Thirsty for God

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

It’s been a week of anxiety and confusion, hasn’t it?
Every time we turned around, the precautions we are taking as a society to help slow the spread of this new coronavirus have changed.  Will there be school? book club? March Madness? business meetings? church??

What’s canceled now, and what’s open? How is that different from this morning? from 30 minutes ago?

And then, as the closings escalated…. well, if you’ve been to a grocery store in the last 48 hours, you’ve been in a wilderness of anxiety and scarcity.

A place of confusion, complaint, and thirst.

It’s not just that the bottled water has been in short supply for a week or more now. Groceries, general goods stores, and the internet have become places where we are now vividly conscious of our need for the essential things necessary to sustain life.

That’s thirst.

The thirst that God’s people experienced in the wilderness, when they’ve made camp in the region of Rephidim, and they discover that there’s really no water here. God’s already providing manna and quail, so they can eat. But without water… without water, we simply can’t live.

It’s not even a tiny bit surprising – perfectly reasonable, in fact – that the people turn to Moses, God’s direct representative among them, and demand water. Demand what will save their lives.
No surprise, honestly, that they do it with complaint and anger and accusation.

It’s not surprising to me, either, that the fundamental question God’s people are asking isn’t just “where’s the water?”, but “What happened to God??”
Did God abandon us, now? Did God bring us out here to die?
Is the Lord among us, or not?

Those are the questions that often underlie our sense of anxiety and danger. The often unconscious triggers of our irritability, bursts of selfishness, or loud complaint in situations of uncertainty and scarcity.

It’s that question about whether we still matter. Are we no longer loved by God? How could God let this happen to me, to us? Is God just not paying attention?

Are we still the people of God, if the outward and visible signs of God’s care for us are gone? If the things we depend on to assure us of God’s grace are being withheld?

The warnings not to touch one another right now, the decision not to gather in person for prayer and assurance, the upheavals in our sense of blessing and security at the communion rail have stirred some of this anxiety in God’s church here and now. We know what it feels like to be thirsty for that baseline sense of God’s presence and care that we’ve gotten used to.

Of course, it affects many of us differently than others. Some of us even find assurance and care in the decision to step back from communion and public worship.

And others of us may just not be wondering about God at all – other pains and needs, other challenges and absences have more of our attention.

Sort of like that woman Jesus meets today, in the quiet noon at Jacob’s well.

She knows she’ll find the basic life necessity of water in the well, haul it home, and keep working on daily life. She’s gotten used to living with problems, used to a life without many signs of God’s grace and care for her.
There are, it turns out, a number of explanations for why a woman of first-century Samaria would have had five husbands and now be living with some other man. Many of them are no fault of her own; all of them suggest a history of things going wrong, of troubles uneasily survived, of becoming that unlucky person that no one wants around any more.

She’s gotten used to living without evidence of God’s presence and grace, and she’s not aware of her thirst for much of anything – except maybe a common drink of water – when she comes to the well.

But Jesus stirs up her thirst,

asking her – unfortunate, weary her – to give him water,

and then tantalizing her with living, running, unquenchable water – and reminding her of all that mess in her life that needs the healing and grace of God.

It’s probably not an accident that after he stirs up her thirst, she starts asking him those questions about where we truly find God.  Here, on the mountain our ancestors have worshipped on? There at your Temple in Jerusalem? Where’s our real access to God? Does God even care?

Jesus’ fundamental answer to her questions is “I AM.”
It’s a declaration of the real, vivid, presence of God right there in his body in front of her at that well in the middle of the most ordinary of days. It doesn’t matter what mountain you worship on. God is here. I am.

These stories about thirst that we read today are really stories about the revelation of the presence of God.

That woman has such a powerful experience of the presence of God, of the care and grace of God poured into the numb, exhausting shadows of her life, that she drops her bucket and races into town to tell the world, to ask them to share her experience of God and affirm it for her – to make it real by sharing it.

And God doesn’t just pop open a river by the thirsty camp in the wilderness. He calls Moses and the elders – the trustworthy witnesses and leaders of the people – out to a place where God will be standing right in front of them as they find the water God provides.
Water that saves our physical lives; the trustworthy assurance of God’s presence, God’s active care, that heals our souls of the dry blistering of uncertainty, anxiety, doubt and fear.

When the ordinary signs of God’s care for us go missing; when our basic assurances of comfort and love are dried up or disappeared,

God is going to break open some new way of revealing God’s self to us.

Sometimes that means that God is going to stir up our thirst, awaken longings we’ve long since learned to ignore. Sometimes we’ll get cranky in the delay between our awareness of this thirst for love and holiness, when we feel how hard it is to live when that God-shaped well in our hearts feels empty.
But every time – every time – God will reveal God’s self in acts of salvation and healing, love and care, embracing our needs and doubts in God’s overwhelming love.

I don’t know what the next month or two holds for us.
I’m not even sure about this week, or what may change by tomorrow.

I know we’ll be out in this wilderness for a while, and that there’s every chance we’re going to feel our spiritual and emotional and even physical thirst repeatedly.

So I’m asking you to join me in intentionally receiving the revelations of God that are happening even now, in response to our thirst, and the thirst of others.

Maybe it’s simple kindnesses in those chaotic grocery stores – or at food pantries and on neighbors’ doorsteps.

Maybe it’s a decision you didn’t want to make that somehow relives your anxiety anyway.

Maybe it’s a word of truth and trust that you discover because suddenly you’ve got to read the Bible or pray at home – or the stirring in your own heart by which God invites you to a new kind of prayer.

Maybe it’s a miracle of cooperative action or unexplained chance that spreads healing or saves the vulnerable.

  

Keep your heart open; and pay attention to your thirst,

and even to your anxiety, uncertainty, and doubt,

because God is about to reveal God’s self,

to astonish us with the vividness of divine presence and the salvation of God’s loving care.
To assure us that yes, always, with us and for us, God is here.