Living Water - WADE IN THE WATER

At the beginning of this series, I introduced the River of Life exercise—a creative way to reflect on your story by imagining your life as a river. Later today, during Coffee Fellowship, I’m going to invite you to actually try it: …to sketch the bends and turns of your journey—places you’ve lived, people and moments that shaped you, and even the waterfalls you somehow made it through.

It’s a reminder that none of our lives are stagnant. The only true constant is change—we are always being carried by currents we didn’t choose and can’t fully control. 

Some of those currents we’d love to paddle away from as fast as possible—things that shape our lives in ways we didn’t ask for and wouldn’t have chosen.

I can easily think of at least a dozen people with a lot of power right now whose choices are shaping my life in ways I would rather they didn’t.

TheRiver of Life helps us see grace in hindsight—the people who loved us into being, the lessons that shaped us, the doors we didn’t expect to open. When we look back, we begin to see God’s loving touch in places we might not have recognized before. 

We can imagine the story of Scripture as its own River of Life—not a single, stream, but a vast, complex river system, with many channels, currents, and crossings. And today’s readings take us not into the bends or around the boulders, but high into the headwaters—a place where the river first begins.

Today’s stories from Exodus and Matthew represent those headwaters. They are mountaintop moments, experiences literally on mountaintops, in the journey of faith: moments of spiritual awe, of astonishment, of ecstasy.  

These stories of Moses and Jesus were, to the witnesses gathered, fuel for long and frightening journeys ahead them. They returned to the stories, again and again as the stream of life carried them away.

Moses' second meeting with God on Mount Sinai becomes essential for the people of Israel as they face a long, uncertain journey through the wilderness toward the promised land. They are newly freed. They are tired. The future feels fragile and far away. The Jordan River—the crossing from wandering into freedom—lies so distant it feels more like a dream than a destination.

And then scripture gives us this arresting image: the glory of the LORD settles on Mount Sinai—thick cloud and devouring fire, a terrifying sight for anyone who has lived through fire season out here in the West. And into that swirling smoke and flame, Moses steps. He enters the cloud and remains there forty days and forty nights.

Down below, the people grow anxious. They do not know what has become of their leader. They do not know what will become of them. And so they demand a golden calf—a glittering god of their own making to worship. 

For Moses, this is an awe-filled, unforgettable encounter with the living God—one he will return to again and again when the road ahead begins to feel unbearable. For the people below, this moment would confirm, once Moses returned and they sorted out the business of this idol worship, would confirm that beyond a doubt: that God was speaking to them through Moses.

In a similar way, the story of the Transfiguration in Matthew becomes essential for the disciples as they move toward the terrifying days that lead to Jesus’ crucifixion—and the long, uncertain work of building the early church, without him physically present, and within the empire that had killed him.   

The stories from Exodus and Matthew mirror one another in striking ways. There is the mountain landscape. The enveloping clouds. The divine voice.

Here, Jesus’ face shining like the sun, echoing Moses’ radiant face when he descends the mountain, aglow with God’s glory. And just like the people of Israel at Sinai, Peter, James, and John are both amazed and afraid to witness something so overwhelming, so beautiful, and so far beyond ordinary human experience.

In this moment, the disciples glimpse the truth of who Jesus really is.

Transfiguration by Paulo Medina

But this is also the moment when Peter makes a very human mistake. Right after Jesus is revealed in glory, Peter blurts out, “Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” Peter wants to capture the moment. He wants to preserve the feeling. He wants to hold onto the spiritual high and keep the energy good.

These mountaintop moments are not meant to be preserved; they are meant to prepare us. They give us strength for what comes next. And what comes next, for Jesus and for the disciples, is a journey into the heart of the empire’s violence, the journey to the cross. 

This is why the Church celebrates the Transfiguration on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday. This story roots us in the good news of who Jesus is—God-with-us—so that when we begin the forty-day journey of Lent, when we walk with him toward the suffering of the cross, we can rememeer that glorious moment on the mountain, and God’s command, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!”

From here, I want to take us to a scene in the story of Jesus' ministry. This passage from John is not included among the the common lectionary readings for today, but was my own inclusion. 

Perhaps for obvious reasons. 

This story takes us, not into the crisp air of the mountain top, or by cool rushing headwaters, but down into the heat of an ordinary day. 

Jesus is on the move, and has taken, what the text says, is a necessary detour into Samaria. He is tired and so he sits beside a well. It’s noontime, the harsh light of midday, beating down on his head. There is one other person there, a woman of Samaria. And to everyone’s surprise—including her own—he asks for her help saying,  “Give me a drink.” 

She is surprised because Jews and Samaritans did not get along. Though they shared ancient roots and similar religious traditions, generations of migration, cultural intermixing, and change had taught Jewish people to see Sarmaritans as corrupted. As people beyond God’s covenant promise. 

The Samaritans did not understand themselves this way. They had their Scriptures and house of worship, established on Mount Gerizim. 

You can imagine Jewish perceptions made Samaritans a bit hostile.

 “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” She asks.

And yet the prophets, including Ezekiel and Jeremiah, had long imagined something different—a reunifying of a divided people. 

John the Baptist and Jesus step directly into that prophetic current. Jesus is not here to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it—to complete the long work of God’s restoration that has always included the people we were taught to leave behind.

So Jesus speaks to this women of Samaria, and then—because this is how Jesus often works—he flips the script. 

After asking for a drink, he offers her living water.

“If you knew the gift of God,” he says, “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.”

His metaphor isn’t random. It has meaning within their shared traditions. 

Living water is the language of the prophets—the water that cleanses, restores, and sets people free. Later in John’s gospel, Jesus will make it explicit: this living water is the Spirit of God, the breath of new life that reconciles what has been divided and renews what has grown dry.

At first, she doesn’t quite get it. Who could blame her? Jesus keeps speaking in metaphors. They're both probably hot, thirsty, and tired, and he’s babbling on about living water. If we’re honest, many of us would have wanted him to just speak plainly. But the confusion itself becomes part of what makes this encounter so remarkable.

Unlike others Jesus has encountered, like Nicodemus, who slips away in the night still unsure of Jesus' meaning, this woman is curious, courageous, and she craves this living water. So she sticks with the conversation. 

She asks, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” 

And Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” 

But I have not husband, she replies. 

Ouch, we might say. 

There have been lots of ink spilled over the meaning of her marital status. Much of this commentary conjuring details that are not in the text itself. Like that she is a prostitute… it never says that… or a serial divorcee… highly unlikely considering her context…. Perhaps an adulterer… we don’t know. 

This moment has so often been used to flatten her into a cautionary tale against sin… don’t be the women who thrist too much… 

But this reading misses the point of this text. 

As bible scholar Gail O’Day writes: The reasons for the woman’s marital history intrigue commentators but do not seem to concern Jesus. 

There is something there… perhaps gnawing at her spirit. Perhaps some shame that causese her to avoid her peers and go to the well at noon rather than in the cool dew of morning. 

I think Jesus sees it, but he brings it up, not to deepen her shame, or even to forgive her her sins, but to call her into a life-giving faith. 

“The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” 

He helps her speak her truth with tenderness. 

He treats her as someone worth seeing, worth speaking with, worth offering the gift of God.

And being seen like that is transformative. It is its own kind of transfiguration. Not light blazing from a face on a mountain, but a conversation that satisfying a person thirsts for dignity.  

She says, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet.” This is her confession of faith. 

And from there she asks the question she knows to ask: “Where should we worship? On this mountain, or in Jerusalem?”

She’s asking, should I worship like my people, or yours? 

And Jesus’ answer recalls the mistakes of the people waiting anxious for Moses, of the mistake of Peter, eager to capture this spiritual high. 

“Believe me,” he says, “the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.”

Jesus answer is, worship like neither. 

Just as the People wanted to worship a golden idol, and Peter wants to build shelters to contain God’s glory on that mountain, this woman worries about where she is worshipping. And Jesus gently but firmly refuses both options. The living God is no longer contained in the tabernacle, or reserved for sacred places. The glory revealed on the mountain flows down into the valleys. The living water offered at the well flows beyond every boundary—ethnic, religious, social, embodied. 

This is not the end of religion.

It is the reformation of religion. 

A reformation instigated by God, the Creator of us all. 

And next, this woman—this outsider, this person on the margins, this one who came to the well alone in the heat of the day—having received this living water—runs with it. She returns to her community and tells them this good news. 

She who had once carried shame leaves carrying good news. 

The one who arrives thirsty becomes a source of living water for others.

This is transfiguration, too. Not light on a mountaintop, but life remade at a well. 

Not glory held at a distance, but grace offered face-to-face. 

The same Jesus who shines with divine radiance before his closest friends also sits, on the ground, tired and dusty, to reveal the heart of God to someone in need of some good news. 

And maybe that is the final gift of these stories, placed here on the threshold of Lent. Our spiritual mountaintops sustain us for the journeys ahead. But God’s glory does not stay on the peaks—it flows into the dry places of our lives, bringing refreshment, justice, and peace where we thirst most.

And this loving presence, God’s loving touch, can changes us—not so we can stay where we are, but so that, like this woman, may be refreshed, and carry living water back into a thirsty world.

Sermon preached by Rev. Delaney Piper on 2/15/26.