(Note: This blog entry is based on
the text for “Living Water For You”, originally shared on March 8, 2023. It was the
256th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced
with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
What if someone offered to give you a kind of water that would make it so that you would never be thirsty again? Would you drink it? Would you think it was a scam? Today we’re going to find out how one woman responded, and how you can respond to the same offer.
Do you
remember the first time you ever looked at something under a microscope?
Chances are that it was in a science classroom, maybe in middle school, and
that one of the first things you looked at was water. Maybe it was swamp water
or water that had been stagnant and sitting around for a while. Maybe you saw
life in that water, an otherwise invisible world filled with one-celled
creatures and other organisms.
That is the opposite of what the Bible means
when it uses the words “living water”.
Snow has continued to fall in the mountains.
There has been some success in plowing major roads and getting food to the poor
people who have been trapped in their homes for 2 weeks.
This coming weekend, however, more rain is
predicted, but that rain will not turn to snow. It will help melt the snow. And
when it does, the water will come down in streams, cascading into and through
the areas that had been covered with snow.
That will make what the Bible means
when it uses the words “living water”.
“Living water” means water that is moving,
like rapids, like fast-moving rivers. “Living water” is found in both the Old
and New testaments of the Bible in places like the Bible’s book of Jeremiah,
where God speaks through the prophet Jeremiah to the southern kingdom of Judah,
just before it falls to the Babylonians, in Jeremiah 2:12-13,
12 Be appalled, O heavens, at this,
be shocked, be utterly desolate,
says the Lord,
13 for my people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me,
the fountain of living water,
and dug out cisterns for themselves,
cracked cisterns
that can hold no water.
Jesus speaks to the people gathered in
Jerusalem for a religious festival at the Temple and we see, in John 7:37-39,
37 On the
last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he
cried out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, 38 and let
the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the
believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” 39 Now he
said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive; for as yet
there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified.
The snow
looks beautiful from here. It’s different when you are up close. I did a
wedding once for a couple that wanted to get married in the snow, though no one
in the wedding party had ever been in real winter snow and hadn’t anticipated
that it would be cold. So, we drove up Mt. Baldy in a couple of limo’s until we
reached the snow and everybody piled out of the cars for the wedding.
But, it was
snow, and it was Mt. Baldy, and it was winter and the winds howled down the
mountain, and the bride’s wedding dress was blowing all around, everyone’s face
was red and teary from the freezing wind and as soon as the ceremony was over
everyone jumped back into the cars to get warm. The pictures turned out great,
but the actual experience was unexpected.
Living water
is a metaphor for the Holy Spirit in the Bible. It is untamed, like the winter
wind, like the melting snow. It’s wild. It’s the third person of the Trinity,
the personal presence of God transforming, challenging, calling, equipping, and
sending us through turbulent times on the course that leads to receiving
eternal life.
The Holy Spirit is God. It is God’s personal
ongoing presence for good in the world. It is poured out, if flows out of the
believer’s heart, it gives us a foretaste of the feast to come in the fully
perfected Reign of God.
It is within us. It flows like a fountain.
It is active, and present, and powerful and alive. It brings life that really
is life.
When the
pandemic got to the point where we were pretty much confined to our homes,
Sally and I decided to produce videos of encouragement that would provide a
means to reflect on what it meant to be a Christian in the LA area and beyond.
We called them “Streams of Living Water”, because we were never alone in the
Holy Spirit and, well, the videos were being streamed, get it? 😊 Those developed into a blog, “Words of Living
Water”, and a podcast, “Living Water Radio.” Do we see a theme there?
In the main text we are looking at today, John
4:5-42, Jesus speaks to a Samaritan woman, a follower of the Samaritan
religion, at a water well about the nature of the Christian faith, about living
water.
Samaria was a foreign nation in the middle
of Israel. It had been formed, mostly, by the Assyrian Empire when it conquered
the northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C. Assyria had mixed the populations
from throughout its conquered territories. The result in Israel was Samaria.
The Samaritans had retained enough of their
Judaism to look a little bit familiar to the Jews, but they were not Jews. They
were this hodgepodge of religions. They were Samaritans.
Observant Jews were not supposed to set foot
in Samaritan territory. Jews traveling from Galilee, where Jesus was based, to
Jerusalem were expected to walk to the other side of the Jordan River and then
walk around, the long way.
Observant male Jews were also not supposed
to speak with a woman in public, not even with their wives.
So, what is Jesus doing in Samaria, talking
to a woman who we find out later has a questionable reputation, with no one
else around?
Let’s take a look at the beginning of the
passage, in John 4:5-14,
5 So he came to a
Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to
his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey,
was sitting by the well. It was about noon. 7 A Samaritan woman came to draw
water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8 (His disciples had gone to
the city to buy food.)
We know that our current rainy season will
be followed by a dry season, and that all these green hills will soon be brown.
Oops, sorry, I meant “golden”.
I learned that when I first arrived in
Berkeley from Wisconsin for seminary and a reception was held for first year
students. I met a student from Sacramento who asked me what I thought of
California. I said that I liked it, but that I was having a hard time getting
used to all the brown hills.
She literally took a step back and said,
“Well! In California we call them “golden.”
Israel has a climate much like that of
Southern California, though it didn’t have irrigation back then. People had to
draw water from cisterns that had stored water under their homes during the
rainy season and from wells during the dry season.
Women usually went out to the local well to
draw and carry water to their homes early in the morning, while it was still
cool. This was a time when they could be with other adult women and exchange
information and the news of the village.
We find later in this text that the
Samaritan woman who Jesus has been speaking with at the well has been married
five times, and that the man she was with is not her husband. Now, we don’t
know the circumstances behind these marriages. She may have been divorced by
each of her 5 husbands, or widowed 5 times. But, given that she’s out at the
well by herself in the middle of the day, there is something to say for her not
being very popular among the other women in the city.
So, this particular Samaritan woman came to
the well and unexpectedly found Jesus there alone as his disciples had gone
into the city to buy food. He was tired, and Jesus spoke to her and asked her
for a drink of water. What was he thinking?!
The drama continues with verses 9-14,
9 The Samaritan woman said
to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”
(Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus answered her,
“If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a
drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” 11 The woman said to
him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that
living water? 12 Are you greater than
our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks
drank from it?” 13 Jesus said to her,
“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.”
The woman wanted that water. I’m guessing
that she did not like going to the well at noon by herself, and that she was
starting to realize that Jesus would mean more to her than avoiding shame and
inconvenience. Much more.
Jacob’s well is still producing water. I
drank from that well when I studied in Israel for a semester when I was in
college. Back then there was just a bucket and a ladle that everyone who wanted
could drink from. I’m sure it’s different now, but it does give us a strong
image for what’s happening with Jesus’ revelation to the Samaritan woman.
Jesus is in Samaria to show that God’s love
is for everyone. Everyone.
You might have seen on the news that the
Girl Scouts are selling cookies, and that this year they are selling a new
flavor, “Raspberry Rally”, which sold out at $5-$6 a box and is now selling
online for $36 and up!
There are people who know the cost of
everything and the value of nothing.
The cross is free, we can’t earn it, but
there are some who think that we need to pay for it, and some who want to
control the product and inflate the price.
But the message of the good news of Jesus
Christ is that our salvation has been paid in full at the cross! There is
nothing more valuable, and it’s free. It is revealed by the Holy Spirit, the
living water within us!
How do we convey that message to people who
are ruled by their failures, their fears, and their false belief?
In the course of their conversation, Jesus
asks the woman to go and get her husband, and when the woman says that she has
no husband, Jesus tells her that he already knows about her marital history.
Have you ever lived in a place where you
were a religious minority. Well, I suppose that we all have if we are living as
Christians in an increasingly non-Christian, even hostile, world. We seek to be
more inclusive and accepting, even to the point of being reluctant to share the
good news of the living water that gushes up to eternal life. We go along to
get along.
That’s why I think that the exchange between
the Samaritan woman and Jesus is so shocking to our 21st century
ears. The woman deflects attention from herself and changes the subject. She
calls him a prophet and points to their religious differences.
Jesus replies, in verses 21-26,
21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me,
the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain
nor in Jerusalem. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know,
for salvation is from the Jews. 23 But the hour is coming, and is now here,
when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the
Father seeks such as these to worship him. 24 God is spirit, and those who
worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 25 The woman said to him, “I
know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will
proclaim all things to us.” 26 Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is
speaking to you.”
Sally and I attended the cathedral funeral mass for Bishop David
O’Connell, the Roman Catholic bishop who was murdered recently, last Friday as
two of the ecumenical and interfaith guests of the Archdiocese, Sally for her
many years of ecumenical leadership in Southern California and I because I’ve
gone with Sally to events so often that I’ve become part of the furniture.
Bishop O’Connell was remembered for his commitment to prayer, his work
among the poor, and as a peacemaker. The congregation burst into spontaneous
applause as his casket was wheeled to the place of internment at the end of the
Mass.
There were many references to Bishop O’Connell’s Irish background, some
funny and some poignant stories told by his friends and family members, and a heartbreaking
singing of “Danny Boy” at the end of the Mass by the cathedral choir.
But, right at the center of everything, as a physical reminder of why we
were all there, was the cross, with the body of Christ hanging from its nails.
Jesus is the Messiah, fully God and fully
human being, and the worship that we offer comes from within us, it is the Holy
Spirit, gushing up to eternal life. The word “messiah” means “deliverer”. Our
deliverance from sin, death, and the power of the devil was accomplished on the
cross.
Jesus does not mince words about what truth
is. It isn’t a proposition; it is a person. It is found in a living
transforming relationship with God in Jesus Christ.
The disciples return and are astonished that
he was speaking with a woman.
The woman, an outcast among outcasts, living
a separate existence within Israel, and a seemingly separate existence within
Samaria, returns to her village and fearlessly shares what she has encountered
in Jesus, and that he might be the Messiah.
Jesus’ disciples seem to be concerned only
with Jesus’ immediate needs. They do not see the necessity of his doing God’s
will and of the need of the Samaritan people for the good news of Jesus Christ
that is greater than life itself.
Jesus refocused their attention toward
Jesus’ mission, and that of his disciples, and what was happening right in
front of them. The Samaritan woman is telling her community about Jesus and the
disciples need to get busy!
What’s happening? The Bible reading
concludes in verses 39-42,
39 Many Samaritans
from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me
everything I have ever done.” 40 So when the
Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there
two days. 41 And many more believed because of his
word. 42 They said to the woman, “It is no longer
because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and
we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”
What opportunities are right in front of us
that are we missing?
What friend or relative is ready to hear our
stories, the ones about how we became a Christian or the ones where we were
challenged and remained one?
Who do we encounter in a grocery line, a
sporting event, an outdoor restaurant, or among our neighbors, or anywhere that
people gather where we go?
How many people do we know that have been
stewing about their lives, isolated by our polarization and siloed social media
groups, and need a word of hope about this life and the next?
You may have seen the maps that show how
much of California is moving out of “drought” status.
What if we could make those maps maps of the
work of the Holy Spirit moving our unbelief to our belief in the absolute love
and grace of God for all people?
The Holy Spirit is everywhere, flowing like
streams of living water, planting seeds in every heart. Who will name the name
of Jesus at work in those hearts, knocking and asking to be let in?
I saw on the news once that 6” of moving water can knock a person over
and 12” of moving water can sweep away a motor vehicle.
Living water is powerful, and the streams of living water within us that
is the Holy Spirit is powerful. It transforms lives. It endures forever.
We don’t work in our own power in this world. The Holy Spirit is our
power.
Seek this water, this living water, gushing
up to eternal life, the power of the Holy Spirit within you that opens your
heart to receive the gifts of faith and the water of baptism and seek the reign
of God.
The rain has come to bring life to the
earth. The already-but-not-yet perfected reign of God has come in Jesus Christ
to bring eternal life for all who receive it and live by faith.
His reign is seen wherever God’s justice,
that is, God’s will, is being done in the world. We are called to do God’s will
in God’s power in response to the gift of God’s self within us, gushing up like
streams of living water. This is the source of the hope that does not disappoint
us.
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