February 27, 2005 At Saint Mark Church in Norman, OK
Exodus 17:3-7 + Romans 5:1-2,5-8 + John 4:5-42
Adam then Abraham have stood before us this season unfolding the plan of God to restore us to the holy ground of paradise. The land we have been promised.
Having led the people of Israel from Egypt where they might have been tempted
to think that all was well, that the plenty of those “flesh pots” as he calls them
was really “heaven.” He has taken them to the desert where there is nothing;
to the desert where there are no man-made comforts or pleasures;
to the desert where finally there is nothing to rely upon but God.
Of course, stripped of all their comforts and plenty, they complain.
They doubt that God is there just as we do when it happens to us.
They become bitter and quarrelsome
when immediate satisfaction of their needs does not happen.
Their hopes for a good life are threatened by a desert experience because
it is not what they expected or bargained for
when they trusted Moses and his God.
What they learn, and the lesson they teach us
is that the power to quench thirst does not reside in Moses; it resides in God.
Jesus of Nazareth, prophet and teacher has learned that lesson from his youth in the synagogue and in his home.
In his own “exodus” story, his own journey back to his father,
he teaches again the lesson of Moses to a people who are quarrelsome and complaining, doubtful and bitter: the apostles and the Samaritans.
The “holy ground” or “paradise” for which we long
has no work or labor, want or need.
Our hope for heaven suggests that the condemnation we read of in Genesis
will be reversed. (3:17-19) “Painfully will you get your food from the earth as long as you live…By the sweat of your face you will earn your food until you return to the ground as you were taken from it.“
The Samaritan woman is tired of her labor. She is all of us who work and labor
day in and day out. She hauls that water back home only to turn around and to it again and again, dreaming of a time when it will no longer be needed.
And suddenly she looks up to discover that it might be possible,
and her hope rests on the most unlikely of possibilities, a Jew.
It is like the Israelites standing around a rock.
No one would think that water would come from a rock.
It comes from a wells dug deep in the earth.
No Samaritan would think that anything good could come from a Jew.
The messiah for which they longed would be one of their own.
But it is not so.
Moses is not directed to do the usual thing, dig a hole.
He is not led to some secret spring. He is told to bang on a rock!
The Samaritan woman never able to quench her thirst
is led back to the ancient well where she meets a Jew,
the most unlikely and unexpected of persons!
In his presence, she finds paradise and her thirst is at an end.
Her labor and the sweat of her face is finished.
Now her work is to bring others to this holy ground.
Moses followed God into the desert because he had faith that God
would carry Israel into a new way of living.
He knew the risks, and he did it anyway.
It seems so odd that Jesus had better luck with outcasts and Samaritans,
lepers and gentiles, children and slaves than with his own.
The orthodox had a hard time hearing what Jesus had to say.
Too concerned over what they had to loose, they have hardened hearts.
The Samaritan woman had nothing to lose.
She understood the message, and she went running to tell others.
In fact, she left her water jar behind!
Water jars were expensive – it was all she had to hang on to for water.
But she left it behind. Then the apostles come a long and grumble.
Like us, or we like them, are not quick to leave what we have come to trust.
We don’t want any risk involving God.
We want the safe way into heaven even though we’ve been told by Jesus
time and time again that there is no such thing.
We like things the way they are with us in control, knowing what feels right,
what is familiar and comfortable, and we want it to stay that way.
The apostles did not like this Samaritan stuff.
They liked the safety and guarantee that they would get to heaven their way
with prescribed prayers and doing what they’ve been told.
Twenty centuries later, we are still telling the story,
thirsty, and longing for paradise.
We are still giving our money, our gold, to make false gods,
and the truth is, where we spend it or who gets reveals our values.
The God who gets the left-over is not really our god.
It is the same with our time: in a bed, before the TV, or before the Altar?
Where we spend the best of it reveals what matters most.
Still those who have the most to lose are least likely to wander into a desert
and find the God who will lead them to holy ground.
Our Lent is about such a journey and such a desert.
Forty years or forty days — the risk of leaving things and ways that are comfortable for the discomforts of the desert is our choice – one will leave us thirsty no matter how often we go to its well, the other leads us home to paradise for which we were made.