Guarantees of the absurd: Water safe for bathing (but what about baptism?)
Far too often, we talk past one another. Far too often, we speak solely from the place of our own experience and expertise. Almost always, speaking from a place that values expertise over experience ensures that everyone in the room knows one thing for sure – somebody in the room doesn’t get it.
Almost always, it is the expert who doesn’t get it, and almost always, the expert in the room is the one who thinks he or she is the one getting it right.
Don’t believe for a minute that I am anti-science. Don’t believe for a minute that inner-city folks or under-educated folks don’t trust science. Of course, there is a caveat to that statement – a lot of folks don’t trust scientists or government or corporations who present science as the only means of knowing what is true and what isn’t.
Jesus stood before Pilate with an opportunity to extend his life by accepting a basic truth that was empirically evident. Caesar was king, Jesus was not. In fact, there was absolutely no evidence to suggest that Jesus was even King of the Jews. There was plenty of evidence to the contrary. Another fact is that Rome and the Jerusalem leadership put Jesus to death for challenging the truth of Rome and the Temple. Jesus was crucified, perhaps not so much for stating a conflicting truth to Pilate and Jerusalem, but for refusing to acknowledge the truth of authority and those in charge of things like truth. In the end, Rome and the Temple elites, and mechanisms of domination controlled truth, and tossed away those who challenged truth like so much rubbish.
In Flint, people told a truth gleaned from experience that was denied by authorities. When Flintstones spoke up about bad water, rashes and hair falling out, and then stated that people were not listening to them – the State of Michigan and the federal Environmental Protection Agency told the people all was well. In fact, the truth of authority was as made up as some many truth claims often are. The state was telling lies made of whole cloth that only those in charge could see. To the residents of Flint, a few doctors, and a college professor, the Emperor in fact had no clothes. Yet no one was laughing. Just as Pilate washed his hands of Jesus’ impending execution, the government of Michigan and the EPA silenced its own employees and prevented the proof of poison water from being made public. Everyone was going to let the chips fall where they may.
What was perceived to be truth by Pilate was in fact an enforced truth, based on evidence both created and disseminated by the very folks who decided what truth would be. Jesus challenged the truth, and was executed. In Flint, while the government insisted, guaranteed, promised, and lied that the water in Flint was perfectly safe, they could only do so as long as state government held the keys to information that was locked up and out of public view. Once the information was released, it became evident that the people of Flint could trust their experiences more than they could trust any experts provided by the state. Not only was the water bad, it seems that nine or ten people died because of a legionella bacteria that seems to be directly related to the water. In order to prevent truth from being made public, or even considered, the state government refused to allow the CDC to study the outbreak. They would rather people die than have their version of truth challenged.
I suggest to you that the gospel, while making a specific truth claim about the nature of a specific God, has just as much to say about how we know what truth is, and how such truth is embodied. Whether one discusses the plagues upon Egypt or Jesus’ claims of how we should understand the law and prophets, the challenge is not so much concerned with how truth is known as much as it is about who controls truth and how such a claim is used to control people and protect claims to power. While science is about collecting data and predicting outcomes with some kind of certainty, truth often has very little to do with data or expertise. Truth often has to do with experience, identity, and perceived reality.
You can imagine the response when someone at a community meeting in Flint, and then another, claimed with certainty that the water in Flint was safe to bath in. Don’t drink it yet – but go ahead and wash with your tap water. This claim was made after a CDC spokesperson stated that after a week of testing and one fourth of the data collected, preliminary results indicate no dangerous levels of toxins or heavy metals were evident in the water samples. There are a few more weeks left in the study related to rashes and hair loss. A lot of folks are tired of waiting.
They are also to be commended for not riding two certain people out of town on a rail after listening to these individuals “guarantee” that the water was safe to bathe in. Most of the people in the room were not buying into that. Others were simply shocked that someone would say such a thing.
“I’ve been washing with Flint water for 50 years and never had a problem. You’re telling me now that after I get a rash from the water, and still can’t drink it, that I can wash with it and nothing is going to happen.” You see, the people of Flint have heard these guarantees before and now they have no water at all. They were promised savings, yet continued to pay the highest water bills in the country while being unable to use the water. They were promised good clean water, and got brown swill. They were promised that rashes and hair loss were unrelated to Flint River water, and then found out that everyone they spoke with was lying. And now they hear more guarantees about how safe the water is.
This is the hubris, not of science, but of scientists, government, and experts in fields that have everything to do with science and nothing to do with truth. Truth has to be understood and contextualized. Data must be interpreted. Interpretation insists on the recognizing of all contingencies. Most of all, truth relies on shared stories, relationships building, empathy, and hopefully, trust. Experts from the EPA or state government do not have the authority to mandate a uniform understanding of truth. In fact, they can only try to enforce it, or initiate propaganda programs. The people of Flint won’t have it any more. It seems that only experts cannot understand the problems here. There is a lack of evidence that empathy or understanding exists on their part, even if they indeed do possess it.
If someone is making guarantees to a lied to and traumatized people, those people can be certain that they might have been heard, but they sure weren’t being listened to. How many promises must be made before one recognizes that, not only is their version of truth being rejected, so are their ways of knowing. Black folks, Latinos, and poor whites, as well as many women and immigrants to mention a few, recognize that, not only is the truth of the authorities not true, but they recognize that authorities are so invested in protecting their truths that they will hide the facts and punish those who issue public challenges. There were cover-ups by state and federal authorities when it was known that the water was bad and the legionella bacteria was perhaps killing people.
When such colossal blunders and criminal behavior has occurred, and then people are not held accountable, to come in to town as an expert and make more promises and guarantees is not lying, but [potentially, it is much worse. The woman from the EPA was not lying that I know of. I do believe she was sincere in her statements. But to believe that her guarantees held weight was to engage in the worse kind of patronizing. It not only rejects the trauma of the water issue, it rejects the very reality that is evidenced by a five-mile stretch of empty concrete that was once Buick City. Reality of poisoned water is also the reality of neighborhoods of burned out houses, abandoned businesses, and a people without aces to grocery stores with fresh fruit, how don’t know if they can even garden this year in their back yards. The promise of safe water not only neglects the lies of previous experts, it in fact denies the very reality of a people who have been shat upon by government at every level.
This is why the church is so necessary to Flint and the world, but it is also indicative of why the contemporary church in the United States may need to die and be resurrected to address the ways that God’s desire can be revealed through the catastrophe of Flint’s water supply. The church has spent years, not only buying into the truth of the nation state or government, much of the church has been fully invested in disseminating the state’s version of the truth, and even politicizing the gospel as a coercive means of electing politicians that further carry out the truth of Caesar over the self-emptying and sacrificial truth of Christ. I don’t know if government should be fixing things in Flint. Can the abuser be changed after his or her truth has been challenged?
Government may have a role in Flint’s response to this “failure at every level” of government, but I can see plenty of places where Flint is representative of the failure of the church to respond to the realities of a people who cannot work enough to feed themselves, let alone others, as Paul insists we do. The church’s claim about truth, when it does not challenge the assumptions of government and empiricism as the arbiters of truth, is not invested in being witness to the truth of God. If Jesus is Lord, as we tend to insist, then we had better embody that claim by allowing ourselves to be ministered to in the context of the realities of Flint, and present the truth of the gospel in a manner that not only makes sense in Flint, but opens our heart to the truth of the gospel. It is in the cross and our voluntary sacrifice that truth is found, and not in political or electoral outcomes. The church is to provide living water to Flint and the world. We need to give up our profitable interest in controlling the corporate outcomes that favor our own well-being over that of others. If we are looking to profit from the distribution of living water, or control access to it by domesticating it with an empiricism-laden additive, we are liars, and God will not be made a liar.
