Sermon for the Third Sunday of Lent

Lectionary Readings for the Third Sunday of Lent

Exodus 17: 1-7

From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. The people quarreled with Moses, and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” So Moses cried out to the Lord, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” The Lord said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?” Psalm 95 O come, let us sing to the Lord; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation! Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise! For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods. In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also. The sea is his, for he made it, and the dry land, which his hands have formed. O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker! For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. O that today you would listen to his voice! Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, when your ancestors tested me, and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work. For forty years I loathed that generation and said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they do not regard my ways.” Therefore in my anger I swore, “They shall not enter my rest.”

Romans 5: 1-11

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

John 4: 5-42

So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.” Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” They left the city and were on their way to him. Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.” Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”

Sermon for the Third Sunday of Lent

The Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying,

Is the Lord among us or not?

We are living in a time of unprecedented uncertainty. The corona virus has slowly made its way toward us from China, having first been identified there in December. We have been left to look on with anxiety and dread, anticipating ever more drastic measures that have already changed the way we live. Nothing has ever happened quite like this before, at least in my lifetime, and so I am one of those following the latest news to see how the latest developments are going to affect me. It is natural, it is human, to wonder how something so large, so seemingly inevitable, will affect us as individuals. But if we find that our natural human feelings of worry and even fear are taking over our lives, dominating every waking moment, making us become obsessed only with this, then something is clearly not right.

What are we to make of all this?

What does our Christian faith have to say to this situation?

Christians believe that God reigns, that the world is indeed in God’s hands, that God knows our needs before we speak them. We pray: Our Father Who art in Heaven, Give us this day our daily bread.

God does; God has.

The Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying,

Is the Lord among us or not?

God is here; God is with us, throughout all the ills that human life can possibly throw up against us. Human beings have managed to create an almost unending series of wars, diseases, disasters of one kind or another all through recorded human history, but God has never left the world….What we are experiencing now is certainly not what God ever intended, but God is still with us, in the midst of all of it.

This is our Christian hope; this is our Christian certainty.

Eating and drinking, eating and drinking—-do I have enough? Will I have enough?

Eating and drinking, eating and drinking—-the business of daily life. Will I have enough to sustain myself, as I live this life that I have been given?

God gives us our security; God is our ultimate security. We are given all that we need.

Jesus said: Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Matthew 6:25

Jesus knew his Hebrew scriptures. He knew this beautiful passage from the prophet Jeremiah (17: 5-8):

Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord.

They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream.

It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.

No matter how deep the roots of our fear, the roots of our faith are even deeper.

When Jesus came to fulfil Hebrew prophecy, he said to the Samaritan woman at the well: Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.

Jesus said to them, My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. That work was to show us what the Kingdom of Heaven is.

What does it mean, to be part of that Kingdom? To live in love; to live without worry and without fear.

It is the season of Lent, now, a time when we discipline our physical desires so that we can focus all our desires on God, and what God would have us do in this life.

What is it that sustains us, in the end? It is the upholding, uplifting love of the one God who created us and loved us into being, who cares for us day by day, who never leaves our side, despite the worst that life can bring us. Our hope is real.

Paul said in his letter to the emerging church at Rome: We boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

Despite what we face these days: a plague that is disrupting our accustomed ways of living—of eating and drinking—that is challenging all our deeply-held notions of security, despite this, we have hope. We have hope that our ultimate security lies in the God who holds the earth in the hollow of his hand, and that this God will never abandon us.

The Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying,

Is the Lord among us or not?

Even for those appallingly ungrateful Hebrews in the desert, having just been rescued from a life in bondage, saved, guided out of slavery by God’s almighty hand, even for those ancient Israelites, God manifested his very real presence. God gave them manna in the wilderness; God gave them their daily bread. He himself was always the answer to their question.

To Julian of Norwich we attribute the earliest surviving book in the English language written by a woman. It is called Revelations of Divine Love. She was a female Christian mystic —-we don’t even really know her name—-the name, Julian, is taken from the church where she lived in a small attached cell —-Julian of Norwich dictated to a scribe an account of visions that she had during a severe illness, when she was thirty years old. They are recorded as occurring on the 13th and 14th of May 1373, almost exactly 647 years ago. This is the much-quoted line from one of those revelations that has come down to us:

All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.

So, for us.

All shall be well, despite what is happening all around us, despite our very human worries and fears about what we shall eat and what we shall drink—-our own security—-because God, our ultimate security, our only security, is with us. Our hope is well-founded; our hope is real.

Let us use this time as we continue our journey through Lent as a time of greater prayer, greater discipline, greater giving to those even greater in need.

God will give us the bread that we need in this time in the wilderness. Jesus is the living water!

Amen!

The Revd Dana English

The Church of St. George’s, Campden Hill, London

March 15, 2020