A Reverence for a Deeper Thirst"

A Sermon for III Lent                                                            All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N.C.  March 23, 2014                                                    Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

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

 

"A Reverence for a Deeper Thirst"

One of my many pleasures in life is reading a monthly magazine called The Sun which is published in Chapel Hill by Sy Safransky. It says of itself:  “The Sun is an independent, ad-free monthly magazine that for more than thirty years has used words and photographs to invoke the splendor and heartache of being human.“ 

We already have so much clutter in our house, but back issues of this magazine pile up because I don’t want to throw any of them away. In the March 2014 issue is a reprint of a page from a 1928 book by Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. Please excuse the lack of inclusive language, but let me read you part of it:

“Creation is here and now. So near is man to the creative pageant, so much a part is he of the endless and incredible experiment, that any glimpse he may have will be but the revelation of a moment, a solitary note in a symphony thundering through debatable existences of time. Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.”

When I looked at the lessons for today, all I could think of is that these stories are a critique of settling for lives lived without reverence.

In the Gospel Story, the Samaritan woman is just going through the motions of life and all she is thirsty for is water to fill up the water bucket. But she has an encounter with Jesus and that sets her free to seek a different kind of water. It awakens an awareness in the depth of her soul of a different kind of thirst, a living water, where every moment is moistened with the presence of God.  In the letter from Paul to the Romans, Paul is filled with reverence about what God is doing in his life and in the world through Christ. In the Psalm for today, the Psalmist sings of the joy of an enthronement of God as King of all the world. He laments the people of the Exodus lesson for today and urges us to learn from their failure as they ask for just water to drink when there is a deeper thirst that is ignored.

Harden not your hearts,
as your forebears did in the wilderness, *
at Meribah, and on that day at Massah,
when they tempted me.

They put me to the test, *
though they had seen my works. 

What are we really thirsty for? 

When I started to ask myself that question, my mind went in another direction and said to me, “Right now, you are probably asking yourself, what does a parched Christian drink to quench his thirst?” For those of you around in the 1950’s, you may remember a series of ads done by Walt Disney for the soft drink 7-UP – I’m sorry, but this is the way my mind works. Disney was having a cash flow problem and he agreed to do a series of commercials for Ipana Tooth Paste with the character of Bucky Beaver (“Brusha- Brusha- Brusha with the New Ipana”) for the Mickey Mouse Club.  To go along with the Zorro TV series, his 7-UP commercials featured

Theses adds were printed versions on the back pages of Comic Books

Fresh Up Freddie, an energetic animated rooster who dressed in all sorts of costumes and who would  start off by asking  “Right now you are probably asking yourself what does a sandy Beach goer, or dusty Bullfighter, or red hot fighter pilot, or tired fox hunter, or whatever, drink to quench his thirst?” Freddie always thought that a sugary soft drink would do the trick - which is what young kids tend to do. Sometimes we graduate to caffeine drinks, or alcohol drinks, to sooth the thirst and something else. As I grew older, I remember that I needed a couple of diet cokes to get going in the morning and to be up to doing the work that needed to be done. Likewise, I found that I needed a couple stiff drinks after a day at work to finish the chemical search for meaning. The problem is that, while these chemicals can help to divert us from physical thirst, they do nothing to help with the deeper thirst we have. 

The Psalms keep speaking of that deeper thirst: “As the deer longs for the water- brooks, so longs my soul for you, O God./ My Soul is athirst for God, athirst for the living God, when shall I come to appear before the presence of God (43:1-2), and “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.”  

Jesus knows something about that kind of thirst for connection with God. That is why he is traveling through Samaria, where the people have no love for Jews, who treat them as second class people. Both the Jews and Samaritans consider themselves to be descendants of Jacob and, as they stand estranged by the well of the common ancestor, Jesus’ thirst for connections with God has brought him to the land of his extended family who see him and his kind as enemies. It is in this place and in this time where he makes himself vulnerable in this hot, dusty, and hostile land and asks for water from the person who has no reason to display kindness toward him. Yet, he empties his pride; he empties himself out and asks for a peace with his enemy. I think he knows that at a deeper level this woman also has a thirst for something deeper than water to drink. He intuits that she has a thirst for the living God they both share. He sees into her soul, her true self, and offers his soul, his true self, for her to share. Maybe at the level of the soul they sing together in silence from the Psalm 123:

 Have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy upon us,
    for we have had more than enough of contempt.
 Our soul has had more than its fill
    of the scorn of those who are at ease,
    of the contempt of the proud.

Jesus on the cross will return to the psalms:  “They gave me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink”. He also cries out his thirst, perhaps for water but I think it is also for the connection to God and for us. I think Jesus says, “I thirst” as an invitation for us to join him in a hunger for righteousness and a thirst for justice as he is a victim of injustice. I think he calls for us to have a thirst for helping strangers as he is a stranger in that land.  I think he invites us to thirst with him for connection with God and neighbor. 

Sister Corita - "I thirst" from Zach Feuer Gallery

What would it be like if we saw in ourselves that woman who is being asked by Jesus to join in the deeper thirst for connection on a deeper level? Suppose we read this Gospel story not as something that happened only once 2000 years ago, but is the archetype, the motif, of all of our encounters with the divine. Suppose every time we decided to pray we would sense the thirst of God to drink deeply of the thoughts of our hearts instead of the jumble of words we offer off the top of our head?

God has an abiding thirst for union with us.  And what is our deepest thirst?