Drinking Deeply From the Waters of Eternal Belovedness

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Third Sunday of Lent, March 12, 2023 by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.

The basic shape of Lent is the movement from slavery under the thumb of Pharaoh to a life of individual and community flourishing. God fashions for Godself a people that God might make them a light to the nations, a people who live with the Living God as the rock upon which their lives are built where justice, mercy, loving kindness are the daily bread of the community. Where widow, orphan, stranger, and alien in the land are seen not as inconvenient others, but as welcomed kin: the beautiful, beloved community that springs up around the Beautiful, Beloved, Christ, “lovely in limb, lovely in eye.”

A couple weeks ago, I was talking about what Merton, Pennington, and Keating call the “false self”--the self that seeks for its happiness apart from God in power, possessions, and prestige: those temptations to define ourselves by what we do, what we have, and what other people think of us. Absent an encounter with the love of God–absent a recognition of our belovedness as the people of God’s pasture and the sheep of God’s hand–the human person naturally looks for the love for which we are made, and that can be found in God and God alone, in various progams for happiness that invariably disappoint.

Hot on the heels of his take off your shoes for the place where you are standing is holy ground encounter with God as the Great I AM at the burning bush Moses (that tongue-tied murderer plagued with self-doubt) leads the Israelites out of Egypt. They are no longer under Pharoah’s thumb. But their new freedom chafes. It turns out that it’s superficially easier to trust a strong man in a leopard skin holding a heka who tells you what to do than it is to root and ground oneself in the living God whose presence, abundance, and provision are our constant companion: above and below, behind and before, within and without.

Why so hard? Well, a couple of places human beings go for happiness absent a recognition of the presence, abundance, and provision of God are in routine, feeling productive, and getting basic needs met. The Israelites are brickmakers for Pharaoh. They know who and whose (Pharoah’s) they are in that context–even if they aren’t the best brickmakers on the planet, they at least have a sense of “purpose” however utilitarian. And they get three squares a day with all the water they can drink.

Being led out into the desert, passing through the wall of water, the Israelites are baptized into a new way of seeing and being with God, not Pharoah, at the center of their lives individually and communally. Their collective false self and its securities falls to the ground. They are challenged to unhook from securing their happiness and identity under the framework imposed on Pharaoh, and find themselves in God. They mutter, complain, and quarrel. Just like we do when things are not to our liking, or our routine is upset. The Israelites even get to the point where they are ready to kill Moses. Rather than face their addictions, they project onto Moses what they can’t face about themselves: the part of me that would rather be a brickmaker for Pharaoh. The part of me that prefers those flesh-pots to the open-handed dependence on God for water, quail, and manna. No one likes to face that about themselves. Easier to get rid of Moses.

And when Moses strikes the rock and Massah and Meribah as a prophetic sign of God’s loving, steadfast, covenantal faithfulness with God’s people, it is as a sacramental sign that despite appearances to the contrary “all things work together for the good.” Stay patient. Persevere. Stop, look, and listen to something other than your grumbly stories and you’ll be shown a way where there was previously no way; provision where there was only scarcity; abundance where there was only lack; belovedness where fear had once the final word. 

No, Moses is not the problem. It’s the Israelites’ addiction to old stories and identities that is the hindrance to trusting God. What we witness is the patented desert effect at work. We see where we’re painfully stuck, open to God’s healing and transfiguring presence and action in our lives, gently release everything that isn’t God’s love for us, and then find ourselves bafflingly sent as the very healing we’ve received. Water from a stone. Presence in what we took for absence. Everything we could ever need or want given as free gift once our stony hearts are cracked open by God’s love for us and Christ’s water irrigates the parched places of shame, blame, fear, and exclusion. 

The Samaritan Woman’s journey, from shame-bent outcast trudging to the well with her leaky bucket all by herself in the heat of the day, to setting down the bucket and going as the very water she has recognized and received in Jesus, enacts on an individual level what the Israelites show us as a people. This encounter with Jesus is her Exodus. In the eyes of the patriarchal culture she’s a triple outcast: a woman, a Samaritan (gentile) woman, and a woman with a marriage history that rivals Liz Taylor. Of course, to even survive, the Samaritan woman likely would have had to have had a husband. But is there a deeper reading where she can be seen seeking in relationships what can only be found in relationship with God?

She goes to the well, day after day, with a leaky bucket and only her shadow for company. She’s internalized her community’s judgment on her so thoroughly that she takes it as the truth of who she is. That’s her Pharaoh. And it’s a lot of work to live under the thrall, to be possessed by, such a diminishing story. It literally kills us. What are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, other people, the world, and God that keep us under some Pharaoh’s thumb? What variations on the theme of fear, scarcity and lack do we hum trudging to the well day after day in noonday heat? What judgements about who we are do we take as the truth of ourselves? What is the effect of those stories? What if Massah and Meribah water, what if Jacob’s well water were to show us that those stories are just stories? What if our non-negotiable belovedness–the only real truth about ourselves and others–is what burbles up when the temptations to believe any other story are gently laid aside? What if we practiced being sourced there, abiding there? What if belovedness–fountain of mercy, ocean of grace–were where we planted ourselves? 

When Jesus is crucified in John’s gospel, he utters those words–”It is finished,”--and bows his head, giving up his spirit. And when the soldiers come by to speed things along by breaking the legs of the three men crucified on Golgotha, they discover that Jesus is already dead. And so they stick a spear in Jesus’ side. What pours out is blood and water. A sacrifice to end all sacrifices, but an explicit noonday bringing together of the Israelites’ journey with Moses to the Promised Land, Jacob’s Well, and the Crucifixion. Staff against rock. Water in the well. Spear in the side. He is our bread in the wilderness. The staff cleaving the stones in two. Our rock. Our water. His constant loving presence irrigates us with waters gushing up to eternal life even here and now. He is our refreshment dispelling the false claims of all the Pharaohs trying to tell us who and whose we are.

In her encounter with the person of Jesus, the Samaritan woman knows herself as a beloved child of God, created in the image and likeness of God. The old stories lose their hold on her and she drinks deeply from the well of the Great I Am (Jesus says, “I AM he,” remember). She is seen, heard, known by Jesus…. and still loved! The rock at Massah and Meribah. Jacob’s Well. The Church as the receptive chalice filled from the opened side of Jesus from which we drink at each Eucharist. All of these separate instances overlay one another as a palimpsest in the person of Christ to remind us that no matter what desert we find ourselves in, no matter which well we are trudging to talking to ourselves, there is a place of refreshment. Let all who are thirsty come, let all who wish receive the water of life freely.

But do we know we’re thirsty? Perhaps it's useful  to sketch the contours of our various Egypts. What grumblings and murmurings keep us, here and now, under Pharoah’s thumb? Onto whom have we projected our unexamined captivity to fear, scarcity and lack? Towards whom have we pointed the accusing finger convinced that the world would be better off without them? What stale, tired story about ourselves and others holds us in Pharoah’s thrall? What “if onlies” haunt our lives like jackals? What “this isn’t its” blind us to God’s presence, abundance, and provision? Can we recognize their cramped confines? Can we recognize their isolating self-enclosure? 

If we can recognize our thirst, and how absent relationship with God  our shadow is our only companion, right there is door, the gate, the well brimming with water that doesn’t come and go: Give me this water always! The astounding thing is that once we see this, once we name our thirst and turn to Christ to drink deeply, we become bearers of that very same water for others. And not just our friends! The Samaritan woman sets down her bucket and goes to the very people who shamed and gossiped and ignored her as that water of belovedness. What a perfect enactment of the Christian life: she comes as a cast-off, excluded other. She drinks deeply of her own shame-shattering belovedness. And then, having become belovedness, she goes as those healing waters to those whom she might be excused for seeing as her enemies. Instead of retribution, she invites them to a life that is truly life, “Come and see!” Her encounter with Jesus and the re-sourcing of her identity in and as the waters of eternal belovedness frees her to now be a repairer of the breach, a breaker of every yoke, someone who no longer hides herself away, but sees others as her kin. Who are we when we set down our leaky buckets and let ourselves be loved? To whom does the Spirit lead us as refreshing water? Let all who are thirsty come. Let all who wish receive the water of life freely. Amen.