Lent 3A, 12 March 2023. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
- Exodus 17:1-7. The people thirsted there.
- Romans 5:1-11. God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.
- John 4:5-42. Give me a drink.
O God of water and thirst, grant us the strength, the wisdom, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may and cost what it will.
One theme for the day that I hear in our scripture readings is thirst. Maybe you know Mary Oliver’s poem called “Thirst,” in her book by the same name. [1] When I first read the poem, I heard it in Mary Oliver’s voice; this time around the I hear two voices in dialogue. The first part of the poem seems like the voice of the Samaritan woman.
Another morning and I wake with thirst
for the goodness I do not have. I walk
out to the pond [or in her case, the well] and all the way God has
given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord,
I was never a quick scholar but sulked
and hunched over my books past the
hour and the bell; grant me, in your
mercy, a little more time.
Midway through the poem, midway through a line, the voice of Jesus agrees and says:
Grant me, in your mercy, a little more time.
Love for the earth and love for you are having such a
long conversation in my heart. Who
knows what will finally happen or
where I will be sent, yet already I have
given a great many things away, expect-
ing to be told to pack nothing, except the
prayers which, with this thirst,
I am slowly learning.
The story goes that Jesus was tired out by his journey. It’s one of the rare moments in the Gospel of John where we get the idea that maybe Jesus’ feet really did touch the ground. He was human; he was tired; he needed a drink of water: he was thirsty. While Jesus’ disciples had gone into the city to buy food, he rested and waited for their return. His resting place was Jacob’s Well outside of Sychar, which means (by the way) deeply drunk! When Jacob, who was traveling away from conflict, got as far as he could and laid down to rest in what he took to be a godforsaken place, he had one of the great dreams of the Hebrew Bible. When he awoke, he said, “Surely God was in this place and I did not know.” Surely Jacob’s name is in this story for that reason. Perhaps it is to emphasize that while Jesus was traveling through Samaria, a god-forsaken land for Judeans, God had indeed been there before him.
This Samaritan woman is not named in the Gospel account, but I think of her as Sylvie because of that great jailhouse-blues song by Huddie Ledbetter, “Bring me little water, Sylvie.” She needs a name, in my opinion, because in all the Gospels she was the first person to engage in an extended theological discussion with Jesus; she had the longest reported conversation on any topic with Jesus; and she was the first person to bring good news to an entire city. If Mary Magdalene was the first apostle, Sylvie was the first evangelist. Why does she not get respected as such?
Instead, this Samaritan woman has been grossly mistreated by theologians, preachers, and Sunday School teachers, who have said that if she were a good woman, she wouldn’t have been at the well alone in the middle of the day; she wouldn’t have had five husbands; and she certainly wouldn’t be with a man who was not her husband. But, you know what? I think that’s nonsense; there’s nothing here to suggest that she is anything but a good woman: maybe unlucky, looking for a little alone time at the well, or avoiding encountering the other women. Bold, maybe: uppity enough to ask some questions, get some answers, and then tell the people in the city that she might have met the one who was going to save them all. John writes that they trusted in Jesus because of her testimony, literally because of her Word. Then they had the nerve to tell her that it was no longer because of her Word but because of their own experience. How did they know to have the experience in the first place? Oy, Sylvie! She was a truth-teller from the very beginning to the very end of this story; so put the idea that she was somehow tainted or immoral out of your head, at least for the next ten minutes.
This story takes place very early in John’s Gospel, which begins (as you know), “In the beginning was the Word.” If we were listening in Greek to a reading of his whole narrative, logos would still be ringing in our ears: the Word, the Word, the Word. In this story, the people believed the woman because of her word. Up to this point in John’s Gospel not much has happened: just to review, we have heard the prologue, about Jesus’ encounters with John the Baptist, Andrew and Peter, and then Philip and Nathaniel, who have started following Jesus. There was the wedding feast in Cana, Jesus turning tables over at the Temple in Jerusalem during the Passover, a nighttime meeting with Nicodemus, and such tension between John the Baptist’s disciples and Jesus’ disciples that Jesus had decided to leave Jerusalem and head back to the Galilee. He could have gone around Samaria, but he decided to go through a place where he was unlikely to be welcome. I bet he made his disciples so nervous.
There are two things that I want you to notice here. First, whatever happened to Jesus in this encounter, it led him to say, “I am,” in response to the Samaritan woman’s hope that the Messiah would come and explain everything. I Am is the name of God revealed to Moses at the burning bush. [2] In the Gospel according to John, this is the only time that Jesus directly acknowledges that he is the Anointed One, the Messiah. He says it not to a Judean or Galilean, but to a Samaritan and, not to a man but a woman! Furthermore, he doesn’t tell her to keep it secret.
Second, Jesus says, “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.” A few chapters later, he says, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and let the one who trusts in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.'” [3] In the end according to John, Jesus on the cross says, “I thirst.” John is testifying here to the idea of God being both the water and the thirst, both physically and spiritually: God is the wellspring and the desire. It reminds me of Carl Jung’s saying, “Only paradox comes close to comprehending the fullness of life.” [4]
As I was working on this sermon, the more I reflected on thirst, the thirstier I got, physically and spiritually. I remembered times and places in the world I had visited where I didn’t have access to clean cold water. A full-third of the world’s population lives in water-stressed conditions, and the lack of clean water causes thousands to die every day. I thought of how little experience I have with their plight and the back-breaking work of carrying water.
Then I thought about how many people (myself included) are thirsty, emotionally and spiritually. I thought about how easily we could see ourselves in an arid desert spiritually, like the people Moses led out of slavery, who wandered in a very dry place. Feeling as if we were running on empty, we might look longingly over our shoulders at the good old days, when we might have been enslaved, but at least we weren’t thirsty! As Audre Lorde wrote in Sister Outsider, “The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressor’s tactics, and the oppressors’ relationships.” [5]
I thought about how we need to keep finding and pointing to those wellsprings from which we can draw living water to refresh our whole beings (bodies, minds, and spirits) and our whole communities, which are parched and brittle with thirst for right-relationship, for distributive and restorative justice. I want to invite you to take a few minutes right now to reflect on your own thirst. May these questions help you discern how thirsty you are and inspire you to discover ways to find refreshment from God’s abundant, living water.
- What’s the state of your refreshment today? Are you tired and thirsty, rested and satisfied, or somewhere in between?
- If you are thirsty, what are you thirsty for? If you are satisfied, how could you use your energy to help quench someone else’s thirst? Could you show us where some water is?
- Where have you found living water in the past? Could you tell others about it?
- Toward what wellspring is the Spirit drawing you?
- What tools (or practices) might you need to draw living water? Where are your buckets?
Maybe you don’t have any idea what cup of cool water you might need or what you might offer another. You’re here this morning so that’s a good start! Think about what refreshes, what gives you energy, inspiration, encouragement, and hope, and what refreshment you could show or share!
- Mary Oliver, Thirst (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006).
- Exodus 3:28.
- John 7:37-38.
- Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Collected Works v. 12, p. 18 (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953). See also Jung on Paradox.
- Audre Lord, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (NY: Penguin Books, 2020).
- Thanks to Bruce Epperly’s column Spiritual Practices for Preaching.