John 4.5-15
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning,
Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado

One of the best cartoons I saw online this week was a picture of Jesus and the Samaritan woman standing at the well…but the pump bottle on the edge of the well was a dead giveaway, and the sign above the well indicated that this wasn’t just the story you heard from John’s gospel this morning, it said “Jesus and the woman at the Purell well.” 

I know that a lot of us are really feeling a sense of anxiety about the spread of the coronavirus. Many of us are nervous because it seems so ominous – and like flu viruses, it’s invisible, transmissible, and potentially fatal. 

We have something in common with the woman at the well. We are seeking the healing waters that will enable us never to experience spiritual thirst. And we need to have some kind of assurance that it’s going to be okay, whether we get the coronavirus or not. 

William Sloane Coffin, the late senior minister of the Riverside Church in New York, offered some profound words in a sermon ten days after his 24-year-old son died in a car crash: This is “what God gives all of us — minimum protection, maximum support.”

What does that mean? I take it to indicate that God does not keep bad things from happening to anyone. But if we have a relationship with God, we are held up by a companion who walks with us through the wilderness. 

“Minimum protection, maximum support.” Perhaps that is a way that we can approach what God’s world is experiencing right now: as a time to broaden our perspectives and become stronger. 

Our faith is like muscle that needs to be stretched and tested in order for it to grow, and Lent can be a time for a good spiritual workout, not that anyone EVER asked for the coronavirus to help us. Ernest Hemingway wrote this in A Farewell to Arms: “The world breaks everyone, then some become strong at the broken places.” The experience of living in these days will break some of us, and within that group there will be those who are made stronger. Some of us will learn to rely more fully on God’s presence within us and among us. Some will finally see that God’s abundance means that there is enough for all of us if we share. Some will take away the idea that radical individualism is morally bankrupt. Others will learn the lesson that it is a beautiful thing to rely on one another….that working together, we can make it over this hurdle.

And there will be those among us who aren’t able to open their eyes to learn those things: Some people will hoard toilet paper (for unknown reasons!), others will make certain that THEIR family has the supplies they need without caring for anyone else, and others will not take precautions because THEY are not worried about getting ill, even though people around them may be at greater risk than they are.

Whether we like it or not, the whole world is in this together. And nothing like a virus can show us that we are truly interconnected as the human family. The God who walks with us through the wilderness isn’t going to magically keep you from getting sick, but that same God is going to stay by your side no matter what. That’s what “minimum protection, maximum support” means. Not only is that what God offers US, it is what WE can offer to one another: supporting each other, perhaps from a distance, but supporting one another nonetheless. 

Last week, Carla got an email from a Plymouth couple in their 30s saying that since they were not in a high-risk group, that if there was something that elder members of our congregation needed, they could help out. That’s maximum support.

Mandy Hall sent me an email concerned about the plight of our childcare staff, who are paid hourly, if there wasn’t going to be a need for their work if we don’t have in-person worship, and we’ve come up with a plan to continue to pay them, which we are doing. That’s maximum support.

In the midst of this pandemic, we all are finding ourselves in unknown territory, in a wilderness. We can see this wilderness as a parched and barren land that is filled with threats, fears, and real danger. But that isn’t the only way to look at it. We can hold fast and see the landscape as one that is saturated with living water: with the love and the radical generosity and abundance of God. We can see the abundance of scientists, physicians, nurses, and other caregivers in the midst of a crisis and say, “Thanks be to God. This is living water.” We can see the indomitable spirit and the cooperation of people working together and say, “Thanks be to God. This is living water.” We can hear online the people of Italy applauding for medical workers and singing from their balconies and say, “Thanks be to God. This is living water.” We can feel the sense the compassion of people caring deeply for those most in need and say, “Thanks be to God. This is living water.”

There are desert wilderness times for us all – moments or seasons in our lives when things seem to have dried up and blown away. And that is part of the reminder of Lent: that Jesus had those moments of walking through a parched landscape. Jesus confronted his demons and walked past them. It was a time that stretched him to the limits of physical, mental, and spiritual exertion…and he made it beyond that breaking point and lived into his ministry. Jesus opted to live a life that was saturated, not parched: a life of extravagant welcome, risk-taking, and active engagement, of envisioning and proclaiming a new way of being in the world. And that is the spirit-saturated life that we are being invited into. 

Jesus says to the Samaritan woman, “If you know the generosity [the gifts] of God and who it is asking you to give him a drink of water, you’d be the one asking me for a drink, and I would have given you living water.” In Hebrew and Aramaic this is a play on words, “living water” means water that is upwelling from a spring, like an artesian well. And it also has the significance of something more than just H20. “Everyone who drinks of this water will never be thirsty again,” Jesus says.

Do you want to live a parched life or a saturated life?

I had planned to talk more extensively today about the Celtic tradition, since St. Patrick’s Day is only two days away, but just to give you a snippet: In the pre-Christian Celtic tradition, wells (what you and I think of as springs and the ancient Jews thought of as “living water”) were considered sacred, not only because they sprung up pure from the earth, which was the source of their divinity, but because of all the metaphorical meaning that water has as being essential to sustenance, to growth, to the greening of life itself. 

As Christianity moved into Celtic Britain, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, the druidic wells were “rebaptized” in the name of Christian saints. So, in London you find a section called Bridewell (the well of St. Bride or St. Brigid), and all over Ireland there are wells dedicated to Brigid and Mary. The Gaelic word for well is “tober,” and on the Isle of Mull in Scotland, the largest town in called Tobermory, the Well of Mary. Throughout the middle ages and even today, people come to these sacred springs, many seeking healing and others on pilgrimage seeking living water. At St. Winifred’s Well in Wales, etched into the gothic stone walls surrounding the spring, you will see etched graffiti with the names and dates of physical healings accomplished there going back centuries, and people still come to the well seeking physical healing and spiritual wholeness.

As we walk together through Lent and as we walk together through this pandemic, may we remember that God’s presence is with us, strengthens us, upholds us and offer us the living water we need.

Amen.

(If you’d like to see a three-minute video meditation on Holy Wells and this story from John’s Gospel, you can go to tinyurl.com/Celticwell)

© 2020 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact hal@plymouthucc.org for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.

John 2.1-11
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning,
Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado

I spent much of the day on Thursday reading a volume of sermons by an eminent mid-century theologian. And though these sermons were written 50 or 60 years in the past, there is still a freshness and relevance to them. And that is unfortunate in some ways, because the moral and religious failings these sermons address are still with us.
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When we celebrate Martin Luther King Day tomorrow, most of us in America will think of Dr. King as a great civil rights leader, which to be sure, he was. But that is not all he was.

Clayborne Carson, a professor of history at Stanford, writes, “The world saw him as a marching protest leader, but Martin Luther King, Jr., was first and foremost a preacher. ‘In the quiet recesses of my heart,’ he once remarked, ‘I am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher.’” [1] And we know that Dr. King was a great preacher, but when you begin to read his sermons, you come to an understanding of the theology and the faith that informed who he was as a leader. 

“As a young man with most of my life ahead of me,” King proclaimed, “I decided early to give my life to something eternal and absolute. Not to these little gods that are here today and gone tomorrow…. I’m not going to put my ultimate faith in the little gods that can be destroyed in an atomic age, but the God who has been our help in ages past, and our hope for years to come, and our shelter in the time of storm, and our eternal home.” [2] No one knew that King would not grow past middle age before being killed by an assassin’s bullet.

The other thing that was new for me was to understand his theological progressivism. I knew, of course, that he was steeped in the experience of the African-American church and its commitment to social and economic justice, but when you read Dr. King’s sermons, you learn that it really was about justice…not “just us.” His concern was not only for African-Americans, but for all people. Dr. King was also shaped by Colgate Rochester Divinity School, where a half century earlier the theology of the Social Gospel was enunciated most clearly by Walter Rauschenbusch, standing as a counterpoise to fundamentalism, and in many ways, King was the transmitter of the Social Gospel in the mid 20th century.

Like progressive Christians now, King identified a “widespread belief in the minds of many that there is a conflict between science and religion. But,” King writes, “there is no fundamental issue between the two.” [3] He was in no way a biblical literalist; in fact, many white Evangelical preachers in the South who stood against the civil rights struggle were literalists who used the Bible as a bludgeon, rather than as a source of grace and light. 

King speaks in his sermons against materialism and in favor of a lived faith. “It’s possible to affirm the existence of God with your lips and deny his existence with your life,” King claimed. “We say with our mouths that we believe in him, but we live our lives like he never existed.” [4] You probably aren’t going to hear that quote on the news tomorrow, because it’s “too religious” for our secular society. But if you don’t understand Dr. King’s faith, you cannot understand Dr. King in any deep and meaningful way.

“We just became so involved in getting our big bank accounts,” King preached, “that we unconsciously forgot about God – we didn’t mean to do it. We became so involved in getting our nice, luxurious cars, and they’re very nice, but we became so involved in it that it became much more convenient to ride out to the beach on a Sunday afternoon than to come to church that morning. It was an unconscious thing – we didn’t mean to do it. We became so involved and fascinated by the intricacies of television that we found it a little more convenient to stay at home than to come to church. It was an unconscious thing – we didn’t mean to do it.” [5] Thank God his parishioners didn’t have the temptations of the internet, Netflix, and skiing! Seriously, he was calling his congregation out to remind them of what it means to be faithful. In another sermon he claimed, “You are more concerned about making a living than making a life.” [6] Think of the contrast between Dr. King’s theology and today’s “prosperity gospel.”

I also discovered a short sentence that hit me like a rock. I want you to listen to this sentence and don’t think about the situation in the late 1950s…I want you to think about what it means today. “Social problems and racism in particular are moral and spiritual problems that create political and economic consequences.” Listen to that again: “Social problems and racism in particular are moral and spiritual problems that create political and economic consequences.” [7]

That we have a president whose administration imprisons children on our border…that is a moral and a spiritual problem: his and ours. That we have a shut-down government denying work to federal employees and contractors…that is a moral and a spiritual problem: his and ours. That we are witnessing a rise in hate crimes…that is a moral and a spiritual problem: his and ours. Do we have a moral and spiritual problem to address in this country? 

Dr. King said, “One cannot worship the false god of nationalism and the God of Christianity at the same time. The two are incompatible.” We call the worship of false gods idolatry, and it is a violation of the first commandment. Can you say “America First” and call yourself a Christian? 

The economic and political consequences that we live with today are the manifestation, the consequence, the result of the undealt-with moral and spiritual problems that haunt this nation. We need to deal with our national obsession with material things, with the avarice that drives our economy, with ongoing racism that eats away at our nation. These are moral and spiritual problems.
And one of the consequences that Dr. King didn’t live to see is that we are killing God’s planet as well as God’s people. We need a church that is willing to speak out as the conscience of our society, and we need a government willing to get tough, work across the aisle, and make hard choices that address the moral and spiritual problems that cause such suffering. “The church must be reminded,” King preached, “that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state.” [8] Congregations like ours must claim that mantle, but it means we need to focus not just on charity, but on the work of systemic justice, as we are doing on the border, with our police, with affordable housing. 

One of the things that Dr. King knew and experienced is that doing the work of social justice requires risks and is incredibly taxing. It exhausts those who stand up for the oppressed. And he knew in the depths of his soul that his faith in God was what gave him and the movement the kind of spiritual resiliency that made change in the long term possible. Without roots extending deep into the soil of faith, the tree of social justice will wither and blow over in a strong wind.
 
When Mary tells her son that the wine has run out, Jesus says to his mother, “My time has not yet come.” In other words, his time to die is not yet arrived. But then he asks the steward to bring the jars and fill them with water. And he changes them into wine.

Jesus shows up at just the right moment, and even though time seems out of joint to him, he proceeds because he sees what is needed: the people need to taste and see that God is good. Sometimes situations call forth leaders who are needed in the moment, and I sense that God called Martin Luther King, Jr., into the moment when America needed him most. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a mystic, scholar, and activist said, “The whole future of America will depend on the impact and influence of Dr. King.” The man had incredible gifts, talents and abilities that were ripe for that Kairos moment of American in the 1950s and 60s. He was not Jesus turning water into wine, but he was a prophet, showing this nation and the world a third way, a nonviolent path toward spiritual, moral, and social transformation.

Who will turn water into wine for our nation today? 

There is much we can do today as the heirs of Dr. King’s spiritual legacy. We can use our faith as our bedrock as we lift our voices to speak out against racism, police violence, white nationalism, jingoism, economic injustice, and unjust immigration policy. But we need to lift every voice and sing…we need to stand up and let our voices be heard, in the halls of Congress, in the voting booth, in the public square.

“Taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are those who take refuge in him. O fear the Lord, you, his holy ones, for those who fear him have no want.” [9]

Amen.

Notes:

1.  Clayborne Carson, and Peter Holloran ed., A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons on Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (NY: Warner, 1998) from the introduction.
2.   MLK, “Recovering Lost Values,” in Carson and Holloran, op. cit., p. 17
3.   Martin Luther King, Jr., “Three Essays on Religion,” held in Chester, PA.
4.   MLK, “Recovering Lost Values,” in Carson and Holloran, op. cit., p. 15
5.   Ibid.
6.   MLK, “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” Carson and Holloran, op. cit. p. 28
7.   Ibid., p 22.
8.   MLK: “A Knock at Midnight,” in Carson and Holloran, op. cit., p.72.
9.   Ps. 34.8-9

© 2019 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact hal@plymouthucc.org for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.