Living Water.

John 7:37-53.    (June 21, 2015.)

I.

It is now the last day of the Sukkoth festival, to which Jesus had come at first inconspicuously, to avoid untimely arrest.  He has been teaching in the Temple for several days, and it is now the last and most important day of the festival.  For seven days they had this ceremony in which water was carried in a golden pitcher from the Pool of Siloam into the Temple as a commemoration of the way God gave the people water in the desert, and as a symbol of hope for deliverance and liberation.  

That is the context in which Jesus cries out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink.”  He is basically saying that he comes himself to fulfill these prophecies, which are not truly about literal water, but have to do with enabling people to have life in the Spirit of God.

In other words, the people who trust in Jesus will receive in reality the symbolic and ceremonial benefit people are receiving from this water, ritually conveyed through the city to the Temple with solemnity and prayers and the singing of Psalms.  What this sign is pointing to, Jesus reveals and embodies.  He is basically saying that he is the whole point of this festival, and that the people should come to him for the true life that the ceremonial water represents.

He is now the way to remember, that is, to take to heart and integrate into our lives, God’s provision of water to the thirsty Israelites in the Sinai desert, enabling them to continue on their journey to the Promised Land.  To trust in him is to allow the water of God’s life to infuse and soften and relax every part of us, and enable us to attain God’s Kingdom.

If we come to him and believe, or trust in him, we receive this spiritual life.  The invitation to come to him assumes that in some sense we are separate from him, we are separate and alienated from our own life, our own true selves.  It is easy therefore for many to suppose that Jesus Christ must be out there somewhere and we have to physically relocate to be with him.  But I have found in my life that no matter where I go, I carry my own problems and issues, anxieties and fears, with me.  Physical movement by itself makes no difference at all.  

The movement that matters happens within us.  We come to Jesus Christ by finding him in our own hearts, for he is there already.  We come to him by digging beneath the mental clutter and the emotional distractions, by setting aside the whole psychic superstructure which governs our seeing and our acting.  This interior prison has been constructed and imposed upon us first by our own egos, and then by the collection of blind, imprisoned egos that constitutes society.  But all these “normal” ways of thinking and feeling, all our desires that we usually assume are just natural, are not.  They are conditioned.

II.  

To come to Jesus Christ means to find within yourself your own truest and deepest humanity, and to discover that it is at the same time the Presence of the Creator.  Jesus Christ is the Word by which all things were made, and he therefore resonates and echoes within everything, he informs and shapes all things.  He is the embodiment of God’s love and everything that exists bears his imprint, his voiceprint, in its very nature and essence.  The universe is therefore not random, but its purpose and destiny is encoded within it by the One who spoke it into being.  That’s why life emerges and triumphs everywhere.  

Whatever outward form coming to Jesus may take for us — like when we physically come to him for baptism or to his Table — it reflects and expresses our inward discovery of Jesus Christ, the truly Human One, within ourselves as created beings.  Unless that is happening, unless we are experiencing the new life of the risen Lord in our own souls, the fact that we physically move our bodies here or there doesn’t really matter.  Such physical movements are supposed to represent, reflect, and express something that is happening in our own consciousness.  

When we come to the Font for Baptism, or to the Table for the Lord’s  Supper, we have to know that we are coming to God.  We are coming to the God who self-empties on the cross out of sheer, infinite love for the whole world, and gives us this new life of resurrection.  The God with whom we are buried and raised up in Baptism, whom we are given to eat and thus who becomes us in Communion, is the God whom we become by the obedience of repentance, that is, by trusting in Jesus Christ and obeying his commandments.

Just having an experience of Jesus Christ in your heart isn’t enough either.  We have also to trust in him, which is to say, this experience isn’t fully real until and unless it has transformed our behavior.  This is not a mindless word game.  It is actual and real.  It changes your life.  It changes the world.  When the Lord says, “Let the one who believes in me drink,” he means that we don’t receive this life until we start expressing it in our actions with our bodies.  

That’s why I use the word “trust” so often to talk about faith.  We tend to imagine that faith is something we can have in our minds alone, that does not have to have any impact on how we live in the world.  Indeed, it is the great liability of Protestantism that faith is about what we think about what Jesus did back then, but has nothing to do with what we do now.

No.  We discover the Presence of the Lord within us when we make room by consigning to a dumpster whole trainloads of what we thought was our own identity.  It is into our interior spaces that have cleaned ourselves out of, that God can grow into.  How many times does Jesus remind us that this is about losing ourselves, even hating ourselves, and renouncing our possessions?  What he means is losing our old, false, blind, limited, broken, enslaved version of ourselves, so we can be open to our true selves in God.

III.   

Jesus goes on to finish his thought.  He states, “As the Scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’”  In other words, to receive these rivers of living water from God means having that living water flow through us outward into the world.  Back in chapter 4 he tells the Samaritan woman that the water he gives “will become in [people] a spring of water gushing to eternal life.”

In other words, the more we empty ourselves of ourselves, the more God’s life can come into us, and when God’s life comes into us it gushes through us into our relationships with others.  It is like when you siphon gasoline from one car to another (something I confess I have never actually done).  Apparently, you have to create a vacuum in the hose by sucking the air out of it.  The gas from one tank rushes in, and then by gravity flows into the second tank.  When it comes to God’s living water we have to become the empty hose so life can flush through us into our world.  If the hose is blocked, either by air or something else, there is no flow.

Whatever you think of that image, this is a very important point.  We come to Christ, we empty ourselves of ourselves, and then Christ comes through us.  We are to participate in God’s blessing of life to the world in Jesus.  We become extensions and expressions of Jesus Christ.

But the key activity here is the self-emptying, both for Jesus Christ and for us.  Our task as followers of Jesus is to work on one thing: to make ourselves clear channels for God’s love and life, to become so transparent and open, and to blow, scrape, dig, scrub, and otherwise remove everything within us that blocks this flow.  That is, to get rid of everything we have been taught to think is who we are — our traditions, habits, memories, loyalties, prejudices, assumptions, expectations, desires, fantasies, preconceptions, fears, anger, and self-image — so that our true selves, Christ-in-us, may emerge, expand, grow, and flow.

It is like we are thoroughly soiled, dirty, grimy, and muddy windows, who have become convinced that the opaque gunk that covers us in encrusted layers is what we are.  We have to be reminded that we are actually created to be transparent, and the sludge we think we are has to be wiped away so God’s radiant love can shine through us into the world.  If it does not shine through us it bakes and burns us, which is what we call God’s wrath.  Wrath is God’s love obstructed.  

Repentance is when we get to work removing the lifetime of crud that has accumulated within us, and getting back to our original nature as channels through which God’s love may pour into the world.  It requires faith and trust because we have no clue about who we are supposed to be.  We have to take Jesus’ word for it.

IV.

If we do not do this work in both its interior and outward dimensions, we remain in darkness and we project that shadow into our world.  That darkness takes the form of violence, bigotry, selfishness, hatred, anger, paranoia, greed, and murder. 

We are recovering from a terrible event this week.  This was the terrorist murder last Wednesday night of nine African-American Christians in Charleston.  In this we were reminded that one of the most virulent and corrosive cancers that breed in the darkness of hearts from which the light of God has been excluded is racism.  I invite all of us to look into our own souls as well over this, and identify and remove the attitudes and presumptions, and the practices, that we have that create disparity and suspicion between the  different races God has created and brought together in this land.

What happened in Charleston was not an isolated incident by a “crazy loner.”  It was part of a 400-year pattern ingrained in our history and culture from the beginning.  It will not be easy to eradicate.

But if we really believe that in Jesus Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, which means neither black nor white (nor red nor yellow), we will have to go through the pain of critiquing and rejecting many of our most cherished ideas, assumptions, values, and institutions.  We will have to confront privileges we don't even know we have, and inequalities we maintain without even thinking about it.  Most of all we will have to reject much of our own logic and reasoning, all of which is biased and perverted by this particularly virulent, evil demon.

This will have to be done humbly, confessionally, tearfully, and prayerfully.  But it will have to be done, if we want to follow a poor, Palestinian Jew named Jesus.

V.

For, when he says that “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in the world will keep it for eternal life,” what do we not understand?  If we are going to participate together in God’s life of love, peace, and justice, we are going to have to recognize and eradicate the counterfeit existence we mistake for life, which is characterized by selfishness, violence, injustice, self-centeredness, and bigotry.

This is actually impossible for us.  It is only possible for God.  It only happens through prayer, confession, and forgiveness, when we have the courage to face ourselves and the desire to come to Jesus Christ.  

God created the world in goodness and blessing.  There is no room in it for our hatreds and narrow-mindedness.  So I have no doubt that, like the Israelites in the wilderness, the water of life will sustain us until we do come to the Promised Land of eternal life.  I know that the will and Word of God will be done, and justice and equality, peace and love will prevail in the end.  I hope that my own blindness and fear will be dissolved in that blessed water, and that we will all be washed clean of all that separates us from God, and from each other.

+++++++