Running Water

John 4:5-42

I am addicted to water. 

To fresh, clean, running water. 

And when the all-too-frequent notices go up in my condo building about water shut-off for repairs, I get anxious and cranky.  I imagine everything that can go wrong if the water stays off.

I can’t cook or clean up.

I can’t wash my hands.

I’ll get thirsty.

The bathroom isn’t much use without water.

Things get dirty.

Dehydration gives you headaches, you know.

Imagine if the water were off in your home and workplace every day.

If the woman in today’s gospel story lived in the twenty first century developing world, she might find herself at the well at noon – in the worst heat of the day – because that’s the only time and way she could get water.

The water might be miles from her home.  Perhaps there are dangerous wildlife or gun-toting rebels between home and water source. 

Some days she has to send the children to fetch the water, but they can’t carry all she needs, and they miss school because keeping the family alive is an all-consuming project.

Her husband has died, because this water carries typhoid and intestinal parasites, and her brother, who has the only income in the family, is so sick he can’t get reliable work

The small garden she tried to plant has died because she can’t carry back enough to water the plants.  Fresh food is scarce.

Lack of water is deadly: to the body; to the heart and mind and soul.

Of course, that’s probably not the story of this Samaritan woman.  More likely the well is a short walk from her village.  But still, to cook, or clean, or drink, or bathe, she has to come haul heavy buckets of water up from the well, carry it home, and do it over and over again, as often as she needs water.

So when she gets over her astonishment at a Jewish rabbi asking her (a woman from the “unclean” stepsister tribe of Samaria) for water, and hears him offer her flowing water, running water, no wonder she leaps at the chance:

“Give me this water so I never have be thirsty again!”

Water is life.

Running water, flowing water, is freedom and abundant life.

Of course, this gospel story about water isn’t about running water, even though that’s what the phrase “living water” meant in the first century.   It’s about water that leads us to Spirit and truth.  It’s about the way that Jesus’ gift of life isn’t just for our thirst, but becomes a fountain within us, bubbling up continuously to spill over into other hearts and lives and souls.

The woman at the well asks Jesus for flowing water because her shoulders and her heart and her mind and her spirit are tired from hauling and fetching water over and over and over again.  Because she wants her life back.

But Jesus gives her what he offered in the first place. Not the running water she imagines, but the flowing Spirit that gives new life.

We see it happen gradually, as she begins to see him for what he is: a man of God, who sees the hard truths of her own life.  We see that flowing Spirit spill through her, inviting her neighbors to faith even before she is sure that she has seen the Messiah.

You and I don’t have to ask Jesus for running water.

When we don’t have flowing water we generally call the plumber.

But this morning we remember that every drop of flowing water in our lives is a sacrament, an outward and visible sign of God’s call to abundant life. To life without fear and anxiety, life with overflowing generosity.

This week, when you are anxious or distressed, go to the sink and turn on the water.  Fill a glass, and drink deeply of God’s call to live with confidence and freedom.

When you are tired or not feeling well, wash your hands in warm, clean water, and receive God’s gift of health and love.

Wash dishes.  Crunch vegetables that grew well-watered. 

Turn on the shower, splash with a child in the bathtub, and marvel at the sacrament of abundance.

When you sit down in a restaurant, or visit a friend, and someone offers you a glass of water, give thanks for God’s call to share our joy.

And this week, if you are moved to write a check, or dig in your pocket for some cash to help us dig a clean water well where it’s most needed,

pause to feel God’s Spirit bubbling up within you.  Notice the “spring of water gushing up to eternal life”  that Christ has already given you.

Because that is what’s happening. 

God gives us gifts we may not even recognize until we share them.

Many of us bought cupcakes and brownies last Sunday with pocket change, a dollar or two that we might not have thought about having in our wallets.  And the Rite 13 students raised $250.  (That’s 5% of our well, but it’s a very respectable number for pocket change.)

We can give the gift of life even before we realize we have received it ourselves. God’s Spirit bubbles through us even if we aren’t paying attention.  All we have to do is let it happen.

That’s what the woman learned at Jacob’s well one hot afternoon.  That’s what you and I get to learn this Lent:

Water is life. 

It’s health and freedom and opportunity for body and heart and mind and soul.  And it’s for sharing, whether we know it or not.

It’s not our water, it’s God’s: the gift of life bubbling over from our questions and our hope, from our thirst for God, and God’s love for us. 

We know it’s God’s water when it flows through us to bring new life to strangers and neighbors alike.

So when you turn on the tap this week, notice God’s gift of living water: all around us, and within us. A fountain of living water, gushing up to eternal life.

Are you thirsty yet?

Tempted by More

Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7, Matthew 4:1-11 

Every year I indulge in a little fantasy about what I’d like to give up for Lent.  Years ago, I would resolve that I was giving up homework, or being nice to my brother.  More recently, I’ve imagined giving up certain housekeeping chores, or meetings, or sometimes even church and work entirely, because by the time Lent comes, well, it’s been a busy winter, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks it would be nice to have a vacation about now.

This past week, as I talked to commuters and reporters and colleagues about Ashes to Go, our ministry at the train station, I found myself talking about how busy we are.  

We have long commutes, hundreds of chores and meetings, email that follows us wherever we go, basketball and ballet and play rehearsal. 

Multiplied by however many people live in your household.

No wonder people don’t come to church on Ash Wednesday.

Yes, it’s a matter of priorities.  We can still choose to make time for worship, for prayer, for the community of faith.  But the choices are hard, and many of us choose to try to do more, rather than choose between.

Sometimes those choices make us stronger. And sometimes those hard choices lead to frustration and anxiety. 

I find that doing all the things I ought to do, all the things I want to do, can turn me into a person I don’t want to be: Impatient, forgetful, and just plain tired.

(Has that happened to you?)

Work is necessary.  Volunteering is important.  Sports, clubs, music and art enrich our lives and our children’s lives.  Prayer and community feed our souls and put us in a position to help others.

Often our choices are between one good thing and another; between one good thing and more good things.

And that’s exactly what temptation is all about.

When the devil comes to Jesus, alone and fasting in the wilderness, it’s not really self-indulgence that the tempter offers.  It’s the opportunity to do more.

Turn these stones into bread.  You’re not the only one who is hungry.  Shouldn’t the Son of God make enough food for a hungry world?

Throw yourself off the roof of the Temple.  Let the whole world see that God is active, and will protect you.  Imagine the great PR you’d get!  Shouldn’t the Son of God demonstrate God’s power to a doubting world?

Shouldn’t the Messiah rule all the nations?  Isn’t that why the Son of God came to earth?

Those are the questions the tempter asks.

Something similar happens in that familiar episode from Genesis, from the beginning of our human story. Two humans, God’s good creation.  Conversing with another creature – a snake, more clever or cautious than the others, still of God’s creation – who suggests that God has been holding out on them.  That there is so much more that they could have and do.

“Don’t you want to be like God?  To know what God knows, to make your choices with knowledge like God’s?”

It’s a choice between good – serving and tending God’s creation – and more good – knowing what God knows and being able to choose between good and evil.

Shouldn’t God’s servants try to be more like God?

Shouldn’t the Son of God feed and rule the whole world, and demonstrate the power of God so the world will cease to doubt?

Eve and Adam choose more.

Jesus chooses less.

And so many generations later, I am still tempted by more.  Every day, when new knowledge is waved before me by the internet, the media, and other people, I reach for that fruit.  When the opportunity to do good in caring for others, by showing off the power of God, or leading and directing other people shows up in my work, it’s easier to say yes than no.

So I go past my limits.  My body can’t keep up, my heart and my head get overloaded.   I get tired, impatient and forgetful.

In trying to imitate God, I can entirely lose the image of God created within me.

I believe that’s what Lent is about.  A time to reclaim our limits,

to give up playing God for our own lives,

so that at Easter we are ready for resurrection to restore the image of God within us.

Jesus, fasting in the wilderness, declines the temptation to define himself, or his relationship with God, in terms of what he can do or achieve, but keeps turning the conversation to how we depend on God, how we pay attention to God.

We, keeping Lent in a busy, fast-paced world, can learn to do the same.

Maybe that’s why many people were so grateful to receive ashes at the train station.  Not just because they didn’t have to figure out how to fit church into a busy schedule,

but actually being reminded of our limits.

We are dust. 

We do die. 

We do fail. 

With all the goods that we can choose, we can’t create or earn immortality. 

We can’t do it all.  We have limits, and we need God to be more than we are ourselves.

That’s the truth of the ashes.   

And that is also what we practice in Lent.

We choose not to do something we enjoy – eat chocolate, watch a favorite show – so that we remember that we can’t have it all.

We confess things we don’t usually confess, because this is the season to remember that we fail.

We let go of the ways we try to make ourselves like God, so that we can remember the image of God that is already within us, created from the beginning, out of dust.

In Lent, we give things up, we let things go,

so that we are reminded, with every cookie left in the box,

that we cannot heal the world, we cannot save ourselves, by what we do.

When we let go, when we depend on God, the image of God within us is set free. 

And we are free to be healed by God, when we cannot do it ourselves.

Being Seen

Ash Wednesday 2011: Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

I was excited last week when I found out that the Daily Herald was interested in a story on our “Ashes to Go” ministry at the train station.  Thrilled that 25 other Episcopal congregations around Chicago were also taking Ash Wednesday to the streets. And very pleased when I heard there’d be a photographer from the Chicago Tribune.  
I want the cool things we can do in the Episcopal Church to be seen.   I want us to be recognizable as the people who think outside of the box, and bring church to the places where people need to meet God.

So we met people in the midst of their daily busy-ness, and prayed.  People who met us at the train got to see the gospel news it’s sometimes hard for us to say, and spent the day with a sign of our faith on their forehead: in meetings and errands and ordinary labor: a silent witness to our relationship with God.

And we got our picture taken.

And then we came back to church, and read the Gospel of Matthew.

"Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them…

Don’t blow your own horn.

Don’t disfigure your faces.

Don’t give, or pray, or practice self-denial so that other people can see you.

It’s ironic that we read this gospel right before we get ashes on our foreheads, but it is also exactly right.  Because even as Jesus tells us not to show off in order to be seen, he’s reminding us that everything we do is seen.  When you give, or pray, or fast: your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

God sees us. Even when no one else sees us.  Especially when no one else sees us.

Even if we don’t do “Ashes to Go” and call the newspaper, every Ash Wednesday you and I still have to consider those words, and decide if other people will see us with ashes on our foreheads. And we have to consider how we are seen by God.

Being seen by others isn’t entirely bad.  Being seen gives us instant feedback that we are meaningful, and interesting, and that the good we do is worth doing – even, sometimes, allows us to inspire others to do more good.  Those are good things.   Just as Jesus says: being seen by others is its own reward.

And some things require being seen by others. We couldn’t proclaim God’s invitation to repentance and forgiveness to strangers if we weren’t seen today on the train platform.

Of course, our human need to be seen, to be recognized, to know that we are significant to someone, even my desire to get our photo in the paper, can sometimes lead us into those things we are going to repent together in a few minutes.

But our desire to be seen by others reminds us that even more, we need to be seen by God.

And God does not see us through other people’s eyes, or even through our own.

That’s what the ashes are about.

We who receive ashes today were seen by God – noticed, recognized – when we were dust, when we were atoms and potential, before we were ever born, before humanity was created.

And we go back to that dust, to that formless state, in which no one can see us.  In which we can’t even see ourselves.  And in dust, in our formless, unseeable state, God’s recognition of us is just as real as it is in this moment.

Today, being seen by God is how we are called to repentance and grace. Or at least, that’s what allows me to face my failures,

my inability to measure up,

the things left undone,

the wrong I didn’t challenge,

my need to be “seen” by others,

every way in which I am broken.

Today we remember that when we are broken, God sees us more truly than we see ourselves.  From dust before we exist to dust beyond where we can be recognized anymore, God recognizes us.  And God who knows me in that way is the only one who can truly hear and forgive all of the ways in which I fail, and the things I don’t want anyone to see. 

I believe that’s why Jesus reminds us that God sees us “in secret,” and that’s why we receive the ashes. Because our everyday, public selves can’t bear the weight of what we will confess today. Only our self that is dust, the self visible only and always to God, can see all the ways we need God’s grace and love.  Only if we know that God sees us when we cannot see ourselves can we ask forgiveness for the things we don’t realize we do.

So today is a good news day.  Not because we were seen in the paper and the local news.  Today the really good news is that we can be seen in the ashes themselves. 

God sees us in the dust that comes before and after the life we know.  So God can heal even the brokenness no one else can see. And you and I, dusty or whole, can see grace we’ve never yet imagined.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

In God’s sight that’s not the end of our story, but the very best place to begin.