We can read the scriptures today and forget how important water is for us and how much we take for granted.
Many years ago, when I was a young man in my 20s I would hunt on a ranch in the hill country run by one of those salt of the earth type of women. She was friendly but direct. She said less with her words than she did with her actions, work, and you learned more from her eyes than you did her lips.
She was Hill country through and through. She was working the ranch when Lyndon Baines Johnson, a local boy, ran for congress and fought for including the Hill Country in the Rural Electrification Administration created by President Franklin Roosevelt. It was the 30s and while most cities had electricity many rural areas did not…making the impact of the depression even worse. The Pedernales Electric Coop was the result of Johnson’s efforts. By the time I would hunt there in the 70s no one would have guessed the struggles the people, and this hill country grandmother had experienced.
We would hunt their each season and we got to know her and her family. Her son, Lyndon was named after President Lyndon Johnson. As were many in that region because of Johnson’s efforts to make life easier in the hill country.
Before the late 30s when electricity began to flow, they drew their own water from wells and required housewives to haul up the 4 gallon buckets from the sometime100 foot deep wells, for washing clothes, drinking, food preparation, and well living. Manually retreiving water was difficult. The did everything manually while the world read by electric lights they went to bed for another hard days of work was to be had the next day…and every day…it was a chore and it was part of the life living in the hill country.
When President Johnson and the Pedernales Electrical Coop brought electricity in 1939 it changed their life forever. Today there are still a lot of Lyndons in the phone book.
When I read about water in scripture I always think about the history of the Hill Country, the struggle for electricity and running water and what it meant to the people I met there.
When the Israelites camped in the desert and thirst for water it was a real human need just as it is for all people. Everything needs water to live. There were no faucets with water flowing or convenience stores with rows upon rows of bottled water.
And the woman at the well had come there because she like all people needed water for her own thirst and her household needs, for cooking, cleaning and drinking.
But it is good that we remember that water was a much more precious commodity then than it is for most of us sitting here today.
Scripture uses the things of this world, earthly, physical, temporal things to teach us about spiritual things. About eternal life, about God and about our relationship with our Father.
Water is a good example for we thirst very soon if deprived of it. We depend on it as do all living things
We need clean water.
But the message today is that we also need living water, spiritual nourishment. When we fast in Lent it is so we can take a moment to realize that our need for water and hunger for food should be secondary to our thirst for God.
Most people in our world spend a lot of money and time trying to quench a thirst or feed a hunger they cannot ever satisfy.
Some think if we just had a better job, a better house, a better spouse, if we only had more money….if we only had that next nip or tuck, if we could just look younger for a few more years….
and we trade in our wives like Henry the 8th and we take on another mortgage for the second house, and we may find we are a little less Christian in our focus and thirst as we strive to get ahead of others in business or work….all the while like the Samaritan woman who traded husband after husband only to find she was without a true husband still…
This Lent is a good time to reexamine what do we believe will satisfy our hunger and thirst? What have we exalted by placing all our time and money and energy in achieving?
And how that has worked for us so far. All of us who seek the truth will find it in the Living Water, in Jesus Christ. We are all seekers in this life.
There are actually three seekers in our readings today. The israelites who sought water but also were struggling to believe God was with them still, the woman at the well who sought happiness with multiple husbands,
and the disciples, who sought food while Jesus spoke to the woman at the well. The disciples who came back with food and wondered what Jesus was seeking, why was he talking to this woman, this Samaritan…..
Jesus told them he had food that they do not know of.
It might seem this mention of the disciples is just a digression from the story of the woman at the well but it is central to his message. For Jesus lived to do the will of the Father and it was like food to him.
So we have here food and water as rich symbols pointing to something bigger than mere water and mere food but pointing to truth and belief and the will of the listener to consume what was being said.
Jesus explains further that the harvest is near and that they are harvesting what they did not sow.
The Samaritans are the fruit in this lesson and we like the disciples are being tasked with what the woman has already done. She ran and told the people all about him. She received the living water as her very being recognized the truth of Jesus Christ. Her will became one with his.
And what a turn of events for the world. The sinner, the woman with five husbands is the harvester working for Jesus and the Father while the disciples struggle to understand what they see and hear. They were confused by societal norms that put a barrier between the Jewish man and Samaritan woman in such a discourse. They saw hunger and thirst as only physical things. It would take them longer to understand that the Living Water was the truth of Jesus Christ and the real food needed was to do the Father’s will and set about harvesting those seeking truth and union with God.
This Lent we need to ask ourselves if we seek the truth. It doesn’t matter what we have done or even who we were before today for if we hear his words and take them inside of us and make them part of us, we join with him in his work.
Do we seek and value monetary things, possessions or others ….. as source of all happiness, of all truth, do we covet the creation of the one who has created all? Instead of the creator?
Or do we seek first the creator, the Father, and focus on the message of the Son?
Lent is a good time for us to ask where our life is going, where do we place our trust? Regardless of what the media tells us, or for that matter anyone, there is only one truth and one way to eternal life.
There is only one source of living water. One source of truth. One path that we as our Father’s children need to walk.
Water is a very very good thing. We are created to rely on it to live. Food is also very good for us. And our Father wants us to enjoy the things of this life. All of his blessings.
But if we do not trust him first, put our faith and hope in God, then we may find we are lost in a desert of emptiness, thirsting for something we cannot find.
If we put others ahead of him, even a spouse or children, we will find they also do not bring the satisfaction we seek. For they, like us are mere humans, broken and never perfect.
The Samaritans told the woman that they no longer believe just because of her word but now believe because they have seen and heard for themselves.
Can we say the same?
We have heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ every Sunday.
We have his body and blood to provide us with the real presence and real flesh of God to feed us.
Will we change our life like the Samaritan woman? She realized that he knew all about her life and and could read her heart. He knew and now she knew that her multiple husbands were dead ends for a searcher of truth and eternal life.
This Lent lets let go of the dead ends in our life, whether it is expecting humans to be God or we expect things of this world to finally bring us happiness and eternal peace and joy. They wont.
Jesus Christ is the Living Water. And once we turn to him in truth, change our hearts to rely on him for our needs. Then like the Hill Country women of the 1930s we will find our burdens lifted, our live easier to live and even better…our thirst and our life will be eternal with Christ in Heaven.
Deacon Tony Pynes 
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