Living Waters of Justice

Living Waters of Justice

John 7:37-39

John 7:37-39 is a rather odd little pericope. Jesus has been at the festival of Booths, or Sukkot, a Jewish fall harvest festival. On the last day of the festival he cries out, for no apparent reason: “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” John 7:37-38. That’s not really a quote from scripture but never mind. This isn’t the first time John’s Jesus has spoken of living water. Shortly before this passage he has told the Samaritan woman at the well that if she knew who she was talking to he would have given her living water. John 4:10. It makes a certain amount of sense to put these two passages together and understand Jesus to be saying that out of the believer’s heart shall flow the living water the believer gets from Jesus. It’s an odd image. We don’t usually think of water flowing out of the heart, but of course Jesus uses a metaphor here so I guess it’s OK.

Jesus refers to people who are thirsty coming to him and drinking, presumably drinking his living water. Yet these days when I think of living water flowing out of faithful Christian people I think of it being the whole world that is thirsty. The world isn’t in very good shape these days. We are still in the midst of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic. That nasty virus has infected more than one million Americans and killed more than one hundred thousand of them. Worldwide numbers are of course substantially higher. So many people are so anxious to get life back to what used to be normal that we’ll certainly see those numbers go up substantially as businesses, offices, and other things reopen. Some church people seem particularly anxious to resume in person worship disregarding the well-known dangers of people gathering together even in church.

The economic impact of the pandemic has been catastrophic for tens of millions of Americans and far more than that around the world. Our federal government has botched its handling of the pandemic from the very beginning thereby making the impact of the coronavirus even worse than it had to be. The world desperately needs both an effective treatment for COVID-19 and a vaccine against it if we’re ever going to get over it. Lots of highly qualified people all over the world are working on those medications, but we still don’t have them.

Then in the midst of the pandemic four Minneapolis police officers killed a defenseless Black man named George Floyd. Protests against police brutality, of which Mr. Floyd’s death is only the most recent and best known example, broke out all over the country and even beyond our country. Most of the thousands of thousands of protesters have been peaceful, but a small number of people bent on theft and destruction of property have caused large amounts of property damage and economic loss across the country to businesses whose owners have nothing to do with police brutality against Black people. Some of those business owners are themselves Black. President Trump has responded to the demonstrations not like a concerned American president but like a fascist dictator, using the US military to stop protests (or try to) in Washington, DC, and threatening to do it outside of the capital city where he has no legal authority to do it. As if the pandemic weren’t causing the country enough pain, the killing of George Floyd and its nationwide aftermath have torn open the country’s deep wound of racism in dramatic and powerful new ways.

Our country desperately needs to be flooded with living water. So does the whole world. We all need the living water of justice, the living water of peace. People of faith can be a source of that living water. We can speak out strongly for racial justice, as many faith leaders already have and continue to do. We can resist demands that we resume communal worship when it isn’t safe to do so no matter what the civil authorities are doing. Beyond that I’m not sure what we can do. Pray of course, but faith leaders don’t have much prestige or influence in the US these days, so our influence probably won’t be what we would wish.

Yet we know what our call is. God calls us to water the wasteland of American culture and politics with the living water of justice and peace. All we can do is speak up and speak out every chance we get. Most of us don’t have that many chances to do it (especially if our congregations object to “political” preaching), but we can look for opportunities to create more opportunities. We can join organizations that work for racial justice. We can support political candidates (especially candidates of color) who have good policy proposals for improving racial justice including but not limited to good ideas for police reform.

Will anything we do make a difference? Maybe. People of good will speaking out in support of what is right changes things if enough people do it loud enough for long enough. Yet our call from God is what it is whether our individual efforts make a difference or not. We do what is right because it is right. We don’t need more reason than that. So let’s stream as much living water of justice and peace out of our hearts as we can. It’s all we can do. As people of faith it is what we must do.