The Rev’d Armando Ghinaglia
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
The Third Sunday in Lent
March 15, 2020
Sermon begins at 5:50.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Our reading from Exodus comes shortly after the Israelites escape from Egypt. After four hundred years of slavery, God responded to his people’s cries and called Moses to lead the Israelites out of bondage into the land that God had promised their ancestors long ago. And though they were skeptical at first, God’s people realized that this God—their God, our God—works wonders because this God saved them, time and again, from the hand of their enemies. By now, the Israelites should know that this God loves them—that this God, the true God, is faithful.
And that’s precisely what they sing just a couple chapters earlier: “I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider has he thrown into the sea. . . . Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in splendor, doing wonders? . . . In your steadfast love you led the people whom you redeemed . . . .”
But once they reach the wilderness, they quickly forget the wonders that God showed them in the land of Egypt—and more than those, God’s love and faithfulness all throughout. They lose faith. They complain to Moses and Aaron, ignoring God’s words as they start the journey: “I am the Lord who heals you.”
The first time, God is gracious. “I have heard the complaining of the Israelites . . . ‘At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall have your fill of bread; then you shall know that I am the Lord your God.’” The Israelites still seem to don’t trust God, but God bears with them all the same and gives them each day their daily bread.
In our reading today, the Israelites find something else to complain about: “Give us water to drink.” When Moses points out that their complaint is really a complaint against God’s faithfulness, the people insist: “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?”
Now God is gracious but upset: Moses, go, “[s]trike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” And yet as the psalm today puts it, “Forty years long I detested that generation and said, ‘This people are wayward in their hearts; they do not know my ways.’ So I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter into my rest.’”
Over a thousand years later, the Son of this same God is “tired out by his journey” and decides to sit by a well. As a Samaritan woman comes by, Jesus says to her, “Give me a drink.” Oh, how the tables have turned! The one who is himself living water thirsts, but he does not fear death from that thirst, as the Israelites did in the wilderness. Christ offers the woman what God offered sometime in the wilderness to the Israelites: “If you knew the gift of God, . . . you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” And “[t]he water that I will give will become in [you] a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”
“Where do you get that living water?” the woman asks him.
There, on the cross. “Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” And so “[o]ne of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out.”[i] The woman asks him to give her this water so that she may never be thirsty or have to keep coming back to the well to seek it for herself. And indeed, “it is by God’s will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all,”[ii] Christ the “atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.”[iii]
Nothing presents that sacrifice more clearly or more tangibly than the bread and wine offered in the Eucharist, which become for us the body and blood of Christ. This sacrament we celebrate today, albeit in a new way, points us to the loving and faithful God who continues to show wonders among us and who promises to be with us always, even in the wilderness.
Friends, today and in the weeks ahead, we find ourselves, like the Israelites, in a new kind of wilderness. Closing churches to public worship, not receiving the consecrated bread and wine in person, preaching to a congregation assembled virtually on Facebook Live—none of this is terribly familiar to most of us, not to mention COVID-19 itself. As Christians, what are some of the ways we can respond to these new and unexpected circumstances?
First, let us be subject to the authorities, for in this public health emergency, they are God’s servant for our good and the good of all those around us.[iv] Difficult times call for difficult decisions. The decision to close a church to public worship even temporarily is never easy. But God willing, time will tell that it was the right thing to do—the most loving choice that protects the most vulnerable among us. As such, that decision is its own Christian witness, to our respect for human life and to our faith in God’s unfailing goodness toward us.
Second, though it may pain us not to share in communion all together here and now, rest assured, as the Prayer Book says, that “all the benefits of Communion are received, even though the Sacrament is not received with the mouth.”[v] The God who made a way in the wilderness, who brought forth streams from parched ground, is just as able to nourish our souls in other ways, to make a way to our own hearts, that he might dwell in us and we in him. Trust that God will be faithful.
Lastly, a related point: “Pray without ceasing.”[vi] In this wilderness, God invites us to worship “neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem,” as Jesus tells the Samaritan woman, but “in spirit and truth.” As Saint Peter writes, “Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.”[vii] Pray when you wake up, and pray when you go to bed. Pray wherever you may be. Pray for the church. Pray for the nation and the world. Pray for your city and your state. Pray for all who are ill and for all who are vulnerable. Pray for all who are treating them and for all who work for our good. Pray for strength. Pray for faith. Pray for hope.
And as we raise those prayers to God on high, whatever fears or anxieties we may have, hold fast to that most comforting promise given to us in the Scriptures:
Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.[viii]
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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[i] Jn. 19:34.
[ii] Heb. 10:10.
[iii] 1 Jn. 2:2.
[iv] Rom. 13:1–4.
[v] BCP 457.
[vi] 1 Th. 5:17.
[vii] 1 Pet. 5:7.
[viii] Rom. 8:38–39.