What is a person to do when their very source of existence is contaminated? Where do you go when the persons responsible for your well-being reduce your present and future health considerations to cold-eyed economic calculations? To whom do you turn when the boundless future imagined for one’s children are constrained by the reality that their mental development will be severely impacted and physical pain will be as common as the next breath due to diseased and contaminated water? This is not a scene from the dystopic future imaginings of George Orwell’s 1984, in fact, this is the present dystopia of Flint, Mich., in 2016. The Flint Water Crisis, in my estimation, is a theological problem as much, if not more so than it is social or political. I frame this entire issue as a “Fight for Living Water.”
This is a fight over water, the source and sustenance of all life. Though a human being can live for a month without eating, that same person can only live a week without water. The body of an adult consists of about 70 percent water. A baby, at birth, consists of about 80 percent water. Water is around 80 percent of the human brain. Water is indispensible to any hopes of a future were humans hope to flourish. If this is so, what happens when water, the source of all life, is not only contaminated, but also, intentionally given to the poorest among us?
Consider these facts as a way to understand the severity of this issue. Lead in the drinking water of America is a factor in the learning disabilities of more than 475,000 children every year. When pregnant women consume water contaminated by lead, the risk for birth defects grows exponentially as there is no safe amount of lead for a human to consume. While many struggle for clean water, many others struggle for basic access to water. More than half of the states in this country are already experiencing water shortages. Beyond our national borders, water insecurity threatens most of the world’s population. The United Nations projects that two-thirds of the world will face water scarcity by 2025. Almost 2 billion people drink water contaminated with fecal matter and other life-threatening pathogens. Water that should be a living source is either scarce or contaminated, ranging from safe and expensive to elusive and diseased. Humans, in large part, are literally mobile repositories of diseased water, doomed to a physical fate shaped by adverse chemical reactions within their own bodies reducing the infirmed to a social situation of exile, powerlessness, and pain. We, as a human family, are essentially fighting for our lives, one drop of water at a time.
A reason why Flint, the former home of Buick and Chevrolet, is in this situation is in large part an economic issue. The deindustrialization of Flint led to the loss of jobs, rise in crime, amid a larger social disregard for the human “externalities” of the shifting economic realities. The water source for the city, because it was cheaper, was shifted to the Flint River, a source of water rejected by the carmakers as too toxic for inanimate objects, much less human consumption. Because the people left behind in Flint are largely poor, they were not seen as deserving of living water. Living water is not a liquid death sentence that plays out slowly, averting the eyes of the complacent from the certainty of their neighbors’ certain demise. Living water improves the quality of life and ensures the future flourishing of all who need it, which means everyone. Many op-eds and articles are making necessary insights into the social and political ramifications of this issue. I want to briefly state why this instance is a small indicator of a larger theological problem.
The theological issue is grounded in the question of who deserves living water. Jesus, speaking to the person normally characterized as the “woman at the well” in John 4, makes this point clear. Jesus encounters a woman who has been drawing water in the physical sense who needed to be introduced to truly living water. Living water speaks to the work of the Spirit. She was drawing water at noon, a time that would allow her to escape the communal shame of being married five times and living in a non-married state with another. Her body, mind, and soul existed within a diseased context that hindered her potential much like those whose bodies in Flint and beyond are composed of water so full of lead and disease that each day proves to be a new experience in surviving one’s own compromised anatomy. Due to the marital practices of the day, women could not divorce men. She found herself constantly fighting for self-respect, needing water to live. Jesus, meeting her at the well, identified the social and theological situation she faced and offered her something beyond what she could attain, living water. Jesus models that everyone, regardless of gender, age, social status, financial attainment, religious difference, and political affiliation DESERVES living water.
I am not a utopian thinker. I recognize the imperfections of the world we inherit and each of our complicity in it. It is quite easy to say, “everyone should have living water” in the physical or spiritual sense. I write this to sound an alarm that Flint is all of our concern because living water in the theological sense or in its physical reality is scarce due to human agency, not God’s ultimate plan. There is enough clean water for all but we choose who receives it. This is a theological choice. We may not be able to see with the naked eye what is in the water that kills the body and soul but death is there. How do we love our neighbor as ourselves when we close our eyes and serve yellow-tinted cocktails of pandemic to the least of these? Maybe we so readily do it because we may be already dying ourselves. We all need to fight for living water.
Mark A. Jefferson is an adjunct lecturer of homiletics at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.