"Our Fathers’ Wells"

A sermon preached a Christos Metropolitan Community Church, Toronto, ON and

Holy Fellowship Metropolitan Community Church, London, ON

June 16, 2002 – Fathers’ Day

Since it’s Father’s Day, I want to talk a little bit about water. I know that may have seemed like a bit of an abrupt change of subject, but actually, there IS connection, and hopefully, it’ll become clear.

Water’s the most common substance on earth – and the most necessary. It’s essential to life. Here’s a couple of factoids. You can live for two months without food -- but only a few days without water. Seventy percent of the earth’s surface is water. Ninety-seven percent of all the earth’s water is in the oceans. The availability of water has given rise to some of the great civilizations of history, like Egypt and Mesopotamia. Kings and empires have fallen when water supplies failed. People have been killed over access to a muddy water hole.

There are some places on earth where there is not much water at all. Like the place where Isaac settled. In the dry climate of the Middle East, the availability of water was priceless. It still is. A couple of years ago, I spent a summer in Jordan and Israel, working on an archeological dig with one of my Bible professors. And it was so hot, and so DRY, that the air just SUCKED all the moisture right out of you. Now, have to admit, I hate humidity, and I didn’t miss it at all, but it was hard to take at times. I’ll try not to gross anyone out here, but just to give you an idea of how dry it was, we worked out in the sun and the heat, just in the mornings from five till one, not even the really hot part of the day, and you could work all morning and drink four or five liters of water – well over a gallon – and never go to the bathroom, and never feel yourself sweat a drop. It was so dry that the air just absorbed your sweat before you even felt a drop of it on your skin. But at the end of the day, you knew you had sweated buckets because you and your clothes would be covered with this fine white dust. It was the salt that your body had sweated out.

So, in a land like that, it’s no wonder that wells were extremely important. And it’s not surprising that they were a source of strife and fighting. Even in our own recent history, especially out West, people fight bitterly over water rights – who can draw how much from the ground, and who can tap into a river upstream from someone else.

Nowadays, the fights are a little different, but we still argue over who owns the water. Nations quarrel over water, too. There are folks in the United States who seem to think they have some god-given right to Canada’s water just because they think they need it. Now, we don’t kill each other much over water any more, but we litigate, which is a kind of living death, in this ex-lawyer’s opinion. That’s a topic for a whole different sermon, though. Another water fight in the news lately is over the moraines – truly southern Ontario’s "living water." And the fight is because we’ve already lost a lot of it, and do we, like the Philistines, really WANT to throw up a lot of junk over our wells? And the fight over the junk in our water takes us to places like Walkerton, where the junk in the wells turned deadly.

Wells, and water, in the Bible are often a metaphor for the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of those who know God. We read in John’s Gospel that "Jesus said to the woman at the well, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I give them will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’" Just as wells of water are necessary to sustain physical life, the work of God’s spirit is essential to sustain spiritual life.

Sometimes it must seem as if someone has stopped up our wells. It may seem that way especially for our community sometimes. But I think what this scripture can show us – and what we really need to know as we go into the season when we celebrate our pride in who God made us, gay, lesbian, bi, and trans people – is that we CAN go to the wells that have sustained us in the past. We don’t need to be afraid of the junk. We can clear away the debris to find the water we need to sustain us now, and we as a people have a place and a future, drinking from the well of life.

This passage from Genesis tells us that Isaac went to a dry land, and he prospered there. To get the water he needed, he went first to the wells his father Abraham had dug. And lo and behold, there they were, but they were full of old junk. They were completely unusable. His enemies had piled all kinds of stuff in them – most likely rocks and debris, garbage, maybe a few dead animals for good measure. Some things never change in the Middle East -- this still happens. When I was on an that archeological dig in Jordan a few years ago, one of the dig teams I was with had to clear out an old cistern. Before they could get down to looking for ancient artifacts, first they had to clear away piles of garbage and old car parts and a dead goat and other things not suitable for mention here. It wasn’t pretty. And it was just because some people got territorial about a water source.

The places that Isaac went to were important places in the history of the Israelites. It was down in the southern end of Canaan, in the desert and the wells of his father Abraham were the first places that were actually his in the land that God had promised would be his home, and the home of his descendants, forever. This was his father’s land, the "old home place." To these nomads, who had wandered all over looking for a home, this was it. These were people who had no safe places. Moreover, the traditions recalled in this story, and most of the book of Genesis, were probably written down in this form around the time of Israel’s exile. For that generation especially, the notion of God making a place for them must have been a very powerful message of hope and a powerful reminder of God’s love and abiding care for them. This was what God had promised them – a home, and someplace where they could find water, the stuff of life.

I think about the places I can go to to find spiritual refreshment – to drink deeply of the living water. One place, for me, is here – the church. Another, for me, is this, God’s word. For me, these are often deep, deep wells, full of life-sustaining things. But I also know that at times in my life, and in the lives of many of you, and in the lives of many, many in the GLBT community, those wells have been pretty polluted. People have thrown a lot of junk in those wells. Deadly stuff. Like God doesn’t make queers. Like you don’t belong here. Like God doesn’t love you the way you are. Those are like the wells of Esek and Sitnah, the wells of contention and accusation.

When I was growing up, I heard a lot of that. And I believed a lot of it. For instance, I believed with all my heart that there were passages in the Bible that unambiguously condemned homosexuals. And the dumb part was that I believed that without ever once having read those passages. I didn’t know that was junk. I didn’t know that I needed to dig down past that to get to the water that God promised me. Sadly, many people hear the junk, and they stop digging, thinking that there is nothing here [in church] – or here [in the bible] – for them. But folks, the good news is this – there is water, there is LIFE, in those old wells. We need to get rid of the junk and get back to the water.

When I was thinking and praying on this sermon, I thought some about my father. It IS Father’s Day, after all. And I wondered about my father’s wells. Is there any water there for me? Or is there just too much junk piled in? Many of you have heard me speak of the spiritual grounding I got from my mother; you haven’t heard me speak much about my dad, and there’s probably a reason for that. My father’s hobby was genealogy. He had our family traced back, he said, to the 9^th century, back in Wales. There was even a branch that came through Canada. A couple of branches, now. And for my father, genealogy really wasn’t just a hobby, it was an obsession. He was obsessed with his forefathers. So much so, that when people would ask me what my father’s religious background was, I would say "ancestor worship."

And yet... the most spiritually authentic moment I recall in my relationship with my father – indeed, the only spiritually authentic moment I recall – was the night that HIS father died. We’d traveled by car from the San Francisco area to northeastern Oregon, about an 18 hour drive, straight through without stopping, because my grandfather was in the hospital, and wasn’t doing well. And when we got there, it was just a little bit too late. Grandpa Dudley was already gone, and my dad never got the chance to see him again before he died, never got that chance to say goodbye. Which was a real shame, because there was a lot of history there, a lot of unfinished business.... a lot of junk piled in that well. Some of that junk had to do with the fact that my father’s mother died giving birth to him, and my grandfather abandoned the baby, left my father with HIS grandparents, and didn’t come back to him for years, and never was a father to him. So.... there was a lot of junk in that well.

But that night, when my father tucked me into bed, on the couch in Grandpa’s living room, he did something he’d never done before, and never did again. He knelt down and prayed, and asked me to help him pray for Grandpa. I don’t remember all that he said; I do remember it wasn’t an entirely coherent prayer. That’s OK. Prayers don’t have to be coherent for God to hear them. But the gist of it was that my dad loved his father, and at the end, he no longer resented the past, the junk in the well. And the one coherent sentence that I remember him repeating over and over was, "Father, accept my Pop into your kingdom. Father, accept him into your kingdom." So, at the end, he was able to dig out some of that stuff from the well, and find there, a source of life.

What will we find when we dig into our fathers’ wells, the wells of our pasts, the wells that we thought had nothing there for us?

Did any of you notice the name of the third well Isaac dug – Rehoboth. What it means is "large places, wide places." What it meant to Isaac was, "God has made a place for us." What it means for me is "God has opened up God’s arms wide enough to embrace me."

There’s a town in the state of Delaware called Rehoboth, and it happens to be THE premier gay resort town in the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. So for the last 20 years of my life, Rehoboth has been a place of, if not necessarily spiritual refreshment, certainly recreation.... I have this sweatshirt. A place where many of us in the GLBT community felt that "God has made a place for us."

But the REAL Rehoboth is the place where we find the water of life, the place where we know God embraces us. So when I wear this sweatshirt, I think of that beach town in Delaware... But I never put it on without ALSO thinking "God has made a place for me...."And I found it, in Rehoboth, When I dug down through all the junk.

We do have a place, we can find the water of life, and strange as it may seem, sometimes it’s where we least expect it to be – where it has been all along.

Isaac kept digging because he believed the promise God had made to his father Abraham, that there would be a place for them, and water for life. God has promised us a place too. God has promised us a spring of water gushing up to eternal life. So keep on digging. It’s there for you.