Living Water

 

St. Agnes Catholic Church 

March 2/3

3rd Sunday of Lent

 https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/030324-YearA.cfm 

As the deer longs for streams of water, so my soul longs for you, O God. It is you I seek! For my body yearns, my soul thirsts for God, the living God (Psalm 42:2-3a, 63:2).

My high school students have a very strange problem.  [pause for dramatic effect].  They are overhydrated.  I know you are familiar with dehydration.  It may sound strange to hear that a person could be overhydrated, but I see my students carrying around large water bottles at all times—Stanley cups, Camelbacks, Yetis—which they are constantly draining and refilling.  Consequently, they can hardly sit for whole class period without needing to visit the restroom.  And on the way, they refill their water bottles.

 This situation would be utterly alien to the people of Jesus’ world, who experienced water scarcity when wandering in the Sinai desert, and like the woman at the well in Samaria struggled to find a reliable source of fresh, safe drinking water.  They would be dumbstruck by the refiling stations throughout Assumption that quickly dispense a liter of filtered, purified, chilled and delicious water through a motion activated sensor that requires no work or thought.  

Most of the world today is more like Samaria and Sinai than like Cincinnati.  Over two billion people live in regions experiencing high water stress (according to the UN). Around 2 million children die every year from waterborne diseases.  I witnessed this dire situation firsthand as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Bangladesh.  I would spend hours of every week boiling and filtering my own water when I lived there, and those steps were still not a guarantee of staying healthy.

During Lent, I we are challenged to sit with the suffering of our brothers and sisters. To hear them crying out for water—the living water that isn’t just a metaphor, but is literally life.  If Christ is the living water, what are we Christians doing to bring him to the world?   What acts of charity, prayer, and fasting are we making on their behalf?   Two local agencies named Water Step and Water With Blessings both address this critical issue in the developing world, and are worthy recipients of our service and charity.  

We are at the midpoint of Lent on this 3rd Sunday.  This is a good moment to renew our commitment.  As they wandered in the desert, the Hebrew people doubted God and His promise that they would reach the Promised Land.  Indeed, they feared that they would die of thirst and even looked back nostalgically to their old lives of slavery under Pharaoh.  

Yet their journey in Sinai demonstrated to the Hebrews, that it is God who provides us the water of life.  It is not us.  Our God makes water flow from the rock, in a dry, and weary place without water.  Their 40-year sojourn taught them that that the things we actually need are limited and our deepest longings can not be met by material goods.  

St. Augustine famously wrote that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God.  Put another way, we have a God shaped hole that cannot be filled by anything that is not God [phrase credited to Blaise Pascal].  But we try.  We try very hard to fill ourselves up with everything and anything that is not God.  We overhydrate ourselves when we are not thirsty.  In the land of milk and honey, we overindulge.  We revel in overabundance and luxury.  

Our human nature and our consumer society tell us that that, “we need more.”  God tell us that we need less.  Ultimately, what we need is God alone.  Let me repeat that.  Ultimately, what we need is God alone.  

The Samaritan woman at the well embodies this conversion from a life of overindulgence.  She has had five husbands and is living with a sixth man when Jesus speaks to her.  Yet, she comes to believe in his promise that he is the living water, the longed-for Messiah, who can quench her deepest thirst, and who will bring reconciliation between the Samaritans and the Jews.  Her encounter with Jesus leads her to become the Apostle to the Samaritans, the proclaimer of the Good News to the estranged cousins of the Jewish people.  Though her life choices caused her to be ostracized by her community, Jesus transforms her, and she rushes off to tell her people about this new spring of living water.  

The dryness of our baptismal font calls us to thirst for righteousness.  To remember and pray for our catechumens who will be baptized here in a month.  To remember our own baptisms and our call to follow Christ.  

Christ is our living water.  Christ is the wholeness that fills the emptiness at the heart of our self. Christ brings us to completion.  As he says, “whoever drinks the water I give will never thirst; [It] will become in her a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”  Amen