Good morning. I hope that our attempt to live-stream our service this morning is adding to your sense of connectedness with a community that loves you and is not adding to your sense of isolation and frustration. Technology can and does work both ways. Please know that, wherever you are on your spiritual journey, the power of prayer transcends walls and web connectivity. I am grateful for your prayers and I am keeping you in mine.

This morning our lectionary has given us readings for worshiping in the midst of a state of emergency – a national emergency – a world emergency. One of my wise mentors taught me in times of great peril, a wise preacher stays close to the text. Ripped from the headlines, the first reading from Exodus describes a people lost, wandering in the wilderness. If they had walked directly to the promised land at a comfortable pace, they could have made it in a few weeks, a month tops. They went the long way, the hard way, a way that took forty years. You might know that forty is a symbolic number for a period of trial or testing. Our word quarantine comes from forty and has to do with a test period to stop the spread of disease (spiritual or physical – no real difference in the Bible or in our lives either). Exodus describes a forty-year period of trial, and right from the beginning, a shortage of water and good food (and probably toilet paper) made the people grumpy, afraid, and dissatisfied with their leadership. The Torah says they were drinking from a well of bitterness and resentment. They quarreled with one another and tried the patience of the Holy One, saying, “Is the Holy One present among us or not?” (In Jesus’ own time the desert was the place for a quarantine.)

It’s important to me to tell you (or remind you) that the Hebrew place name spelled “samech-ayin-nun” that gets transliterated into the letters S-i-n is dangerously wrong for Christian readers of English. The word “Sine” is etymologically connected to Sinai. It would be much better to just use the word Sinai since that is the peninsula where the people were, and a more particular location hasn’t been determined. I shudder to think how many English-speaking priests and pastors are talking about the Israelites being in a wilderness of sin this morning. Our scripture readings for today are not directly addressing sin, but are reflections on thirst, and the physical and spiritual desire for wellsprings in the midst of suffering. In her book about Exodus, The Particulars of Rapture, Contemporary Bible scholar Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg writes “the Torah makes a point of God’s not taking the [the people on an] obvious route … Through this opening speech at the moment of redemption, we understand that the Israelites, even at this moment, (having been delivered out of Egypt and across the Red Sea) are ambivalent about the movement to freedom.” Zornberg writes of the enormous challenges of anxiety and uncertainty for the Israelites, and the great temptation to return to enslavement, where at least the people had a sense of consistency and predictability.[1]

Rabbi Corey Helfand points out that the Babylonian Talmud teaches, “There is a long way which is short and a short way which is long.” The journey of the Israelites through the wilderness from slavery to freedom was filled with trials and tribulations, yet ultimately, through their circuitous route, they became stronger as a people from their experiences, more mature through overcoming adversity and eventually, more assured that leaving Egypt was in fact the right thing to do.[2] But that was only in hindsight.

Our reading from Paul’s letter to the Jesus followers in Rome is written to encourage a group of people he did not know personally, but whose fidelity in spite of their afflictions or sufferings he had heard about. He reminded them that their fidelity to caring for one another and loving God was in fact their vindication or justification before God. He reminded them that “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the spirit of holiness that has been given to us.” It’s Paul’s elegant way of saying that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. And we know from this same letter from Paul that nothing, not even death, not even what does kill us, whenever it comes, can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. 

Our Gospel story this morning is the story about the first person to engage in an extended theological discussion with Jesus according to the Gospel of John, the person who had the longest reported conversation on any topic with Jesus in all four of the Gospels. She was the first person reported to have evangelized a city, to be an apostle, according to the Gospels. And the Gospel of John tells us it only took two days for the people to tell her that her testimony was no longer needed. The Gospel of John doesn’t honor the Samaritan woman at the well with a name. I call her Sylvie because of that great jailhouse blues song by Huddie Ledbetter, “Bring me little water, Sylvie.” 

What I want to tell you is that this Samaritan woman has been grossly mistreated by theologians and preachers and Sunday School teachers who have said that if she were a good woman, she wouldn’t have been at the well alone in the middle of the day. If she were a good woman, she wouldn’t have had five husbands and she certainly wouldn’t be with a man who was not her husband. But, you know what? I think that’s nonsense. There’s nothing here to suggest that she is anything but a good woman. Bold, maybe. Uppity enough to ask some questions and get some answers and then tell the people in the city that she might have met the one who’s going to deliver them all. They believed in Jesus, were loyal to Jesus, sought Jesus out, John writes, because of the woman’s testimony – literally because of her Word. Our Sylvie was a truth-teller from the very beginning to the very end of this story. Our Sylvie reminds me of our beloved Bishop Barbara Harris.[3] So please get the idea that she was somehow tainted or immoral out of your heads, because it’s just not true. 

John’s story goes that Jesus was tired out by his journey — tired and thirsty. Providentially, his temporary resting place was Jacob’s well. Jacob, you may remember, like Jesus, was also traveling away from conflict when he got as far as he could, laid down to rest in what he took to be a godforsaken place, and had one of the great dreams of the Hebrew Bible. When he awoke, he said, “surely God was in this place and I, I did not know.” His name is in this story to emphasize that God is present in places or situations or people that some folks deem godforsaken. 

There are two more things that I want you to notice here. First, whatever happened to Jesus in this encounter, according to John, it caused him or provoked him to say, “I am” in response to the Samaritan woman’s hope that the Messiah will come and explain everything. “I am” is the name of God revealed to Moses at the burning bush.[4] In the Gospel according to John, this is the only time that Jesus directly acknowledges that he is the Messiah. And he says it not to a Judean, or Galilean, not to his band of followers, but to a Samaritan, and not to a man, but a woman. He says it to our “Sister Outsider,” Sylvie! 

Second, Jesus says “those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” A few chapters later in John, Jesus says “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who trusts in me drink. Anyone, as the scripture has said, ‘Out of the one who trusts shall flow rivers of living water.'”[5] And, in the end, what Jesus says on the cross, according to John, is “I thirst.” John is testifying here to the idea of God being both the water and the thirst – both physically and spiritually – God is the desire and God is the wellspring. Love is the question and love is the answer.

The more I reflected on thirst, the more I was thinking this week about how many people (myself included) are thirsty, emotionally and spiritually. I thought about how easily we can see ourselves spiritually in an arid desert, like the people Moses led out of slavery, feeling like we’re running on empty, looking longingly over our shoulders at some “good old days” when we might have been enslaved but at least we weren’t thirsty! I thought about how we need to keep finding and pointing to those wellsprings from which we can draw living water to refresh our whole beings – bodies, minds, spirits, and to refresh our whole communities which are parched and brittle with thirst for right-relationship and thirst for distributive and restorative justice. Our thirst is an indication of the presence of the Holy One. Remember. Remember, our wellsprings are an indication of the presence of the Holy One. Remember.

I want to invite you to reflect on taking the long way to God’s promised place, of suffering and endurance, character and hope; of your thirst and the wellsprings that even now are pouring living water of God’s love for you from the buckets of strangers, yours for the asking. Listen to this poem by American poet Virginia Hamilton Adair called “Entrance”[6] Remember as I read it that “hamakom,” Hebrew for “the place,” is a name for the Divine.

We have all known, now and then,

that the place is always there, waiting,

ours for the asking,

for the silent stepping out of ourselves

into solace and renewal.

We do not even need a gate,

though it can be pleasantly awesome,

a ritual of entrance.

Some walk straight in,

through the invisible wall of wonder.

Some scramble through a hedge of thorns,

thankful for the pain, the bright drops of blood.

Some enter over the token length of wall;

They like the solid scrape of stone,

the breathless act of climbing.

Once we are in, no matter how,

the secret terrain goes on forever.

When we forget it is there,

then it is gone,

and we are left outside

until we remember.