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Good morning.

‘Son of man - eat your bread with quaking, and drink your water with trembling’ (12:18) – so the word of God instructs the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel – and he certainly would drink the water with trembling if it had been drawn from an English river.

A report from the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee says that no river in England can be given a clean bill of health. ‘Rivers are in a mess’ the MPs declare: ‘A chemical cocktail of sewage, agricultural waste, and plastic is polluting . . . many of the country’s rivers’. It being breakfast time, I won’t dwell on the slurry and sewage, but I can probably safely mention the plastic – plastic pollution is now ‘ubiquitous’ in English rivers says the Report, with reefs of wet-wipes being a particular, and rather unpleasant, hazard. In one stretch of a river in the north west, there were 500,000 fragments of plastic for every square metre of riverbed - ‘many, many more times the number of insects.’

In the world in which Ezekiel wrote, that of the ancient near east, the Canaanites, Egyptians and peoples of Mesopotamia, venerated storm gods – for water was very plainly the stuff of life. The God of the Hebrew bible is pictured, in the Psalms, as planting his footsteps in the sea and riding upon the storm, and water is his most precious gift. ‘I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground’ – so God promises Israel through the words of another prophet.

So what’s up with Ezekiel? Why is he directed to drink his water with trembling? He is told to do so, so that his actions can be a warning sign, a piece of street theatre if you like, for his audience - the people of Jerusalem - who are complacently ignoring a looming catastrophe of epic proportions, namely invasion and exile at the hands of the Babylonians. It is time they were trembling.

Though it has no power to compel anyone to action, the Environmental Audit Committee makes a host of recommendations in its report, but drinking water with trembling is not amongst them. It surely is fear and trembling, however, which we need to learn to feel if yet another environmental report which makes for grim reading is not to be well, just water of a duck’s back. Perhaps living amongst ‘our clouded hills’, we have less sense of the preciousness of water than did the peoples of the arid ancient near east. Yet if our rivers are suffocating, as they are, as raw sewage, slurry from poultry farms, and wet wipes drives the life out of them, this is surely a telling sign of a looming ecological and environmental catastrophe of epic proportions which we ignore at our peril.

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