Our spiritual food

Exodus 17:1-7

17:1 From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. 2 The people quarreled with Moses and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” 3 But the people thirsted there for water, and the people complained against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” 4 So Moses cried out to the Lord, “What shall I do for this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” 5 The Lord said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile and go. 6 I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. 7 He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”

Psalm 97:7b-11

O that today you would listen to his voice!

8   Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, 9 when your ancestors tested me and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.

10 For forty years I loathed that generation   and said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they do not regard my ways.”

11 Therefore in my anger I swore,    “They shall not enter my rest.”

John 4:5-30

5 So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.

    7 A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8 (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” 11 The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” 13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 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.” 15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

    16 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” 17 The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband,’ 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” 19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” 21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 25 The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” 26 Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

    27 Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” 28 Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, 29 “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” 30 They left the city and were on their way to him.

The Lord delivered the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and into the Promised Land - but not before they first wandered in the wilderness for 40 years.   I saw a Bible once that included a map of their journey, and it shows them more or less walking in circles.   They moved at the Lord’s command, so why did it take 40 years to get from one place to the other?  

In the passage we read the Israelites depart from the Wilderness of Sin (which has nothing to do with “sin”) and stopped at a place where there was no water.  When it says “they camped” it’s not like they popped their tent for one night and moved on.  They probably stayed for a while - maybe quite a while.  And sooner or later the lack of water became a problem.  If you were in the desert without water, you’d probably start to get a bit antsy.  At some point the people went to Moses demanding a solution to the problem.  It’s not hard to sympathize with their complaint: “Why did we go to all the trouble of leaving Egypt only to die in the desert!?  Why are we camping where these is no water!?  Do something!?”

Moses responds like a typical middle-manager, rejecting their complaint even as he’s probably wondering the same thing himself.  He’s essentially saying that his hands are tied, that they’re complaint is actually directed at the Lord.  It’s worth noting that, at least in this passage, the Lord never chastises the people for demanding water, for being afraid.  Instead, when Moses asks the Lord what he should do, he’s told to strike a rock and water will pour forth.  And it is Moses who then names the place because there the people had dared to question, “Is the Lord among us or not?”

It’s not an unreasonable question.  You’ve been wandering the wilderness for who knows how long, and the memory of your deliverance from Egypt fades further in further into the past.  Did what we think happened really happen?  And if indeed God delivered us then, how do we know that God is leading us still?  How do we know we haven’t been abandoned?  But even if we’re exactly where God wants us, that’s not entirely comforting either, because it seems we have to demand provision for our most basic needs.   It’s not difficult to sympathize with their plight.  

And yet, the Christian tradition - taking clear cues from Scripture itself - has not sympathized with the Israelites.  We read Psalm 95 in two parts.  The second part switches abruptly from speaking about the Lord to the Lord speaking an admonition not to be like the Israelites whose demand for water evidenced a hard heart toward the Lord.  This episode becomes a paradigmatic instance of the people who ought to know better failing to trust in the Lord.  And because they fail to trust, this generation will also not receive the reward of the Promised Land.  They will perish in the wilderness, and their children will inherit the promise.  

The obvious message for the preacher to deliver is that, unlike the Israelites in the wilderness, you just need to trust God because God is always faithful - and any doubt of that amounts to a betrayal of the God who has delivered you.  It’s that simple.  Christian life is lived in the wilderness, the time in between our deliverance and our eventual arrival in the Promised Land.   

In the story of Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well we see a recurring, almost comical, confusion about what Jesus means.  Jesus asks her for a drink, and after she expresses surprise that he would even talk to her, he tells her that if she knew who he was she would’ve asked him for living water.  But then she observes that he doesn’t have a bucket.  Presumably living water requires a bucket, no?  The disciples weren’t around for this because they’d gone looking for food, and when they return - after their surprise that Jesus is talking to this Samaritan woman - they plead with him to eat something.  Jesus responds, “I have food to eat that you do not know about”, and the disciple start trying to figure out who brought Jesus food, or maybe where he keeps he secret stash.  But he said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.”  

In both instances, the people Jesus is speaking with misunderstand his meaning because they take him too literally, presuming that he’s talking about the kind of water drawn from a hole in the ground, or food that you chew and swallow.  They are thinking in terms only of their physical, material, when Jesus addresses our more profound spiritual needs.  Like the Israelites in the wilderness, these are people preoccupied with how they’re going to find water and food when they really ought to concern themselves with the spiritual water and food which will truly nourish and sustain them.   And obviously we are those people as well.  

There’s a danger here, that we conclude that only spiritual things matter and the physical, material is finally irrelevant.  I remember one time in university (during the stage I was most “spiritual”) I encountered a man on the street who told me he was hungry then asked for money, to which I replied I would pray for him, and his face turned to pure disgust.  I wasn’t tending to his deeper needs; I was being lazy.  

On Thursday a few of us, accompanied by a barber, went to Abrigado, a facility for drug addicts, to organize their first ever men’s day.  We brought pastries, there was coffee, we offered haircuts, and we talked to the guys who showed up.  They didn’t know we were from a church and we didn’t tell them about Jesus, but what we did, by offering them hospitality, by affirming their dignity - by treating them like people made in the image of God - did address their spiritual needs. 

Whenever and wherever Christians have either explicitly or implicitly decided that meeting people’s material need is a waste of time, they have given up on the way of Jesus.  

If we are to be faithful, there is an important distinction between what we pursue ourselves and what we provide for others.  We can and should call ourselves to something higher without then denying others what we’ve denied ourselves.  You can - and should - turn the other cheek, but you would be way out of line to turn someone else’s cheek.

In this season of Lent, especially, we wrestle with the reality that our lives are often preoccupied with not just our material needs, but our material comforts, with securing for ourselves the kind of life we want.  And we think that if gain these things, then our needs will be met, our deepest desires satisfied.  

It’s pretty much standard fare in church to hear that your deepest needs will be met not by material stuff but in God.  And, of course, it’s true.  But then how do you learn to do this? How do you become the sort of person who not just agrees that you ought to find satisfaction in God alone but who actually lives the kind of life that embodies that truth?  One good is answer is by practicing self-denial.  It’s often only when deprived of our comforts than we can see clearly what our true needs are, only when when deny ourselves that we see who can actually provide what we  most need.  When we find ourselves in the wilderness we have at least the opportunity - if not the certainty - of learning where our help comes from.  If we want to trust God more, we might need to practice more self-denial.  

And it’s also when we practice self-denial that we become less self-absorbed, it’s in denying our material desires that we become those capable of pursuing our deepest spiritual needs.  It’s when we become those who see the needs of others.  Every Sunday, after coming to the table - after receiving the food that Jesus gives, his very body and blood - we pray, “Grant that we may go into the world in the strength of your Spirit, to give ourselves for others”.  As it was for Jesus: our food is to do the will of the Father.