Today in worship we will share Living Water, one with the other.

The text is the story of how it was Jesus found himself in conversation with a woman outcast in her society.  He asks her to share what she has:  a cup of cold water.  She does, and because of that elemental sharing, she becomes a part of the movement of freshening we’re trying to remember is our own.

Rob Bell has written a book asking why it is the “church” writ monolithic has become so enamored of the notion of hell fire and damnation.  It’s a book that is causing a ruckus in circles theological.  It’s a book I like very much.

I’m in the first chapter, but already I know I have met a compatriot who mourns, as do I, the ways that the Christian church has become more about barbed wire and less about living water.  The message of love gets lost, both within our churches and in the ways the church is perceived in the arid world around it.  Who would want to be a Christian, he asks (and we know this question oh so well) when the church and the Living Water it seeks to share seems almost gleefully judgmental and the withholding of juicy good seems to be driving motivation?

The story we will encounter this morning has to do with seeing the holy in each; in outcasts, in the lonely, in the society-assures-us-is-damned and in our very selves.  It shares with us, does this encounter between the Samaritan woman at the well and Jesus, the ways that grace is elemental and human encounter conduit and the cellular cry for holy communion real.

So we will offer it, one to the other.  And we’ll seek to live it, this way of sharing the Living Water of Jesus.  The burble of life is meant to be taken into our bodies and sung through our souls.

We’re tired of living parched.