THE JOURNEYS OF LENT
MOSES – WATER IN THE WILDERNESS
Scriptures:
Exodus 17:1-7
John 4:5-15; 19-26
For the past two weeks we’ve been exploring our Lenten journeys – seeking to follow some key Biblical characters through their stories in order to see how their ways might link up with our own process of development (which is what a journey is really all about). We’ve followed Adam and Eve as they left the Garden of Eden, a form of being birthed. We’ve spent time with Nicodemus as Jesus led him through an inner journey, a form of being re-born. Now, we come to a truly long trek – wandering for 40 years in the wilderness. I doubt that too many of us would identify with that lengthy hiatus (although perhaps for some of us time spent in our own wilderness wanderings might seem like 40 years).
Our scripture passage from Exodus is one snapshot from that lengthy time. It comes after the heady experience of crossing through the Red Sea, leaving Pharaoh’s mighty armies far behind, and feeling that rush of exhilaration that comes from knowing that you are truly free. It takes place after the Israelites had been moving through the wilderness of Sin (or Sinai) for many years, trying to gather food where there was very little – until the Lord provided manna. Their prospects looked pretty dim. And so, as you might expect in such a situation, there was grumbling. The comfort and safety of their Egyptian homes was starting to look pretty good. That, of course, is the trouble with selective memory. Those “good old days” have a nice rosy glow to them, despite the fact that they were slaves and spent 20-hour days turning straw into brick. We can identify with that, can’t we? So often the problematics in our present situation make it seem as though we had it so much better way back when.
And so for the Israelites their freedom becomes a burden rather than a blessing. They squabble over every little thing. In the chapter immediately before our text they were upset because they had to go out and gather manna over and over again (even though it had freely come to them from the Lord) and especially because they had to gather two omers of it on the sixth day in order to be able to rest on the seventh, as the commandments Moses had from God said that they should. Moses is feeling pretty exasperated. So is God. The people had gone out to gather manna on the seventh day in spite of God having provided enough the day before to last two days. And so the Lord says to Moses (and you can just hear the frustration in God’s voice): “How long will you refuse to keep my commandments and instructions? See! The Lord has given you the Sabbath, therefore on the sixth day he gives you food for two days; each of you stay where you are; do not leave your place on the seventh day.” (Exodus 16:28-29)
And now after yet more wandering they come to camp at this place called Rephidim, where more frustration sets in. There’s no water to drink. Now, water is pretty essential for a group of people wandering through a desert. Here we can identify fairly strongly, can’t we? I know that while we’re in Las Vegas there doesn’t appear to be any trouble getting enough water to drink or for other necessities like bathing (although we do start to be very aware of it when we see a headline like that in the RJ on Wednesday announcing a 23% water bill increase). But all you have to do is go outside the city limits a little way, and you soon become aware of the toll a desert region can take on drinkable water. Last Monday Ann and I went north to the Valley of Fire and saw how prehistoric tribes tried to utilize this arid region – from the Anasazi Pueblo farmers, who were nomadic and didn’t stay in the area very long when it became too arid, to the Paiutes who sought to adapt to the desert environment and make it livable. For those of you who have been to the Valley of Fire, you probably took the trek to what’s called Mouse’s Tank, named for a renegade Indian who used the area as a hideout in the 1890’s. It’s a natural basin in the rock where water collects after rainfalls, sometimes remaining for months. It takes some moderately strenuous hiking to get there, but when you do you can see the water that’s been collected there against all expectation in that dry, arid country.
At Rephidim the Israelites needed to find something like a Mouse’s Tank. And so they came to Moses and demanded a miracle. It didn’t matter that God had already provided manna and quail or the pillars of fire and cloud that guided them. No, they were very much in a “what have you done for me lately?” mood.
And Moses comes through! Against all logical and human expectation the Lord directs Moses to take elders with him, lift up his staff, and strike the stone. And water flows out of it. This despite the fact that the people were bickering and quarreling and Moses admonishes them for trying to test the Lord. Indeed, he decides to call that place Massah (which means “test”) and Meribah (which means “quarrel”). Talk about your ironic names for something which is a miracle from God!
What’s behind this miraculous story – and the reason it is important for our Lenten journeying – is the need for us to be able to move forward with faith and trust in God’s abundant empowerment. As Andrea La Sonde Anastos notes, “The image of water in the desert, pouring from the rock to satisfy the needs of the people, is not merely an ancient miracle. It is a statement from God that God wishes us overflowing and new life out of the barrenness of our present existence. Like Moses, we have the power to uncover that miraculous spring. The only difference between Moses and the people of Israel was that Moses believed God’s promise and was willing to lift his staff and strike the rock. Moses was not capable where the people were not; Moses was willing where the people were not.”
This story of Moses striking the rock to bring forth water is repeated in the book of Numbers, chapter 20 – but with an important difference. The initial verses emphasize the fear of death. The text says that Miriam died there, and the quarrel that the people have with Moses begins, “Would that we had died when our kindred died before the Lord! Why have you brought the assembly of the Lord into this wilderness for us and our livestock to die here?” Most significantly, Moses is initially skeptical about the possibility of finding water, and his skepticism becomes a reason for God keeping him from entering the Promised Land. The purpose of this story, therefore, is to show that it is indeed God who controls the life-giving force, who gives the people what it is that they need to ease their thirst.
Water is such a powerful symbol for both life and death. We’ve talked about this before, I know, but it’s worth keeping in front of us as a primary way the Bible has to show us how God cares about us. The word “water” itself occurs 460 times in the Bible. In the creation story it is the deep, watery chaos that is the prelude to creation. Here water is a symbol for the unknown, for the “dark and hidden impulses which are active below the level of consciousness”, as Gilbert Cope puts it. The symbolism of creation, though, reminds us of a baby’s birth, as a mother’s water-sack bursts and the water flows out as a prelude to birth. It is through the nurturing and protectiveness of this water – and then finally its loss – that new life becomes possible. No wonder Jesus told Nicodemus that you must be born again of water and the spirit. Later in the Bible water becomes a symbol of destruction – the flood and the crossing of the Red Sea whereby the Egyptian armies are swallowed up. But at the same time these passages through waters became a sign of hope (the dove) and of deliverance from bondage – it became the gate of entry into a new life. What flows from the rock when Moses strikes it with his staff does not merely alleviate the people’s thirst. It gives them God’s blessing, as the prophet Second Isaiah will later come to express it:
For I will pour water on the thirsty land,
and streams on the dry ground;
I will pour my spirit upon your descendents,
and my blessing on your offspring. (Isaiah 44:3)
Of course, Jesus takes this symbolism one giant step further when he speaks to the woman at the well of “living water”. We’ve used this story before, but it’s such a seminal one that it bears taking a second look. It only occurs in John’s Gospel, but it has many striking features to it. The woman, whose name we never know, is a triple outsider: a Samaritan (hated by the Jews and vice-versa), a woman (little more than a piece of property in that culture; men’s morning devotions included the prayer, “Thank God I am not a woman”), and also, in that quaint phrase, a “fallen woman”. Nevertheless, Jesus talks longer with her than he does to anyone else in all the Gospels – longer than he talks to any of his disciples, his accusers, or even members of his own family.
Perhaps most significantly this woman – this three-times-an-outsider – is (in John’s Gospel, at least) the first person to whom Jesus reveals himself. At the end of their conversation, when she says, “I know that Messiah is coming,” Jesus simply, profoundly, proclaims to her: “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.” He is enabled to do this – that is, reveal his true identity – because she has allowed him to reveal her true identity. As Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor says, “By confirming her true identity, he reveals his own, and that is how it still happens. The Messiah is the one in whose presence you know who you really are – the good and the bad of it, the all of it, the hope in it. The Messiah is the one who shows you who you are by showing you who he is -- who crosses all boundaries, breaks all rules, drops all disguises – speaking to you like someone you have known all your life, bubbling up in your life like a well that needs no dipper, so that you go back to face people you thought you could never face again, speaking to them as boldly as he spoke to you.”
“…bubbling up in your life like a well that needs no dipper…..” Hold on to that image. That’s the crux of what Jesus means by “living water”. At first, this encounter seems very simple; Jesus is just asking her for a drink. But nothing is ever that simple with Jesus. This savvy woman knows that he is a Jew, and Jews have endless rules about what they may and may not eat and drink. If he sips from her bucket, he would be breaking the Jewish law.
She is not willing to leave it at that, though. She wants to talk about it. And Jesus, undoubtedly delighted by her forthrightness, responds: “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” Like Nicodemus, then, she takes him literally and asks questions intending to get a rational definition of this term “living water”. But after Jesus’ second response (“The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”) she “gets it”. “Sir,” she states quite decisively, “give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
Jesus has offered her a gift, symbolized as a spring of water which flows into and out of the heart – refreshing, rejuvenating, renewing – offering a new perspective on life and the beginning of an understanding of what it means to enter eternal life. A heart which is thinking only about the self is dry and barren – like the desert around us – but a heart which has felt a spring of water start to flow realizes now something of God’s purpose for it: to water others’ lives with this same sense of renewal. Our baptism, as we said last week, means accepting the flow of new life which rushes over you when you drink of the living waters.
Dante expresses this feeling at the end of his Purgatory:
I came reborn from that most holy water,
Renewed as with new leaves the trees of springtime,
Pure and intent on mounting to the stars.
Most of you know by now that my favorite film director is Ingmar Bergman. One of his loveliest films, though initially one of his bleakest, is “The Virgin Spring”. In it a beautiful maiden is attacked, raped, and murdered by thieves, who then ironically seek shelter for the night in her father’s house. The father discovers what they have done and brutally kills them. The next day they go to recover the girl’s body, and as they remove her a small spring bubbles out of the ground from the spot where she had been lying. Even out of an act as evil and incomprehensible as this – the sort of act which causes us to damn God for the purposelessness of the world – even here new life is possible. It is seeing this spring – this symbol of new life – that moves the father to forgive his daughter’s murderers and finally to bless God.
The spring of living water that Jesus offers to the woman at the well and that Moses offers to the people in the wilderness is there to assuage all of our thirsts – even that of Jesus himself, who cried from the cross, “I thirst”. What happens when we bring our thirsts to the spring of living water? We thirst for power, and we are given the meekness of a cross. We thirst for healing, and we are given the opportunity to heal others through the one kind word or the self-giving gesture. We thirst for love, and we are told to love our neighbor as ourselves. The living water of this spring does not quench our thirst directly but turns us outward beyond ourselves, and in so doing it refreshes and renews us in a way no ordinary water can. For the assuaging of any thirst always carries with it the command: “Go, and do likewise”. We thirst; we are filled; but then we are to let loose this spring of living water to flow throughout the world as it flows out of our hearts.
Amen
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
February 24, 2008