Look for the Thirst Quencher

In my last sermon, I confessed that I’m an eldest child who likes to follow the rules. But the rules won’t save us. We have to step out in faith.

If I’m honest with myself, some part of me knew this already. The rules are there for a reason. Boundaries are important in our lives. Yet a rigid enforcement leads to the creation of bubbles. Bubbles we can feel safe in, but aren’t reality. In a bubble, we can think everyone thinks and acts exactly like we do.

My bubble was popped in college. There was a whole swath of people I’d never met from hometowns I’d never even heard of. The Boston Catholic Church Scandal broke in 2002 and solidified everything I already knew about the church. I had had it with the corruption and hypocrisy of the Catholic church and Christians in general. It felt like I had to choose between the corrupt structure of the Roman Catholic Church on one hand, and the holy rolling religious right on the other. The right was too anti-science, reactionary, and downright hateful.

My atheist friend and I spoke about philosophy and values. My Muslim friend taught me about service. My Hindu friend taught me about taking sacred stories seriously, not literally. My Buddhist friend taught me about prayer and meditation.

I was spiritual, but not religious. Spirituality felt safer after the rigidity of my religious upbringing. My pendulum swung from religious with no spirit to spiritual but not religious. I was surprised to find myself thirsty. I was still thirsty for community. To gather and talk about the deep things in life. In college, I had a whole community to have those conversations with. My peers and professors filled that role.

After college… I was adrift. Thirsty, but with no watering hole to stop by and have a deep conversation. Where would we find such a community?

I’m thankful for the rigidity of my youth. Of knowing the rules. I know that people who are thirsting for something can look for love in all the wrong places. They can try to quench their thirst with booze or drugs. They can sate it with romantic flings and a long line of partners. I was filling it with work and books. Not bad options considering, but it didn’t satisfy. I didn’t know where else to look.

Nor did the woman at the well know where to look. She longed for community. The Samaritan woman would go to the well at noon because no one would be looking at her then. In the high heat of the day, the other women would be long gone. She’d have the well to herself. That was nice. But she longed for community. She longed to be a part of something.

Her soul was thirsty like mine was. She tried to find love in the arms of others. She had a long line of husbands, and the man she’s with now isn’t great, but it’s better than being alone. Isn’t it..?

She was surprised to see him sitting there. Obviously not from around here. He was dusty from the road. Dressed differently. And when he asked for a drink, his accent gave him away. Maybe from Galilee? A Jew then. Not a Samaritan.

She decided to give him some attitude. Men just don’t talk to women in her culture! As tattered as her reputation is in the community, there are some dignities that can’t be lost and certain boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed. She decided to remind him of his place. “How is it that you a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman from Samaria?”

But his reply… His reply was puzzling and given with a hint of a smile and a muffled laugh.

“If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

That struck her funny. She’d been on the Holy Land tours. Here’s the site of where Jacob wrestled with the angel… or God. But there were like three spots that advertised that. She had at least 5 t-shirts from places that claimed that they were the spot where Joseph was sold into slavery. But there was only one Jacob’s Well. And this is it. Even the Jews and Samaritans who agreed on next to nothing, agreed that there was only one Jacob’s Well, and this watering hole was it.

“Sir, you have no bucket and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?” She asked, less confident. Then she remembered herself. “Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob who gave us the well, and his songs and his flocks?”

He wasn’t phased. “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 I give gushes up to eternal life.”

The woman didn’t understand why she looked for love in the arms of all those partners. She didn’t understand why her community ostracized her. She didn’t know why she’d been roaming around, looking down at all she saw and using people. She didn’t understand what exactly this Jew was talking about… But she did understand thirst.

She looked for it in religion, but nothing made sense. It just felt like one talking head after another… If God was so great, then why was she so bored in worship? She knew thirst, and she was thirsty and she longed for it to stop.

“Sir…. Give me this water so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here.”

Then something strange happened. He looked at her and he saw her. He named her 5 ex-husbands. Not in a mean way. It’s hard to explain. He named them as if he knew her thirst and all the reasons why she chose and then broke up with each.

She said, “You are a prophet… Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain but you say true worship is in Jerusalem.” Ah… denominational differences. That’ll get things back to normal. He’ll spout how all Samaritans are sinners and are going to hell. But he didn’t.

He said, “God is spirit, and those who worship the Creator must worship in spirit and truth.”

Something was happening. In that moment, the sun shone a little brighter. The air was clear. She could see and feel everything. For the first time in a long time, she felt electric and fully alive.

She didn’t know it then, but much later, scholars like Blaise Pascal[1] and Friedrich Schleiermacher[2] have written about a God-shaped hole in our hearts. There is a hole in our soul that nothing but God can fill. A thirst in us that only God can quench. This woman had looked for love in many places, in many faces, and when finally offered a soul-quenching love by Jesus, she became a powerful messenger of Good News.

She tells the whole town of the love she found. “Come and see the man who told me everything I have ever done!” The chapter ends by saying, “Many Samaritans from that city believed in Jesus because of the woman’s testimony.”

February was an incredibly hard month for me. I felt depressed. I would inexplicably be on the verge of tears. I was thirsty for love and I didn’t know where to turn as the comfortable ways weren’t working anymore.

I had a great day toward the end of. I felt a lot had been accomplished. I didn’t have that nagging sense that I was forgetting something, I felt good. But as I left the office, I started to get that feeling again. The tears started to well-up as I exited the building. I was half-way to my car and just feeling lower than low… then I heard it. “Hey, Pastor Luke!”

It was Donald. A friend who visits our church regularly. With the timing of Esther, it was Donald. It felt like the voice of God calling me out. All I could say was, “Here I am Lord.” At least in my head. I said, “Hi, Donald!” Out loud. But in my soul, I was no longer thirsty. And that feeling hasn’t come back since.

Love fills the hole. The love of God and the love of neighbor. Each and every time. The hardest part of the Christian faith is to accept that we are accepted. Accepted and loved by God not in spite of our missteps or misdeeds, but because of them. God accepts us all and loves us fully. We need reminders.

It is as the poet Hafiz writes, “It is unanimous where I come from. Everyone agrees on one thing: It’s no fun when God is not near. All are hunters. The wise one learns the Friend’s weaknesses and sets a clever trap. Listen. The Beloved has agreed to play a game. Called. Love. Our sun sat in the sky way before this earth was born, waiting to caress a billion faces. I encourage all art for at its height it brings Light near to us. The wise person learns what draws God near. It is the beauty of compassion in your heart.”

That is the living water that has never ceased to flow from God. Love. Love is the Living Water.

I understand the spiritual but not religious. They are thirsty and when they show up to church they don’t get Living Water, they get the stale ol’ water of judgment and guilt. I don’t understand the religious who would rather call out the woman at the well for her past choices and shame her. Yell at her for co-habitating. Kick her out of bible study and shun her so she has to go to the well at noon. Instead of acting like Jesus who offers no condemnation, but compassion. For Christ knows thirst and the God-shaped hole in our heart that only he can fill. I understand the move to be spiritual but not religious, yet I hope those folk find community elsewhere if they can’t find it in the church. It’s one thing to be spiritual, but another to be challenged in community.

For that woman might have been spiritual but not religious… but she found community in Jesus that day. She became a preacher and her testimony got the whole town fired up! Just look what love can do! It’s just like what Hafiz also wrote saying, “Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, ‘You owe me.’ Just look at what a love like that can do. It lights the whole sky.”

May you feel that love. And offer it to others. For that is the Living Water that flows to us from God. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Works Cited

[1][1] “What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.”- Blaise Pascal, Pensées VII, page 425.

[2][2] Christianity is the specific form of the God-consciousness shaped through Jesus Christ and the community of faith in him. The church (or Christian community) is foundational to the experience of God which works itself out in a moral, thoughtful life of love. -Schleiermacher 1994, Fourth Speech, pages 147-209.

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