Meeting our spiritual needs is just as critical to our survival as meeting our physical needs

Sermon delivered Sunday, March 19, 2017 (Third Sunday in Lent, Year A) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): Exodus 17:1-7, John 4:5-42

Water is essential for all known forms of life. It could even be said that water is the key to life, biologically speaking. So it no surprise that religious symbolism around water is extensive and widespread. We are dependent on water for our very survival, and we are dependent on God to provide us that water.

In our baptismal service, we give thanks to God for this physical, earthly element and recount the ways in which it is part of our religious history:

“We thank you, Almighty God, for the gift of water.
Over it the Holy Spirit moved in the beginning of creation.
Through it you led the children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt into the land of promise.
In it your Son Jesus received the baptism of John and was anointed by the Holy
Spirit as the Messiah, the Christ, to lead us, through his death and resurrection, from the bondage of sin into everlasting life.

We thank you, Father, for the water of Baptism.
In it we are buried with Christ in his death.
By it we share in his resurrection.
Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit.
Therefore in joyful obedience to your Son, we bring into his fellowship those who come to him in faith, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” (BCP 306-07)

But this brief summary of significant events in the history of our faith that happened in water, with water, or through water doesn’t include the two we hear about in our readings today. The framers of our Prayer Book could have added a few more lines to that prayer:

“With it you nourished the children of Israel in the wilderness.
Through it your Son Jesus connected with a Samaritan woman, breaking down religious boundaries and bringing her to acknowledge him as the Messiah.”

God not only brought the children of Israel out of Egypt through water – by walking through the parted waters of the Red Sea – he sustained them during those forty years in the wilderness with water, providing them water from the rock in the desert. Despite the people’s quarreling and grumbling and complaining, questioning the purpose of that very liberation God had brought to them, God continues to be faithful and provides them with the basics for life – water from the rock, and food in the form of manna from heaven and quail.

And Jesus was not just baptized in water; he continued to use water as a powerful image in his teaching, including when he spoke to Nicodemus about being born “of water and the spirit” in the passage we heard last week, and when he told the Samaritan woman in our reading today that he had “living water” to give her, water that would never leave her thirsty again.

She doesn’t understand at first that he’s not talking about actual physical water, some kind of magic liquid that could slake her thirst forever, but about a spiritual sustenance that could feed her soul from within, an internal “well” of strength, of support, of love, of comfort, of protection, offered to her through a connection with this man standing before her, this man who “told me everything I have ever done.”

Jesus’s reference to this internal spiritual sustenance as “living water” draws on its vital importance to human existence: it is key to life; without it we die. The same is true of our relationship with God. We must continually seek it – like this woman coming day after day to draw water from the well – or else we perish.

In 21st century America, where clean water is readily available with little to no effort or money expended on our part, many of us have lost touch with just how important the search for and acquisition of water is when one does not have easy access to it. To us, an offer of “living water” that would never leave us thirsty might be a nice but unnecessary additional convenience. It wouldn’t really impact our lives that much, because for us, acquiring water is as simple as turning on a tap only a few steps from where we happen to be at any given moment. For this woman, though, to have access to water that would assuage her thirst forever would be life-changing. It would mean she would not have to keep coming back to this well to draw water and cart it back to her household. She would have time and energy to devote to things other than mere survival. And so we can almost hear the desperation in her voice when she responds, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

It is with that kind of intensity, that kind of passion, that we should seek God as well. Our physical needs are so primary, so essential, that we can get stuck in seeking to fulfill them alone, but fulfilling our spiritual needs is the only way we will find true sustenance, true life, life beyond the physical, biological meaning of the word. Psychologist Abraham Maslow observed that until our basic physiological needs are met, it is nearly impossible for human beings to focus on anything else. Only when we have enough to eat, shelter, and water, can we begin to explore higher level needs like spiritual awakening. But what we often don’t realize is that our hunger, our craving, for those “higher needs,” is just as essential to our survival as the physical needs. Too many of us stop when we have our basic physiological needs met, neglecting to continue up that hierarchy of needs to pursue the rest of the things we need in order to be truly alive, truly fulfilled.

Jesus is telling the woman by the well that she has a deeper need even than the physical thirst that brings her here day after day, and that only when she addresses that need will her real thirst be quenched.

When the disciples come back and meet up with Jesus and encourage him to “eat something,” his response is, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” Just like the woman at the well, they don’t get it either, asking one another, “Did you give him some food? I didn’t give him any food. Did you give him some food?” - but again, he’s talking about a deeper hunger than the physiological. The “food” he has is of the same sort as the “living water” – an internal source, connected to a higher spiritual power, that has the ability to truly nourish in a way that literal, physical food cannot do.

Jesus reminds us that we will only assuage our true hunger and thirst when we seek God as desperately as we seek to fulfill our physical needs. “Give me this water,” we should cry out, like the woman at the well, give me the living water of God that will quench my soul.

But since it is very difficult, if not impossible, to do that seeking after God if our basic needs for food and shelter are not met, those of us who do have our basic needs met are called to do all in our power to assist others in meeting those basic needs so that they, too, can seek the kind of spiritual sustenance that will truly nourish them, completely, wholly, at every level of their being.