LIVING WATER

Scripture Lesson: John 4: 5-30, 39-42

Dr. Matthew Brown

February 27, 2005

It is the kind of thing that keeps comedians in business and on the road. Bottled Water. Go into your neighborhood convenience mart, Harris Teeter, Dean and Deluca, and there will be a refrigerator reaching from floor to ceiling packed full of it. Dasani, Aquafina, LaCroix, Evian, Deer Park, Crystal Springs, Perrier, Artic Mist, etc.. No one seems to leave home without it and Lord have mercy on the poor sap who enters into a meeting sans bottled water. One social commentator said that like the mobile phone, bottled water has become an essential fashion accessory. So that got me thinking; if I, like, carried around a bucket of water, would that be like driving a Hummer?

No, it’s the bottle that has the cache, isn’t it? Whatever the motivation we are certainly buying it. Did you realize that in 2001 Americans consumed 5 billion gallons of bottled water? It’s currently a $46 billion dollar market. In their zeal to beat the competition, bottlers have started marketing flavored water. In my day we called that Kool-Aid. 5 billion gallons of bottled water a year!

What do you usually pay for a bottle? $1.30 - $1.40 for your 16 oz. basic brands? So what’s that $5.60 a gallon? A gallon of milk is $3.90; a gallon of OJ-?; a gallon of gas is running you about $1.85.

Let me give you a clue - (It’s called a faucet). A $46 billion dollar a market! Shh. Shh. If you listen carefully you can hear some guy named Hank laughing his head off back at the sink in the rear of the Coke plant.

Yet, I know how dependent we are on that one atom of oxygen bound to two atoms of hydrogen. My doctor keeps telling me I need to drink more of it than I can ever imagine getting down. The importance of hydration becomes clearer when you realize that 70% of your brain is composed of water; 82% of your blood is composed of water; and ironically, 90% of your lungs are made up of water.

In a statement that sounded almost theological, the US Geological Survey web site stated that, “Where there is water there is life, and where water is scarce, life has to struggle or just ‘throw in the towel.’”

Where there is water there is life. The USGS and certainly the people of the drought experienced lands of Ethiopia and Somalia and the Sudan understand what we so often take for granted and what God has been trying to tell us through the millennia, that water is a powerful symbol of the source of life, and thus an appropriate symbol, as demonstrated in today’s baptisms, to praise and rejoice in the Giver of life.

In Revelation 22 we are given this image of the Kingdom of God, “Then he showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God...” In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” In Psalm 42, we hear the lament of one who feels separated from God: “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for thee, O God. My soul thirsts for the living God.” In the book of Jeremiah, the prophet speaks of a people living under the false conviction that they can provide for themselves without God: “For my people have committed two evils; [says the Lord], they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.”

If you want to impress your friends, go and buy a five dollar bottle of water. If you want to understand who you are and whose you are, learn about the water of life.

These passages, and others like it, provide the background music for an amazing encounter between Jesus and an unnamed woman of Samaria.

The powerful message of life is amplified exponentially as we understand that the cultural and religious landscape of the day indicated that the encounter should never have taken place.

Jesus, born a Jew, is traveling in Samaritan territory and historically the Jewish people and the Samaritan people were not on the friendliest of terms. Claiming the same forefathers, the centuries had divided the people. The Jews considered the Samaritans “half-breeds” because of the way they had assimilated into the culture and their failure to recognize the Jerusalem Temple as the focus of their faith. In fact, to have contact or conversation with a Samaritan was to render one ritually unclean.

Strike one against the woman. O, did I say that Jesus’ conversation at high noon on that thirst-inducing day was with a woman? Well, in that day, that was a problem. It was certainly not a land of equal opportunity. Women were not allowed to speak to men in public and the supposed “holy” men of the day didn’t even speak to their wives in public. Women and men did not worship together and the men’s morning devotions included the prayer, “Thank God I’m not a woman.”

Barbara Brown Taylor tells us about one group of religious leaders who were referred to as “the bruised and bleeding Pharisees.” They were called this because “they closed their eyes when they saw a woman coming down the street, even if it meant walking into a wall and breaking their noses.”

Strike two against the woman. Third, in addition to the fact that she was a Samaritan and a woman, she was also scorned and disenfranchised. The conversation at the well between Jesus and the woman took place around noontime. But women did not come to the well at noon. They would come in the morning to draw water to meet the needs of the day and then they would return in the evening to draw water to meet the needs of the night. The trip to the well was a social event. It was the time when the community came together, when news was shared and plans were made and friendships were built. But this woman, so tired of being so scorned, tired of being ill-treated, tired of being looked at with the disapproving looks we all would dread, came at noon when no one else was around. Strike three.

And yet, Jesus busts through every imaginable cultural and institutional religious barrier and speaks to this woman. This story’s not about Jesus’ thirst, it’s about hers.

Jesus’ lips may be parched, but he sees and knows that she is dying of thirst. You know, for the most part we are a people of such pretense. We are constantly working to create some image that will hide the cracks and creases in our lives - some kind of botox for the ego. Name-dropping, exaggeration of our accomplishments, lifestyles that mask the poverty of our lives. But our Lord sees through all of that. The psalmist says, “Thou searchest out my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether.”

There is no hiding. The besieged and beaten down woman of Samaria could hide from the judging glances of the morning and evening empty water bucket brigade, but she could not hide from the penetrating gaze of Jesus, and neither can we, though we try so hard. He knows. He knows.

And yet what comes with that gaze and with his knowledge is not the fire of judgment but the water of life. Did you know that when a cup of water was exchanged in that day in that culture, the two people were entering into a social contract committing to be friends for a year? The people of the village assumed a great deal about the woman and treated her with scorn. Jesus knew who she truly is, and he desires to be her friend.

The woman left her water jar at the well, but she left with an ocean tanker full, so much so that the bitterness in her heart was washed out with an overflowing desire to share the love of Christ with others, yes those others, the very ones who had pushed her to the margins.

Don’t tell me that love doesn’t change a person. Don’t tell me that. Don’t tell me that the experience of love doesn’t change you.

The love of Christ is an oasis in the desert of our lives, irresistibly drawing us to the water that is life. The psalmist said, “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for thee, O God.” Jesus said, “Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

And so we come. We come to gather around the Word in worship, in the Sunday School Class, in the Bible Study, in the fellowship of the community of faith. We come to be in the presence of the One who comes to us in love, bearing the water of life. Because once you’ve tasted the water of life, you know that nothing else will quench your thirst.

Amen.