Seeking God-sufficiency
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
March 12, 2023—Lent 3A
Exodus 17:1-7; John 4:5-42
“If you ask me, I will give you living water.”
I hear this, and it strikes a deep chord within me. As I’ve mentioned, the theme that’s arisen for my sabbatical is “Living Water:” my desire (my need) to drink deeply from the well, to be revived and given new life.
Because I know that I, like so many of us, am tired. After the grief of losing Brian. After the stresses and challenges of the pandemic. I. am. tired. But more than just my personal need for rest, I know that my ministry among you is starting to suffer. Because, when I get worn out, and stressed out, the danger is that I become disconnected from the Source of my calling: losing track of the power that comes from remembering and drawing on my fundamental grounding in God.
This phenomenon is similar, and not unrelated, to the ways in which our ability to rely on other people can wax and wane. Ironically, it’s when we need it the least that we most easily remember it. When things are low stress and somewhat under control, we’re more likely to ask for input and assistance: more able to cooperate and compromise. But when we are least healthy, and lowest functioning, we face the temptation to run on autopilot, relying on our own gifts and reserves rather than doing the work of collaboration and interdependence.
It brings us to the crux of all our cultural myths about self-sufficiency. As it turns out, going it alone is actually a lot less work than cooperation and compromise! It’s kind of the lazy way, to be honest. It’s also a path to solutions that are much less complex. A less complete picture. Narrower and shallower.
Scripture calls us to a different way of being, calling to the part of us that yearns (like the Samaritan woman) to drink deeply of living water. The part of us that knows that self-sufficiency is a limited and exhausting path. The part that longs to be connected … to reach beyond … to allow ourselves to be brought into something far larger than ourselves that will strengthen, refresh and inspire us.
Last week during our conversation with the bishop, Ann made reference to the revival that took place in February at Asbury University. What began as a regularly scheduled student worship service simply … kept going. For several weeks, around the clock. Those who were there would leave for short times, perhaps for class, perhaps to eat, or sleep. But many of them were drawn back to the space, in which the power of prayer and worship was so palpable that they simply longed to be there over any other place they could be.
The holiness tradition in which Asbury is steeped comes from the Methodism of John Wesley, who insisted that sanctification is a gift from a gracious God: beyond the reach of human effort, but nonetheless secure because our souls rest entirely captive to the love of God.[i] Revivals are in their DNA—it’s in the water there, you might say—because the awareness of a divine love that eclipses even our human sinfulness is understood not as a gradual realization but a sudden burst, a revelation of such power and joy that it might well spread from one person to another.
At Asbury, in February, it did indeed spread: throughout the undergraduate population, into the seminary, and out to people who came from hundreds of miles to be a part of what was happening. Who came because it spoke to a hunger within them, a thirst for a powerful experience of God that they hoped to find in this gathered and expectant community.
The experience itself seems foreign to many of us, but the reasons for that are not at all straightforward. Partly, as noted, it’s a question of religious culture: religious experience, no matter how spirit-led, is likely to unfold within the expected parameters. We Episcopalians simply don’t expect this kind of thing, because, well … it’s not as ordered and controlled as the English tend to be. More than that, it’s possible that we shy away from it because of the kinds of religious fundamentalism that are often associated with such shared ecstatic experiences. For some of us, the thought of revivals comes with some pretty bad memories.
But the thing is, my friends: the living water Jesus promises does not have its source in things like the opposition to homosexuality that will likely make Asbury the flagship of the traditionalist Methodists in the U.S. And an overwhelming experience of the love of God is NOT the exclusive property of those who had otherwise feared that they faced an eternity in hell.
The power of the revival in Asbury rests in one thing only: a thirst for Jesus. And we too thirst, if only we can recognize it. We too yearn. We too have an ache and an exhaustion within us that longs to rest itself in God.
So we would do well to hear Jesus when he promises the Samaritan woman that it does not matter where one worships God. All that matters is Spirit and truth. All that matters is your desire for God, and your honesty about all that is in you that reaches out toward God.
You too can come to Jesus. Like this foreign woman, with so many husbands lost, you can bring your whole self (all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid) and find yourself accepted. And the living water that is your love for God and God’s love for you just might well up inside you, reviving you and filling you with power for a life you could never even have imagined.
May it be so, my friends. Amen.
[i] Alan Bean, https://baptistnews.com/article/shelter-from-the-storm-the-asbury-revival-as-woodstock-2-0/