Let Justice Roll Down Lesson Four
Lesson Four: Water Justice
Scripture: Genesis 1:2; 2:10; 3:17–19; 4:12; 5–9; 7:17–24; 9:18–17; 12:10; 26:1; 42:5; 46
Water Justice
As the first chapters of Genesis and Exodus illustrate, our issues with water take the forms of too much water, too little water and polluted water. In the U.S. and around the world we are seeing such vulnerabilities. Yet as global warming intensifies, the unexpected continues to shock us.
As of today, October 2, more than 130 people are known to have died and hundreds are missing in six southeastern states from Hurricane Helene’s flooding. Strangely, the destruction is far greater inland than on the coast, with western North Carolina, some 500 miles from the hurricane’s gulf coast landfall, suffering the worst damage. As New York Times climate reporter Manuela Andreoni noted yesterday concerning the city of Asheville, N.C., long considered a relatively safe locale, “climate havens don’t exist.” This reality should move us to consider safety measures where we are but, even more, should move us to take action on climate itself.
The effects in countries with more tenuous infrastructures can be far worse than we have seen. Eastern Africa, for instance, has been subjected to repeated El Niño storms exacerbated by climate change. The most recent one extended from fall 2023 through much of 2024. As this article reports, more than 194,000 Kenyans were displaced by the flooding in spring 2024 alone, which also destroyed homes and schools, affected sanitation and damaged infrastructure, exposing many to cholera.
The first thing I noticed when I visited Kenya last month was the unpaved road between Jomo Kenyatta airport and the guest house that should have been fifteen minutes away. The last mile was nothing but rubble and potholes. “El Niño flooding,” the driver said. “But it’s being repaired. By the way,” he added. “Will you be back in the U.S. in time to vote?” Over the week we saw trucks rolling in and out as workmen poured concrete culverts, fashioned and refashioned wooden bridges, pickaxed rocks by hand, blocked entrances with mounds of pebbles and otherwise labored to restore a city street close to one of Africa’s busiest airports. And sure enough, the question of whether Americans would elect a climate-smart president was uppermost for many Kenyans, who see a connection we may not recognize between U.S. politics and Africa’s future.
Traveling the countryside between Nairobi and Kisumu, we saw field after field of drowned crops and heard one story after another of homes, schools, businesses and lives destroyed by floods. Equatorial Kenya has no winter; its year is normally punctuated by a long rainy season in the fall and a shorter one in the spring. In more predictable years, farmers can take advantage of these rains by planting just before then. But when the weather can’t be gauged, entire fields are ruined and subsistence families go hungry. We heard about school children whose parents could not afford the modest lunch fees, forced to walk home at noon for nothing more than a sip of water before returning to long afternoons of class.
When I went to preach at a boys’ secondary school on the eastern outskirts of Kisumu one Sunday, I found 700 teenagers had carried school chairs to the shade of a large tree canopy that made our hours in the heat pleasant. I had been asked to discuss caring for creation, so I read 1 Corinthians 12 (“There are a variety of gifts…”) to talk about the many talents and passions from which to fashion sustainable careers. But I could not suggest what they could do without apologizing for industrialized countries like mine, which had been burning carbon fuels far longer and more aggressively than Kenya had. After I spoke, a biology teacher took the microphone to say he had never before heard regret from a first world nation over what is happening to his country, nor even heard climate change mentioned in a sermon before.
This needs to change. Christians must be forthright. Long before the environment was politicized by those who try to silence pushback, scripture depicted creation as God’s gift. We can express our gratitude by defending both it and those who suffer most when it is damaged by human activity. We who worship and serve God can make upholding creation’s health our priority: mourning with those who mourn the destruction of homes and lives. Encouraging one another to live in harmony with the earth’s systems, the laws of nature. Boldly naming environmental destruction as sin and creation care as a godly virtue. This is how we honor the God who made a place for us on earth by holding back the waters (Gen 1:6-10).
The prophet Jeremiah, in fact, saw in the seashore’s boundary evidence of creation’s harmony, and contrasted it with neighbors in Jerusalem whose greed knew no such bounds, saying in Jeremiah 5:22-25:
I placed the sand as a boundary for the sea,
a perpetual barrier that it cannot pass;
though the waves toss, they cannot prevail;
though they roar, they cannot pass over it.
But this people has a stubborn and rebellious heart;
they have turned aside and gone away.
They do not say in their hearts,
“Let us fear the LORD our God,
who gives the rain in its season,
the autumn rain and the spring rain,
and keeps for us
the weeks appointed for the harvest.”
Your iniquities have turned these away,
and your sins have deprived you of good.
Remembering with gratitude who our creator and keeper is, we cannot keep silent in church about what is happening in our land.
To learn more about Presbyterian initiatives concerning clean water, go here. To learn more about waterways close to where you live, go here. Look for many more Presbyterian resources on issues related to water here.
Patricia K. Tull
Author of the 2024–2025 PW/Horizons Bible study, Let Justice Roll Down: God’s Call to Care for Neighbors and All Creation.
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This blog is the fourth in a series of nine blogs.
Let Justice Roll Down is the Presbyterian Women in the PC(USA), Inc. Bible study for 2024-2025. Go to presbyterianwomen.org/bible-study/justice to find more resources and purchase Let Justice Roll Down to study along with us. Call 800/533-4371 or order online.
