March 3, 2002
Third Sunday in Lent

Living Water

How many of you have read James Mitchner’s novel Hawaii? Quite a few of you. Now Mitchner doesn’t do a great job depicting the congregational missionaries, in fact they would be enough to make you change to the Baptist along with Bob Wiesen. There is another story to be told about the Congregationalists, and if you read some other materials, you will find that they were not as despicable as Mitchner made them out to be. In Mitchner’s books there are sometimes these images that have stayed with me for a long, long time. As I thought about the issue of “living water” I remembered some of the story that I shared in preparation for worship today. When the Polynesians from Bora Bora were headed out to find these islands that had been told of in legends throughout the years. They were south of the equator and they headed east on the trade winds that would carry them. They carried them past the islands, they had to get far enough past the islands then paddle north again to catch the prevailing winds west, north of the equator, to get back to the Hawaiian Islands. I remember the story in part because it has a strong image about how the heavens, the stars were used for navigation. The Polynesians we good friends with the night sky and could finds their way about all of the islands, because they knew the stars and knew their movements. As they traveled east and farther north, they began to lose the constellations that were familiar to them. It is an amazing part of the story when they came north and discovered a star that does not move in the night sky. At first they were even afraid to speak to each other about it, then finally, tentatively they said, “Did you see it? Did you notice that it did not move?” They had discovered, of course, the North Star. They said, “How wonderful it must be for navigators to have that star to sail by.” But while they were traveling east and then paddling north, they ran short of water. They didn’t know if they were going to survive. The ration was cut down, day by day. Particularly for the livestock and the women onboard. The men needed to continue paddling and to keep up their strength, but for all hands, there was very little water to drink. The heart-breaking story of the preparation for worship spoke about seeing a squall of in the distance and paddling madly only to find that it had moved on or disappeared by the time they arrived.

We have a great physical need for water in our lives. Without a rainstorm, those Polynesians would not have survived the trip and would not have settled in the Hawaiian Islands. Without water, we wouldn’t last very long. Each of us could last maybe a month, maybe a little more, without food. But two or three days without water is all we could survive. I was surprised a couple of months ago when the muslins were carrying on their month long fast of Ramadan, that they fast from sunrise to sundown, eating during the hours of darkness. Their fast is not only from food, but is also from water. I don’t know about you, but if I go without drinking for a long time, my mouth starts to real like a morning mouth, like the Russian Army walked across it in their stocking feet. It is not a pleasant feeling to not drink water throughout the day. There has been more that one member of our congregation who has been taken to the hospital with dehydration, for not drinking enough water. Water is critical for us as human beings. The majority of our bodies are just corralled water, held together. So, we need to have water on a regular basis and to understand the life giving properties of water is not difficult for us at all.

But, water is used in another way in the scriptures. Not literally, but figuratively. That we have a thirst, a spiritual thirst. A thirst that needs to be quenched. So, we try all different ways to try and quench it. Often we attempt things that are of no help at all in quenching a spiritual thirst. Fredrick Buechner, one of the authors that I like to quote, has a definition for the word “lust.” He said, “Lust is a man who craves salt to quench a thirst.” We try all sorts of things in our lives to take care of the spiritual needs that we have. You might define these in different ways. You might say that we are lonely, or that we need to feel loved. That we need to belong. That we need to have a sense of meaning in life. However you define it, it is the same for each of us. Some kind of a deep need for connection. An understanding of exactly who we are. Where we belong. What we should do with our lives. So people are led astray in all sorts of destructive ways. Lust, alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, food. Food is an example of something that is good and necessary, but taken to an extreme then becomes something bad. I have been mulling over as the years have gone by, what my relationship to all of the material things that we have in our house. I have made asides to that from time to time in my conversations with you. I keep thinking about the issue of collections. I know that there are people who collect things because it is part of their career, part of their vocation, they need examples of things, or they are trying to learn about a particular issue or time in history, so they collect things to help give them knowledge. But, I think that a lot of us collect things as part of our attempt to slake our thirst. We think that if somehow we can just be in control of this part of our life, if somehow just this special interest can be complete, that somehow we will have won a victory. Some how we will not be as thirsty anymore. So, if we have rooms and rooms of books in our house, the more books that we have, the more we can assure ourselves that we have the best stories, that we have the information that we will need at our finger tips whenever we need it. I think you can be addicted to books. To figurines, or to marbles or to stamps or to coins. What ever it is, I invite you to ask the questions of yourself that I ask of myself, “What purpose do these things have in my life? Do they enhance my life? Are they a burden? Are they something that I use to fool myself?” I think experiences can be the same way. Some of us when we finally get tired of collecting things, we then collect experiences. To go places, to travel, to see new things. Now that is not to say that there aren’t good learning things that can be done with travel, just as there are good learning things that can be done with collections. But it is important for us to know the reason why we go places and do things. If we are keeping busy, just so that we don’t have to live with ourselves, then again, it is a bad habit, it is a preoccupation that keeps us from being alive. Keeps us from living.

A couple of weeks ago I attended a folk concert and Utah Phillips said, “Well folks, it is a pleasure to be...” and everyone was filling in the blank with “Seattle,” “the great Northwest”. “…it is a pleasure to be, well it always has been a pleasure to be, it is now and it will be in the future, it is a pleasure to be anywhere.” He said, “It is a pleasure to be alive! It’s a pleasure to be able to wake up in the morning! It is a pleasure to be able to greet friends! It is a pleasure to be able to enjoy food, to drink water! It is a pleasure TO BE!” A lot of us are uncomfortable being. A lot of us are bored to tears with “being.” So, we find something to keep ourselves busy, something to entertain ourselves. We slake our thirsts with salt. And find ourselves as empty as when we first began.

The scriptures say that if we are thirsty we can turn to God and God will quench our thirst. If we turn to God, and open ourselves to God’s love, and commit ourselves to working for God’s justice in the world, Jesus said we will never thirst again. We will still have to go to the faucet for a cup of water, but that thirst, inside here, right hear, that thirst will be quenched. It is a remarkable promise. Remarkable promise because all of us spend our lives searching for someway to stop thirsting. I invite you to open your lives to God’s love. To live that love out in your life. To love yourself, to be comfortable with who you are, with just being in the world. If you collect, or drink, or eat to excess. Some of us eat to success too, I guess. If you eat to excess, if you travel compulsively, think on those things, pray on those things, ask for God’s Spirit in your life.

We give thanks for the living water. Amen.