schneider Creek in Kitchener, mostly lined with concrete to quickly take away flood waters from this concrete jungle of a city. It has the most spills in the Region. Spills and contaminants from Shumacher Creek, Westmount Creek and Henry Sturm Creek, along with the large storm water outfalls at Victoria Park and near 50 Kent all feed into Schneider Creek, and yes, then into the Grand. There have been efforts to naturalize parts of this Creek to absorb more, just like we have become more aware and appreciative of ponds and marshes and wetlands in helping our watersheds. Micah’s main point was how interconnected all of this is, how much good works goes into spill mitigation and clean up, and they do a great job, and how important it is for society to be more environmentally friendly, in so many ways.
We have probably dipped too far into all these water systems, but I found them both intriguing, but also informative and instructive to how interconnected our watersheds and environment are. The decisions we make, how we live, what we pollute or discard or cause in spills… how we clean up, how we live, how we create good systems and infrastructure, how we structure things politically – all these things matter. The interconnectedness of the Grand River watershed can be a metaphor for the interconnectedness of so much of our lives, our communities, our society, our faith, our spirituality – and whether we contribute to their health or harm.
So, do we think of all sorts of ways for this day, the situation of our environment and world to be worse, imagining what could all go wrong? There is a realism here we need to pay attention to, and things we can no longer ignore. Do we bury our heads in the sand and say all will be well, no matter what? Or is there a balance here, where we admit just how thirsty we are and how thirsty our world is, how dependant? How so often what we work for and pursue does not satisfy; how much we do not know or are in control of, … while at the same time, in doing so, come to the water and drink and be satisfied, claiming what we can do and the difference we can make by making good choices and working for change in this world we love. This is our spiritual journey. We can choose abundance over scarcity, action over passivity, hope over despair. We can choose to live in ways that promote health and healing in this interconnected world we live in. This is the journey we are invited to in worship for the next weeks, but also in our lives. Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters! Amen.