Water, Water Everywhere (Lent 3)

Exodus 17: 1-7 & John 4: 5-30 & 39-42

Roger Lynn

March 4, 2018

3rd Sunday in Lent

(click here for the audio for this sermon)

(click here for the video for the entire worship service today - the sermon begins at 25:40)

I’ve preached more than 100 sermons here at Plymouth. Some of them have been pretty good. Some of them have probably been something less than stellar. I’ve sought to offer glimpses into how I understand God, the world, and our relationship with both. I know that there have been times when what I had to say has challenged you. Sometimes what I’ve said has been comforting. You’ve agreed with me. You’ve disagreed with me. And through it all you’ve honored me by listening to me. Sometimes I worry that I am repeating myself. I’ve been preaching for almost 37 years and it can be challenging to stay fresh. But then I remind myself that at the heart of it all, the message is really pretty simple. It just takes us a while to let it sink in. So, here I am again, trying to find a way to tell you what we already know, but somehow keep forgetting.

We live in a world of abundance. God is everywhere. Grace abounds. And yet, all too often, we view our lives through a filter of scarcity. We think it is a choice between seeing the glass half empty or half full, when the reality is that the glass is completely full to overflowing. The paradox, of course, is that how we see life is how we experience life. If we are surrounded by a lake filled with beautiful, pure, clean water, and what we see is desert sand, we will still die of thirst because we don’t know we can drink.

The Hebrew people had escaped a life of slavery and were on their way to freedom. God was with them every step of the way. The Sacred Presence was described as a pillar of fire and a holy cloud. Over and over again God’s presence was experienced. And over and over again they forgot. They found themselves in the wilderness without water (a powerful symbol for the source of life) and they panicked. Their first thought was not, “We are in need of water. I wonder how God will help us find what we need.” Their first thought was, “God has abandoned us and we are going to die.” When Moses strikes the rock and finds a spring, it becomes clear that finding enough water is not the problem. Finding enough faith is the real challenge. 

How often do we fall into the same trap? We find ourselves wandering through the wilderness of life, feeling lost and abandoned. We are scared and desperately thirsty for meaning and purpose and comfort and safety. We quickly become convinced that because we can’t readily see a way out there is no way out. Surrounded by an abundance of possibilities, we nonetheless find ourselves dying of thirst because of perceived scarcity. The water of life we need to thrive may be as close as the nearest rock, but we’ve stopped hitting rocks because it seems so pointless.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus also uses the powerful symbol of water, and here again we find the theme of abundance flowing forth from the story. He meets a woman who is trapped in a world of scarcity and judgment. She is cut off from community and from God because she doesn’t fit the perceived rules regarding who is acceptable. It is no accident that she is coming to the well at noon, when none of the other women are there. She is not welcome in their company. Then along comes Jesus with the message that it doesn’t have to be this way. The water of God’s love is both free flowing and abundant. The only requirement is that she receive it. Her life is transformed. The life of her entire community is transformed. All because someone dared to embrace the reality of God’s abundance. By his words, and even more powerfully by his actions, Jesus proclaims that God’s love is not limited and it is not limiting. When we open ourselves to the free-flowing water of life that pours forth from the presence of God, we begin to discover that perceived barriers dissolve. New possibilities emerge. Abundance bursts forth. Jesus engages in a life-changing conversation which the cultural rules of his day simply could not conceive of. Jews didn’t talk to Samaritans. Men didn’t talk to women, and certainly not women of “questionable” character. The living water of God’s love only became accessible, truly and fully accessible, when the limitations of scarcity thinking were set aside. Even the rocks which seem to block our path can spring forth with water when we trust in God’s abundance rather than in our own scarcity.

We have trouble perceiving it and trusting it, because it does not always look like what we expect. The Israelites wandering in the wilderness didn’t see the water because they expected it to come in some familiar form, like a stream or a lake. The woman at the well had a hard time grasping the gift which Jesus was offering because she expected a world that is divided into us and them, good and bad, insider and outsider, acceptable and unacceptable. How often do we miss the living, transforming water of God’s ever-present love because we expect it to arrive in the forms with which we are already comfortable and familiar? The water really is everywhere! May we remember to drink. May we remember to offer a drink to those have forgotten. Amen.