Rivers of Living Water

A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

20th February 2022

Exodus 17.1-7

Isaiah 12.2-4

John 7.37-52

In our reading for today, from John’s gospel,

            we’re returning to a theme we first met a few weeks ago,

when we were with the Samaritan woman

            encountering Jesus in the heat of the day beside Jacob’s Well.

 

In that moment, Jesus told the woman

            that those who drink the water from the well will be thirsty again,

but those who drink of the water that he gives

            will find that it becomes in them a spring of water,

            gushing up to eternal life (4.13-14).

 

And I shared the words of a friend of mine,

            spoken as we had stood around the fountain at St Dunstan in the East,

            as she wondered, ‘well, who wouldn’t want that for their life?’

 

This is a fine question, and an important challenge:

            Jesus offers us a way of living that is like a spring of water

            gushing from the ground to give life to all who drink from it.

 

And John’s gospel could have left it there,

            and moved on to other metaphors for the new life that Jesus brings,

            such as light, or bread, or vines, or shepherds, or doors…

 

But instead, just three chapters later,

            the gospel returns us to the theme of water.

There is more, it seems, that we need to discover and think about

            if we are to get to grips with the true significance

            of Jesus as the water of life.

 

By the time we get to chapter 7, Jesus has gone back down to Jerusalem,

            this time for the great Jewish festival of Booths,

            sometimes also known as the feast of Tabernacles, or Sukkot.

 

This festival was a kind of harvest festival,

            but with added layers of symbolism,

and understanding a bit about it can help us

            begin to get to grips with what Jesus is saying here in John 7.

 

At one level, the festival of Booths marked the end of the autumn harvest,

            with people making a pilgrimage to give thanks

                        for the ripening of the grapes and olives,

            and to offer their prayers to God for the start of the rainy season,

                        without which there would be no harvest the following year.

 

A winter of drought could be catastrophic,

            and the autumn rains literally brought life to the land and the people.

 

The final day of the festival, on which John tells us

            Jesus gave his discourse about living water,

was the day of the ‘water ritual’,

            where the high priest would walk from the Temple to the pool of Siloam

                        to collect a pitcher of water,

            which would then be poured onto the altar in the temple

                        as part of the prayers for life-giving rain.

 

This is, then, the first layer of meaning

            that we are invited to see in Jesus’ talk of himself

            as the source of living water,

and I think it speaks down the millennia to us, too.

 

As I’m sure Matthew could explain far better than I,

            we live in a world where the future well-being of humanity

            is going to be affected profoundly by issues around water supply and scarcity.

 

As climate change continues its inexorable transformation of our planet,

            and desertification makes previously habitable areas

                        inhospitable to life and agriculture,

            we too, or at least our children and grandchildren,

                        may find themselves again offering prayers for rain and an end to drought.

 

And as is so often the case with prayer,

            it may be that the answer is before us already, at least in part.

 

There is a need for urgent adaptation,

            for a re-thinking of the relationship between our planet and its inhabitants,

             if death and disruption on a global scale are to be avoided.

 

From the decarbonisation of the global economy,

            to planning now for the changes

                        that are already locked-in to our climate systems,

            we need a new and better way of being human,

                        where the resources of our planet are treasured and conserved, r

                        ather than taken for granted and exploited.

 

And water supply will be at the heart of this.

            Without water there will be no life, no crops, no civilisation.

 

Jem Bendell, in his 2018 paper ‘Deep Adaptation’,

            adopts a prophetic voice in calling humanity

            to resilience, relinquishment, restoration, and reconciliation.

To which I would add, I think, repentance.

 

Resilience will come as we decide what we value most

            and how we want to preserve it;

 

relinquishment will be the letting go of what is not needed

            or which makes things worse;

 

restoration will be the rediscovery of better ways of living with nature

            which have been set aside in recent centuries;

 

reconciliation is a call to move towards peace and away from conflict

            as we adapt to a new world;

 

and repentance will be a recognition that those economies

            who have reaped the greatest rewards from the burning of hydrocarbons

            must take the greatest share of responsibility for driving change.

 

And as the people of God,

            the church needs to hear again the words of Jesus

who spoke to a world of drought,

            to proclaim that anyone who is thirsty should come to him and drink;

            that from his heart, and the hearts of his followers,

                        shall flow rivers of living water.

 

We should not seek to spiritualise this away.

            There is a spiritual dimension to it, which we will come to;

                        but if the people of God are not engaged in the climate crisis,

                                    calling humanity to a better way of being human,

                        and working to bring that new humanity which is in Christ

                                    into being in our world,

                        then we are missing a key aspect of what Jesus is saying.

 

We are those who can call the world to a Just Transition,

            because we do not ultimately answer

                        to extractive systems of production, consumption,

                        and political oppression.

 

Rather, we answer to the lordship of Christ, the source of life,

            and so we can prophetically embody

                        resilient, regenerative, and equitable living,

            where the transition to a post-carbon world

                        places concerns of race, gender, and poverty

                        at the centre of the solution’s equation.

 

As a church here at Bloomsbury

            we are already Eco-church accredited to a Bronze award,

                        and it is my hope that we can achieve

                        silver and gold accreditation before too long.

 

And some of us are already involved through London Citizens

            in the Just Transition campaign for London to prioritise

                        the needs of those living in fuel poverty

            as the city decarbonises over the next decade.

 

If you want to be part of these with me,

            please speak to me and together we can work out what it means

                        for us, in our context, to be a stream of living water

                        for the thirsty in our world.

 

But there is a second layer to the festival of Booths,

            and it invites us to take Jesus’ words to another level too.

 

You see, the festival wasn’t just about the harvest and the autumn rains.

            It was also a specific remembrance of the exodus.

 

You know the story;

            the people of Israel were led by Moses from slavery in Egypt,

                        through the waters of the Red Sea,

            into 40 years of wandering in the wilderness,

                        before finally settling in the promised land.

 

In the desert of the wilderness

            they had need for sustenance, and need for shelter.

 

We have already seen how the language of Jesus as the bread of life

            recalls the bread-like manna from heaven

            that the Israelites gathered from the desert floor each day to feed themselves;

and here in the festival of Booths

            as the setting for Jesus’ sermon on living water,

            we encounter yet more Exodus imagery.

 

The booths or tabernacles

            in which the festival-attendees stayed for the week,

were temporary structures

            that echoed the temporary and portable housing

            in which the people of Israel lived through their decades of desert wandering;

 

and the water ceremony on the final day

            recalled the striking of a stream of water from the rock at Horeb,

as the staff of Moses that had parted the waters of the Red Sea

            was used to part rock and bring forth life giving water into the desert.

 

This theme of water in unexpected places

            echoed into the spiritual imagination of Israel,

and became a recurring symbol for the life-giving,

            saving power of God.

 

So in Ezekiel’s vision,

            a prophecy given to the Israelites in exile in Babylon,

                        following the destruction of the first Jerusalem temple

                        at the hands of the invading army,

            the prophet describes a restored temple,

                        with water flowing from below the threshold of the temple

                        to fill a vast lake, teeming with life,

            making the stagnant waters into which it flows

                        fresh enough to sustain fish,

            irrigating the land so that trees grow

                        whose leaves never wither and whose fruit never fails,

            because the water that sustains them

                        flows from the sanctuary of God in the temple itself.

 

Here in Ezekiel, the image of a life-giving stream of water

            becomes a symbol for a restored Israel,

            for the end of exile and the rebuilding of the temple (Ez. 47.1-12).

 

But Ezekiel’s vision is far wider than just Israel:

            the restoration of the people of God is, he says,

                        to be a blessing for all people,

                        for the lands beyond Jerusalem and Judea.

 

Ezekiel speaks of

            the fruit of the trees that grow from the water’s edge

                        as being for food,

            and of the leaves as being for healing (47.12).

 

This image finds its way into the Christian tradition in the book of Revelation,

            another visionary text written for people of faith

            facing difficulty and oppression.

 

In Revelation, written just after

            the destruction of the second Jerusalem temple by the Romans,

there is also a vision of a restored Jerusalem,

            and like Ezekiel’s temple this one also

            has a stream of water running through it.

 

In Revelation’s reworking of this image, though,

            there is an important difference.

 

Whereas in Ezekiel the water flowed from the sanctuary in the temple,

            the new Jerusalem in Revelation has no temple.

 

Rather, the river of the water of life, bright as crystal,

            flows directly from the throne of God and the lamb, that is, Jesus (22.1).

 

In the Christian visionary tradition then,

            Jesus has taken the place of the temple sanctuary

            as the source of life-giving water in the world.

 

Like Ezekiel’s vision,

            the river of life in Revelation also irrigates a tree,

                        described as the tree of life

            and, as in Ezekiel, its leaves are also described as being for healing:

                        ‘for the healing of the nations’ (22.2).

 

Jerusalem as a city famously had no natural water supply,

            but in the visions of both Ezekiel and John of Patmos

it becomes a source of life-giving water

            flowing from the heart of the people of God

            to bring life to the world and healing to the nations.

 

From Horeb to Babylon to Patmos,

            the water of life is a gift from God

            given through the faithful as a gift to those in need.

 

And all of this is in the background

            to John’s description of Jesus in Jerusalem

                        on the final day of the great feast,

            as the high priest went to the pool of Siloam

                        to collect the water that would be poured out on the altar.

 

Those who are thirsty,

            whose souls are parched and whose spirits are desiccated,

are invited to drink deeply from the well of life-giving water

            that has come into being in Jesus, the word of God made flesh.

 

From Jesus’ heart, and from the hearts of all who believe,

            shall flow rivers of life-giving water.

 

And here we come to the third, most spiritual, layer of meaning

            in this sermon from Jesus on living water:

the water of life is encountered in the world

            as the Spirit of Christ.

 

Today is not the day for me to explore

            the rights and wrongs of the Nicene creed and the filioque controversy,

but it is worth our while noting

            that the 1,000-year global division of Christianity

                        into two traditions, of East and West,

            owes much to this passage,

and to the debate over whether the Holy Spirit

            should be understood as proceeding into the world from the Father alone,

            or from the Father and the Son together.

 

We’ll save more on that for another day.

 

But it is interesting to note, I think,

            that this idea of Jesus, present to the world as life-giving water,

            through the gift of the Holy Spirit to his followers,

was controversial not just in historic Trinitarian debates,

            but also for those in Jerusalem who first heard him make this claim.

 

His proclamation of the gift of the Spirit as a stream of living water

            unmasked all kinds of prejudice and bigotry

            in those gathered around him on this final day of the festival of Booths.

 

We see racial prejudice,

            geographic and class-based prejudice (41, 42, 52);

we see false accusations seeking to silence someone

            who has tried to speak out, tentatively, for justice (52);

and we see a tendency to disregard the rule of law (51),

            the role of the police (45-47),

            and a desire for mob justice to overcome.

 

It all feels frighteningly contemporary.

 

I’ve just been listening to a fascinating podcast on BBC Sounds

            called ‘Things Fell Apart’

in which the journalist Jon Ronson

            explores the origins of the culture wars

            that currently dominate social media.

 

It has been salutary to discover

            how often Christians have been the originators or instigators

            of social movements that have oppressed, and continue to oppress,

                        the lives of countless people.

 

From the pro-life movement,

            to anti-Trans activism, to the Q Anon conspiracy,

            to cancel culture, to racist bullying on Snapchat,

Christians do not have a proud record of tolerance and justice.

 

My own recent negative experience

            at the hands of hostile Christians online

has left me both shaken but also somewhat despairing,

            that those whose hearts are supposed to bring forth

                        the life-giving water of the Holy Spirit as a blessing to the world,

                        and as a gift of healing to the nations, the climate, and the planet;

            have instead become the self-imposed gate-keepers of orthodoxy

                        in ways that divide, demean, and destroy.

 

Friends, this call to be the bearers

            of the water of the Spirit of life to the world

            is not an abstract calling.

 

It is not something we can or should

            try to do alone or in secret.

 

Rather, it is a call to collective action;

            it’s a call to build communities of love and acceptance

                        and to offer them as a gift to all

                        who are longing for somewhere to belong;

            it is a call to engage in acts of justice,

                        building creation-centred communities

                        with a bias to the poor;

            it is a call to challenge any system, whether secular or religious,

                        which excludes or perpetuates injustice.

 

It is, therefore, a call to controversy and to courage;

            but it is also a call to generosity, to healing,

            to love, and to life.

 

Let anyone who is thirsty come, and drink.