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Living Water

April 2, 2022

Jeremiah 11:18–20 | John 7:37–52| Psalm 7:6–11

In John Chapter 7, Jesus cries out to the crowds at a festival, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” What a beautiful image of abundant fulfillment that a life of faith promises. I so desperately wanted to write a lovely reflection on these words and call it a blog. But the Holy Spirit is not letting me do that this morning. She is forcing me to confront a darker place in my heart and admit to you that there is no river of living water flowing from my heart right now.

Instead, I am struggling with feelings of anger and hate over the brutal and horrific destruction in Ukraine. I am more in tune this morning with the raw feelings shared in Jeremiah. “But I was like a gentle lamb led to the slaughter.” Is this not an apt description of the Russian bombing of a theater filled with women and children in Mariupol? A building that had “children” written in large letters on its roof?  300 dead in that building alone. THREE HUNDRED! Can you imagine if those were our families and neighbors incinerated inside the Odeon Theater on Main Street in East Greenwich? Jeremiah asking God to “let me see your retribution upon them” becomes a lot more understandable, doesn’t it? As does the psalmist’s impassioned conjuring of God’s wrath in Psalm 7: “Stand up, O Lord, in your wrath; rise up against the fury of my enemies.” “Awake, O my God, decree justice.” “Let the malice of the wicked come to an end.”  My faith is a shallow façade if I traipse along passages of living water and ignore these passages of impassioned anger that are really resonating.

Yet… I’ve GOT to put a check on these feelings or I risk descending into the transgressions I am railing against. In these passages from Jeremiah and Psalms, indeed in many passages throughout the Psalms and scripture, it is not God taking retribution; it is we calling upon God to take retribution. It is weaponizing God. Not only is that wrong, it subverts our relationship with Him. It limits God to whom we think He should be and what we think He should do.

Sadly, the weaponization of God is one of the things we do quite well. The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the attacks of 9/11. Putin quoting Jesus that “greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” — in a disgraceful attempt to associate his atrocities with Christ’s compassion. Our own former president clearing Lafayette Square of peaceful protesters in order to march to a church, OUR Episcopal church! and hold a bible up in the air — using both as a prop for calculated political gain. Thousands and thousands of churches across our country using the Bible to shut gay and transgendered people off from God’s love and making them ashamed of how God created them. Myself a casualty of that one.

Oh, it has got to stop! As deeply felt the pain of transgressions against us might be, we cannot respond by turning God into a weapon against our transgressors. We cannot continue to drink from the poison of our hate. And so, it dawns on me that surely Jesus must have been aware of this when he cried out to that crowd and offered to quench their thirst with living water. And not only quench it, but provide it in such abundance that it flows out in rivers from our hearts to others. Jesus was not just floating before the crowd in radiant white garb offering platitudes. He was down in the muck of humanity, just as I am this morning struggling with my anger. Jesus knew the depths of our anger, our despair, even our hate. He saw our thirst for something better. It is from there that he offered us a better way. A way out of this. Friends, we’ve got to keep drinking from God’s living water of love, kindness and forgiveness. Even when we don’t feel it, we’ve got to keep drinking. Don’t turn it off. It is the only way we will find peace – with ourselves and with one another.

I guess this is a blog about living water after all.

Gary Schweizer