In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen

In January we marked the beginning of our participation in the Kairos campaign “Water: life before profit”. This campaign calls on the Canadian government to resist the privatization of water and to support public, community run water systems both here and abroad. The campaign also seeks to raise our awareness concerning our use of God’s precious gift of water. We had a wake up call again this week when the power was out at the pumping station in Grand Bend.

 Last month we explored the theme of water as the gift of life. This morning we will look at water as a gift of hospitality. Now rather than bombarding you with a series of statistics dealing with the commodification of water or burying you with acronyms like IMF, WTO and NAFTA, we begin with a story entitled “The Water Man” which was in the bulletin a few weeks ago. It is a true story first told to me by Ben Taal.

The Water Man went a prospectin in Northern Ontario. He wasn’t looking for silver and gold like in the days of old. The new prize was water. The thirsty millions in the great cities of the south didn’t like their tap water. The water in the cities was fine but still the cry rose up: “Give us Bottled Water.” Perhaps the sophisticated city folk were affected by advertising. Whatever the reason, the demand was there.

And so the Water Man came to Sprucedale, northern Ontario. There was a spring bubbling in Sprucedale and the town owned it. And the Water Man wanted it, at least a lot of it. Some in the town protested. One of the protesters was the Rev. Palin, a local minister.
What about the water table? What about the wells?
But the Town Council said: “This town needs jobs!” No doubt. But what about the cost? The people of Sprucedale were about to find out. The Water Man started pumping water, the wells started going dry. The minister had no water. The people of the town said the Water Man was to blame but he retorted. “Prove it”.

That was not so easy. A hydrologist could probably make a determination but it would cost $100,000. The minister wasn’t poor but she wasn’t rich either. A new deeper well would cost $10,000. Even that was too much for the church. For two years the manse in Sprucedale had no running water. The Water Man kept pumping from the spring and the minister drank bottled water.

We are told that everything is a commodity to be bought and sold including God’s precious gift of water. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the marketplace will guide us all to prosperity and happiness. Sure there will be some causalities along the way, including the minister and townspeople of Sprucedale, but in the end all of us will be a great deal better off.

However, this myth supported by the media, politicians and huge water corporations like Vivendi Universal and Suez has in many respects reduced our humanity to the sphere of economics. It has devalued us to playing the role of passive consumers. And to the extent that we buy into this myth we are stripped of our role as members of a wider community. Relationships then between human beings and with the earth are broken for the sake of the profit motive.  And rather than building a society where the weak and poor are welcomed and cared for, we are left with a system that is based on economic competition-of winners and losers
But in spite of its flaws and challenges, the church has the capacity to act in ways that are unique to our society. We can challenge this dominating myth by returning to our story-the biblical story. God calls us into relationship both with himself and with others. The essence of Christianity is community. We live, we worship, we serve not as a collection of sovereign individuals or passive consumers but as a community that is responsible to and for one another and for God’s creation which is shear gift.

Real community is built by real people, in face to face interaction with each other. But community begins with the gift of hospitality- the welcoming and opening of ourselves to the other. It is an act of generosity. We see this welcoming, this openness, this vulnerability in our reading from Genesis.

Let us turn now to our reading from Genesis chapter 18. Our story opens with Abraham sitting in the entrance in the heat of the day. He sees three visitors approach and he hurries to the visitors, bows low before them and offers them the gift of hospitality- “Let a little water be brought, and then you may all wash your feet and rest under the tree….”
A little later in the story we learn that the visitors bring a message from the Lord that Abraham and Sarah will have a son.

Now this strange encounter between Abraham and the (Lord) three men begins with hospitality that is marked by the sign of water- the purest and clearest of liquids, the image of the spotless nature of the Divine Spirit. In Abraham’s desert context where water is precious, this gift of water is generous almost extravagant in its effort to refresh and renew.

But hospitality is a complicated virtue today. Some folks make you feel at home. Others make you wish you were. And in a culture of anonymity such as ours hospitality to the stranger has been significantly reduced. It has become the art of making good connections at cocktail parties. We don’t talk in elevators. We simply watch the numbers make their ascent or descent. We don’t know the security guard’s name. We don’t invite even the neighbours in to the sanctuary of ourselves.

And yet God wants us to let down our barriers and to be open to the other in our midst.
For Christian hospitality is one form of worship and is clearly meant to be more than simply an open door. It is an acknowledgment of the gifts that the stranger brings. In our text Abraham’s hospitality marked by the gift of water allows him to be open to the message that the three men bring concerning the birth of a son. It is Sarah who laughs at the audacity of the message not Abraham.

But to be open to the gifts the stranger brings requires a poverty of mind and a poverty of the heart. Henri Nouwen once said, “Someone who is filled with ideas, concepts, opinions and convictions cannot be a good host. There is no inner space to listen” There is no inner space to receive the gifts of the other.”

By being poor of mind and of heart in order to receive the gift, we may be able to see that life is greater than our life, experience is greater than our experience, and God greater than our God. It is a risky position to open ourselves, and empty ourselves, to become vulnerable.
Here at Elmwood over the last few months, we have offered hospitality to Friends of the Coves and to L’Arche London. But this hospitality is not simply bed and bath. Nor as some have suggested is it simply about money, budgets and financial considerations. At root it is an effort to open and empty ourselves to the stranger in our midst. To open ourselves to the gifts that these groups bring us, to the message that these brothers and sisters bring us if we are willing to listen.

Friends of the Coves speak a message concerning the integrity and stewardship of God’s creation. L’Arche speaks a message concerning the integrity and value of all persons especially those who are deemed as useless by our wider society. Can we be open to their gifts, as Abraham was open to the three visitors? Can we build a community that includes them as well?

The way we see God is crucial in answering these questions. Remember we worship a God who became a child, a “God who spans the heavens, but comes to us on tiny feet. It is out of this Christ like vulnerability that we hear the wisdom that water is not a commodity, that the world is not just about winners and losers, that there is power in being a community.

THANKS BE TO GOD, AMEN.