Lent III                                                Seminarian Kathryn Reinhard

Exodus 17:1-7                                     Rite II Holy Eucharist

John 4:5-42                                         February 24, 2008

“Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.”

 

Many of you will recognize these lines from Coleridge's great poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The Mariner and his crew find themselves in the middle of a deadly calm on the ocean. The wind has stopped, and with nothing to fill the ship's sails they cannot move. The crew has already exhausted their supply of food and drinkable water, and so they find themselves literally surrounded by water and yet dying of thirst.

 

Roughly 70 % of the Earth's surface is covered with water, yet only 3% of this is drinkable, fresh water. Water is absolutely essential for all life on Earth as we understand it. The human body itself is mostly water. Human beings can only survive 3 days without water. Dying of thirst is one of the more excruciating ways of perishing – extreme dehydration leads to the swelling and cracking of the tongue, blood sweats, hallucinations and blindness.

 

Our readings this morning from Exodus and from John both seem to understand this crucial connection between water and life. In Exodus, the Israelites have set up camp in the wilderness and there is no water, so Moses, at the Lord's command, famously brings water from the rock. In John we meet a Samaritan woman gathering water at Jacob's well. In the ancient world, and in many cultures still today, gathering water is women's work. Water for drinking, for washing, for cooking, must be collected in large containers and brought home for each day's use. It is about noon – during the heat of the day. Jesus has been traveling and he is thirsty. He asks the woman for a drink.

 

We should not be fooled by the domesticity of this scene. This is no casual encounter. Jesus appears to have happened upon this woman as she goes about her day, but actually Jesus has interrupted her in one of the most important, most crucial tasks she will do today. She is responsible for providing for her family. The water she brings is essential to their health and well-being. Water, as we have seen, is life giving, and it is this woman's vocation to bring this life to others.

 

“Water, water everywhere, and not drop to drink.”

 

In Scripture, salvation is often spoken of as water -- particularly moving, flowing, “living” water. To settle for anything less than living water is to settle for something that is less than God. In Jeremiah the Lord laments, “My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and have dug out cisterns for themselves – cracked cisterns that can hold no water.” A cistern is the opposite of flowing, living water. It is surface water. It is stagnant, and easily becomes dirty, gathering filth and spreading disease. Well water is also stagnant water and can be subject to contamination. So, when Jesus offers the Samaritan woman “living water,” she first thinks that Jesus has identified a spring of flowing, moving water – a superior drinking source.

 

Jesus says, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but 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.” The Samaritan woman thinks this sounds pretty good. …Can you imagine never being thirsty again?! What is this living water? And how can we get it?

 

“Water, water everywhere, and not drop to drink.”

 

How many of you have ever experienced a kind of restless thirst that nothing really seemed to assuage? An aching need that no amount of work or play, food or entertainment could really satisfy? Why do we come to this place week after week? What thirsts are we looking to satisfy? Perhaps we are here because we sense, even unconsciously, that at the end of the day, when we have come to the limit of the place where our intelligence and beauty and charm can take us, what we really need is God .

If our lives and our world are to make any sense, we need God .

 

Sailors who are stranded in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by water and dying of thirst, know better than to try to drink the salt-water because doing this only increases dehydration. Instead of slaking your thirst it compounds it, making it worse. This is what we do whenever we try to fill ourselves with something that is not God. When we use food, alcohol, work, a relationship, to fill up the space inside us that is intended for God – that only God is meant to fill. None of these things, as good as they may be in their own rights, can satisfy our thirst for the divine, can quench the longing inside of us for the living water of a relationship with God – sharing in God's own inner life of love. If we try to drink from the cisterns that we dig for ourselves, our thirst will not be satisfied. It will be compounded. As Augustine so eloquently put it, our hearts will always be restless until they rest in God.

 

“Those who drink of the water that I give will never be thirsty”

 

Once the woman has drunk from the spring of living water, once she has begun a relationship with Jesus, she forgets about her physical thirst. She leaves her jar and goes to the city and tells everyone she can find about Jesus – the one who has told her everything she has ever done, the one who has brought meaning to her life. Notice that Jesus did not wait for a more convenient time to offer this woman living water. He interrupted her in her daily routine – in the middle of her most crucial and important work. In heeding Jesus' call, this woman has not abandoned her vocation. She has been empowered to live into it more fully. She was responsible for bringing life-giving water to others. Now, she brings her community living-water – the Good News of Jesus. She has become the rock in the wilderness – the unlikely vessel that brings hope, life and sustenance to her people.

 

God draws water from the rock. God does not wait for the rock to become something else. God does not turn the rock into magic pool; God uses the rock as it is. God did not send Moses to a moist plant; God chose to use the rock. And in God's hands even a rock can become a spring of water, gushing up to eternal life. God wants to use the rocks of our own lives – as improbable and unlikely as this may be. No heart is too hard, too dry, for God to use.

 

God is offering us living water – right now, right in the middle of our busy lives. God is not waiting for us to become other than we are, for a more convenient time when we are less distracted, less busy, when we have become more holy, or more organized or to have finished with our taxes. God wants a relationship with us now, in the midst of the rockiness of our lives as they are.

 

Right now God is offering you living water, a relationship of love with God's own self. God is offering this water to you – just as you are – in all the complicated reality of your life. If what you want is to never be thirsty again, all you have to do is offer the rock of your heart to God, and where you were bare, dry and hard, God will create in you a fountain gushing up to eternal life.

 

AMEN.

 

 

 

 

 

Amen.