"The Inward Journey...THIRST "
- Rev. Bob Thomas
Senior Pastor

the Old Testament Lesson:
Exodus 17: 1 - 7

the Gospel Lesson:
John 4: 5 - 15

          A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university professor.  Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life.

          Offering his guests coffee, the professor went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups—  porcelain, plastic, glass, ceramic, china, some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite—telling them to help themselves to the coffee.

          When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the professor said:  “If you noticed, all the nice-looking, expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones.  While it is normal for you to want only the best for ourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress.  Be assured that the cup itself adds no quality to the coffee. In most cases it is just more expensive and in some cases even hides what we drink.

          What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for he best cups.  And then you began eying each other’s cups.

          Now consider this:  Life is the coffee; the jobs, money and position in society are the cups.  They are just tools to hold and contain Life, and the type of cup we have does not define, nor change the quality of the Life we have.

          Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee God has provided us.”  God brews the coffee, not the cups.  Enjoy your coffee!         

The professor concluded:                                                 

“The happiest people don’t have the best of everything. They just make the best of everything they have.”   

Live simply. Love generously.  Care deeply.  Speak kindly.  Leave the rest to God.”   

Sounds simple but we have been struggling with our thirsts for a long time.   

  In the gospel lesson from John that Dave read for us, it’s not the cup but rather the lack of a bucket that creates some of the tension in this powerful story of Jesus and the woman at the well…His thirst and then hers.  From the first sharply spoken word, the conversation assumes the character of confrontation that is charged with significance far greater than not having a bucket and presumed racial barriers.  He is the teacher from above, brimming with heavenly wisdom; she is a woman of the world who by now has become hardened to the jokes in her village.  Like Jesus, she too is thirsty but for something she cannot name.  What could these two have to say to one another?  What indeed! 

This woman at the well lived on the fringes of “acceptable society.”  Obviously, no judgment ought made as to her moral integrity, yet the fact that she came to draw water at a time when few would have been willing to frace the noonday sun, has led many to speculate about the woman’s reputation.  And she is identified as a Samaritan—an ethnic and religious group rejected by the larger and more powerful religious establishment.  Jews regarded Samaritans as little more than Gentiles—half-pagan heretics and religious infidels.  Nevertheless, Jesus chose this woman whom the rest of society considered to be of no account to teach his own disciples how to be disciples. 

The woman at the well is remembered by the church as one who allowed her own life and all her dark secrets and shameful acts to be the vehicle through which Jesus would teach the necessity of repentance.  Where others might have turned away and shunned Jesus’ probing questions and challenges, the woman let him in.  With Jesus, she looked at her life and she allowed him to point out those places in her heart that needed to be filled with God’s gift of living water.  Thirsty for the gifts he offered, she welcomed him into her life.  Then, with the grateful elatedness that comes to those who know themselves to be fully forgiven, she ran to tell others of her experience.  What a marvelous teacher and Lenten guide she is for us!  She welcomed Jesus not only into the tidy anteroom or parlor of her life, where formal visitors are received and carefully but superficially entertained before being sent on their way.  On the contrary, she allowed Jesus access to that deepest part of herself, that place where most of us allow no one, and where if the truth be told, we’d rather not even go ourselves.  For her daring, for her humility, for her willingness to be exposed to the truth, the woman was graced with the desire for and the resolve to repent to drink deeply of this “living water.”  Her experience is set before us once again so that from her and with her, we too might welcome Jesus into those seamy  places in our lives where he alone can make a difference.  With her, we are called to repent of our sins and selfishness so our thirst for the things of the world can wiped out and replaced with a thirst for the gifts of God that come to us in the person of the living water…Jesus of Nazareth. 

The story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman is a love story…

·        for only one who loves you knows you as you are and not as you pretend to be.                                                                         

·        Only one who loves you knows your deepest desires. 

                                                                                 
·        Only one who loves you can look at your past without blinking. 

When we get splashed by the love of God, we really begin to change.

          Like our Samaritan sister, we to have struggled to believe and find meaning in life.  And we like her have made some tragic/comic/ridiculous mistakes in the process.  Like her, we have become comfortable with the words of religion, but we sometimes fail to connect them to the living God.  Remember when Jesus commands her to “go call your husband?” without the awkward details of the woman’s intimate history, we would have only a nice theological conversation in the blistering heat of the midday sun.  But when Jesus connects with the grit and fabric of her troubled life, she understands enough to say, “Sir, give me this water.”  And we learn that this teacher, this savior knows us as well as our secret sins, our festering pride, our spiteful resistance, our selfish egos, our willful defiance…and he asks us to go and stand in that very place we have worked so hard to cover up and avoid…especially in polite society…particularly in church. 

          At the conclusion of the story of Jesus and Samaritan woman, most readers would have expected the hero to ride off on a white horse in view of the baffled Samaritans or, like a prophet or a Greek hero, to be taken to heaven in a fiery chariot.  But instead, Jesus continues on his journey…keeps his face toward Jerusalem and the destiny that awaits him there…a Cross.  In a short time the One who is Living water will say to Roman and Jewish spectators, “I thirst.” 

That’s how the scene at the well begins  Jesus asks the woman, “Give me a drink.” It’s an interesting and ironic way to open the conversation that follows because the woman, like all of humanity, is looking for something to quench a deep spiritual thirst to be with God. Can it be that God thirsts and longs for us to come and enter into personal relationship with him?  Look at all the ways God seeks after us… 

Recognizing God in the ordinary rhythms of life, finding access to God the living life-giving water of the Spirit, isn’t something we have to demand from God.  All we have to do is take and drink of the living water that Christ offers.                                                                                       

 We have all the proof we need that God loves us and cares for us.  As if all the miraculous works of God weren’t enough, we have to remember that “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners, Christ died for us. Rather than continue to prove we’re human over and over again through our self-centered and sinful ways, God calls us instead to simply drink deeply of the living water and Christ will quench the deepest longings of our souls…The woman at the well not only asks for the water she allows the Lord into her life and she is changed.  She runs back to her village and announces that she has met the messiah and he is sitting at the well on the outskirts of town.  

Today on this third Sunday in Lent, we continue on our own inward journey.  What do you long for this morning?  What secret sins do you need to ask God to wash clean in your life?  What are you thirsting for this morning?  Some thirst for recognition by their peers, or theological certainty, or financial security, or spiritual knowledge…some thirst for forgiveness, healing, hope…and think of all the things we chase after to quench these thirsts…and we drink deeply of superficial beverages that simply can’t quench the deep thirsts of our soul.                                                                                      

 The scripture is clear, Jesus is the living water…God’s answer to all the things for which we long and thirst…all we need do is ask,  “Give me this living water…Fill my cup Lord

And as Brenton Brown has so passionately written: 

All who are thirsty
All who are weak
Come to the fountain
Dip your heart in the stream of life
Let the pain and the sorrow
Be washed away
In the waves of his mercy
As deep cries out to deep
Come Lord Jesus come
Holy Spirit come
As deep cries out to deep
Come Lord Jesus, Come!

I’m going to ask the band to come now and lead us as we sing together:

“Your Love, O Lord.”