Living Water

This sermon was preached on June 14, 2009 at the Presbyterian Church of Laurelhurst in Portland, Oregon. The text for the morning was John 4: 7-14, and the worship service included a baptism.


It’s just water—just ordinary water from the tap. It came to us today, as the Portland Water Bureau motto says, “from forest to faucet”—from the Bull Run watershed high in the Mount Hood National Forest, through lakes and streams and dams and pumps, through miles and miles of industrial piping underneath our streets and yards and sidewalks, carried in a pitcher from the church kitchen sink, and poured out here into our baptismal font. It’s just water, ordinary water from the tap.

And yet, when little Oliver received the sacrament of baptism in our midst a few minutes ago, this water wasn’t ordinary at all. This water, so familiar and so useful to us for drinking, and cooking, and bathing, and swimming, and washing the car, and doing the dishes—when we used it in baptism, this water became more than ordinary. It became sacramental: a central sign, and seal, and symbol of our Christian faith. It was set aside for sacred use. You might even say it became living water.

Our gospel reading for today from the fourth chapter of John, which tells us of an encounter between Jesus and a Samaritan woman at a well, is not primarily about baptism. But it brings us, in compelling and evocative terms, the image of living water that illuminates not only our understanding of baptism but our understanding of the Christian faith that we profess to live and live to profess –our understanding of the nature of God, the person of Christ, and the presence of the Holy Spirit.

In our gospel passage, Jesus pauses by a well, and strikes up a conversation with a Samaritan woman who has come to draw water. Jesus doesn’t wait to be recognized or greeted; instead he reaches out, asks this woman, a stranger, for a drink of water. When she responds to him in astonishment, Jesus reveals that he is the bearer of living water, telling her, “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.”

Now Jesus isn’t talking here about literally whipping out some hidden canteen of water from underneath his robe. Jesus is talking, as he so often does in John’s gospel, in metaphor; he is offering the Samaritan woman, and all of us, no less than himself, the Son of God, the promised Messiah; he is offering the Samaritan woman, and all of us, the spiritual reality of his presence and his power. The living water he offers the Samaritan woman, and all of us, is nothing less than life itself, life in him, and life forevermore.

It is this same living water Jesus offered to the Samaritan woman that little Oliver experienced today in the sacrament of baptism. Before he can even form the idea of God, or say God’s name, Jesus has called him by name into the Christian community, claimed him as his own, and offered him the living water of grace, redemption, and eternal life. And it is this same living water that Jesus offers to all of us, freely and unconditionally and graciously, today, on our own baptismal days, and every day of our lives.

If you do a little research on “Jacob’s well,” the place where Jesus and the Samaritan woman talked about “living water,” you’ll find that it’s a little bit special. It’s a famous well, a place that the gospel of John’s original readers would have certainly known about, just the same way we know about the origins of, say, Perrier, or some such.

In particular, Jacob’s well is said to tap into not an underground cistern or area of still water, but instead it seems to tap into an underground river, so that the water isn’t just sitting there, quiet and contained, but sweeping along of its own volition—powerful and uncontrollable, lively, fresh, and always renewing itself. It’s an appropriate setting, isn’t it, for a discussion of “living water,” especially when we remember that medieval theologian Meister Eckhart famously said, “God is a great underground river that no one can dam up and no one can stop.”

The image of God as a living, rushing river is beautifully captured by the Christian singer/songwriter Stephen Curtis Chapman, in his song “Dive,” which is one of my very favorites. Perhaps some of you know it? Chapman writes:

There is a supernatural power
In this mighty river's flow

It can bring the dead to life
And it can fill an empty soul

And give a heart the only thing
Worth living and worth dying for

But we will never know the awesome power
Of the grace of God

Until we let our selves get swept away
Into this holy flood

So if you'll take my hand
We'll close our eyes and count to three
And take the leap of faith

Come on let's go

I'm diving in, I'm going deep, in over my head I want to be
Caught in the rush, lost in the flow, in over my head I want to go
The river's deep, the river's wide, the river's water is alive
So sink or swim, I'm diving in

How interesting, and how fitting, that Jesus and the Samaritan woman ponder the nature of God and the presence of the Messiah, as somewhere deep beneath their feet a living river rushes by—a physical representation of the spiritual reality of the living water they discuss.

And now, I’d like to think a little bit about Perrier.

If you go to France, and sit down in a bistro or restaurant, and order a drink of water—“boisson de L’eau”—the waiter will ask you something puzzling. It’s especially puzzling if you speak really bad French, as I do! The waiter will ask you “avec gaz?” Which means essentially exactly what it sounds like—with gas.

What he’s offering you is a choice between still water—water from the tap, or in a bottle like this—and sparkling water, like this Perrier right here. And let me ask you what’s the difference? There’s a little something extra in this one, the Perrier. It’s infused with little bubbles of gas—we Americans call it carbonation—little bubbles of gas that move, and pop, and fizz, and tickle your nose. And if you shake up this bottle and open the lid, what will happen, do you think? Perhaps those little bubbles will get all excited and push the water out of the bottle in a great foaming gush.

This Perrier water has bubbles of gas—maybe we could say, air, or breath, or spirit—that make it move, and sparkle, and expand, and seem to breathe.

Here’s the thing. Perhaps the gas that infuses the water in the Perrier bottle is kind of like the Holy Spirit—the breath of God--that infuses our ordinary baptismal water and makes it sacramental. Perhaps it is the movement of the Holy Spirit—the breath of God—that infuses our ordinary lives in baptism and makes us not only receivers of living water but enables us to be that living water for others.

So I hope that the next time you sip a “boisson de l’eau avec gaz,” whether in Paris, in downtown Portland, or at your own dining room table, that you will remember the Holy Spirit; that you will remember your baptism; and that you will experience, again, the presence and the power of God in your life, bubbling and splashing and overflowing.

Jesus tells the Samaritan woman, “The water that I will give will become a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” As theologian Jurgen Moltmann puts it in his book The Spirit of Life, “ The well of life is not in the next world, and not in the church’s font. It is in human beings themselves. If they receive the life-giving water, they themselves become the well-spring of this water for other people.”

As we experience it in baptism, living water is water infused with the Holy Spirit to become that visible sign of the invisible grace we know as the living love and presence of the risen Christ. As we are touched and washed and made wet by the physical water which sprinkles on us, pours over us, or immerses us--so are we touched and washed and made new by the living water of the Spirit working in us, and with us, and through us—quenching our spiritual thirst; claiming us as members of God’s family, and, as Jesus puts it in our scripture passage for today, equipping us to “gush up to eternal life”—or as we say in our rite of baptism, “to continue forever in the risen life of Christ.”

The river’s deep, the river’s wide, the river’s water is alive--

On our baptismal day, on this day, and every day,
Let us say together,

We’re diving in!

Amen.