Exodus 17:1-7
John 4:5-42
Romans 5:-11

When I was going through my basic training course in the Army, about four weeks in, the long days and nights, the hot South Carolina weather, and the general nonsense of being in the American military started to settle in with my group. You could tell people were at the edge – tired, frustrated, and worn out – because we started complaining and sniping and criticizing each other. One of my coursemates had the guts to go to one of the instructors with some of his complaints, which was a big mistake on his part. 

The instructor didn’t smoke him and make him run laps, or do push-ups, or do extra duty. Instead, his punishment – “corrective action” as it’s called in the Army – was to be confronted with his own ridiculousness. The instructor walked away from my classmate in silence after hearing his grievances and ten minutes later returned with a piece of paper. It looked like a standard government form. He made my classmate fill it out, and then read it to the rest of us.

What he printed out and had my classmate complete and read was a “Hurt Feeling Report”. It was completely a joke, but the joke was on the classmate who complained about having too much to do. It was like filling out your tax return with questions and places to put checkmarks, except the form asked questions like:

• Name of whiner.
• Date feelings were hurt. Time feelings were hurt.
• Which ear were the words of hurtfulness spoken into with a block to check for the left ear or the right ear.
• And then space for the person to write out what happened to cause their feelings to be hurt or the cause of their complaint.

My classmate was horrified. What he was complaining about sounded ridiculous, mainly because everyone who has ever gone through their military basic course had the same issues. We all got a good laugh, as did the instructor.

In our Old Testament reading this morning, the Hebrew people, the Israelites, the people of God, are lodging their own complaints against Moses and God. Now, I’m not suggesting that we should make fun their complaints or that we should not pay attention to anyone who complains. There are legitimate complaints people can have that need to be taken seriously. And then there are complaints that are more like whining. 

The reason the Israelites are complaining about Moses and God in our reading from Exodus is that they are in the Sinai wilderness and they’ve run out of water. Remember how Exodus goes? The Lord God hears the cries of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. God remembers his promise to their ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Sarah and resolves to free them from their slavery. He calls Moses through the burning bush to tell Pharoah, ‘let my people go.’ Moses eventually succeeds with the help of God (through the plagues). The Hebrews are liberated from their slavery, cross the Red Sea, and then spend the next 40 years learning the ways of God and how to be the people of God in the Sinai wilderness in Egypt. Early on in their newfound freedom, they start running out of water. Naturally, they get scared and they start complaining.

“Give us water to drink!” the people demand of Moses.

Moses, himself fed up with their complaining, snaps back. “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?”

Remember, they are thirsty. But even more so, they are scared. No one survives long without water. The conflict reaches its most intense moment when the people cry out and accuse Moses of intentionally leading them to their death. “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst.” 

Moses is at his breaking point too. He cries out to God, “What shall I do for this people? They are almost ready to stone me.”

If you have ever been at a breaking point, you know a little of how the people of God and Moses are feeling. For me, the times in my life when I have been at a breaking point, it follows a pattern like this – usually I’m scared about something, I’m worn out, I get irritated, and I stop praying to God and listening for God. Instead, inside of me becomes a never ending monologues of complaints and I stop praying to God.

The situation changes for the people and Moses because God makes a way for them. The Lord tells Moses to go with some of the leaders, along with the staff that he used when he turned the Nile River of Egypt to blood and led the people to freedom, to the rock at Horeb. This was a giant boulder. The Lord’s command to Moses is simple, but strange, “Strike the rock, and the water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.”

Let’s now shift our focus to our gospel reading from the gospel of John about Jesus and the woman at the well. It’s a long story with a lot of moving pieces. It is also a story that is filled with layers of meaning so that water doesn’t just mean the cold beverage that is H20 that we drink in order to live, but water means that and something deeper – communion and connection with the source of life himself, God. 

The story goes that Jesus was traveling, and his travels were taking him through the region of Samaria (remember Samaria from the Parable of the Good Samaritan. It’s a breakaway region, and the people of Samaria are different and Jews like Jesus normally don’t interact with them). Jesus comes to a Samaritan city and goes to the local well, the local watering hole because he’s tired and needs a drink.

A Samaritan woman arrives to draw water at the well to take back to her home. Jesus initiates a conversation. “Give me a drink,” he tells the woman. The woman shoots back, I think rather sarcastically. “How is that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a Samaritan.” 

The conversation then takes a strange turn. “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’” Jesus tells her, “you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman again responds, I think rather sarcastically, “You don’t have a bucket and the well is deep,” she points out to Jesus (it seems rather obvious). “Where do you get that living water?”

Jesus and the woman continue to have this conversation. He tells her things about himself, like “Everyone who drinks of this water [from the well] will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty.” Later, Jesus tells her that the true worshippers of God are those who “worship the Father in spirit and truth”. And finally, when she says that she knows the Messiah is coming, Jesus identifies himself as the Messiah. “I am he,” he says to her, “the one who is speaking to you.”

You get the sense reading the story that the woman is sceptical of Jesus. You can understand that, if you put yourself in her shoes. But something seems to change when Jesus talks to her about her personal history. She eventually leaves the well and John tells us that she went back and told people about what happened, specifically that Jesus knew more about her than a stranger should. ‘Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” We’re told at the end of the story that many people from that city believed in Jesus because of her testimony. She became a preacher from her encounter with Jesus at the well.

Where is there a word from the Lord for us in this readings? Here is what I heard this week: we need God and God gives us what we need. That might sound obvious, and it is. But it’s easy to forget that we need God, especially when we have most of what we need to live and have tons of gadgets like phones and TV’s to distract us.

Let’s go back to the story from Exodus and the thirsty people who Moses gives a drink because the Lord told him to strike a rock. There is a deeper meaning to it than Moses striking a rock and essentially digging a well. The rock stands for Jesus Christ. Moses’ staff stands for the cross. And Moses striking the rock with his staff is Jesus’ crucifixion and death on the cross. Do you see the symbolism? God made a way for the thirsty people in the desert by providing water from the rock. God made a way for people who are tired, sinful, and worn out through Jesus’ death on the cross. The living water that Jesus offers the woman at the well is life in the deepest, truest, and richest way possible. 

The church word for this is salvation. Salvation is God rescuing us from the trouble that we are in and giving us what we need. Or, as the apostle Paul put it in our reading from his letter to the Romans, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly…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.”

Here is what is important to remember from these passages: you have a heart, soul, mind, and spirit. It can be easy to forget that in day to day life, especially when things are really hard. It can also be easy to forget that in our modern world with our gadgets, TV’s, the news, and endless distractions. But we do each have a soul, and what our souls needs most is God himself. Just like our bodies need water to live, our souls need God, whose presence is like living water.

We need God to be present in our lives, to be active in our lives, and to love us, free us from sin, and change us. That is what Jesus was offering the Samaritan woman at the well when he talked about living water, and it’s why it was so attractive and hopeful for her. That is what Jesus’ death on the cross offers to us. The woman at the well was thirsty on a soul level, a heart level. My guess is that if we would take enough time to think about it and not have all of our distractions around us, we would be in the same boat. What we need is God himself who comes to us in Jesus the Son by the power of God’s Holy Spirit.

We’ll close by doing spiritual direction. Here is the question: what is the most frustrating and or worrying thing in your life right now? It could be health, your job, a relationship, or any number of things. Put another way, what is the thing in your life right now where you complain and become bitter and resentful quickly, similar to how the people of Israel were towards Moses and God when their water was running dry?

Here’s the bad news: there are probably no easy answers to this situation. Our faith is not magic in that I can give you three things to do to live a better life or three prayers to pray and God will fix whatever is troubling you. God doesn’t work like that. But that doesn’t mean that God doesn’t care about us and what we need. The word from the Lord today is that God gives us what we need, living water, himself.

When you find yourself irritated, resentful, and ready to complain, remember the Israelites in the desert and the woman at the well. The promise of God is living water, what we need to have life on the inside of us. Maybe something will change with your circumstance, but maybe something will change on the inside of you. Remember that you belong to Jesus Christ and he gives you himself.

Amen.