Sermon - 3rd Sunday in Lent (3/15/2020)
Ex. 17:1-7; Ps. 95; Jn. 4:5-30, 39-42
If we were looking to the Scriptures to tell us something about us, and our experience and our lives today, the first reading today from Exodus would be an excellent passage to describe who we are and where we are right now.
The people of Israel had been liberated from Egypt, delivered from danger through the waters of the Red Sea, but they were still on a long journey through the wilderness to the Promised Land. We have been set free by faith, liberated from anxiety and shame, delivered by our passage through the waters of baptism and set free with Jesus from the fear of death and loss, and yet we also are on a long journey through the wilderness, and the Promised Land is still a long way off.
And on their long journey through the wilderness, we read that the people of God stopped at a place called Rephidim, which in Hebrew simply means “the resting places.” And they were thirsty. It’s a terrible thing to be thirsty. Human beings can go weeks without food, if necessary, but we cannot last more than a couple of days without water. People who are thirsty are rarely their best selves. People who are desperate for life-giving water and don’t know where, or if, they are going to find it, find it hard to be objective, hard to be kind to their neighbors, hard to trust, hard to have faith.
And so when the people came to Rephidim, when they came to the resting place and they were thirsty and had no water, we read that they turned on Moses. “Why have you brought us out of Egypt to bring us to this place where we and everyone we love is dying of thirst?” In the moment of their thirst, they forgot all that God had done for them in rescuing them from slavery in Egypt, they forgot all that God had promised would be ahead of them. And even though the Lord did indeed provide water, abundant water, more than enough water for all the thirsty people to drink, the people of God did not remember Rephidim as the resting places where they rested along the way of their journey and enjoyed the bounty of God’s living water that satisfied their thirst. They remembered the place with the name Massah, which in Hebrew means the place of temptation, and Meribah, the place of strife and contention. Because it was the place where they asked themselves, Is the Lord in our midst or not?
The psalmist today urges us to worship and bow down, to kneel before the Lord who made us, who made the heavens and the seas and the earth and all that is in them, to stand in awe of the wonderful gifts God has given us. Oh, says the psalmist, that today, on this day of worship, that today you would hear God’s voice! And if you do hear God’s voice, the psalmist says, do not be like the people at Massah and Meribah. Where they tested and tempted God, even though they had seen all God’s wondrous deeds for them, even though they knew full well all the blessings they had received from God. They should have been able to trust in God’s promises, but they didn’t, because they were so thirsty.
Sometimes we hold up the Scriptures like a mirror, and they reflect to us who we are, or who we can be, sometimes, on our bad days, when we are thirsty. When we need God’s presence, when we need the gift of life-giving water and don’t see where we are going to find it. But the Scripture also can be a glass through which we can see, often darkly, something about the God who speaks through God’s word. And today we also have a text that shows us something, not just about we human beings who can get so stressed, so fearful, so lacking in trust when we are thirsty, but something about God.
In the gospel today we read that Jesus was on a journey that took him through Samaria – a place that no self-respecting Jewish person in the first century would have even wanted to pass through, let alone stay in any longer than absolutely necessary. But, we read, “Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well.” Jesus, tired from his journey, sought out a resting place. He was sitting next to the well, at noon, when the sun was highest in the sky. And, as the Samaritan woman who found him there was quick to point out to him, the well was deep, and Jesus had no bucket. And so this is the picture that the evangelist paints for us: Jesus, on a journey through what God’s people in those days thought of as God-forsaken Samaria, is tired and comes to a resting place, where he is hot and thirsty. The deep and ancient well of his ancestor Jacob is right there, but Jesus has no way to access the water he so desperately needs. Until a Samaritan woman arrives at the well, and Jesus says to her, “Give me a drink.”
This is how God comes to the woman of Samaria: as a hot and thirsty foreigner, tired from his travels, who by speaking with her violated every accepted rule of gender and religion and nationality, asking her, as one human being to another, for a drink of water. At first it surprises the Samaritan woman that God would come to her in this way, but it shouldn’t surprise us. “For I was hungry, and you have me to eat, and I was thirsty, and you gave me to drink.” “But when, Lord, did we see you hungry and thirsty?” “As often as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.” Of course Jesus comes to her as a thirsty stranger asking for a drink. How else does Jesus ever come to us?
And yet, as the conversation between Jesus and the woman of Samaria continues, it immediately becomes clear that Jesus is not the only one who is thirsty. She also is tired and thirsty. Tired of walking alone every day, in the heat of the noonday sun, to fill her bucket with water and carry its heavy weight all the way home in the afternoon sun. Thirsty for a connection with someone, even if he is a stranger and a foreigner asking her for a favor, who will treat her as an intelligent and thoughtful human being, and not just as a human piece of plumbing.
We often assume that, because she has had five husbands and is now living with a man who is not her husband, that there is something morally deficient about her – but I don’t think that’s right. Remember, in the first century, marriage was usually a contract made by a man and a woman’s male relatives; the woman herself had little choice in the matter. That this woman has had five husbands says less about her than about her husbands; she has not abandoned them, but they have abandoned her. It’s not her fault that the man who is now responsible for her will not even give her the dignity of the status of wife, yet apparently expects her to go to the well and carry home the water the rest of the family needs. Oh, I have no doubt that she is thirsty. For dignity, for respect, for something more than each day’s drudgery.
You see, this is what happens whenever we meet Jesus. At first we see someone asking something of us, a thirsty stranger asking for a bit of water, someone we do not expect to see and who we might barely even notice. But very quickly we learn that we are the ones who are thirsty, and that Jesus offers us water that will always satisfy our thirst. Water that becomes in us a spring of water gushing up to life in God’s presence. When we are alone in the wilderness with our thirst and our fear, like the people of God of old, we are tempted to strife and contention and to lose our trust and our faith. But when we respond to the one who asks us for a drink, we discover God’s promise of all the life-giving water we could ever need. And all this was discovered because one day at a well, one thirsty human being asked another thirsty human being for a cup of water.
This is a time when a very peculiar request is being made of all of us. We are being asked to physically separate from one another as much as we possibly can, for the sake of our own health to be sure, but even more because the health of our most vulnerable neighbors is at stake. And because the ability of our doctors and nurses and hospitals and medical teams to care for and heal as many of our neighbors as possible requires us to slow down the spread of the coronavirus as much as we possibly can. This request goes against so many of our most fundamental instincts, especially as a church. And it comes at a time when so many are already feeling lonely, disconnected from community, divided by religion and gender and nationality and age and sexuality and politics and so many other things. This could so easily become a time when we are overwhelmed by our thirst that we lose heart, that we lose trust, that we wonder whether God is truly in our midst or not, that we break down in strife and contention, as our ancestors in faith did at Massah and Meribah.
But if we can see in our vulnerable neighbors asking us for this favor, this grace, this deed of love, the request of Jesus saying, Give me a drink, perhaps we also can here his offer of life-giving water for us too, for a different type of connection and mutual care and love for one another. And I pray that, when this time that could be unlike anything any of us have ever experienced before has come to its conclusion, we also will be able to say with the people of the town of Sychar in Samaria, “It is no longer because of what you have said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this truly is the Savior of the world.”