Sermon: March 12, 2023, Third Sunday in Lent

Preacher: Rev Ryan Slifka

Scriptures: Exodus 17:1-7 ; John 4:5-42

Today’s scripture takes place at a well. And not just any well—a famous one. One near the property that the great biblical patriarch, Jacob, willed to his son, Joseph. More than a thousand years before. Here Jesus, tired from his journey through Samaria on his way to his hometown in Galilee, pulls off the highway to take a little rest. Then a young woman stops by to fill her bucket. And Jesus asks her for a drink.

This blows her mind. How could Jesus, a Jewish man, ask for water from her, a Samaritan woman? Samaritans and Jews are two branches of the same social and religious tree that have grown completely apart, now hostile towards each other. It’s like a United Church Minister asking a fundamentalist Baptist preacher for advice. Or vice-versa. You just don’t associate with people like that. You might catch what they’ve got. Then his disciples are astonished that Jesus is just talking to a woman without first going to her husband. Jesus is violating decorum all over the place.

Soon, though, Jesus shifts the conversation from everyday stuff—like water—to deeper stuff. "If you knew the gift of God,” he says. “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him for water, not the other way around. And if you did,” Jesus says, he would have given you living water.” Living water.

This leaves her a little confused. For her, living water means, like, a rushing river. Water teeming with fish, with life. Fresh, clear, crisp. Not funky, sulphur-infused well-water. “Living water?” She says. “But you’ve got no bucket. Where’d you get this stuff, and where is it?”

Soon it’s clear that Jesus isn’t talking about sipping on some Evian. “This living water’s different,” he says. “The living water I give comes gushing up like a geyser into eternal life.” The water she’s been drinking can only satisfy for a short period of time, but the water he gives will never leave her soul thirsty ever again.

What he says obviously piques her interest. "Sir,” she says. “Give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” Gimme some of the living water.

And Jesus gives it. What’s strange in my mind, though, is how he gives it to her. She asks, and suddenly Jesus is peering into the deepest, aching places of her heart, unprompted. He tells her that she’s had five husbands, and the man she’s living with now isn’t one of them.

Now, that might sound crazy to us. But we’re not talking about a middle-aged woman being on her fifth divorce after a string of Vegas Chapel weddings. Some are likely deaths, and convention said she’d have to marry her husband’s brother if her husband died. Some could have been divorces, because men could divorce women under certain circumstances. Could have all been deaths, or all divorces. We don’t quite know. The fact that she’s not married now is also a taboo. One makes her sinful and unclean in the eyes of her community.

What’s clear is that this woman’s life isn’t pleasant. Just imagine what it’s like to be her. I mean, this is something John’s gospel does. Last week it was Nicodemus… we’re always invited into the shoes of a conversation partner with Jesus. Imagine… you’re not only poor, as a woman you’ve got no control over your life. One husband dies, you’re passed to another. Just when you think everything’s OK, the same thing happens yet again. You can’t leave any of them, because how will you eat? You’ll even risk all sorts of shame of shacking up with another guy. And when you do, people turn their backs. You’re a pariah, you’re unclean, you’re a nobody. Shame, failure. No agency, no family stability. No way out. This is a life that has completely dried up. Imagine yourself in her rather dusty sandals.

In fact, my guess is that you don’t have to imagine very hard. My guess is that each of us have felt dry like this, in at least some way. Thirsty for more than literal water. Longing for our souls to be refreshed, for green hills and meadows flecked with yellow flowers, rather than a barren desert. A thirst we maybe didn’t even know we had. This is what life is like for this woman. To the nth degree.

But this man, Jesus. He sees her. He knows all of it, every last detail. Who she is, what she’s done. Her fears, her follies. Her disappointments, and her shame. The fact that she’s an outcast and a nobody. And he doesn’t turn her away. In fact, he’ll break all the rules, discard any convention just to be right there with her at the well.

This is how he does it. Because as soon as they’re done talking she tosses her bucket aside and runs back to the city. She grabs anyone who’ll listen, and tries to drag them to Jesus. "Come and see,” she says. “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done.” Like the old African-American spiritual says, “Jesus gave me water… but it was not from the well.” And she’s gotta tell everyone.

This is how Jesus gives her living water Jesus sees it all. And none of it matters to him. He sees who she is, what she’s done. And he’s with her, and loves her in spite of it all. This is the living water he was talking about. In encountering Jesus, she’s come face-to-face with the power at the heart of the universe, with the presence of the living God. And rather than peering at her with more condemnation, he stares right back with eyes full of gentleness. Eyes brimming with mercy, and forgiveness. A face overflowing with unconditional, unmerited, one-way love. That word we call grace. In seeing her and knowing her and loving her, this is how Jesus pours out eternal life into dry desert of her heart. Where green shoots of hope, strength, and joy have sprouted for the first time she can remember. This is the living water Jesus gives, from a well that’ll never run out. One that’ll never run dry.

And the good news, dear friends, this well is as bottomless as it ever was.

In the last few weeks I’ve received emails from several of you about what’s being called the “Ashbury Revival” at Ashbury University, a Christian campus in Kentucky. On February 8th, several students felt called to stick around after a chapel worship service. They felt called to continue worshipping and giving folks the opportunity for prayer. And spontaneously, it continued through the night and the next day, and the next and the next for more than two weeks. It finally wrapped up on the 23rd. By the time it was done, thousands of people flew and drove and bused from all over North America to experience it. Some have claimed miraculous healings, others have spoken about basking in the palpable presence of the Holy Spirit.

Now, I’ll be honest. I can be kind of skeptical about these things. In The United Church we tend to be leery of charismatic experiences of faith. The old joke is that we’re the “frozen chosen.” We can get freaked out even by people raising their hands to a good praise song. They’re kind of like Samaritans in today’s passage to us—no thank you. So when it comes to revival stuff we might wonder if it’s actually God or just the madness of crowds. And usually come down on the latter. I’m not closed to the possibility. But I don’t entirely know what to think because I’m not there.

Nevertheless, I was struck by one journalist, Olivia Reingold’s firsthand account. She interviewed a student, Gracie Turner.[i] For the last four years at her Christian college, Gracie had kept a secret. And the secret was that she’d lost her faith.

“In high school, she watched cancer ravage her great-grandmother. Then she saw her family fall apart. One fight drove her to call the police on a relative.

“I just remember thinking, why is this happening?” she said. “How could this happen? And my first thought, or first person to blame was God. I would lay in bed sometimes and just pray to God, like, it would be really nice if I didn’t wake up tomorrow.”

When she got to Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky, she was required to go to chapel three times a week for college credit. But she never believed God would fix anything, since life only seemed to be getting harder between the anxiety, depression, and recent back injury that brought her to a “breaking point.”

But one Sunday, something changed. She woke up and spontaneously blurted an idea to her roommate: What if, instead of doing homework, we went to chapel today?

She had heard a revival had sprung forth a few days earlier there, and hadn’t stopped. When she opened the doors, the same chapel that had never spoken to her before suddenly seemed alive. The pews were packed with more than a thousand people—including many of her classmates—weeping and swaying with their eyes closed to nothing but an acoustic guitar and each other’s voices.

Suddenly, Gracie Turner no longer felt any pain.

“I just slumped down,” she said. “It was the first time in a long time where I could finally just rest because I felt like I was at peace, and I was protected. I felt like it was God telling me, this is what you’ve been missing.”

Like the woman at the well, Gracie Turner’s life had dried up almost to complete nothingness. She felt hurt. She felt helpless, hopeless and estranged. But at this service of worship she was refreshed. Like the Samaritan woman she met someone who told her everything she’d ever done, and then gave her exactly what she needed. One who poured out the living water that she’d been missing, been thirsting for so long. There she felt it all wash away into rest, into protective peace.

Like I said, I’m not sure what to think of this whole thing. But I can’t help but hear echoes of today’s scripture in Turner’s story. I can’t help but think this is the kind of thing God does. It sounds to me like Jesus gave her living water in the same way he gave it to the Samaritan woman.

And if Jesus gave it to her, like he gave it to the Samaritan woman, he can give it to you, too. I mean, the beauty is that we don’t have to travel to a holy-rollin’ shrine in Kentucky to get it. Jesus says that this water’s for everyone, and anyone who approaches him in Spirit and in truth. It’s why we fill the baptismal font every Sunday—baptism is the sign and seal of the grace that flows and flows and flows. And the taps are on full blast, right here right now. Ready to flow into the dry, desolate places of your life. Where you can’t imagine anything but dust and deadness. Like Moses tapping a gushing spring from a rock, he has the living water you need, the eternal life you long for, and promises to make it spring forth your soul. All you need to do is ask. And it’s yours. This grace is available to all, a gift that can only be received.

Now, we don’t normally do things like this in worship. Like I said, skeptical, frozen chosen. But I’m going to invite everyone to close their eyes. Take a moment.

Now, imagine the desert. Craggy dead trees. A tumbleweed or two.

Find that dry, empty, desolate place in you. The place of your deepest thirst. Find your anxiety, your fear of the future. Find the place of loss failure, find the failure the guilt, the shame. The deadness inside of you, or the chronic pain.

Now, know that there is someone who already knows this about you, one who knows the terrain. Because he’s been there before. He knows what you need and longs to give it to you.

Now, imagine right out of one of the rocks—water. A little leak, a drip at first. But then gradually it bubbles, then it bursts in one thick, wet cloud. That cool, crisp springwater, rolling over every dusty square inch. Then sudden shoots of green, red, blue, and gold flowers. As you reach out your hands and drink deep, feel it all wash away. Imagine your thirst dissipating with every sip. Every muscle relaxing until you feel that deep sense of peace… of satisfaction.

This is God’s grace. What Jesus means by living water bubbling up within you to eternal life. He knows what you need and it’s yours for the asking.

Now, repeat after me.

“Lord, give me this water so that I may never be thirsty again.”

“Lord, give me this water so that I may never be thirsty again.”

“Lord, give me this water so that I may never be thirsty again.”

Let us pray.

By the well, a thirsty woman
found the life that you give,
we, too, thirst like empty vessels—
fill us full that we may live.

Lord, send your Holy Spirit upon us this day…
give us this water that may we never be thirsty again.

Amen.

[i] Olivia Reingold, “Why Students in Kentucky Have Been Praying for 250 Hours,” The Free Press, February 19, 2023. https://www.thefp.com/p/why-students-in-kentucky-have-been