Lent 3                                                                                    Exodus 17:1-7
Twente, Arnhem                                                                    Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-42
Living Water
Do you know what it is like to be really thirsty?  We live in a country where the problem is more often too much water than too little.  It seems unimaginable to us that there are places where water is scarce, when we are surrounded by canal after canal, river after river and a vast system of dikes to keep the North Sea at bay.I have never seen the Sahara or the Australian Outback.  But I have travelled across the vast Western deserts of the US, through Texas, Utah, New Mexico, California and Arizona, whose very name means dry place.  Those deserts are awesomely beautiful but also forbidding places.  Nice places to see on holiday, but it must be a challenge to live there.  Signs warn motorists and visitors to make sure they have enough coolant in their engines and enough water to drink.  ‘Drink even when you are not thirsty’, they say, and ‘Wear sun block, factor 50 if possible!’  I can assure you that you wouldn’t want to be stuck without water or skin protection out there in Death Valley or in the Mojave.  Without that you wouldn’t last more than a day, if that.So I can have sympathy with the poor Israelites, following Moses around in the Egyptian and Palestinian deserts.Freed from slavery in Egypt, they expect to march straight to the Promised Land.  But they lose their way, both in the literal sense and the spiritual one.  Faith was easy when all seemed certain.  But now, when things get tough, they begin to lose it.  And they start to quarrel amongst themselves and with Moses, their leader.  When faith is not deep-rooted, it will dry up when challenged.  But if our faith is nurtured and we attend to it, it will stand up to the tests of life, and see us through the hard times.Moses, the great leader himself, was under pressure.  He was beginning to lose confidence in himself and God’s plan.  It is actually quite easy for leader to lose faith in himself and his mission, especially when under criticism.  And Moses, unfortunately does what any leader is tempted to do at that point: give the people what they want, even if it is not what God wants for them at that stage.  God had fed them with manna, God had previously led them to watering holes; surely he would provide again.  But the people were impatient with God and his representative, and part of me can sympathize.  But that did not mean that Moses should have caved in, which is what he did.  In the version of this story in Numbers 20, after Moses strikes the rock to give water to the thirsty Israelites, the Lord tells Moses that because of his mismanagement of the situation, he would not enter the Promised Land.  Such is the penalty the leader paid for caving in to the demands of the people instead of heeding the Lord.  It seems harsh, but then, at the end of the day, who knows better, those who wait for the Lord or those who are impatient?The place where the Israelites quarrelled and Moses caved in is known as Meribah (quarrel) and Massah (test).  The story asks us how deep is our trust in God?  Will it get us through the dry places in our lives?  Should we not seek to deepen it so it will?Fast forward to the story of Jesus meeting the woman at the well.  In last week’s Gospel passage, Nicodemus met Jesus.  And this encounter provides the contrast.  Nicodemus was influential, respectable, orthodox, a trained theologian.  The woman at the well is despised, otherwise she would not be forced to be out in the noonday sun to fetch water, but would do it with the other women and children at the cooler times of day.  She is a moral outcast, a woman with a reputation for being with many men.  She is heterodox, a Samaritan, who did not agree with the Jews about the importance of the Temple.  She was uneducated.  She is the opposite of Nicodemus.  He came to Jesus at night.  She in the scorching sun in the middle of the day.  But she is bold, where Nicodemus was tentative and timid.  And there is something to be said for her boldness.  She thirsts for a new life.Like Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus, this conversation, too, unfolds on two levels.  The literal one of her thinking, and the deeply meaningful one of Jesus.  Nicodemus was no better for all his learning – he thought being born again meant having to go back into his mother again!  But Jesus is speaking of the deep things of the Spirit, and he can’t be so earthbound and literal when he speaks of Spirit.  It is not possible.Instead, he invites this woman into his world.  A world that is not solely devoted to our physical needs but our spiritual ones.  Where spiritual thirst is understood and can be satisfied.  Not with some concoction we invent for ourselves.  This woman has been there and done that kind of life, so to speak.  But with the very living water of God himself.  One can keep coming back, day after day, to the same old things the world offers.  Or one can drink in God.  If we truly drink in God, we will be alive in a totally new way, that will be hard to explain to those who are focused on the physical and the literal.  But if we drink in God, we will never be spiritually thirsty again.  Because we will be drawing on the living source of all things.No wonder this woman ran off and told all her friends.  When one is filled with the living water of God, God’s Spirit of love bubbles up in you.  It may challenge the way you live, just like changed that woman at the well.  And it will certainly flow over, and flow out to others.They really should put up warning signs in spiritually dry places.  Warning.  It may look dry, but if you dig deep, beyond the surface, God is to be found.  Just as Jacob once realized, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.’  If you thirst for God, he who knows our needs better than we do, will not just fill you with what you need to live, but will fulfil you with eternal life.