Exodus 17:1-7
Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-42
Psalm 95
Murmuring in the desert, the woman at the well, the promise of living water
“To be on a quest is nothing more or less than to become an asker of questions.” ~ Sam Keen
A sermon preached Lent 3:
“…Last Wednesday morning, I was sitting at my desk with this story of the Samaritan woman at the well, and the story of Moses striking that rock, and an email announced itself in my mailbox. A member of the parish was sending me one of the New York Times’ editorials of the day, an editorial bearing photographs and commentary about genocide in Darfur.
Attached to the email were her words, referencing our Lenten series on Forgiveness; she said “I am not sure what to do about this...how are you all handling it? How can I ask for forgiveness when the genocide continues?”
How can I ask for forgiveness when the genocide continues.
I had heard the same question the evening before, at our Tuesday Evening Lenten series table discussion about sin, when another person asked: “how can I be forgiven when I have so much, and so many in our world have nothing?” Around the table came the questions: “What about the tsunami, what about AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa? What about global warming? What can I do? What should we do? What can I tell my children? How much is enough?”
Good questions. And no tidy answers, much as I might like to offer even one.
These questions echo, in a particular way, the questions we hear in today’s scripture stories. They echo something that sounds in the Israelites’ question to Moses in the desert: “Is the Lord among us or not?” They echo something we hear in the Samaritan woman’s question “where do you get that living water?”
Look at the Israelites. Driving Moses crazy. Yesterday, they were hungry, and down came the quail and the manna. Now, they’ve forgotten about that. They’ve forgotten about the Passover, they’ve forgotten about the pillar of fire leading them through the desert, they’ve forgotten the parting of the Reed Sea. They’ve forgotten all the times they have received God’s abundance, God’s mercy, God’s grace. They are thirsty, stuck out in the middle of the Sinai, hot, rocky, parched-dry desert. They are bone-dry and bone-weary after long days of marching away from their cool green Nile River. So Moses, where’s the water?
Moses doesn’t have a good answer, and he doesn’t have any water. But he does have his rod, his staff, the very same rod that he had back that day at the Reed Sea, and that jogs his memory. He doesn’t have to have all the answers; he hasn’t had them before. After all, this whole exodus thing began with his question at the burning bush: “who am I, puny little Moses, that I should challenge the might of Pharaoh and lead the people out of Egypt? I’m just one little guy here, and besides, I’m busy with this flock of sheep, aren’t I? I’ve got all kinds of obligations with my father-in-law Jethro, don’t I? Who am I?”
God answered Moses with the promise that God (I am who I am) would always be with Moses. Moses touches that rod, and remembers that promise. He remembers all the times he has seen God be there for him and for the people. And a river of water gushes out from the rock.
The Samaritan woman at the well is thirsty too. She’s been thirsty for a long time, trying to slake her thirst, as John tells it, with a long string of men, one after another. Her past is a tangled mess of broken relationships and broken taboos, as sorry as the complex history of the Samaritans and Jews, rival tribes locked in a pattern of bristling hostility. And her future’s no brighter. She’s learned how to cover up, how to put on a brave face, how to hedge any revealing truth.
But today is different. This stranger is different. After all, this Jew had broken taboo first, speaking to a woman, an unclean foreigner, asking for a drink of water. He didn’t seem to mind the risk. So neither does she. She decides not to hedge any longer. What did she have to lose anyway? “Where do you get this living water you are talking about? Where do you get this living water?”
She wants the well that is deeper than Jacob’s well, she wants to quench her thirst. And she gets what Moses got at the burning bush, she gets that same promise, she gets what Moses got out of the rock. She gets, in the person of this stranger standing right in front of her in the middle of the village in the middle of the day. She gets a taste of God, and it’s just like a cool drink of water on a hot summer day. For the first time ever, her thirst is quenched, her hunger satisfied, and she starts off with a fresh sense of purpose, a new mission, a new life.
Asking questions is risky business. Our questions can push us a bit, like the questions pushed Moses and the Samaritan woman, so that we have to look at our lives, to see what we want, what we need, what we don’t need, what God needs from us.
That’s what Lent is all about: the time to ask the questions. That’s why we’ve embarked on our parish Lenten series on Forgiveness, to take a look at the questions we might leave unasked at other times of year, the questions about forgiveness and reconciliation and sin.
Not that anybody cares about a laundry list of misbehaviors, not that anybody (least of all God) is keeping score. What we do care about is the big picture: who is God, where in the world do we see God? where in my life? What is God asking me to look at in my life right now? What am I trying not to see? What is the right thing to do? Where is God in all of this? What does it matter that we are Christian in a world of suffering? Is the Lord among us or not? What would forgiveness look like in my life? What does it mean to see the places in my life where I am alienated from my neighbor, from my own self, from God? And how about my place in the world, as a first-world consumer of resources, and reader of news stories and troubling editorials? How can I reconcile?
No easy answers to Lent’s hard questions, of course, no cheap grace. But the ancient stories tell us that authentic faith, any faith worth having, any relationship with God worth bothering about, any life worth living, begins with questions-- and comes with a promise, the promise that our questions can lead us into an encounter with the holy, with God. But the getting from here to there pretty likely means we take a look at what’s wrong, what’s missing, and what needs to change. That’s where the language of sin and forgiveness comes in.
We shy away from the word sin, because so many of us have been wounded by childhood experiences in churches that took a legalistic approach to sin, making God into a judge to be pleased by good behavior. The church looked like a courtroom. Or we’ve traded in the language of sin for a diagnosis of psychological trauma or existential angst or the human condition, and we’ve make the church into a clinic. Something different happens when we choose the word sin. If you choose the word sin, says Barbara Brown Taylor in her great little book Speaking of Sin, “you have chosen a term that requires something of you—if not an outright confession of your peccability, then at least an admission of your frailty: that you are sick and tired of being sick and tired, that you cannot live with this suffocating ache one moment longer, that you are as ready as you will ever be for a whole new life. As hard as such a confession may be, it is also a confession of hope—that things may change, that the way they are is not the way they must always be. The catch, of course, is that this hope begins with some acceptance of your responsibility for the way things are.” (p.60)
John might say this is when you ask for the drink of water.
Taylor says that when you begin to accept responsibility and start to make a change, you can “glow like a furnace” for a couple of days until things cool down, until your friends and loved ones “pat you back into place” and encourage you to stop asking the hard questions.
Friends and family who have different kinds of questions:
“Honey, you don’t really have to cut back on your business trips, do you? The kids and I are OK. What’s a missed soccer game or two. Don’t you want to move up in the world?” We really deserve a bigger house, don’t we?”
“Drink too much? I don’t think you really drink too much. You just know how to relax. If you want to cut back, go right ahead, but you don’t really want to quit do you?"
“Africa? Why do you have to bother yourself about Africa when we have plenty to worry about right in our own backyard? How can you worry about Africa?”
These kinds of questions are the ones that keep us from the hard questions, the big changes. Taylor tells of the writer Reynalds Price, who went through a huge life change with a diagnosis of cancer and the subsequent loss of his legs. Price said:
“When we undergo huge traumas in middle life, everybody is in league with us to deny that the old life is ended. Everybody is trying to patch us up and get us back to who we were, when in fact what we need to be told is “You’re dead. Who are you going to be tomorrow?”
To recognize sin can be such a trauma, says Taylor, because it means we
“measure the full distance between where we are and where God created us to be—to suffer that distance, to name it, to decide not to live quietly with it any longer—that is the moment when we know we are dead and begin to decide who we will be tomorrow.”
It doesn’t really matter so much how we define sin, whether it’s a state of being or a series of actions that result from that state. It can be tucked tight out of sight in our private past or it can blare out in a banner headline in tonight’s news. For someone, sin conjures the image of a secret candy bar, for someone else, the memory of the rumpled sheets on the wrong bed. Or sin looks like a huddle of homeless people around a trash can fire behind a five-star hotel. Or a government official authorizing a paycheck to a journalist. Or a church hierarchy hiding from the world’s complexities behind the blind certitude of biblical literalism. Whatever the image, private, corporate, institutional, international, we know it is sin when it makes something inside of us die.
That’s the place we name as sin, that’s the place we ask for that drink of water. And then, as the promise goes, we’re on the road toward reconciliation, toward Easter. And it’s like a cool drink of water on a hot summer day. AMEN.
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