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ThirstyFebruary 24, 2008 Third Sunday in Lent While in college I worked on the oil fields outside of Corsicana, Texas, whose only claim to fame, so far as I know, is being home to the Collin Street Bakery, the maker of a legendary fruitcake. If you’re a fruitcake lover chances are good that at some point over the years you’ve had one made in Corsicana. Other than that one anomaly, it seemed to me the rest of the Corsicanan geography was given over to the oil industry, where, during the especially hot summer months, roustabouts took their vacations and college kids were brought in to fill their shoes. Among the crew I joined there were only four 19-year-old recruits to fill the slack. It was tough, awful work, made all the harder by the mandatory hazing we had to endure. This included such fun antics as arranging a work activity so that some greenhorn – say, me, for instance – wound up falling into a pit of oil sludge. Or driving more two hours into the desert at the crack of dawn with a pick and shovel to work a spot in the pipeline that popped up from the ground, with no supplies, on a Friday whose temperature topped 110 degrees. Dropped off with the word that our friendly co-workers would be back in a jiff with water, we languished for the better part of the day before anyone showed up. There was no shade anywhere. Eventually we stopped all movement. We considered and then discarded the idea of attempting to walk back, certain they would show up at any moment. I have never experienced such powerful thirst. We must of have looked awful when finally picked up…we were taken to the company medic and checked for dehydration. I was aware that had they not come when they did, the crew’s little yuck at our expense could have turned into something much uglier. They sort of apologized and told us that we had passed into the brotherhood of roustabouts. I’m not certain why, but all of us showed up Monday morning. Thirst is a powerful sensation. That makes good sense considering a healthy adult body is 60% water. Basically, we humans are water-based organisms, which, by the way, is why we’re all supposed to drink at least a half gallon every day. Our blood alone is 75% water. Since water determines our fundamental physical nature it stands to reason thirst is an elemental human driver. We thirst for that which we are and need. After a strenuous journey Jesus sat down by a well outside a town in Samaria. Jesus, like all the rest of us, thirsted for that of which he was made, so when a certain Samaritan woman came to draw water from the well he asked for a drink. This request led to the longest recorded dialogue between two persons in the gospels. After a strenuous journey Jesus sat down by a well outside a town in Samaria. Jesus, like all the rest of us, thirsted for that of which he was made, so when a certain Samaritan woman came to draw water from the well he asked for a drink. This request led to the longest recorded dialogue between two persons in the gospels. We need to acknowledge several things here: First, Jews despised Samaritans. Their quarrel had been simmering for over 400 years. Jews thought them apostates and ritually impure. Halfbreeds and worse. Good Jews would have avoided Samaria altogether. Jesus had no such problem. Second, there is the matter of talking to a woman in public. Men did not speak with women openly. Thus, for Jesus to do so in this very public setting was a severe flaunting of disrespect of community and religious mores. Third, this woman had a notorious lifestyle. Married five times before and currently living with a man who was not her husband. It doesn’t take much imagination to arrive at an understanding of her place within her community. The text reports the disciples were astonished to find Jesus speaking with her when they returned from town with something to eat. Yet, despite all of these established norms, Jesus engaged in deep conversation which turned on the subject of water and thirst. Unhampered by the codes and barriers of the day, Jesus offered the woman a different sort of water for another sort of thirst. A paraphrase of Jesus’ response to the woman in Eugene Peterson’s The Message, helps us understand what’s at stake here. "[T]he time is coming," Jesus says, "it has, in fact, come – when what you're called will not matter and where you go to worship will not matter. It's who you are and the way you live that count before God. Your worship must engage your spirit in the pursuit of truth. That's the kind of people God is out looking for: those who are simply and honestly themselves before God in their worship. God is sheer being itself – Spirit. Those who worship God must do it out of their very being, their spirits, their true selves, in adoration." [1] So I’m thinking that we have a physical thirst based on our water-based biology, and we have another thirst based on our spiritual selves, as Peterson has it, based on “sheer being itself.” In this spiritual sense, we also a have powerful thirst for that which we are and need – spirit. We are spirit and we need spirit just as we are and need water. When Jesus said to the woman that he would give to her the “living water”, he was referencing this deeper, spiritual thirst. And in this moment she was authentically herself. Nothing was hidden. And shockingly, she was found acceptable. You will note that Jesus did not say to her that she had to confess her sins, or renounce her people before he would give her the living water, or that she needed to recite a creed. No, what she needed in order to receive the living water was to be herself in spirit and in truth. Which, by the way, does not mean that confession is not a useful, even important activity. Its just that its not elemental. It comes in response to our essential spiritual nature. When spirit speaks to spirit, certain impurities can get in the way, even make us quite sick – just like impure water. Best to keep our spirit wells as clean as possible. Jesus offers himself to the woman despite all the reasons he shouldn’t. That’s because he’s present to her in spirit and in truth and she to him. Deep speaks to deep. All the surface barriers do not matter. With great care and authenticity, out of his own thirst, Jesus offers himself and, evidently, the woman at the well takes a deep draught. Stripped of their masquerades, Jesus sees the woman for who she is and the woman sees Jesus for who he is. An astonishing discovery is made. The story ends this way, then: Through the woman’s testimony, “Many Samaritans from that city believed in him…they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days…They said to the woman ‘It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.” [2] That town experienced a deluge of spiritual water that slaked a powerful thirst. As I was preparing for today I heard this wisdom from author, Anne Lamott, which I thought was a great counterpoint to worshiping in spirit and in truth. In a Public Radio interview she said, “You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." [3] That sounds right to me; holding that exclusionary posture keeps God confused with all the masquerading barriers that Jesus so regularly exploded. But then I remembered that Anne Lamott had something of her own experience of discovering the living water. She tells her tale in her autobiographical, Travelling Mercies. A writer and an active alcoholic, she walks by a small church where she hears music that draws her inside. “I just went and listened to the music. And the people just let me be. They didn’t force anything on me. I went for months without any real engagement, just letting the music wash over me.” [4] Then, late one night in bed, she reports this: After a while, as I lay there, I became aware of someone with me, hunkered down in the corner, and I just assumed it was my father, whose presence I had felt over the years when I was frightened and alone. The feeling was so strong that I actually turned on the light for a moment to make sure no one was there; of course, there wasn’t. But after a while, in the dark again, I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus. I felt him as surely as I feel my dog lying near by as I write this. And I was appalled…I thought about what everyone would think of me if I became a Christian, and it seemed an utterly impossible thing that simply could not be allowed to happen. I turned to the wall and said out loud, “I would rather die.” I felt him just sitting there on his haunches in the corner of my sleeping loft, watching me with patience and love, and I squinched my eyes shut, but that didn’t help because that’s not what I was seeing him with. Finally I fell asleep, and in the morning, he was gone. This experience spooked me badly, but I thought it was just an apparition, born of fear and self-loathing and booze and loss of blood…. One week later, when I went back to church, I was so hungover that I couldn’t stand up for the songs, and this time I stayed for the sermon, which I just thought was so ridiculous, like someone trying to convince me of the existence of extraterrestrials, but the last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape. It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling – and it washed over me. I began to cry and left before the benediction and I raced home…I opened the door to my houseboat, and I stood there a minute, and then I hung my head and said… “I quit.” I took a long, deep breath and said out loud, “All right. You can come in.” [5] Like the Samaritan woman Anne Lamott finally allowed herself a long draught from a deep well. And the lesson of course, is that all of us are the Samaritan woman. All of us have our masquerades, all of us are found unacceptable by someone, somewhere, sometime. And all of us project this unacceptability out into the world and assign it to others. All of us have powerful spiritual thirst that we slake in any number of superficial and counterfeit ways. Lamott’s way was partly through booze. But all of us have our anesthetizing or distracting methods. Could be anything at all, really. The astonishing news is that underneath all that detritus we’ve collected to hide behind, flow streams of living water. If we let ourselves fall into those streams our deepest thirst will finally be satisfied since we thirst for what we are, and need. Here’s another Lenten mantra to go with the one I gave you last week. The Samaritan woman teaches us to say: Lord, give me the living water that I might truly live. [1] Eugene Peterson, The Message, NavPress, 2002. 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