Sermon delivered on Sunday, Lent 3A, March 19, 2017 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

If you prefer to listen to the audio podcast of today’s sermon, click here.

Lectionary texts: Exodus 17.1-7; Psalm 95.1-11; Romans 5.1-11; John 4.5-42.

In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Like many of you, I suspect, I enjoyed St. Augustine’s Bowling party. I also, like
many of you, I suspect, enjoyed watching a little bit of March Madness this week.
In between the segments of actual basketball playing, of course, we are treated to a
whole raft of commercials, many of which continue to use a lot of the imagery of
the athletes that we have just been watching. There is a lot of athletic imagery and
a lot of people engaging in sports activities and sweating, and a lot of what’s
getting sold in those commercials are beverages of various sorts. We sell a lot of
beverages in this country, and the interesting thing is that a lot of the beverages
that are being advertised are actually not beverages that replenish the water from
our bodies, rather it actually takes more ?uid out of the body than it is putting in,
and there are a lot of beverages that are like that.

Our Old Testament scripture lesson and our Gospel lesson this morning both focus
on the idea of thirst and both of them start at this level where we are talking about
our physical thirst and how we replenish our body with water. But they use that as
a metaphor for moving to a deeper level to talk about our spiritual thirst and how
we go about quenching the spiritual thirst that all of us have.

The metaphor that our lectionary text used reminds us that, like beverages, a lot of
the things that we use to quench our spiritual thirst are bound to disappoint us, and
that what we really thirst for at our root is an encounter with the God who made us
and calls us and seeks relationship with us. Our story from Exodus this morning
reads like the script from one of those commercials during March Madness, where
the people are hot and they’re tired and they need some refreshment, and they
complained yet again to Moses, “why have you let us out here in the desert to die?”
And just like whatever product is being sold, God comes in at the end of the story
with the product that refreshes them. But Moses points out the irony of the story
because the people have framed their question as, is God with us or not? And Moses points out that of course God is with us. He’s just led us to the Red Sea; he
is leading us to Mount Sinai. The people are not interested in whether God is with
them. They want the thing that God is going to give them. They want God for
utilitarian purposes of getting their immediate needs met.

This dynamic is also a part of the wonderful Gospel lesson about the Samaritan
woman that we heard from John. This is about the longest dialogue we have in any
of the Gospels, and it has so many interesting things happening that it’s hard to
know where to even start to unpack it. On one level, of course, it is yet another
story of Jesus breaking down barriers.

A man in Jesus’ time was not supposed to address a woman that he didn’t know,
and Jesus very comfortably just engages this woman to ask her for a drink. Also,
the Jews and the Samaritans were always at odds. The Samaritans were kind of an
offshoot of the Jewish community as the result of intermarrying between the
Jewish community in Israel and Assyrians who had conquered Israel several
centuries earlier. So the Jews always saw them on some level as traitors to the true
faith. So again, Jesus reaches across boundaries of gender and boundaries of
ethnicity and class to engage this woman in conversation.

Their conversation starts with Jesus simply asking her for some water and her
expressing some surprise that he has chosen to engage her. Jesus then used that to
move the conversation to a deeper level about what thirst is about and what we
really thirst for. But, as in the story of Nicodemus that we read last week, Jesus is
talking about the spiritual reality. She is still caught up in the physical reality,
wondering how he is going to get water when he doesn’t have a bucket, and she’ s
kind of sarcastic to him, “are you greater than our father Jacob who made this well
that you can give me this water?” But as Jesus continues to be in dialogue with
her, she responds in much the same way that the children of Israel responded to

Moses, which is very utilitarian, “Give me some of this water so that I will not
thirst and I don’t have to come to draw water anymore.” She doesn’t want to come
and draw water because of her sort of past.

All of the women of her town would come together to get water ?om the well
early in the morning when it was cool. She comes later in the day because she can
do it by herself then. She doesn’t have to stand the harsh stares of the other
women in her town, so she’s there because that’s when she can go. And Jesus, of
course, engages that very issue and asks her to bring her husband to come talk.
And she says again, “Well, I don’t have a husband.” And Jesus responds, “Well,
that’ s correct. You’ve had five and the guy you’re living with now is not your
husband.”

So she realizes that something special is going on with this man, and she calls him
a prophet. But that doesn’t mean she wants to talk to him about this because it’s
awkward; it’s embarrassing. And so she does a classic Metropolitan move, which
is you get asked a question that’s a little bit close to home, and you turn it into a
theological issue that we can intellectualize. So she says, “Oh, I see you’re a
prophet,” and she starts to talk about this theological difference that the Jews and
the Samaritans have. One of the theological differences was where you worship:
the Jews felt that Jerusalem was where you worship, and the Samaritans were
comfortable worshiping up in the worship center that they created in the northern
kingdom. And Jesus, of course, knows a good sidestep when he sees one, and
addressed this issue very directly and says, “Listen, where we worship is not going
to matter in a fairly short period of time,” and, in fact, when John had written this
Gospel, the temple in Jerusalem has been destroyed. So Jesus says, “The time is
coming and in fact and now is, when the people who worship God are not going to
worship him in Jerusalem or here in Samaria. They’re going to worship God in
spirit and in truth.”

The issue is not a theological one. The issue is a spiritual one. It’s where are you
getting fed? Where are you receiving nourishment? Where is your thirst being
quenched? So she has gone to another level now and she realizes something else —
something bigger than she had even thought about — is starting to happen here.

And she tentatively starts to explore, is this the Messiah? Her response to Jesus is,
“Well, the Messiah will help us ?gure all that out when the Messiah comes.” And
then Jesus makes a very powerful and dramatic statement that happens again on a
couple of different levels. He starts off saying, “I am He who is speaking to you.”
Now that’s dramatic to begin with because Jesus never owns his own Messiahship.
He’s always putting that off. This is one of the very few places where he says, yes,
this is who I am.

But remember also that the Messiah for the Jews and the Samaritans was a human
person who is going to usher in God’s kingdom, a physical, temporal kingdom on
earth. Jesus owns that title of Messiah, but then he takes it to a level deeper
because what the Greek text says is simply “I am.” Our translators have added the
“he,” the objective, “I am He.” Jesus simply says, “I Am is the one speaking to
you.” I Am of course is the name of God. It is the name that God gave to Moses
when Moses asked, “Who shall I say sent me?” And God says, “Tell them I Am
who I Am.” So that when Jesus says, “I Am speaking to you,” he is saying yes,
there is the Messiah, but it’s God who is speaking to you right now, right here in
this place.

Jesus is saying, “You thirst, and the One who can quench your thirst is right here in
front of you, engaged with you, in dialogue with you, in relationship with you. I,
the Holy One, am here right now to quench that thirst.” Jesus moves past her
utilitarian hopes of getting some simple water. He moves past her brokenness and
her sinfulness and the things that separate her from the people in her community
and, she thinks, from God. He moves past her attempt to intellectualize what faith
is about and He says I am here for you right now, right in this place, and that’s all
you need.

All of us thirst. We all have a deep thirst at the core of our being that needs to be
quenched. And we keep trying to quench that thirst withall the wrong things,
things that will ultimately leave us thirstier than when we started. We try to fill
that void through consumerism. We try to give our lives meaning through our
work. We engage in addictive and compulsive behaviors. We do all kinds of
things just to quench that thirst that is within us, knowing that the only way that
that gets quenched is when we drink from the living water that is offered to us
through our relationship with God. But we can’t quite let ourselves trust that.

Lent is the time in our church year when we recommit ourselves to this
relationship with God who desires us. In our first two Sundays at the beginning of
Lent, what we focused on in our lectionary text is tearing down the walls that we
have put up between ourselves and God, and between ourselves and each other.

It’s a process that the great saints of our church called puri?cation. It’s getting rid
of the stuff that stands between us and God. As Lent continues, we shift the focus
a little bit to talking about the positive things that we can do to engage God.

At the end of our story in the Gospel of John, the woman at the Well leaves her jug
by the well as she goes back into her town to tell the people about this man that she
has met. And it’s a wonderful metaphor, in a story that is rich in wonderful
metaphors, of leaving behind all of the ways that We have been trying to quench
our thirst as we embrace the one thing that will quench our thirst.

The Gospel of John is a powerful one, and I would encourage you to go back
today or sometime this week, and take a look at this story in the fourth chapter,
because the way it is invites our participation. The Gospel invites us to listen to
Jesus along with the woman at the well, to hear her responses and to listen to
Jesus’ responses to her, and in that process, along with her, to get drawn into this
encounter with Jesus. The great I Am who loves us and seeks us, and desires us.

The story is a wonderful opportunity to engage in that process of setting aside our
need to get something from God, setting aside our embarrassment and our fears
about our sinfulness and our failure, and it invites us to set aside our need to
intellectualize and to simply be in the presence of the great I Am, the only thing
that can quench our thirst.

In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.