Sermon

John 7:37-39

Living Water

By The Rev. Dr. James D. Kegel

Martin Cruz Smith, in his bestseller, Gorky Park, sends his hero, Arkady, to a prison farm in the Soviet Union. He had been discovering police corruption and for that he was exiled to the country. In one scene his captor, Pribluda, gardens to pass the time:

“Agh, the ground is too dry. A dozen big buckets for a garden this size? ”

Pribluda shook his head. “You laugh,” he said to his prisoner. “Drought is a serious thing and I can feel a drought coming. I confess I joined the army to get away from the farm.” Pribluda lifted up a shoulder, a graceful thing for a man of his shape. “But at heart, I’m still from the country. You don’t have to think, you can feel a drought coming on.” ”

“How?”

“Your throat trickles for three days, That’s because the dust is not lying down. There are other ways.”

“Like?”

“The earth. The ground is like a drum. It’s true, you can hear it. As a drum-head gets hotter and drier, what happens? It gets louder. The same with the ground. Listen.”

Pribluda slapped his foot down. He stomped amongthe pails, delighted with his newfound ability to entertain, stomping harder and the more Arkady laughed. “This is peasant science,” he said.

Drought and rain, important to farmers and all of us. The economy is dependent upon a good growing season, cities and town need dependable water supplies. Not too much rain, but enough. Water is a precious thing and long-continuing drought in the Southwest has reached almost crisis proportions. It is precious in the Holy Land.

One of the great celebrations in ancient Israel and among Jews is the Feast of Booths, Sukkoth. If the rains do not come there will be no crops in the coming year. Through history, it was the lack of rains which produced famine, which drove the family of Jacob to Egypt for food. Modern Israelis have worked miracles with irrigation and scientific farming but the key today remains the rains which come in November and December. Each autumn the people of Israel gathered and still do to celebrate the festival and pray for rain.

The setting for our text is the feast. On this day water was carried from the pool of Siloam up to the Temple in Jerusalem. The water was carried around the altar and then poured out. We have a record of this ceremony and the prayers that were said. They all concern God’s gracious gift of water and beseech God to send the autumn trains. It was natural for Jesus to use this image of rain when he stood and cried out, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink!” (John 7:37 WEB). Jesus is the water of life, the living water. He has come to quench our thirst.

Jesus is the water of life, a good image for us because we can have drought in our personal life as well as in the fields. We can see it all around us in crime rates and abused children, drug and alcohol dependence, gangs, suicide. We can see drought in the lives of those who have little or nothing and in the lives of the rich and famous.

I was reading recently about the African-American community. Until the 1960s suicide rates were lower than for any other group of Americans. The people may have been poor, had inferior education and suffered institutional discrimination and bigotry, but they had intact families and communities. They had hope. Over the last forty years there have been so many advances to a non-racist nation but suicide rates have doubled in the African-American community. The article attributed the cause to lack of hope. Similarly, forty years ago the clergy were the healthiest group in America with much lower rates of alcoholism and obesity, divorce and abusive behaviors. Now they mirror the rest of the country and in areas of job and family have stress higher than many other groups of people. Perhaps as respect for the clergy, decline of many denominations, marginalization of religion, have advances, ministers too have lost purpose and hope.

The spiritual drought affects young people and old people, It affects those with little understanding of religion and those who have tried to live the Christian life. Bob George, in his book Classical Christianity, describes how he, like many pastors and church workers and ordinary Christians, had lost faith and hope. His Christianity had become professional. He remembered driving down the road near tears––praying that the Lord would bring back the joy he had when he first became a Christian. Among the ranks of atheists and agnostics there were many who once were Christian but began to feel that God was remote, even absent. Many others remain Christian but feel guilty, feel shamed, feel very little joy or hope.

I was reading recently how so many “shoulds” and “oughts” within the Christian Church cripple many sincere Christians. It takes the form of self-depreciation, spiritual anxiety, legalism, anger, denial. We have taught people that they should somehow be more than human. We quote the text, “Be ye perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect.” We have forgotten that the word really should be “complete” not “perfect.” We are only humans beings and Jesus is really telling us to be our “best selves,” what we really are when God has been able to complete God’s work in us. We have neglected to proclaim grace that frees us from having to perform, be successful, be always cheerful and optimistic and expansive. Jesus is the living water. We do not have to quench the thirst ourselves. We do not have to pretend that we are now dry and dusty, but merely open ourselves to what God has to give us in Christ. Bob George reminds his readers that what we need is what he calls the great exchange. We come to Jesus and give him our sins and doubts and fears. We rest in his promises and receive in the exchange his goodness and acceptance. Jesus is the living water who will quench our thirst.

Norman Vincent Peale tells of a visit he made to Japan. He recalled walking into a Shinto shrine. In front of the shrine was an enormous urn in which charcoal was burning and steam coming up. The Shinto tradition taught that if one were ill in any way, the cure was to stand by the urn and let the steam blow on the ailing part. Then the person would be healed. Peale noticed that people were standing all around. He even saw an American, a Texan, walk over and let the steam blow on his chest. “Do you have heart trouble?” he asked him. “Yes, so I’m blowing it on my heart.” When asked whether he believed it would help, the man replied, “Well, who knows. Maybe it will.” In a sense the Church has forgotten that Christ is the healer. Christ will heal our troubled hearts, our broken hearts. Christ will give living water to quench our thirst and refresh our troubled minds and cool our fevered souls.

Jane Strohl now a professor at Augsburg College but formerly of the Lutheran Seminary in Berkeley, has written about the New Age movement which has grown rapidly among those who are searching for a spiritual experience but have given up on traditional and institutional religion. She writes, “Practitioners of New Age see in their pursuits manifestation of the dawning of a new age of the spirit, human and divine…it is apparent that program are directed to people suffering from some kind of deficit, resulting, perhaps from the dynamics in their family of origin, illness, cultural structures and expectations. There is clearly in all this a longing for redemption, a hunger to know and be known, to move boldly into the future instead of remaining a hostage to the past, to cherish rather than surmount the bodily nature of human existence. Where so much New Age thinking goes wrong,” Strohl continues, “is that whatever the form may take-Hindu or Buddhist thought, crystals, channeling, yoga, recovery movement, men’s movement, women’s movement, goddess-thought, Native American religion––no matter what form the New Age movement may take, it rests upon the powerful belief that the cure for what ails us lies within us. The well is not dry or even polluted,” Strohl notes, “Hand-over-hand, I can draw out of myself the wherewithal to overcome the past and secure for myself a future of ever-expanding possibilities.”

We counter as Christians, that we cannot save ourselves through our own reason and strength. The solution is not within ourselves but outside ourselves. The answer to our longings is God’s grace in Jesus Christ. Christ does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. He accepts us. He forgives us. He heals us. We do not look to ourselves but to Jesus. From his comes the living water to wash away our sin, to quench our thirst, to give new life to our dry and dusty soils. Amen.

Scripture quotations from the World English Bible.

Copyright 2014 James D. Kegel. Used by permission