“This is the Lenten discipline we are called to in the 21st century: to take up less space, to consume fewer resources, to make room for others.”

Now there was no water for the congregation; so they gathered together against Moses and against Aaron. (Num 20:2)

H owever else we understand the symbols at the heart of our sacraments and religious rituals, they are at their most basic about the stuff of life. When we gather at the Lord’s Table, we are reminded that while we may not live by bread alone, we cannot live without bread. On Ash Wednesday, at the beginning of the season of Lent, we put a smudge of ash on our foreheads to remind each other that we are created out of dust, and to dust we shall return. In our baptism, we are reminded that water is central to life itself. (Indeed, we are spending trillions to search for the presence of water on other planets, a sign of the possibility of life.) In fact, that’s pretty much what we are made of—dust and water. We are creatures of mud, creatures of the earth. We miss that in our translation of the creation story in the second chapter of Genesis. Adam was not the first human’s name. Adam is was a play on words. Adama is the Hebrew word for earth. Thus the adam is created from the adama, the earthling from the earth, the groundling from the ground, the human from the humus—sustained in daily life by bread and water. Bread, water, and dirt. These are the basic substances of life.

So you can hardly blame the Israelites for complaining. It occurs to me that a lot of people in other parts of the world might sympathize more with the Israelites than we are likely to, with our abundance of water fresh from the tap or packaged into neat little plastic bottles. I suspect that we don’t think that much about water in our daily lives. Yet access to clean water may well become one of the most urgent issues of the 21^st century. Our bulletin insert about the “batey” communities in the Dominican Republic illustrates how critical access to clean water can be to a community’s survival. In the Darfur region of Sudan, lack of access to clean water is one of the major contributing factors to the humanitarian crisis. After the hurricane in New Orleans, and the tsunami in Southeast Asia, contaminated water caused more deaths than the flooding itself. An astonishing number of the projects supported by our One Great Hour of Sharing offering relate to water: Presbyterian Disaster Assistance works to restore clean water after hurricane or flood; the Presbyterian Hunger Program supports initiatives to dig wells in developing countries around the world. And when communities come together with the support of the Self Development of People program to work on common issues that they themselves define, like the batay communities in the Dominican Republic, access to clean water is often one of the first issues they take on.

In fact, water issues may hit closer to home than we realize. Contamination of the Chesapeake Bay, largely from fertilizer run-off from poultry farms, is destroying not only the bay’s habitats, but devastating an entire industry as oyster production has all but ceased. And in the western United States, communities are fighting tooth and nail over scarce access to water in places like Colorado, California, Nevada, and Arizona. And it now seems clear that climate change is a contributing factor, with warmer ocean temperatures effecting the snowpacks in the mountains, and leading to shifting weather patterns, with alternating periods of drought and flood, an increase in forest fires, and pitched political battles pitting the agricultural community against city residents in the quickly expanding suburbs around places like Las Vegas and Los Angeles, all of which only threatens to get worse in the years ahead.

J ust about now it might be helpful for Moses to show up with his staff in hand. It is both a physiological and a theological truth that we are saved by water. Yet embedded in each our lessons today is an admonition to trust in the grace of God. In our passage from the book of Numbers, God expresses displeasure at the Israelites’ panic over their plight in the wilderness, not because God is dismissive of their need for food and water, but because they did not trust in God to sustain them on their wilderness journey. And in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, the early Christians are admonished not to live by the passions of the flesh or the desires of the senses, but by the grace of God, which will save them, rather than the works of their hands.

Not that there isn’t work to do. In the very next verse we are called to get to work. Listen again to Paul’s words:

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God– not the result of works, so that no one may boast.

For we are what God has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

Or, as Eugene Peterson translates it, we are saved “by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing.”

Thus there is a paradox at work in the very heart of our theology. We are saved by grace, and not by works, but we are saved in order to do the work for which we have been created. In the same way, we are called to denounce the needs of the body, to reign in the desires of the flesh, precisely so that we can honor the body and its needs, as we feed the hungry and care for the planet. In other words, we are called to refrain from work in order to do the work we are called to do, to refrain from the body in order to honor the body at its most basic. Or, to put it yet another way: We are called to live simply so that others might simply live.

Think about it. Western culture in the 21^st century is premised on the notion of insatiable desires that can never be satisfied: We always want more, bigger, faster, louder, and are always willing to sacrifice the needs of others, even the planet itself, in order to satisfy our never ending desires. This is at least something of what Paul meant when he wrote that we “once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else.”

Isn’t that at least a part of the outrage about the bonuses at AIG? People are outraged not because money doesn’t matter, but because it does. The executives at AIG have put their own welfare ahead of the common good, and even in our individualistic society, there are limits to what we will tolerate in the midst of a crisis. Now we need to apply that same sense outrage to the environmental crisis and to ourselves.

T he Lenten theme I keep going back to is kenosis– self-limitation, self-emptying. This is what God did in Jesus Christ, this is what Jesus Christ did on the cross, this is what we are called to do in our daily lives for the sake of our neighbor and for the sake of this planet in peril: to take up less space, to consume fewer resources, to make room for others. This is the Lenten discipline we are called to in the 21^st century. Sallie McFague, the theologian who encouraged us to imagine the world as God’s body, writes:

The model of the world as God’s body is repulsive to us not because most of us are shocked by the linking of God and bodies (though some may be), but because we cannot imagine putting our bodies and material goods at the disposal of the other. In a society where consumerism has become religion, where the insatiable individual is encouraged, the model is repugnant. It would mean looking at all the wretched of the earth—the teeming millions of the poor, the oppressed, the sick and dying—and making room for them. It would mean giving up some of our space, our place, our food so that others might eat and live. It is unimaginable to most of us. But its very offensiveness convinces me that it is perhaps an intimation of the transcendence for our time and for people like us.

To make such a move will require, our texts for today would suggest, that we must learn to trust in the radical grace of God. We will be able to do so only when we discover, like the Israelites in the wilderness, that God has already taken care of our most basic needs.

I said at the beginning that our sacraments and rituals are about the stuff of life: dirt, bread, and water. I did not mention the wine. Its presence on the table is yet a further reminder of the grace of God. Its presence is a reminder that God’s care for us responds not only to our need for basic sustenance to feed our bodies, but for beauty, pleasure, joy. I am reminded of Martin Luther’s famous quip that beer is proof of the existence of a gracious God. Wine on the table, (well, grape juice in our case, but you get the point), is also a sign of God’s grace.

To live simply does not mean that we must cease to live, or cease to live well. It is not unremarkable that the first and last recorded meals in the gospels involve a focus on the wine. This is what John meant when he said that Jesus came that we might have life, and have it abundantly. The urgent call of the present moment is to claim that promise for the whole earth.