"Thirsting and Testing"

First Presbyterian Church
Peter S. Buehler
February 24, 2008
Exodus 17:1-7; Romans 5:1-11

As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.

Imagine if we were all to get into a bus -- taking nothing with us but a copy of our scripture passage from Exodus -- if we were then to drive east four or five hours to the edge of the desert where we were to pull off the highway, get out, and start walking. Hours go by; weary, we find a place to camp for the night. Except there is no water; everyone is keenly aware of it. It's bone dry in every direction.

What would it be like to take out our copies of Exodus chapter 17 and read them aloud there in the desert?

It's one thing to read about the Israelites thirsting in the desert and complaining to Moses, and it's another thing to be thirsty ourselves. Have you ever been really thirsty, with no water anywhere nearby? When that happens it's not just a physical thing, every part of us needs water; it's all we can think about. We too become irritable and quarrelsome, distrustful and rebellious. We've all had the experience.

We should read Exodus 17 when we're thirsty! Because the scripture is not about being sure to carry water with us everywhere we go; it is not about keeping ourselves from getting thirsty. The message is about trusting God when there is no water in sight. The promise is that God satisfies our thirst, our deepest thirst, our need for hope, for happiness, for the assurance of God's presence in our lives. The promise is that this happens in the desert, especially in the desert.

I say this as someone who likes to have water nearby at all times. I'm personally responsible for a small mountain of plastic water bottles in our landfills. Any trip in the car over an hour, I take water with me in a cooler. If I'm in a meeting, especially a dry one, give me water. On a hot day when I'm thirsty there is nothing better than a glass of cold water.

Knowing the health benefits of water, there are a lot of us who avoid thirst at all costs. Yet I wonder, as people who are so incredibly privileged to have safe drinking water always at our fingertips -- knowing that one out of every six persons on our planet now does not have access to safe drinking water, over one billion people -- I wonder if we need to be especially careful not to dismiss the Israelites in our scripture passage, not to assume they were some weak-willed, ungrateful, untrusting, grouchy group who in no way are like good Christian people today.

It's better to empathize. To say with them, When we've been dry, in those times in our life when things were bleak and there was no end in sight to trouble, we too put God to the test. We've said or we've thought, God, what are you doing?
What have I done to deserve this? Have you brought me out here into this desert I'm in just to kill me with thirst, along with my family? What is your plan? Why is it taking so long.

And then the clincher: Lord, other people are beginning to doubt me. That hurts.

Psalm 42, in astonishing honesty, expresses both our thirst for God and our trouble when others doubt us. It starts with an image of a deer at a water source that has gone dry: As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. The psalm writer feels it so keenly: My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. Immediately a question follows, one that is foremost on his mind: When -- When shall I come and behold the face of God? He doesn't hold back, he admits how discouraged and depressed he is: My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me continually, "Where is your God?"

It is no wonder that people of faith turn to the Psalms. Not only do they give us words that fit our lives, they also give us permission to be candid about the state of our emotional and spiritual being. Because the scriptures don't sugarcoat human hardship, neither should we. When we're doing everything in our power that seems right and still there is no water in sight, the voice of the psalms says God can take it! God can take your anger! God can take your fear! God can take your doubt!

It is no more a lack of faith to cry out to God when our souls are dry than it is a lack of faith for a deer to bray over a waterless stream.

Yet there is a difference between the psalm writer and the people of Israel in the desert, as desperate as they were. The difference is that the psalm writer, even in his discouragement, addresses God in faith. He trusts God's goodness, even if it is an unseen goodness. And somehow it is God who is making the trust possible, the memory of God's blessing in his life is possible, so he can be both downcast and uplifted at the same time: Why are you cast down, O my soul,
And why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
My help and my God.

It is astounding; hurt and hope in the same verse. Like Thomas, the so-called doubting disciple, after Easter when he still wouldn't believe the Lord was risen, he had to see for himself. Hardly week had gone by when Jesus appeared among the disciples, went straight to Thomas and said: Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe. Is it not amazing how the Lord finds those who want to believe but have doubt! Thomas's reply is unforgettable: My Lord and my God.

I have a theory. I believe we use the personal pronoun in reference to Jesus, My Lord and my God, when, like Thomas, we know that we have been found. Until then God is an abstraction, a word, an idea. Until then if we are thirsty, we do not know what we are thirsty for -- we just want what we want, and when we get it we're still not satisfied. Our minds are saying Yes while something deeper inside us is saying No. Or maybe it's saying, No, not yet. Keep looking.

The astonishing thing is not that we find what we're looking for, but that the God of heaven and earth finds us. Thomas wasn't looking for Jesus, Jesus was looking for Thomas. Whether or not we seek God, God seeks us -- not because we're so good, or successful, or upstanding, or pure in heart, but because it is God's nature to stand at the door of our souls and knock, to seek us out, to invite us into a relationship with him that is satisfying in depth. When that happens, our language changes and our pronouns become personal: My Lord and my God.

Of course we can choose to stay the same, stay stubborn, keep the door closed, keep God out, and blame others for our thirst.

It's incredible, but Israel had actually stopped looking for water in the desert; all they wanted was to blame, all they wanted was to stone Moses. (Which incidentally is why in the Presbyterian Church we have our congregational meetings indoors. And it's why we keep objects off the tables that can be hurled, tossed, or thrown.) But even with all their complaining and blaming and head-hunting, God didn't punish the Israelites, instead he instructed Moses to go on ahead, to take elders with him as witnesses, to take his staff -- the same one he had used to strike the Nile and make it undrinkable, the first of the ten plagues -- go to the mountain (the same one on which the commandments would be given), and there God would be waiting.

It's a wonderful detail of the story: God is there ahead of Moses, waiting on a crag of the mountain, waiting for the leader of Israel to use his staff one more time, this time for water in the desert.

We're not so different from the Israelites. We think in our times of despair and thirst that God is nowhere to be found. We find ourselves looking not for water but for someone or something to blame. We go to church and try to live good lives and are surprised when everything does not go well. As one wise person put it: God leading does not always move from oasis to oasis. That can come as a surprise.

But especially in hard times, the promise is that God is ahead of us, waiting, and we just need to keep walking.

David Steinmetz, a professor at Duke Divinity School, writes that medieval spiritual advisors often summed up their advice to Christians, those who had the feeling of God's absence, with the words: "God does not deny his grace to those who do what is in them."

It's interesting advice. What does it mean? It's not advice in the sense of someone telling us what we should do. It's more Keep on keeping on. Keep praying, don't stop. Stick with your daily tasks and chores. Worship on Sunday; sing the songs and the hymns, trust the words; receive the sacraments. It may seem like you are "walking through an immense and limitless desert, with oases few and far between, we just keep plodding on." In hard times we are taught, says Steinmetz, "obedience is more important than emotional satisfaction." For God does not deny his grace to those who do what is in them. So we keep going.

I think it is one of the great challenges in life how we deal with the desert.
Yet it's surprising who we meet there -- or put another way, it's surprising who meets us there.

The New Testament takes us one step farther. We've spoken of Exodus 17 and Psalm 42 -- another passage, another story is worth keeping in mind. John chapter 4, the story of the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well, is especially good reading for the desert. The fact that the woman came at noon to draw water is telling: all the other women would have gone early in the day to avoid the heat, the fact that she was alone and late in the morning makes it clear she was an outsider even among her own people. We soon learn why: she had been married several times and the man she was living with was not her husband. No doubt she'd stopped caring what other people thought of her, but neither did the Samaritan woman need to be around the others when they sneered and scolded her with their eyes.

But what is even more interesting is who is already there at the well, almost as though he got there before her on purpose. It is a man who, unlike other men would not look at or speak to a woman they were not related to, calmly asks her for a cup of water. He engages her in conversation. In fact, as writer Barbara Brown Taylor points out, he talks longer to this woman than he talks to anyone else in all the Gospels -- longer than he talks to any of his disciples, longer than he talks to any of his own family. And two things happen as they talk: first, he is personal -- he reveals to her who she is, and second, he is loving -- he reveals to her who he is. The message is this: In his love, she will be satisfied, she will be filled, she will be alive. There by Jacob's well, Jesus says to the woman: Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but 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.

What this says to me, and I believe to us, is that our desert times, our times of thirst, are opportunities for encountering the risen Christ. That he will be ahead of us, waiting; he will engage us in conversation. He will seek our truth, whatever that truth is; as we stay in conversation with him, he will reveal our truth to us.
He will search us and know us, as the Psalm says, and it will be a comfort to us.
And in so doing, he will reveal himself to us; we will know once again that we are his.

There is no greater comfort than this: the knowledge that we belong -- body and soul, in life and in death -- not to ourselves but to our faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

The promise is great: that when we are thirsty, it's not simply a cup of water the Lord offers, it is a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.

Right there in the desert.