“God’s Living Water”
As we continue in our summer sermon
series on being a new creation in Christ, today we focus on water. As seeds germinate and begin the process of
growth, they need the soil, light, and water.
Last week we focused on how we need to be present to God’s light in
order to grow into the God’s new creation.
God also provides us with the image of the living water throughout our
scripture stories.
Our first reading comes from the
prophet Ezekiel. Ezekiel has various
visions and one is of God’s Holy Temple. Flowing throughout the temple is water. This water has life giving qualities. We are told that there is stagnant water but
as this water flows through it, the water becomes fresh. Wherever
the river goes,[b] every
living creature that swarms will live, and there will be very many fish, once
these waters reach there. It will become fresh; and everything will live where
the river goes.
Water
is essential to life. All living things
need it, but water can become tainted, poisoned, dirty, polluted, and its life
giving qualities can be drained away from it.
In various parts of the world, the water temperature has changed enough
that the coral reefs are dying. As an
avid scuba diver, this has saddened me deeply as the once incredibly bright
color underwater world is starting to turn white, called bleaching.
Our
lives can be like this as well. We can
be so exposed to the pollution of the world around us that we become stagnant
or bleached out. Where our true and
natural colors of God given passion and love has begun to fade away. Sometimes we call it burn out.
Keeping
ourselves immersed in God’s water, rather than the water of the world is
essential to being a part of the new creation.
I just had this conversation with someone the other day, on how we often
start our day by turning on the news and it can really just bring us down. What if we immersed ourselves in something
different? What if we started our
mornings with music, or something positive and life giving rather than the
negative we are so accustomed to doing?
As
many of you know, this past week was VBS.
Talk about a dose of living water.
For five days, fifty young people gathered next door for three hours of
positive living. For music, crafts,
snacks, games, and story of God’s love for them. And during this time, they were surrounded by
loving adults that wanted to share God’s living water with them.
God’s
super heroes have: heart, courage,
wisdom, hope and power. So, even though
we did not do the passage of Jesus at the well with the woman who he offers
living water we lived out this passage all week. To be God’s new creation is to receive God’s
living water and then live it out through: having heart, having courage, having
wisdom, having hope, and having power. And
throughout the week, the children also learned a scripture verse which
was: Do good, seek peace, and Go after
it. If we are to be a new creation in
God, we should always be trying to: do
good, seek peace, and finding ways to go after it.
As
Jesus comes to the woman at the well, and asks her for a drink, she is not sure
how to do good, since she is a woman and Jesus is a man, she is a Samaritan and
he is a Jew. There are numerous boundaries
getting in her way. And as they talk,
Jesus breaks those boundaries down and helps her understand that it does not
matter that she is a woman or a Samaritan, that he comes to offer living
water.
At
first she does not get it, she wants to know where his bucket is and makes an
excuse that the well is deep, but she does want to know where this living water
is. Jesus tries to explain to her that
there are two types of water. There is
the water that we drink and there is the spiritual water of God that will fill
our souls with God’s love making us whole.
The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing
up to eternal life.”
In
many ways, Jesus is the temple of God that the prophet Ezekiel was talking
about through his vision. From the life
and teachings of Jesus the living water of God flows forth. It flows out of him into the spiritually
stagnant places of our lives and of the world.
It flows out and brings life to the places that it touches, where it is
soaked in where it is absorbed. And as
the Samaritan woman at the well begins to understand, she is transformed, she
is renewed, she becomes a new creation in God.
She goes back to her village and proclaims that she has met a man who
knows everything about her and she asks:
Can he possibly be the Messiah?
Life
changing moments, moments where we feel something holy in our presence and we
just are not sure if it is possibly of God or just a moment. Life changing moments are happening this
summer, they are happening in places like Camp Johnsonburg, VBS at various
churches throughout the area, and mission trips to places like Appalachia. How are you being exposed to the living
water? Are you at the well not sure what
to do because there seems to be too many boundaries, challenges, concerns in
the way? Are you wading in the water
soaking it up, open to its possibilities but not sure where it will take
you? Are you passionate about how God
has called you to be a part of a certain mission opportunity and fully
embracing it, seeking to make a difference not just in your own life but in the
world as well.
One
example I used through the week of being God’s super hero, is that of one of
our families here at the church. Having
a mission does not have to be overwhelming, it can be something that connects
to your family. One of our families
fosters puppies. They take in dogs,
sometimes for a few weeks, maybe longer until they are able to be placed in a
forever home. This is such a beautiful
way to show young children how to be God’s super hero. It involved having heart, and courage, and
wisdom, and hope, and power. It might be
very difficult to let those puppies go to another home, because we may fall
into love with them very quickly, but when we view it as a mission, as a
calling of God, we release them to the next family knowing we have done our
part in providing a temporary home for them.
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