Scripture Readings:
Hebrew Scriptures – Exodus 17: 1-71
1From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. 2The people quarreled with Moses, and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” 3But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” 4So Moses cried out to the Lord, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” 5The Lord said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. 6I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. 7He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”
Gospel – John 4: 5-30, 39-422
5So [Jesus] came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.
7A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8(His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 9The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 10Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” 11The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” 13Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” 15The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
16Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” 17The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; 18for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” 19The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. 20Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” 21Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. 24God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 25The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” 26Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”
27Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” 28Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, 29“Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” 30They left the city and were on their way to him. ….
39Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” 40So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. 41And many more believed because of his word. 42They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”
“Give Me this Water.”
I really didn’t choose this Sunday as a time to baptize my granddaughter just because the scripture readings would be highlighting how important water is in our lives. Honest. It is, however, a wonderfully serendipitous confluence of events, particularly when I realize that I was not only born in but grew up surrounded by water, that I was baptized by my grandfather, too, and in this very moment can remember my own father’s hand cradling me as I learned to swim. I can still hear his voice over my shoulder gently saying to me, “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.” It wasn’t long before his hand was no longer there and I was swimming on my own. So I claim myself to be water’s child. It’s come as no surprise to me at all, then, that I had to keep pulling Grace (in her pink cowgirl boots) out of mud puddles yesterday and that she and her older sister, Lauren, love to play in and feel the embrace of water every bit as much as I do.3
The message of our scripture readings for today, while they are about the rebirth that is meant to be associated with our baptism, they’re more about thirst. Two kinds of thirst are described for us here. The first is about a physical, bodily, life-and-death need common to us all. It’s the kind of thirst that I thought about as Martha and I had just entered the Mojave Desert at this time last Sunday and a little dashboard indicator light blinked on telling me “check engine soon.” I imagined the engine seizing up or the radiator boiling over and nobody discovering us for hours as we sat stranded in the desert.4 It’s the kind of thirst a rancher can see in the eyes of his cattle during a drought, or a hiker in the back country might contemplate when she comes across a number of bleached sheep skulls strewn across a high plateau. Death from thirst is a horrible death – and here in the season of Lent I’m reminded, yet again, of Jesus’ own dying cry from the sun-scorched cross on which he hung knowing that all now was finished: “I’m thirsty.”5 he said.
The second type of thirst, though, is what ought to have brought all of us here this morning; it’s a deep and interior longing for God that can be every bit as relentless and as painful as physical thirst. It is a thirst for love, for acceptance, for meaning in our lives. This thirst lies at the very root of all of our attempts as human beings to make sense of the world in which we find ourselves and to find purpose for our existence. It underlies our profoundly personal search for that which we would name as sacred and holy, as well as our attempts to deny the existence of God, to object to or run away from the presence of that Holy Spirit or even to dare such a sacred Reality to reveal Itself to us. This same thirst not only underlies all of the collective systems of philosophy and religion, but also (I would maintain) the logic of mathematical systems and our ongoing search for scientific truth. It’s the insight of that fifth century theologian, Augustine, who said about God on the opening page of his work titled Confessions: “You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”6 In fact it can be said that the entire human journey is about the gradual resolution of that restlessness – that thirst that is met by is our encounter with all that we would name as sacred, holy…that is of God.
The thirsty, grumbling and arguing people of Israel, given their present circumstances, ask the same existential question that every one of asks at some point in our lives as we struggle to make sense of things, often in the midst of chaos and heartache: “Is the Lord among us or not?” Is there God at all? Of course many people, as with the Israelites wandering and near death in the desert, presume that the answer is no, until Moses strikes a rock and water gushes out of it right before their very eyes. It’s also from a place of cultural prejudice, and yet a deep and longing thirst, that the Samaritan woman is led to ask her neighbors, “This Jew can’t be the Messiah! Can he?”7 She is deeply suspicious that the answer might be yes. Her neighbors are persuaded enough just by the changes that they see in her to go and see for themselves.
It’s worth noting that in the Ancient Near East going to the well was also a very social occasion – especially for women who are almost always the water-carriers in such cultures. People went for water, of course, but they went to the well also to catch up on the latest gossip and news, maybe even to do a little flirting with eligible bachelors in the surrounding area. Amusingly enough, another way of describing a “loser” in our own day and time is to say that that person has “gone to the well once too often.”
Having had five husbands already and now living with a sixth man, this woman from our gospel story could’ve been considered as having gone to the well far too often. And yet, you’d think by now, that she must’ve been wise in the ways of men and apparently pretty adept at pleasing them – a Samaritan version of Liz Taylor, if you will (God, rest her soul.).8 She may have had her own well-founded suspicions about what this odd man really was looking for. Why else would a lone Jew be passing the time of day with a Samaritan woman? Not only was there already an ancient animosity between their two cultures, but Samaritan women were thought of as ritually impure. Jews were forbidden to even drink from any vessel that a Samaritan had handled. Why would he ask for a drink, then, from her ritually unclean bucket? This decidedly unconventional rabbi would definitely be a challenge to her. Little by little, though, a conversation becomes a conversion. “Give me this water,” she says.
That’s the final surprise of this story; neighbors, who knew this woman and her reputation, listen to her and, like her, also ask the right question: “Will you come and stay with us for a couple of days?” they ask Jesus. It reminds me of what the author of this gospel account was moved to say about Jesus from the very beginning:
What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. [That] light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. … The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him…he gave power to become children of God….9
In this story Jesus goes to stay with a particularly despised group of humanity. But after just his two-day stay with them these Samaritans recognize him, not just as their messiah, but as “the Savior of the world.”10 How extraordinary.
The story began with Jesus sitting on a rock by Jacob’s well. The woman who finally comes to ask him for water was changed from somebody who could not move, because of being blocked by a wall of custom and prejudice, to somebody who could run with news of “living water.” At the end of the story she probably hasn’t reached the level of understanding that Jesus had wanted for her (have we?), but her openness and willingness to listen is a crucial beginning. She can leave her constrained existence and risk calling her whole community to life-giving waters.
It reminds me of that quaint proverb that says, “If you see a turtle on top of a fence post, you know that it had some help.”11
We’ve all come to know that, deprived of water, plants shrivel up, wither and die; the earth itself strangles, returns to dust and is carried away by the wind. Under the same circumstances, human beings are like fish out of water: our throats parch, our breathing rasps, all too soon we ourselves would waste away and die without water. But this Sunday isn’t about that kind of thirst. Given every other kind of sustenance we still will thirst for compassion, for understanding, for wisdom, for love – the chance to love others and to be loved in return. That’s the “living water” that Jesus is talking about, one that can quench all of those deeply held thirsts. This season of Lent invites us to savor a delicious drink of what Jesus has come to offer us. And so, along with a very wise woman, I too am moved to say, “Give me this water.”
1 This is the story of God’s providing water for the Hebrews in the wilderness. It’s nearly the same story as the one we can read about in the Book of Numbers (20: 1-13); one difference, though, is the use of additional names for this place: “He called the place Massah (which means “to test”) and Meribah (meaning “to argue”)” – the grumbling and arguing of the people and their testing of God are intertwined throughout these wilderness stories. Together they set the stage for an act of assurance of God’s presence and power. The whole point of the story turns on the surprising provision of God who offers water when none was available.
2 In this story of the Samaritan woman at the well we’re given yet another example of the compassion of Jesus operating outside preconceived categories. In last Sunday’s reading Jesus had a conversation with Nicodemus, the religious insider who comes under cover of darkness seeking God’s confirmation of this new movement. The Samaritan woman, by contrast, represents all that the society of Jesus’ day (and sometimes, still, our own) considers to be ungodly: she lived and worshiped in the wrong place, she was the wrong gender and had (shall we say) an unconventional marriage. But Jesus does not judge her; instead he draws her out. His conversation with her here, in broad daylight, reveals astonishing insights into his identity and mission.
3 And while we’re on this subject, I don’t know who first messed with the translation from the Welsh of our last hymn, “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah,” but they really got that last verse all wrong in our hymnal. It’s about crossing the Jordan so it should read,
When I tread the verge of Jordan, bid my anxious fears subside; bear me through the swelling current; land me safe on Canaan’s side.
Being held up above raging waters and landed safely on the other side makes much more sense in that line than “death of death and hell’s destruction” – don’t you think?
4 Instead, I was delighted to discover that the malfunction was solely in my ignition system – something Nissan calls a “crank sensor.” What’s more it was still under warranty so was replaced by Scott Lund at Napa Nissan at no cost to me. Now, I ask you: how often does that happen?
5 John 19: 28.
6 Richard Lennan, “Grounded in Faith,” An Introduction to Catholic Theology (Paulist Press, Mahwah, N.J., 1998), p. 61.
7 John 4: 29b.
8 At the time of my beginning to write this sermon the news agencies reported that Elizabeth Taylor had just died on Wednesday: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31749_162-20046305-10391698.html.
9 From the opening prologue of this Gospel – John 1: 4-5, 9-12.
10 John 4: 42b.
11 I’m uncertain as to the source of this wonderfully vivid illustration, but it’s been attributed to the celebrated author Alex Haley [ http://www.notablebiographies.com/Gi-He/Haley-Alex.html ].