Living Water
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
One morning a few years ago I woke to a book review on NPR that sounded really intriguing—both because of the geological connection and the religious connection. The Secret Knowledge of Water by Craig Childs considers the surprising caches of water in the great desert of the American Southwest. The author reflects on the hiddenness of pools of water in the desert and the uncanny ways that animals and desert dwelling humans have of sniffing it out and moving towards it. He writes:
Imagine thirty miles of rock and coarse sand, and a steady, clean light from the sun. You are walking east perhaps, driven by a rumor that water is out there, but you are not certain exactly where. It is one hole maybe four feet wide in a desert that is fractally endless. Abrupt mountains stand in your er to search the mountains, sharp with rock and nearly absent of vegetation, or the dizzying trails of sand-filled washes below. Inadvertently you bite your tongue, seeking moisture.
Say you find the water hole. It is surrounded by artwork of culture here long before: complex, undecipherable etchings on boulders. You drink, mouth to the surface, and it tastes like the foamy sweat of the earth. It enters your blood, preventing your organs from shriveling like the raisins that they are in the leather pouch of your body.
Now say that the hole is dry, or you do not find it, and you have walked thirty miles only to place into your mouth a pinch of sand damp from the night before. The sand is a desperate act, and you die a few hours farther with grit on your swollen tongue. You leave your bones there, in the place where your last fragile thoughts drifted away.
There are great, natural cisterns out in the desert, marvelous contraptions of rock, but each is buried within miles of difficult land. They are revealed gradually, through patient inquiry, through stories told over hundreds of years. Yes, they may be worth dying for, because anytime I find the water holes, they stand out like emeralds in the sand.
What a description of thirst and the drive to find water in the desert!
Now listen to this short reflection about thirst in the desert from Bruce Feiler in his book Walking the Bible:
First, you get thirsty. You wake up thinking about water. You go to bed thinking about water. You walk, talk, and eat thinking about water. You dream of water. You wonder, “Do I have enough water?” “Am I drinking enough water?” “Where is the water?” . . . Go wandering in the desert, for days, weeks, or forty years at a time, and water becomes the most important thing, the only thing. Water becomes life. Becomes salvation.
And so today, as we wander into the middle of Lent, we read about the wanderings of the people of Israel in the desert for 40 years, the years that it took God to knit them together as a people. We hear about their wilderness complaint that they had no water. They were thirsty. Not just a regular kind of thirst but an organ-shriveling kind of thirst, and it made them push and moan and scream and demand that water in order to stay alive. Water became life for them; water became salvation for them; and they knew it.
So Moses goes to God, pushing and moaning and screaming that he was at wits’ end with these people. Moses it seems didn’t have any natural talent to lead them to oases. It took God to find the water and arrange for Moses to strike a rock. And that rock gushed out all the water they needed—and more.
They were saved by God. They were given the water that was life, and it was God’s response to their prayer of complaint.
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Think a bit and we may see how perfectly natural it is that the Bible makes use of water as a symbol for God. We are utterly dependent on water. We shrivel and die without it. We are utterly dependent on God. Our lives are contingent upon God’s continuous creation and God’s sustaining help. God is our salvation from eternal nothingness. Water is our temporal salvation from shriveling and death.
Listen to the first verse of Psalm 63: “O God, you are my God; eagerly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, as in a barren and dry land where there is no water.”
And again, listen to God’s complaints against his people in the Book of Jeremiah: “Be appalled, O heavens, at this;
Be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the Lord.
For my people have committed two evils:
They have forsaken me, the fountain of living water,
And dug out cisterns for themselves,
Cracked cisterns that can hold no water.” [Jeremiah 2:12-13]
Did you pick up on that phrase “living water”? It means water that’s moving, not standing still. Lively, sparkling, clean water. Water moving over rocks or in streams, not water stagnating and souring. Living water is what the early church used in baptism. Our water of baptism, poured over one’s head, is a pale echo of that living water.
Jesus says he can give living water to those who ask for it when he speaks with the Samaritan woman at the well. She’s coming to draw out water in the heat of the day, and he offers her something even better, water that will never end with more thirst. Water that will become in people a lively spring gushing up to eternal life.
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We may no longer gather our water at wells like the Samaritan woman. We may never have tasted water gushing out in the desert like the Israelites.
But we know what it is to be thirsty.
We know the discomfort of working or walking too long without water.
And I think that most of us know the discomfort of plodding through our lives, forgetting about God’s friendship and God’s help that are there for the asking. And we become thirsty for God as we wander in our own deserts for years and years.
Thirst for God is the organ-shriveling kind of thirst. And it’s a kind of prayer, the longing planted in our hearts by the Holy Spirit and nurtured there as time goes on. It’s the Spirit speaking in us with sighs too deep for words—that longing. May we listen to our thirst as it offers us living water, for it is the voice of God.
And may we respond to our inchoate longing for God and to God’s longing for us by spending time in quiet, in prayer, in seeking out God through the Bible and other works of poetry and prose, and of course, in worship. If we only knew the gift of God, we would ask, and we would recognize Jesus giving us living water.
Amen.
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