Third Sunday in Lent -- 24 February 2008

St. Paul Lutheran Church, ABQ NM -- the Rev. P. L. Holman

Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 95; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42

"Dead Water or Living?"

What a paradox to be listening to words about the life-giving water when our font is filled with sand. It'd be far more comfortable to be able to touch the water, at least to see it when we move around the altar for meal and blessing. But no -- not just covered for Lent, or empty, this bowl has dusty sand. It catches us off guard, no matter our age. Last week little Preston James Pifer, who now is running around keeping his grandfather busy during worship, PJ came to the font after church to splash his feet in the water as he did during his baptism. Only there is no water. Even this toddler was surprised. What gives?

The question is rather, who gives? And the answer: Jesus. And the gift: living water.

We don't know this woman's name. We know her story, almost as if she had recorded it through the StoryCorps project we talked about a few weeks back. "It happened this way, at the well, midday when I had to go because I am simply not welcome when the other 'respectable" women are around. Midday, a man, a Jewish man spoke o me -- broke the covenant law and spoke to me a Samaritan, a woman. This one the people call Jesus of Nazareth addressed me as if I really matter, listened to me as though I had something important to say. And he blessed me -- he knows my story and blessed me anyway. It's like I have some value, a purpose or something -- like I am some body."

Jesus names her story and in the naming tells her who he is -- in that exchange Jesus shows her the way to life. It is the way of living water.

Your story and mine are a lot like this woman's story. Oh, not in that we've had five husbands (or wives or partners). Not in the sense either that we are social outsiders -- most of us in this community of Lutherans are very much insiders; if we're white, educated, male, moneyed, heterosexual, first language English speakers, or any combination of these we have far more power than the likes of this Samaritan woman. We have the power to build up or tear down, to drink of the waters flowing freely with the beauty of God's truth, or to wallow in the waters of death.

We have great power to choose otherwise, and yet so often we opt to drink of dead water. Dead water, like excessive fuel or alcohol consumption, or smoking habits that we refuse to break; dead water like grudges we refuse to release or fractured relationships to which we refuse to attend. We all know that brokenness that is dead water -- you and me and the one sitting next to us and the ones not here this morning. Sometimes we choose the dead water because we think it's safer -- we choose to wallow in the anger and faultfinding that seem to free us from taking responsibility, like those Israelites following Moses, eh? Dead water, as Jesus told the woman at the well, always leaves us thirsting for more….

We choose dead water when we persist in habits of over-ing -- over-eating, over-spending, over-reacting, over-doing -- all these dead water habits that isolate us from the simple beauties around us, or keep us from confronting those things that long for healing in our lives. We all know the tendency to wallow in anonymity -- the ways we too go for water at noon rather than mingle with our neighbors and risk being rejected, the ways we hide from the one who can change us, the one in whose presence we see who we really are. The One who welcomes us at the font of Baptism, the one who meets us week after week at well of this Holy Meal, the Messiah we call Jesus Christ is the one who shows us who we are by showing us who he is. This is the one, as Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, who crosses all boundaries, breaks all rules, drops all disguises, and speaks to us like someone we have known all our lives. This is the One who bubbles up in our lives like a well that needs no dipper, so that -- like the woman before us -- we too can go back to face the folks we thought we could never face again, or we thought we wanted never to see again, speaking to them as boldly as Christ spoke to us: "Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done." [Barbara Brown Taylor, THE CHRISTIAN CENTURY, February 12, 2008, p.19]  Christ knows us completely, and loves us anyway. Christ forgives us, and gives us our life back. That's living water.

Like the sands of an hour glass our lives are running out. Sooner or later we will be no more. What matters to God, and to the world around us, is what we do with this time we're given with all its blessing and challenges.

Ø      Terror and angry warfare are destroying villages and families and untold lives in the Middle East -- I fear that by our choices as a nation are we feeding them dead water.

Ø      The ethnic conflict in Kenya is generating a pattern of violence that threatens the future of this once stable country and has profound implications for other countries in the region as well. The ELCA, working in partnership with Church World Service and Lutheran World Relief, is sending living water through prayers and financial aid to help those affected by the violence; through the All Africa Conference of Churches our church is working to help build peace and achieve democratic accountability, transparency, and national unity in the midst of the crisis. This is the flow of living water.

Ø      Johnnie Carr died Friday. A childhood friend of Rosa Parks, 97 year old Carr was a civil rights activist up to the last 11 days of her life. She was a bridge-builder, a woman who encouraged rather than divided in a day and time when division was the far more popular path, and far more death-dealing. Carr admitted she wasn't thinking about making history in those tumultuous years of the 50s and 60s in Montgomery, Alabama -- she was focused on the conditions and discrimination of African-Americans and never stopped working for change. In 2005 at the 50th anniversary celebration of Rosa Parks' life-changing bus ride, Carr told the thousands of schoolchildren who had marched to the Capitol: "Look back, but march forward." That's living water for our children, and our nation. Look back, remember the past, and keep marching on.

Ø      For 15-year-old Lawrence King and the 14 year old student charged with a hate crime for shooting the openly gay youth dead in a California school classroom -- for the sake of the lost lives of Lawrence and Brandon, we aren't marching forward boldly enough.

Look back, and keep moving forward. That's the flow of living water for the Church as well. We remember the saints, sacrifices and traditions that have brought us to this time and place, but to dwell there is to wallow in dead water -- it can be as toxic to us as the stagnant waters of northern Ghana or the Dead Sea. We are called to flow with the beauty of God's truth, open to change and being changed by the good news of the One who drenches us in life-changing water. As we embody love, forgiveness, and hope -- as we embrace new ways of being church, this living water becomes manifest to others as our "yes" to God. It is our "yes" to the One who has already given us all the power we need to live, just like that unlikely witness at the well before us, to live the life-giving question:

This can't be of God -- can it?! 

Come and see. Amen.