Water and life, looking upstream

Ancient depiction of the Samaritan
woman at the well with Jesus

Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 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 said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
John 4:13-17

+ + +

The dawn breaks cold and overcast this morning in Central Virginia. The weather report has icy rain on the way later today. Yet my morning reflection takes me far away, to the life-giving waters of Jacob’s well in the Judean desert that is depicted in John 4:1-26 in today’s Morning Prayer reading.

In the story, Jesus is on his way home to Galilee, having heard an argument has broken out among the Pharisees about the topic of baptism. Jesus cuts through Samaria, a land full of untouchables, and he pauses at the well. He encounters a Samaritan woman, and rich conversation ensues. Gender and religious stereotypes are cast to the dust, and it is one of those stories that preachers can mine from many directions. Indeed, I have commented on it four times before on this page.  We could go many more places; the passage might well have been written as an instruction manual for baptism.

This morning, though, I am struck by the simplicity of the water in the well. Life comes from water. Dirt is washed away by water. The old is washed away, and the new comes from it.

Sometimes in my prayers, I imagine myself sitting beside a cool mountain stream in a grassy meadow. Often I am looking downstream as the water flows past, remembering moments of my life that are gone. But today, I am looking upstream at the water yet to come, and giving thanks for what it will bring.

By James Richardson, Fiat Lux

Finding the place where you can breathe of the Holy

The story of the Samaritan woman at the well, and her encounter with Jesus, continues today with Jesus telling her about her life with five husbands in John 4:16-26. Hearing this, she recognizes Jesus as a prophet, but says that he is not fitting into her familiar categories of religious dogma and debate.

She notes that her people believe God should be worshipped at their mountain, the place of Jacob's well, and they have a firm historical basis for making that claim.

Jesus's people, she says, maintain that God should be worshipped at the Temple in Jerusalem, on Mt. Zion. She could have said, but politely did not, that Jesus's people have a shakier historical claim. The Temple can only trace its lineage to King David, rather late in comparison to Jacob's well, the founder of all Israel.

Jesus cuts through all this religious muck by telling her: "Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem."

You will worship God everywhere because God is everywhere.

Last summer on our journey through the Holy Land, the members of our pilgrim group came to roughly the same realization at roughly the same time: That we all felt stifled by the religious conflict and the oppressiveness of religious dogmas on full display.

The wall separating Palestinian communities
from Israeli communities

The Armenian monks sneered at the Greek monks, the Hasidic Jews looked disdainfully at the Reform Jews, and the Muslims kept to themselves or live behind walls and checkpoints built by the Israelis to keep them separated. Everyone wore distinct garb to separate themselves from everyone else. No one could be neutral, and certainly no one could openly question their own religious dogmas and identity, not without being ostracized or worse. "There are no atheists in Jerusalem," someone told us.

It was hard for us to feel the presence of God in this place that is supposed to be "holy." God felt confined so tightly God could not escape.

Let me explain this another way, because I think Jesus was getting at the same idea in his encounter with the Samaritan woman.

Jesus declared: Let God out.

Look for God beyond the confines of the expected and the dogmatic.

God cannot be enclosed in a temple or a well or in a book, no matter how sacred all of those are. To attempt to confine God into a box is to stifle the holiness within ourselves. God needs to breathe for us to breathe.

As we walked through Jerusalem I began to appreciate more deeply how my own sense of the Holy had grown and been nurtured in sacred places other than Jerusalem. The Holy City was amazing and I would certainly go back. But my sense of the holy has come more deeply in small retreat centers, in the Mojave Desert, on the Karuk Indian rancheria,  and in the churches where I have worshipped and formed lasting friendships. I longed to go somewhere like Iona in Scotland.

There are many holy places on this earth. God dwells everywhere and with each of us, in every living creature, in every rock, in every sea, in every tree. We are connected through the sacred, and that makes us sacramental beings to our core. I hope and pray you will find the sacred places and sacred moments that touch you deeply so that you might breathe of the holiness within yourself.

Art: Depiction of Jesus at the well with Samaritan woman painted in the 4th century in a Rome catacomb.

What inside you is thirsty for the living water?

Today's gospel reading John 4:1-15 is the story of the Samaritan woman at the well. Jesus pauses on his journey back to Galilee. He and his followers have taken a route through Samaria, considered by their pious countryman to be unclean, not because of the water but because of the people who live there.

Jesus breaks several religious, gender and social taboos by asking a Samaritan woman for a cup of water. She is startled that a Jewish man such as he would ask her, an untouchable, for a cup of water.

Then he goes all mystical on her.

"Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink the water that I will give them will never be thirsty," he tells the woman.

She responds by asking for his water "so that I may never be thirsty."

I am struck by many things in the story, and many have preached it from many directions. It is a declaration of faith in Jesus as the "living water." It is a story of a woman who sees him for who he is and responds by following. That may be lesson enough from this story.

But there is more.

The story of the Samaritan woman at the well is a story of Jesus reaching the untouchable, the one who others consider foreign and unworthy for a holy man to reach. She is the wrong gender, the wrong religion, the wrong ethnicity. That makes the story a clarion call to the followers of Jesus to reach the outsiders, the untouchables, the lowliest in our own country. Who are the untouchables for us? The homeless? The alien? The poor? Who are the religious untouchables in our land? Jesus reminds us that the water of his living well connects us all together. If we really are followers of Jesus, we will go to the well and find the people who live there and invite them to have a cup of water.

John's Gospel is also a mystical gospel, and it can be heard as a story of the inner life, not just the outer life. The entire gospel can be heard as a pathway for how Jesus draws people to a deepening awareness of their union with God, and a deepening awareness of what they need to change inside themselves to be living in the fullness of their life with God.

The story of the Samaritan woman at the well invites each of us to ask a very hard questions about ourselves: What is untouchable inside each of us? What is poor in ourselves? What inside us is thirsty for the living water?

Art: "Samaritan Woman at the Well," by He Qi.

Where is your well? Where do you go to find living water?

Today's lessons are Exodus 17:1-7, Romans 5:1-11, and John 4:5-42. Here is my sermon for today:

+ + +

“Here I find my greatest treasure; hither by thy help I’ve come.”

Where is your well? Where do you go to find living water?

I want to tell you about a place that is special for me, where I find living water.

Forgive me if you’ve heard this story before – I have written about it [including on this blog], and talked about it in other settings. But for some, you haven’t heard this about me.

Many years ago, probably around 1980 or so, I was introduced to a stream that flows from beneath a slumbering volcano, Mount Lassen, in the northeastern corner of California.

The stream, Hat Creek, runs cold and deep, and a three-mile section is maintained as a wild trout sanctuary. I learned to catch fish with a dry fly on Hat Creek, and I learned how to read the water and the wily ways of truly wild fish.

I also learned something about patience and solitude, though not nearly enough.

I have returned to Hat Creek many times over the years, often with a buddy or two, and many times alone.

There was a time in the mid-1980s when things were not going so well for me. That was before I met Lori. Things have gone quite a bit better since then.

I got up early one morning, and I was there at dawn for the mayfly hatch.

I wanted to catch fish, but really I wanted to be on the stream to be alone, to sort things out.

I went to the widest deepest section below the riffle at Powerhouse #2. I took my time, gazed at the water for a while. I set up my rod, put on my waders.

I watched the water awhile longer. I got into the water, walked out into the stream until I was waist deep. I found firm footing on the sandy bottom, then took my first cast.

Instantly I caught the largest trout I have ever caught on Hat Creek. The rules say that you can keep two large trout a day, but I thanked this one and let her go (the big ones are usually female).

At that moment, I had this wonderful feeling that all would be well, that God was with me standing in the stream, holding me up.

And like the water flowing by me, I just knew that my life would have many twists and turns before reaching the sea hundreds of miles and many years away, but that all would be well.

I could sense God telling me that my difficulties were temporary. I needed to be patient to see where this river, my life, would flow.

I would not exactly call this a "conversion experience," nor would I have made any connection at the time with church things or John’s gospel about “living water,” or baptism, or any of that. I'm not sure I would have known the words.

But it was for me a holy experience, and I knew in that moment that my life was going to change in ways I would not and could not know, and I didn't mind that unknowing.

You can chalk it up to cold water or a big trout or high altitude, and maybe that would be so. But the moment has stuck with me for 30 years.

As life has unfolded for me, not everything has turned out as I would have liked or planned, but that is what I heard would happen standing in the stream a long time ago.
And that is all right. That is well.

I return to Hat Creek often, although I have not been there physically in many years. Hat Creek is the place of my imagining, the place where I can bring the deepest longings of my heart. It is where I find the well of living water for me, and yes, it is the place where I meet the living Jesus of my prayers.

I don’t have to be there physically to return to that place and that moment long ago. That is my well of living water.

Where is that well of living water for you? It might not be a creek at all; it might be on a hillside or a city street, or beside the road or inside this church. That well of living water can be anywhere you meet the living Christ.

This morning we meet the Samaritan woman at the well where Jesus finds her and offers her living water. She is the exact opposite in almost every way from Nicodemus, who we met last week.

Nicodemus is powerful, elite, a member of the religious upper crust. He comes to Jesus in the dead of night, perhaps too embarrassed that anyone might notice.

The Samaritan woman doesn’t even have a name. She is an outcast, a member of the wrong tribe, the wrong religion, female, dirt poor. Jesus comes to her, at high noon, in broad daylight.

Sometimes modern preachers portray the Samaritan woman as a terrible sinner because she’s been married five times, but that’s not it at all. In her society, she has no right to divorce men even if they abuse her. She is treated as property. She is used-goods; she’s been traded-in five times.

And Jesus finds her and they talk.

Jesus’ disciples are outraged at this behavior. Why would Jesus deign to talk to her? How dare she talk to him? She is a Samaritan, after all, and they see Jesus as belonging only to them (alas, this theme will play out time and again, down through the ages).

But for Jesus, these social boundaries are not his boundaries. Economic class, religious caste, social cliques, gender, politics, credentials – all of that means nothing at all in these encounters Jesus, not then, and not now.

Both Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman have something in common besides meeting Jesus, perhaps something in common with us. They ask questions, lots of questions, and they push the edges of their beliefs until their old beliefs grow into something new.
What counts is that these two people have an experience of the divine when they meet this mysterious rabbi from Nazareth.

Neither can quite put their finger on it well enough to explain it, but something is now different for each. They find a well of living water that never runs out.

We can read books about Jesus, we can argue about theology and history, we can develop intricate doctrines and obtuse creeds, and we can delve deeply into the literary power of metaphors, and that will carry us a certain way.

But at some point to get it – to really get it – we need experience this for ourselves. Maybe we will do this like Nicodemus, and go looking. Or maybe like the Samaritan woman, this living water will find us.

Either way requires opening our eyes and ears, seeing and listening, and being vulnerable to the deepest longings of our hearts, and paying attention to what is around us, especially when we least expect it. That is the central purpose of Lent, to slow down, take stock, look around, and get into the water.

This living water will bring life in ways we can’t yet imagine, and will ultimately wash away pain and all that harms us. Even our tears will disappear into the river and will become droplets bringing new life once again.

Where is your well? Where will you find this living water? It is there, flowing freely, and it is never too late for any of us to have a new beginning; it is never too late to stand in the stream and drink of the living water.

Or maybe catch a big fish.