First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
27 February 2005
Living Water
This morning we stand at the mid-point of our Lenten journey, exactly half way between Ash Wednesday and Palm Sunday. For those who have embraced a Lenten discipline, especially a discipline of denial, these can be the dog days of Lent. The ashes have long since rubbed off our foreheads and the intensity of Holy Week still seems a long way off. I find that when I have given something up for Lent, no matter how small, now is the time I start yearning for it, now is the time I start questioning the practice itself.
What are these Lenten sacrifices for, anyway? Who sees and blesses these small denials? Surely God has bigger fish to fry in this world. Does God really care, or even notice, if I give up that glass of wine, that cup of coffee, that piece of cake? Forty days is a long time, and our lives are stressful, and sometimes it is the smallest of pleasures that keeps us going. We're busy, we're tired, we've shoveled a mountain of snow this winter: don't we deserve our little rewards?
Besides, we're Protestants. What would our Puritan ancestors say? Isn't this keeping of Lenten disciplines a Catholic thing?
The creators of the lectionary must know that, by the third week of Lent, the bloom is off our Lenten rose and the attention we pledged on Ash Wednesday to cultivate is starting to wane. Over the last few weeks, they have sent us out into the desert with Jesus to be tempted and out into the unknown with Abram to be given a new name and to be made, somehow, into a blessing. They must know that the desert is dry and the path into the unknown dusty, because this week they send tired, thirsty people to keep us company. And best of all, just at the moment when we might be getting parched, they offer us water: water that bubbles up from the deepest, most hidden places, springs of water, as Jesus says to the Samaritan woman, "gushing up to eternal life."
The people of Israel, in the story Dave read to us from Exodus, are also in the middle of their journey. Indeed, their forty-year journey out of slavery and toward a home they've never seen provides the model for Jesus's forty-day journey into the wilderness, and so it is the birthplace of our own Lenten journey as well. We meet the people of Israel in the wilderness, nervously taking the pulse of their situation: is God here? Is God with us? Have we done the right thing? Does our choice to leave Egypt for who-knows-what really matter? Is there a purpose to this journey and the sacrifices it has demanded of us? Or are we just walking in circles?
They can't understand why God would lead them to a place with no water—and why should they?. As they grow thirsty, they grow desperate, and growing desperate they become dangerous. Moses complains to God that he's afraid they will murder him if he doesn't provide some water, so God instructs him to strike the rock at Horeb with the same staff with which he turned the Nile to blood back in Egypt. Moses bangs on that rock, and somewhere inside that dry old stone, water begins to stir, until finally, it bursts out, and everyone drinks their fill.
In the story from John's gospel, it is Jesus who is on the road, Jesus who is thirsty and tired, Jesus who longs for a drink of water. He stops in Samaria to ask for one, even though, as the author delicately puts it, he does not, as a Jew, share "things in common" with Samaritans. What Jews and Samaritans have in common is hostility. And some history, and some ancestors. Jesus sits down next to the well Jacob dug for his son Joseph long ago, and asks a Samaritan woman, who is hauling water up from below with a rope and a bucket, for a drink.
There is so much working against the possibility of any kind of conversation here—he's a man, she's a woman; he's a Jew, she's a Samaritan. The divisions between them are ancient. But they are both thirsty, and each has what the other needs. The waters that promise refreshment are waters they can share: the water hidden down deep in the bottom of that well, dug by their common ancestor, and the living water, coming from an even deeper place, that Jesus offers.
Water quenches our thirst and sustains our life. It cleanses and refreshes and restores. But hidden away, water erodes, it destroys, it wears away the boundaries of what contains it. Even sealed in a rock, it will slowly, eventually, find a way out. Hidden below ground, water can carve out caverns we don't even know are there until the first springs find a way to bubble up to the surface.
The story about Jesus and the Samaritan woman is indeed a story about living water—water on the move, water eroding boundaries, water breaking through barriers that seem solid and impenetrable. What begins as a story about a tired, thirsty man and a woman at work in the noonday heat becomes a story full of springs bubbling up through any crack they can find. Once Jesus makes it clear that the walls between Jews and Samaritans, between men and women, between those who worship on one mountain and those who worship on another don't stand a chance in the face of the eroding power of the living water he offers, the outpourings begin. Truth pours out, secrets pour out, a vision of true worship pours out. Jesus pours the news that he is the Messiah into the Samaritan woman's open ears, and she, in turn, the first missionary, pours her testimony into her community. Her story moves through the city like a stream, widening the path between the Samaritans and Jesus, making room for more people to flow back and forth. When she goes to the city with the living water Jesus has given her, though, she leaves her water jar behind. She knows this water can't be held in a jar.
As a church, we're looking for ways to make room for the living water of Jesus to bubble up through the structures of our life together. We know what it looks like when it happens. Our children's creativity breaks into our worship with puppets and quilts and songs. The Daughters of Abraham erode old divisions with their reading and their conversation, a river running with words of healing. The silences in our worship fill up with prayers. The work and witness of our shelter and its guests, the hymns in section C of our hymnal, the jazz service, the wondering questions our children ask during Godly play, and the way the choir lifts our prayers to heaven week after week: all of these springs bear witness to the living water flowing in and through this community.
It's easy to see the springs of living water when they bubble to the surface; they draw us to them with their beauty. It's less easy to see the ways in which those springs might be impeded, less easy to know what living waters are pressing against the rock of our community, unable to find a way out—or in. How can we keep ourselves porous enough as a community to allow the living water Jesus offers to break the surface? How will we know when to catch that water in our water jars and when to run out into the city, leaving those jars behind?
I expect it will take a lot more experimenting and a willingness to risk striking the rock of the way we do things from time to time to make sure the living water hidden there has room to move. And we'll probably feel sometimes like the people of Israel in the wilderness: thirsty and quarrelsome, unsure that we're even on the right path. It's harder to follow the springs that pop up here and there than it is to follow a well-mapped road. There's bound to be uncertainty.
But there's one thing I think we can know for sure, one thing at least: that the boundaries marked by race or ethnicity or gender or forms of worship or sexuality or education or class or income or age are no match for the living water of Jesus. That water is always seeking the crack, the weak spot, the thin place in the edifices we construct to separate ourselves from each other. Even when we can't see it, we can be sure that water is doing its eroding work in secret, we can be sure it is soaking the foundation, loosening the cement, rotting the frames.
So much of God's work is done in secret, and secrecy is itself a Lenten theme. We were told on Ash Wednesday to beware of practicing our piety before others. Do your almsgiving, your praying, and your fasting in secret, Jesus said, and God, who sees in secret, will reward you.
So what about those Lenten disciplines, those small sacrifices seen only by God? What kind of reward might we expect for giving up television for forty days, or meals in restaurants, or any of the other small, seemingly insignificant comforts which punctuate our lives? The reward, I think, is a clearing of space, an opening of channels in which the living water Jesus offers can move unimpeded through our lives. If our small comforts have, over time, dulled our senses, these weeks of Lent are a time to restore them to their full strength. If our habits have lulled us to sleep, Lent is a time to wake up. If we have been distracted, Lent is a time to hone our capacity for attention. And if we have grown hard and unforgiving because of resentment and pain, Lent is a time to risk making ourselves vulnerable to God's mending mercy, and to let that living water Jesus offers water the earth of our lives.
Our pastor Mary's beloved Teresa of Avila once compared the cultivation of life with God to watering a garden. Sometimes, she said, we will have to draw the water up from a well, hand over hand, with great labor and frustration. Other times, it will be a little easier—we'll have a windlass that will do some of the work for us. On yet other occasions, a brook will irrigate our garden, and all we'll have to do is direct the water to the driest places. And sometimes, through no effort of our own, the rain will come. The important thing is to stay faithful to the work of watering the garden, on the days when it's easy and on the days when it's a groaning effort. The important thing, says Teresa, is to keep the garden watered so that it is always a place in which God is delighted to walk.
Perhaps you are working at giving up this Lent gossip or self-satisfaction or scorn, or perhaps you have added a discipline to your life for these forty days: a work of mercy, a time of prayer. Or maybe you have given up a mundane pleasure, something small, something do-able. All of these observances, from the heroic to the ordinary, water our garden, both the garden of our souls and the garden of this community. When we practice saying no to something small, we get ready to resist larger, more destructive forces. When we break a habit, even for only forty days, we leave more room for the living water Jesus has given us to flow through our lives. When we add a practice of prayer, of hospitality, of study we give the living water of God a chance to saturate the hard, rocky places of our lives and the least penetrable places in our community.
When we tap down deep into those hidden waters, God, who sees in secret, meets us there.
© 2005, Stephanie Paulsell