Living Water for the Wilderness of Life

The Third Sunday in Lent, Year A

Sermon for March 8, 2026

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Good morning, Epiphany. Again this weekend, so many of us were here for a funeral on Saturday; I went ahead and gave a special dispensation to a bunch of people and said they didn’t have to come to church twice in 24 hours. The Catholics have 5 pm Saturday mass, right? And that counts for the weekend? Combined with the start of Daylight Savings time, it’s a wonder any of you are here this morning. It’s good to see you here, regardless. I’m going to go collapse into a ball this afternoon and try to rest and recover, I have no idea how Catholic priests do this. Thank goodness we’re a one-Sunday-service church.

And lucky for us, or lucky for me as your preacher, this morning, we have the longest gospel reading outside of the Passion narrative on Palm Sunday, we have 38 verses from John chapter 4. This text is so rich and so full of things to preach about, there are so many different angles a preacher could take… but I am tired, and I’m not going to approach any of them this year. Come back in three years’ time, when this story comes back up in the lectionary, to hear my amazing sermon on Jesus’s interaction with the Samaritan woman, this saint of the church, called the Enlightened One in the Orthodox tradition, a woman who saves her town after Jesus talks with her about the true, living water.  

Instead, I’m going to base this morning’s sermon in the Old Testament. It’s a shorter and easier passage to approach, just seven verses from Exodus 17. I’ve preached mostly out of the Gospels over the last few months, but I think it’s worth our time to hop back into the Old Testament every now and then. The Old Testament, with Adam, Eve, and Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, and Solomon, with Ruth, Esther, and more, well, in our tradition, these are the very first people of God, the first who interacted with our Creator in a way we understand. Their stories were passed down for thousands of years. Their stories made up the only story for the people Jesus interacted with. Without understanding their story, we cannot fully understand our own… perhaps that’s a bold claim, but again, I think the Old Testament is in our Bible for a reason.

This morning, we find the people of Israel in exodus, literally, having left slavery in Egypt. We know the story of Pharoah, yes? My kids have watched the DreamWorks movie Prince of Egypt, at least, which probably has the best movie soundtrack of all time, I do recommend that. But Moses went to Pharoah and demanded, “Let my people go,” and after ten plagues and a lot of needless death, the people of Israel were freed from bondage and are now setting out from Egypt to find a new home. Their path was not an easy one; our 40 days of Lent and Jesus’s 40 days in the wilderness mirror the Israelites and their 40 years in exile, wandering through barren land before finding their new home in Canaan, which became known as Israel. The history, the geography, of these Old Testament stories is fascinating, especially if you’re following current events today.

But back to these wandering 40 years: this is where we find these people, where we find a frustrated Moses, during these 40 days of Lent, on this Third Sunday in our season of Lent. We are at the beginning of their 40 years in this passage, still in the first few months after they leave Egypt, but already, the people are complaining. As I’m sure you’re aware, people do that, especially when they’re hungry and thirsty. I’ve often thought, during my time as your priest, of keeping a Snickers on hand to provide as remedy when people get a little too worried about minute details. “You’re not you when you’re hungry, have a Snickers.” That sort of thing. But the people of Israel were hungry and thirsty; in the previous chapter of Exodus, God provides literal bread from heaven to answer their complaints, manna that falls each morning that will sustain them, and God provides quails, meat for them in the evening. They do have what they need to survive.

In this chapter, we find complaints coming about water. Even though they have been freed from slavery, even though they get literal bread from heaven for breakfast and plenty of meat for dinner each night, the Israelites come to Moses and say, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” Moses, having done literal miracles for their sake, is at his wits end: “Why do you quarrel with me, why do you test the Lord?” I can imagine him thinking, “Look at all the blessings you have, look at all the goodness around you, can we still not trust God will provide?”

And provide God does. In this story, God instructs Moses to strike a rock with a staff so that water will flow from it, and Moses listens, and it does, water comes from the rock where he stands. “Is the Lord among us or not?” he says to them. I want to imagine he says this really sarcastically, but it’s Moses, who knows. “Is the Lord among us or not?”

This morning, you can take this story and apply it to your own lives as you choose, but as I read it this week, I could not help but think about my own concerns and complaints that always rise to the surface in times of anxiety, exhaustion, grief. I have many complaints, about my own health, about the gray skies, about the local school bus system, about how undoubtedly we will have a dozen more snow days before the end of the school year. I have even more concerns, about war, about injustice, about lying politicians and their insatiable greed, about oppression, about abuse of power, about rising costs and our country’s and the church’s inability to adequately respond to the needs of all around us.

But a wise parishioner reminded me this week that “your perspective shapes your reality.” Of all times to hear that said aloud, I heard her say it on the week this passage was in the lectionary, and I cannot help but read it into this narrative, that of the complaining people of God. The people of Israel had a real and genuine and entirely legitimate concern: without water, they would die in the wilderness, they were not wrong about that. But they let that concern turn to anxiety, to fear, to quarreling and dissension, to a lack of faith, and if you believe Moses here, they were “almost ready to stone” him. They let their concerns and their complaints change them, turn them into an angry and quarreling and fearful people, so much so that they began to turn on what got them there in the first place, what earned them their freedom, what made them who they were.

Lest you worry that I feel like Moses in this congregation, I have not experienced too many complaints of late, I do not fear you are ready to stone me. That is not the story of the sermon this morning. But I do wonder how our own complaints and concerns guide us, how those complaints and concerns are enflamed by the media we consume, how we neglect to base our identity and our outlook and our own peace in the love of God, how we forget who we are: beloved children of God. The world is tumultuous right now, make no mistake about it; I have had to talk to my children about death, about American military history, about immigration, about nuclear war far more than I expected to need to at their age. But I would be mistaken, misguided if I did not end those conversations with the many blessings we all enjoy, all of us from America to Iran and everywhere in between, with the manna from heaven provided for us in just the previous chapter, with the loving Christ sent to earth to be with us, with the ways that God had seen us through.

I ask you this morning then, “Is the Lord among us or not?” Do we believe that in the midst of very real difficulty, that God is present? That we have a role to play in being ambassadors of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness? Do we get so bogged down in our concerns and complaints that we fail to see the ways God provides? Do we have faith?

In that long New Testament passage, Jesus does talk about living water, echoing the water that God and Moses provide the Israelites. Jesus says that “the water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” Friends, this morning, I ask that we rely on that spring of water, the water God provides us from rocks in the wilderness, the living water of Jesus and his love, the water that gushes up to eternal life, if we let it.

Instead of living in our anxiety and fear, our complaint and concern, may we live in love and joy and peace, relying on our faith that the Lord is indeed among us. May we face it all head on, never ignoring the truth and depth of our concern, but confident that God is with us as we love all the way through to the promised land.

Amen.