February 27, 2005
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for Life: Spiritual Water We come to you, God, because we are thirsty. Our spirits need the refreshing water of your word, just as our bodies need the refreshment of a cool drink. We worship you with joy, for we can already feel the gift of your presence all around us. Now open our ears that we may hear all that you expect of us. Open our lives to your truth and prepare us to follow Jesus in accepting the unacceptable, challenging the conventional, and joining together in a harvest for your realm. In Jesus Christ, amen (Taught by Love. Lavon Bayler. Cleveland: United Church Press, 1998, p.60). A few months ago, this congregation named three core values – spirituality, love and justice, and friendship and relationships that I will call growing in relationship with each other. Those values are the foundation on which we are rebuilding and renewing our church. Today begins a three part sermon series on those values. The sermon next week will focus on love and justice, and the sermon in two weeks will focus on the value of relationships. We begin today with spirituality, which is our need to reach beyond ourselves until we are intimately connected to God. Water, in the desert and from Jacob’s well and from our own need will be the symbol of our spiritual quest. I want us to know today and every day that when our spirits, our souls, when the deepest part of us is thirsty, God provides us with spiritual water. Now in order to look for spiritual water, we have to realize our spiritual thirst. Have you ever been thirsty? Would you say to a passerby, “Got water”? Can you meet my need for health and hope? We thirst for water to be sure. But we also thirst for many other things; we thirst for meaning in our lives, hope for the future, confidence to face the days ahead, and faith. We thirst to know God, to know love, and to know good and healthy relationships. Have you ever been thirsty and by thirsty, I mean the kind of dry throat, chapped lips, I’m so thirsty I can feel my body dehydrating thirst. It is the kind of thirst athletes know after a hard practice or game; gardeners know the kind of thirst I’m talking about when they have mowed the lawn or tended to a garden in the middle of July. Do any kind of hard work, and you will know thirst. Have you ever been thirsty, and didn’t it seem when you were that the farther away you were from water, the deeper your thirst? Soda, milk, nothing else would do. When we were in Zimbabwe several years ago, we knew that our delicate American systems were not used to Zimbabwean tap water, so we always had bottles of water with us, it kept us from becoming dehydrated, and it seemed to us that when our supply needed replenishing we were a little more thirsty than when there was a case of water in our van. Got water? Has your spirit ever been thirsty? Do you have a time in your life when you lost a loved one, or when your hopes were dashed? We have known brokenness, we have experienced despair, we have known disappointment with no relief in sight, and our spirits are dry and in pain. That is spiritual thirst and it is expressed by the Psalm that says: “As the deer longs for flowing
streams, so my soul longs for you O God. Christian spirituality is the practice of prayer, worship, activity, and study that helps answer the question, “where is your God?” It gives us confidence to say, “my God is exactly where my deepest longing, piercing pain, most magnificent joy, and greatest happiness lie. God is where I am, surrounding me with divine love, leading me with a holy hand, holding me in sacred embrace, empowering me with the strength of God’s word.” We need that confidence because moments of longing and thirst come to us as surely as physical thirst and spiritual anxiety came to the Hebrews in the desert. Like them, we may think that that we have come as far as we can. Like them, we might say, “there is no water in this place, it is dry and life threatening; there is nothing to sustain us. Where is the water we need? Is the Lord among us or not?” (Exodus 17.7) “Tell the people I am here”, God says to Moses. “These folks are thirsty in their bodies and their spirits are dry too. But the water they need is all around them – take your staff, strike the rock and set the water free”. God says to us, I am here – strike your source of life water in me, pray, sing, read my work, seek support among other believers. I am here and I have the water you need.” Have you known the spirit soothing satisfaction of a comforting word, love found again, hope restored, disappointment healed? That is spiritual water. Moses struck a rock and found water. Jesus has a conversation with a woman and shows one more way to find the water God has for us. The story starts simply enough. Jesus finds himself in Samaria, an area hostile to Jews. The disciples have gone into town for food and while he waits by Jacob’s well a women comes in mid-day to draw water. There are two unusual things going on here. “It is surprising that a Jew would ask hospitality of a Samaritan, it is equally surprising that a man would ask hospitality of a woman. It was not considered proper for a man, especially a rabbi, to initiate public conversation with a woman who he did not know” (www.lectionary.org/john4.5-42, p.3). She has a bucket, he doesn’t and the place where they are is a place of rest for him – it is as sacred to her as this building is to us. When Jesus asks her for a drink of water, her first reaction is to be offended. She knows he is Jewish; how did she know? Maybe it is his prayer shawl, or his beard and sideburns, whatever it is, she wants no part of him. In her mind she is thinking, “we Samaritans know how Jewish people look down their noses at us because we chose to marry people who were not of our faith. You think we are not pure enough. Our cultural memory recalls that we, like you, were captured by the Babylonians then when we were released, and you all began to build the Jerusalem temple, we offered to help, and you said, ‘no thanks, we got this’. We were not good enough. So we built our own temple here on Mt. Gerizim. When she speaks, she says, “I know who you and your people are. Why are you asking me for water or anything else?” Jesus reminds her of the water her spirit needs – the water we drink will quench our bodies’ thirst, but we’ll get thirsty again. “Besides, if you really know me, you would know that I have the water your spirit needs – it is living water, it is refreshment for the soul, ‘it will become a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (14b). She thinks he is talking about a stream of flowing water, instead of well water, and she asks for water from his source. She is asking for more than she knows she is asking for, but then the story takes an apparent sharp personal turn. When she asks Jesus for the water he has, and Jesus says to her, “go get your husband”. He knows that she does not have a husband; and that she currently lives with a man who is not her husband, and that she has already been married five times. But before we get caught up in the lifestyle remember this is a story about spiritual, living water, not his woman’s living arrangement. Besides that, we don’t know her story. We don’t know if she was widowed or divorced, in a time when only a husband could instigate divorce. We don’t know if she was abandoned. But we know this: we know that Jesus did not reject her. He welcomed her, he talked with her about the theology of water, and a discussion of where we worship. The one who told us last week that he came to save, not to condemn receives this woman as a child of God. We know that as she talked with Jesus she recognized her own spiritual thirst and she begins to see him as we see him – Jesus becomes for her a source of spiritual life. He is water for her thirsty soul. She has the bucket she needs to reach into Jacob’s well, Jesus has the grace she needs to reach into her spiritual well and to have her soul’s thirst quenched. “The day is coming”, Jesus says, “no, I have brought the day with me, when where we worship is not nearly as important as the fact that we worship God in spirit and in truth”. We worship in good Disciples tradition here, down the street there are Christians worshiping as good United Methodists, and Presbyterians, Baptists, Catholics, and Episcopalians. No matter where we worship, our spirits will find refreshment when we find the courage this woman had and speak honestly with Jesus. The woman wanted to know who Jesus was, he told her. She listened to him, and her life was changed. She recognized him as God’s prophet, he revealed himself to her as a prophet and as God’s Messiah, and she is one of the first people to whom he says, “I am God’s Messiah, God’s Christ, the one whom God sent for the sake of the world ”. The great gift Jesus gives to this woman is that she is one of the first people to whom Jesus says, ‘I am the Messiah, the Christ. “This is the first of the ‘I am’ sayings Jesus will proclaim in the gospel of John. He will also say, ‘I am the bread of life’ (6.35); ‘I am the light of the world’ (8.12; 9.5); ‘I am the door’ (10.9); ‘I am the good shepherd’ (10.11); ‘I am the resurrection and the life’ (14.6). This woman was thoroughly changed. One writer says of her, “there is no possibility of business-as-usual for the Samaritan woman after this meeting with Jesus. She may or may not come to draw water again, but the circumstances of her life have been set in a new dimension” (Texts for Preaching – Year A. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1995, p.207). Her soul was refreshed when Jesus reveals himself to be as the promised Messiah. Our souls are refreshed as we put our trust in him and drink from the living water that Christ provides. She runs back to town, shouting with all the energy and passion of an evangelist, sharing the good news she knows. “Come meet a man, he knows who I am, and he did not judge or sneer, or leer. He talked to me about spiritual water. Surely he is not the Messiah, is he? Her neighbors first go to see what she is so excited about, hear for themselves, they will not let Jesus go, and as they talk with him and listen to him, they come to believe for themselves that Jesus is the son of God, the one who can quench their own thirsts. We cannot be satisfied just because our thirst is quenched. There are a lot of thirsty out there, and we know where the water is. She became an evangelist, and that is our call too. The woman, her neighbors, our own quenched thirsts teach us to rejoice that when our spirits are thirsty, to praise God and to dip our cups deeply into the living water of Jesus Christ. Some of us need just a sip of water to refresh us, some of us a cup of water the size of the one that we drank our coffee from this morning, and some of us need the powerful water of Christ to wash over us like a cleansing shower. We all can praise God that we can have the water we need. Moses struck a rock and found water for his people. Jesus invites us to dig deep and to reach out to him as he reaches out to us and to find in him God’s living water for our thirsty souls. Then because we are filled, and our thirsts are quenched, we can find strength to reach out to others and tell the story. Come meet Jesus, he told me all I ever did and he loves me enough to give himself for me. He knows us and loves us and invites us to find wholeness and refreshment in him. When we are filled with spiritual water, we can indeed worship God wherever we are, in spirit and in truth. We can worship God and praise Jesus Christ that where the spirit and truth of God are, we will be able to rejoice. Are you thirsty? Got water for your spirit? Yes we do; we have living water in the life, ministry, death, and coming resurrection of the Jesus Christ to whom we say “continue to refresh us”, and for whom we say, “thanks be to God”. Amen. Dr.
LaTaunya M. Bynum |
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Broad
Street Christian Church
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