Thirsty People

The Church of St. Paul and Incarnation, Jersey City NJ

March 14, 2020

Year A: The Third Sunday in Lent

Exodus 17:1-7

Psalm 95

Romans 5:1-11

John 4:5-42

Thirsty People

            So, there are some thirsty people in today’s lessons.

            In the first lesson, we find the people of Israel in the midst of their long exodus out of Egypt and they are experiencing – and expressing – some serious remorse about following Moses into the wilderness.

            The people aren’t at all shy about criticizing their leader, saying, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?”

            Moses is frustrated and worried. He complains to God, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.”

            God comes to the rescue, instructing Moses to strike a rock with his staff. Water gushed out of the rock, quenching the thirst of the people.

And then there’s a kind of haunting end to this story.

Moses names this place Massah and Meribah because it was there that the people asked, “Is the Lord among us or not?”

“Is the Lord among us or not?”

            At the start of today’s long and complex gospel lesson, it’s Jesus who is thirsty.

            That’s surprising. We don’t usually hear about Jesus’ physical needs.

And it’s also surprising that Jesus is in the land of the Samaritans.

            Now, because of the famous parable we tend to think of Samaritans as “good” but back in the time of Jesus, Jews and Samaritans did not get along at all.

            It’s a long story, but Jews and Samaritans were related, they were kin, so it was a kind of family squabble and many of us know how bitter those can be.

            Jews and Samaritans shared the five holy books of the Torah, but disagreed about pretty much everything else, especially about the right place to worship – an issue that comes up in the conversation at the well.

            So, it’s surprising that Jesus is in Samaria and it’s really surprising that Jesus strikes up a conversation with a Samaritan woman.

She is certainly surprised, asking, “How is that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”

But, instead of just asking for water, taking a drink, and leaving it at that, Jesus begins to teach her, hinting at his identity and telling her that he offers “living water.”

Just like Nicodemus last week didn’t get it, at first the Samaritan woman doesn’t get it either.

And who can blame her? Living water? That’s some big talk about living water for a guy who doesn’t even have a bucket!

But, unlike Nicodemus who seemed closed off to what Jesus was saying, the woman is intrigued and curious and, yes, thirsty for this living water, this living water that will somehow quench her thirst forever.

And then Jesus throws a curveball, asking her to go get her husband, revealing that he knows that she has had a rather complicated marital history.

The woman is understandably impressed – how could he have known all of this? And, she expresses her faith in the coming messiah.

And then in the most surprising twist of all, Jesus reveals his identity to this Samaritan woman.

It’s the first time in the Gospel of John that he has spoken so openly!

Jesus reveals his identity to this woman who seems to have been a loner – maybe even an outcast - drawing water all by herself under the heat of the noonday sun – this woman with a complicated and maybe even scandalous past.

Jesus quenches the thirst of this woman who maybe had been thirsty for so long she didn’t even know anymore just how thirsty she was!

And what does she do?

She immediately puts down her water jar and goes to share the living water of Jesus with everyone in her city, a city filled with people who may have looked at her with scorn, a city that I’m sure was filled with lots of other thirsty people.

It’s quite a story.

And now here we are today in a time of crisis.

You’re all out there at home and Sue and I are alone here in church.

People are frightened and even panicked, rushing to the supermarket to hoard all kinds of items, some that make sense, some that don’t, but giving very little thought to neighbors who also need diapers and formula and baby wipes and milk and water and, yes, toilet paper.

We look at each other cautiously and even suspiciously as potential sources of contagion or we deny the whole thing is happening and live recklessly, putting everybody else at risk.

We are taking extraordinary actions that I’ve certainly never experienced before, emptying out office buildings, closing schools for weeks, and, yes, something I never thought I would do: closing churches – closing churches for three weeks and maybe even longer than that.

And, like the people of Israel in their long ago time of crisis, maybe we are also asking, “Is the Lord among us or not?”

“Is the Lord among us or not?”

Well, I’m here to tell you that the Lord is very much among us in this time of trouble.

I can’t tell you how many people here in our own community have reached out to me asking if anybody needs help, offering to give up time and their own money, to lend a hand, to quench the thirst of people they know and the many more they don’t know.

Yesterday morning I was walking back home along Duncan Avenue when a neighbor stopped me to talk. Of course, we talked about the coronavirus and she shared with me how frightened she is and listed all of her risk factors related to age and health and then she surprised me by saying that she has some extra canned food that she will leave on our porch so that I can give it to people in need.

The Lord is among us indeed!

Times like these are very difficult for us all but if we pay attention they also offer us some important lessons.

In our case, there are two important lessons that I hope we will learn.

First, there are so many thirsty people among us.

There are so many people, including right here in our own parish, who, in the best of times, live right on the edge, whose cupboards are never full - and get awfully empty during the second half of the month.

There are so many people who work really hard and yet earn so little – who work so hard but can barely pay the bills and certainly don’t have enough to buy two weeks worth of groceries and medicine, who don’t have anything saved for a rainy day let alone rainy weeks or months, who can’t take sick days, who don’t have health insurance and so rely on the ER for healthcare, or just take their chances.

We’ve known that there are thirsty people around us, but now we really know.

And the second lesson is another one that we knew already but somehow need to learn again and again. It’s what our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry said:

We are all in this together.

For too long we’ve kidded ourselves that as long as I have a job, as long as I have health insurance, as long as I have food in the cupboard, as long as I have money in the bank, then it didn’t really matter that the person next to me on the train - or the person beside me in church - didn’t have all of those things.

For too long we’ve made the big and sinful mistake of thinking that there’s “us” and there’s “them.”

You know, the Jews and Samaritans shared history and heritage and belief.

They lived next door to each other.

            But often they didn’t get along with each other and maybe didn’t even care if the other lived or died.

They had a hard time imagining the other as “good.”

But they were family – they were kin.

And so are we all.

So, just like Jesus the Jew - Jesus the Messiah -entered Samaritan territory and offered living water to a very thirsty woman, in this time of crisis let’s share the living water of love with the many thirsty people all around us.

Amen.