“Solid Rock, Living Water”
Patricia Barth
February 27, 2005
Have you ever been between a rock and a hard place? At a dead end, with no place to turn? Most of us have been at one time or another. Every which way you turn, there’s no appealing choice. Or maybe no choice at all.
That’s how the Israelites felt. Although they had been slaves in Egypt, they had food to eat and water to drink. And Moses got them stuck in the wilderness without water. The people whined and complained and quarreled. “Is the Lord among us or not!?” they cried.
There were rocks to the right of them; rocks to the left of them; and Moses was suddenly reminded that rocks were an integral part of ritual execution in those days. Moses cried out to the Lord, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me!”
Well, God was among them. God led Moses and some elders of the Israelites forward, further into the wilderness, and God was there in front of them. Moses struck the rock, and God caused water to come out of it, and the people drank, and were satisfied.
God provides for our needs. God provides water to quench our physical thirst, and living water to quench our spiritual thirst. Did you know we all have a spiritual thirst? It’s a longing for God, a yearning for something greater than ourselves. As St. Augustine and others have said, we each have a God-shaped hole inside us. Or, as it says in Ecclesiastes, “God has planted eternity in the human heart.”
We may try to fill that God-shaped hole with food or alcohol or sex or self-sufficiency, or even excessive church work; but only God is designed to fill that space. Only Jesus can slake our thirst for living water. But in order to receive it, we have to trust in him. We have to trust that he will fulfill our physical and spiritual needs.
Not only does God fill us with water for life, but God seeks us out to give us that living water. Note that God goes before Moses as they walk on ahead, and stands in front of them. God tells Moses where to find the water. The Lord was among them!
Jesus also goes before us, and tells us where to find the water that we need. Jesus met a Samaritan woman beside an ancient well that had been providing water since Jacob’s day. He didn’t just begin preaching to her; he asked for a cup of water for his body’s need. He broke the conventions of the day to speak with a woman in public, and a Samaritan woman at that, in a time when Samaritans and Jews were often in conflict.
She doesn’t understand his offer of living water at first, until he demonstrated that he knew all about her private life, and discussed theology with her. Not only did he speak with her, and ask her to serve him, but they discussed worship and the coming of the Messiah. No self-respecting teacher of the day would have talked with women about serious ideas. She is the first person in the gospel of John to be told the good news, and then to proclaim Jesus the Messiah!
I wonder if the many relationships she had had made her not trust people. The fact that she was getting water in the heat of the day, instead of the normal, cooler times of dawn and evening, meant that she was a social outcast even among her own people. One commentator referred to her as a “triple outsider” but I count more than three reasons she was “different”—she was a woman, of a different religion, Jesus probably perceived her as being from a different ethnic group, and she was living outside the bounds of conventional marriage.
Unfortunately, there are many people who have been abused or simply not loved enough early in their lives for them to learn to trust. I knew a woman once whose father used to put her on the mantle when she was a little girl, and say, “Jump, I’ll catch you.” Then when she jumped, he would let her fall, and say, “See, I told you not to trust people!” That’s an awful, yet very vivid and direct example of being taught not to trust your parent. I’m sure it had consequences all her life—I doubt she ever really learned to trust.
For other people, their life experiences may be more subtle or indirect. But the result is the same, they don’t trust people. They feel they are responsible for everything themselves. And they learn a rigid sort of control over their emotions and actions. For them, learning to trust God, whom they can’t see, is even harder if they don’t have faith in people, whom they can see.
Even if you have had a loving childhood, it can be hard to trust when you’re an adult. It’s hard to trust in something larger than yourself in this do-it-yourself, pull-yourself-up by your own bootstraps, majority culture. Did you ever hear the saying, “God helps those who help themselves.” It sounds like something from Proverbs, but it’s really not in the Bible.
Independence, individualism, pride, self-possession, being the Lone Ranger, getting ahead—these are all elements of U.S. culture that make it hard to trust in other people, hard to give over control to God. We expect to be responsible for everything! What a burden that is!
I’ve learned from my readings in evangelism that postmodern people feel they’ve failed if they come to church with a problem. Of course people who have been dealt blows in life will feel fragile and wounded; but nowadays they feel like failures on top of that—because they couldn’t handle the crisis by themselves. That’s why it’s so important to make visitors welcome and loved.
By contrast, people raised in other countries, or cultures where family is celebrated, are accustomed to trusting in something larger than themselves. In many cultures around the world, the family and the community are more important than the individual. It’s easier for people raised in non-individualistic cultures to trust in God, to take that leap of faith and trust that Jesus will catch them.
We try to trust, but we let each other down when we do. We all fall short of the glory of God. Unlike imperfect, sinful people, God is always trustworthy. God has created a world of beauty, filled it with earth and water and sky and stars, with birds and animals and people to love and be loved by. The earth can provide food and water for all if we didn’t let selfishness rule. There is enough love to go around, and enough living water for everyone to satisfy their spiritual need for God—if we would just realize there is an abundance of all these good things, and no need to hoard them.
The Lord is among us. God has poured out his love to fill our hearts, love in abundance if we will only accept it. God sent us the Holy Spirit, the spirit of truth and prayer, and she will give us help from the inside out. God came to earth as Jesus, to walk as one of us, and to die a painful death just for us. And the risen Christ still goes on ahead of us, showing us the way, surprising us that with cup of living water. We need to accept God’s gift of living water, and then share it with others who need to know of God’s amazing love for them.
I’ll close with a quote from a Jesuit preacher named Larry Gillick, S.J. found on www.textweek.com: “Thirst, hunger, longing, grumbling, hoping, these are elements of believing, but always there is the God, ‘who seeks such people to worship him.’ We each are a part of just how God does the seeking and finding. Like the [Samaritan] town’s folk, others will come to believe, not through what we say in words, but how the Word takes flesh in our human buckets.” Amen
Webmaster : Brian C. Monsell
Sermon Archivist : Jorge Montalvo