Lent 3
Shelagh Balfour

Living Water

Exodus 17:1-7; John 4:5-42

When my children were growing up, we spent a lot of time reading books together. We each had our favourites and, over the years, we managed to wear out quite a few. I still have most of them, some kind of ratty looking, with frayed edges and taped pages. One of the books we read when the boys were quite small was a book about water. It describes the wonders of water from the North Pole to the desert, from the jungle to our own back yard. In simple language and colourful drawings, it shows how necessary water is for life and growth.

I was reminded of this book as I reflected on the readings for this Sunday. It is a reassuring book that shows children water that is playful and plentiful and part of our lives in many important ways.

At the same time, I was reminded of a Sacred Circle I attended quite a few years ago. Archbishop Mark MacDonald who was Bishop of Alaska at the time, was the primary speaker. His topic was also water, but it was not the sunny story of my children’s book. Archbishop Mark talked about communities throughout North America who did not have access to plentiful water. I can’t remember specific places he talked about then, but we know about some of those realities now; about the people of Shoal Lake 40 First Nation who will finally have a water treatment plant by December of this year, ending 21 years of boil water advisories. We know that their water, Shoal Lake water, flows out of our taps, giving us safe, plentiful water, while there is undrinkable. We know about the Grassy Narrows First Nation whose water system was poisoned with mercury laced runoff from a paper company in the 1960’s and whose water system remains poisoned to this day. About people of the Six Nations of the Grand River who have no drinking water while the Nestle Company continues to extract millions of litres of water from their land to sell in bottles to people like us across North America.

It turns out that the water in our own backyard is not as plentiful as we thought, at least not for some. Many people in our country, and around the world know this. As we heard in the lessons this morning, the Israelites who followed Moses into the desert knew this. The Samaritan woman who met Jesus at the well knew this. Those of us who can turn on a tap or press a button on our fridge and get a glass of clear, cold water, need the witness of these others to remind us. Our easy access to water can lead us to forget how absolutely critical water is for life but, for a people who live close to the reality of drought and thirst, water is a precious gift.

If we want to appreciate fully the gift Jesus was offering the Samaritan woman at the well, it will help us if we can imagine ourselves outside our water-rich culture and inside one of the places where the life giving nature of water is of immediate, even pressing, concern.

So what was the experience of the woman at the well? The well itself is a clue. This woman lived in a place that had dry seasons and rainy seasons. It wasn’t a place like Manitoba, with wide flowing rivers and plentiful lakes. Water was accessed in three ways; through cisterns that were built at the back of houses to collect it in rainy seasons, through wells which were dug down to access natural underground reservoirs, and through springs which were also fed from the underground reservoirs. These springs, which of course were moving and flowing, were called living water, fresh flowing water as opposed to the water that sat and could stagnate in a cistern.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the story from John’s.

Jesus, tired and thirsty, was sitting beside a well resting while his disciples went into the nearest town to buy food. As he waited, a woman came from the town to draw water from the well and, being thirsty, Jesus asked her for a drink. This set off a long conversation through which the woman was slowly drawn into understanding that Jesus was far more than a simple stranger sitting at the neighbourhood well. As they spar back and forth, on the surface, the conversation seems to be about water and religious and cultural differences. Underneath, it is about eternal life and who Jesus really is.

Give me a drink – Jesus said.

Why are you, a Jewish man, asking me, a Samaritan woman for a drink? She asked.

Jesus replied - If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.

Now, you can appreciate that, at this point, the woman misunderstands. “Living water”, as we said, means the fresh, running water of a stream and it’s pretty clear this strange man does not have access to any such thing. In fact, if he’s going to get any water at all, he’s going to have to get it from her. Still, the woman doesn’t just dismiss him. She keeps asking questions and, as the conversation carries on, Jesus reveals himself and his purpose more and more.

He tells the woman that, wonderful and time honoured as her source of water is, his is of a higher order altogether. Those who drink the water he gives will never be thirsty. In fact, the water he gives “will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life."

It is a gradual shift for the woman as she moves from understanding his words literally – if she has his water she won’t have to keep coming back to the well to fill up her jars – to grasping that he is talking about the life of the spirit, life in God’s kingdom. The woman becomes convinced that the Messiah stands before her.

One of the things that the writer of the Gospel of John does is juxtapose the concrete things of daily life, with spiritual things, things from above with things from below. In this morning’s readings, there are several such juxtapositions; places where items or activities of daily life are metaphors for the eternal life Jesus promises to those who believe.

The water is one, of course; Life sustaining water for a tired, physical body is compared to “living water” that gushes forth and gives eternal life.

The food the disciples went off to get; physical food for sustenance of the physical body is compared to the sustenance of doing the will of the Father.

The physical harvest of grain is compared to the harvest of believers for eternal life.

And in his conversation with the woman, Jesus contrasts the physical act of worship in specific locations – the mountain, or the Temple in Jerusalem – with worship in spirit and truth, the true worship that comes with eternal life.

Each of these tangible items, the water, the food, the grain, concrete acts of worship, are metaphors that help explain a deeper mystery. But they might be something more than that. Consider our own concrete acts of worship – baptism and the Eucharist for example. We have a name for those. We call them Sacraments. And what do we say a sacrament is? An outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual truth. We know that in baptism, and in the sharing of bread together, that our words and actions are symbols that point to the work that God is doing within and among us.

In this way, John’s gospel uses the most basic elements of daily life to point to Jesus, God’s own Son, in our midst. Jesus’ presence, as the Word made flesh, changes everything, imbues everything with glory. Those who believe in him receive eternal life, this living water gushing up and running over.

These symbols, these day-to-day items like water and bread, point to the work of God in our midst. At the same time, they point back to the sacredness of all of God’s creation. If we accept, with John, that “all things came into being through the Word” through Jesus, then we must recognize the day-to-day sacredness of water, of food, and of all people created in God’s image. And we must recognize the precious nature of water as a life-sustaining gift of God, given to all of creation.

What does this mean to you and me today? I want to offer two directions, one that flows from the living water of eternal life, and one that flows from physical living water, here and now.

As I said a few minutes ago, at the end of her conversation with Jesus, the woman at the well is convinced that Jesus is Messiah. She has been filled with the living water. It is gushing up and flowing over and she cannot keep it to herself. This experience has so transformed her that she needs to tell others. She rushes back to town to tell everyone she can find about this extraordinary man. Clearly, she is convincing enough that most of the town comes out to meet Jesus and many more believe in him, just as she has done.

In the same way, you and I are called to bear witness to the life giving presence of Jesus in our midst. I can understand that this idea makes a lot of us nervous. Evangelizing has gained a sketchy reputation in our culture. But ask yourself this: Do I believe what Jesus said of himself in this passage from John? That Jesus is Messiah? That through belief in him comes eternal life? That he will fill me so full of that life that I will not want or need anything else? Because if this is what we believe, if this living water is gushing up in us, how can we not share it? What that sharing looks like may be something we need to talk about and learn more about together. But if everything we are and everything we do outside these walls comes from our life in Jesus Christ, it should be evident to anyone who sees us that we belong to him.

What about the second direction? At the beginning of this sermon, I talked about those places in the world and in our own back yard where there is no safe supply of water, where people live in unhealthy, desperate conditions because of no water, or tainted water. As disciples of Christ, our concern for the physical and emotional wellbeing of our neighbours is one with our concern for their spiritual wellbeing. There is much that we can do to share a just use of water. With that in mind, I want to draw your attention to just two of many projects supported by the Primates World Relief and Development Fund.

One is a project in Tanzania by which boreholes are dug in communities. These boreholes provide simple access to water through easily maintained pumps. They save women and children in those communities from having to walk miles to access water, often from questionable sources. They allow the community to grow crops and care for farm animals, which gives them food and income in addition to the water itself.

Another project, is the Pikangikum Water Project in Northern Ontario. Pikangikum is one the First Nations communities in Canada that has experienced epidemic youth-suicide levels. This water project is (and I quote) “working to provide a source of potable drinking water to Pikangikum homes, equipping the homes with a cistern to hold the water and a wastewater holding tank, as well as the necessary fixtures and fittings.” PWRDF is supported in this by the Pimatisiwin Nipi Group, which means the “Living Water” group. This group, initiated by Archbishop Mark MacDonald, is concerned with the lack of good drinking water in First Nations’ communities and with how ordinary Canadian churches and community groups can affect change.

These are examples of just two ways in which we can respond to the gift of “living water” in our own lives. In both Tanzania, and Pikangikum, water gives more than a thirst-quenching drink of water. It gives physical health, more secure food sources, and it gives hope.

We are told that those who believe in Jesus Christ will receive the living water of eternal life. The Samaritan woman at the well heard and received the promise of Jesus and rushed to shared that life changing experience with her neighbours. Let this living water be evident in each of our lives as we go into the world to love and serve the Lord.