Living Water in the Wilderness

John4:5-42

"Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but 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." 15 The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water."

Greetings from God, our peace that passes all understanding.

It has been quite a week. 

You know, when we started this Lenten wilderness series a few weeks ago, I didn’t anticipate it being quite this bewildering.  With good reason, many of us are modifying our schedules to take care of children or grandchildren who will be home from school starting next week.  Some of us are worried about our health or the health of our loved ones. Others of us are anxiously thinking about how we will make ends meet as we see our hours or gigs cut. 

With this week’s bible story, it almost seems like God is sitting us down and saying, take a beat. And let me tell you a story about the wilderness.

The story is familiar to some of us.  Jesus and his disciples are leaving Jerusalem after the Passover festivals. They have decided to take the road less traveled back to Galilea and journey through the foreign land of Samaria.  They stop to rest outside of the city of Sychar and the disciples head into the city to look for some lunch.  Jesus rests by the well and when a Samaritan woman arrives, Jesus asks her for a drink of water.  

History has not been kind to the Samaritan woman especially with regards to that painful truth that Jesus brings up about her having five husbands and currently living with a man who isn’t her husband.  There are a number of choice words and phrases that have been tagged to her over the centuries.  Folks have mentioned that she was “no angel” had a “checkered past” was a prostitute and was “living in sin.”

Honestly?  The Samaritan woman would have had little control over how many times she had been married.  Maybe she was first married very young, who knows?  It very well may have been that the Samaritan woman was infertile and couldn’t conceive a child with any of her husbands and was subsequently and continually divorced because of it. We don’t know why she had been married so many times. But husband after husband divorced her or died until she was finally left with the brother of her late husband who basically took her as a pity-wife because the law said he had to.  

Who knows what the stories were that the people told about her, she scars that she carried, the heartbreak she endured. And there, on a sunny afternoon, in her own personal wilderness, she goes to the well alone to fetch water.

At the well Jesus sees her.  As they talk, it’s clear that Jesus doesn’t just know basic information about her but the most painful part of her wilderness story that she carries, and Jesus loves her just the way she is.  God sees her whole heartbroken story; and because “God so loves the world,” He sends her living water in Jesus.

In my sunroom where I sometimes write my sermons, I have a bunch of plants and one of them is this peace lily. My peace lily has a lot of personality.  She is pretty dramatic because when she is thirsty and needs water, all of the leaves droop and spill over the sides of the flowerpot almost like cooked spaghetti.  When I water the plant, I have actually seen the leaves begin to perk up over the course of an hour or two. As the leaves fill with water they begin to reach and extend upwards towards the sunny window.

The Samaritan woman was the same way. She arrived at the well, wilted.  As she talked with Jesus, you could almost see her start to perk up as she began to feel loved and accepted and known and connected.  And that—being known, being seen and loved--was living water to her soul. After that conversation with Jesus there at the well, she was so filled with joy that she ran back into town to tell all of the people about what had happened.

As we hear this story of the Samaritan woman in the wilderness, I’m thinking about the fact that in these next weeks, daily life will probably change.  For some of us it will change a lot.  To love our community will mean to stay home and keep our germs to ourselves. Our routines will be disrupted.  We won’t be at work or school, at the gym or playing basketball. We won’t be able to drop our kids off at daycare.  We won’t have Sunday worship or youth group or choir.  We may be anxious. We may be bored. We may be unsettled.  We may have to firmly argue with ourselves when the time has come to turn off the cable news or close the news app.  Some of us might get ill and we will have each other’s backs if that happens. We may miss our colleagues, our friends, our families, our coffee shops, and hugs from friends.  To call this just “a big change” is kind of an understatement.

It may be, over the coming weeks, that we begin to feel and look a little like the peace lily in my sun room when it needs to be watered.  Wilted, out of sorts, not our best selves. My daughter, Isabella calls “not being our best selves” “letting your hyenas out.”  For the record, yesterday, I was clearly and sternly told to put my hyenas away by my four year old (and she had a solid point).

As we walk into this change, I remember that God always comes to us in ways that are contrary to our expectations.  We expect a prince in a palace and it’s a babe in a manger.  We expect a mighty and powerful ruler, and it is a still small voice.  We expect a formal religious teacher and it’s a woman looking for a lost coin under her bed.  We expect an answer and it is a whirlwind that tells us that life is mysterious.  As we walk into this change, I know that now, Jesus, our living water, is with us in ways that run against the grain of our expectations.

While we often expect that church is a place where we come for living water, church will be differently.  It will still very much be here, but it will look different.  Here’s the thing that has me thinking: while church is a place where we encounter God, something about the current situation is calling on us to change the energy or the flow of God’s living water. 

Have you ever visited one of the beautiful conservatories here in the city?  You may know that while yes, conservatories house plants during the winter, they also take care of plants and make them strong so that they can be transplanted outside.  

Church is a greenhouse where God works on us and transforms us. It’s a place where we are filled with living water and made strong so that we can go out and share this Living Water of Jesus with those who need it.  While we will still be connected, in the absence of our physical church gathering, we will be called, like the Samaritan woman to go and be the church to our family, neighbors and friends.  

Think about it.  We will be called to give living water through the wonders of technology:  calling and face timing people. We can post things to social media that bring joy. We will share Living Water through a commitment to kindness when stress rules the day. We will share Living Water through our financial resources for people who need it.  Now, more than ever, while we will still fill up with Living Water, we will be called to share it with each other and to a terribly thirsty world around us.

As we walk in this unexpected wilderness, take heart, dear ones. God is steady and abides with us.  Just like the seasons that faithfully change from winter into spring, God is faithful and is with us. May God bless you and keep you.