{"id":860,"date":"2014-03-23T11:00:05","date_gmt":"2014-03-23T16:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=860"},"modified":"2021-02-23T11:35:18","modified_gmt":"2021-02-23T16:35:18","slug":"deep-thirst-living-waters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2014\/03\/23\/deep-thirst-living-waters\/","title":{"rendered":"Deep Thirst, Living Waters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Exodus 17:1-7<\/a><\/p>\n

Psalm 95<\/a><\/p>\n

John 4:5-42<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear the full service.<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear the sermon only.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

I thank Dean Hill for the privilege of sharing as a preacher in our Lenten observance.\u00a0 It\u2019s good to be back in this pulpit.\u00a0 Dean Hill wants us to think through Lent with the eyes of John Calvin whose theology is not always in accord with the Wesleyan tradition of Marsh Chapel.\u00a0 Our texts for today illustrate some of the principal issues of Calvin\u2019s theology.\u00a0 God is imagined many ways in the Bible, and Calvin picks up on most of them, from the most anthropomorphic to the most sublime.<\/p>\n

Our Exodus text is from the saga of the Israelites\u2019 flight from Egypt to take possession of Canaan, which they viewed centuries later when composing these texts as God\u2019s Promised Land for them.\u00a0 The relation between God and the Israelites was not a happy one, as they told it.\u00a0 God did not consult them concerning their departure from Egypt, and you remember the desperate flight in front of the Egyptian army that God miraculously destroyed at the Sea of Reeds (or Red Sea).\u00a0 This hair-raising escape was enough to make them nervous, especially since they had stolen all the goods they could from the Egyptians, at God\u2019s command (they reported), and now had great herds of animals that needed to be fed and watered.\u00a0 Shortly before the incident in our text, the Israelite company had run out of food and the people angrily asked Moses why he had led them away from the fleshpots of Egypt, that is, the diet of meat and a plenitude of bread, to die of hunger in the wilderness.\u00a0 That\u2019s when God send the manna from heaven, a nourishing special condensation of dew.\u00a0 But traveling on they ran out of water and complained to Moses again.\u00a0 God was royally provoked but stood on the rock which Moses struck with his staff and water poured out, saving the people.\u00a0 This satisfied their literal thirst and that of their flocks.\u00a0 But God was indeed provoked by their lack of faith in his providence and their complaint that they should never have left Egypt in the first place.\u00a0 We know from our responsive reading, the 95th<\/sup> Psalm, that God therefore determined that they would wander in the wilderness for 40 years until all the adults who had complained about thirst would have died.\u00a0 That included Aaron and Moses. Only afterward were the Israelites allowed into Canaan.<\/p>\n

The image of God here is plainly primitive.\u00a0 We tend to read the later image of God as love back through these parts of the Hebrew Bible. The practice of giving a \u201cspiritual reconstruction\u201d of the Bible based on the theological principle that God is Love was common in Christianity from the earliest times up to the Reformation. Those stories of God\u2019s pettiness and genocidal ways were construed to be allegorical expressions of something else, something consistent with an orthodox Christian theology of God\u2019s perfect justice, mercy, and benevolence. But this is in fact to be inattentive to what the Bible says. The Reformers, Calvin as well as Luther, said our theology should be based on a careful reading of the Bible, not the other way around where the reading of the Bible is based on a preconceived theology. Read straight, God in Exodus is arbitrary in choosing the Israelites over the Egyptians and Canaanites and is jealous about the Israelites\u2019 loyalty, which was shaky.\u00a0 God is depicted as one deity among others who wanted to prove his superiority to the Egyptians Gods, and later to the Canaanite ones.\u00a0 To prove this God hardened Pharaoh\u2019s heart so as not to let the Israelites go until afterGod had killed all the first-born of the Egyptians.\u00a0 This was genocide of untold numbers of innocents.\u00a0 But it is hardly worse than God killing off nearly all the animals and people on Earth at the time of Noah. Read straight, the God of these stories is a primitive tribal deity whose crimes against the humanity of everyone except the Israelite tribal ingroup are atrocities.\u00a0 He was even tough on the ingroup, as I say, requiring the deaths of all those who complained before letting them enter the Promised Land.\u00a0 Later Jewish and Christian interpreters had to find ways of taking these stories to be not true literally but symbolic of something closer to the God of justice, mercy, and love.\u00a0 There is a story I\u2019ve heard of from the Jewish Talmud, for instance, about the angels and deities in Heaven having a party after the drowning of the Egyptian army and rescue of the Israelites at the Sea of Reeds. But they noticed God standing off the side weeping. \u201cWhy are you not rejoicing at the salvation of your people Israel,\u201d they asked him.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m weeping for my people Egypt,\u201d God replied.<\/p>\n

For all his Biblicism, Calvin did not escape imposing his own consistent Christian theology on the Bible.\u00a0 For instance, he was a super-monotheist whereas much of the Hebrew Bible is polytheistic. Calvin has a lesson for us here, however.\u00a0 Realistically, the world is not balanced and just.\u00a0 Some people are rich and others poor.\u00a0 Some nations are favored, at least for a while, and others are swept aside. Some people move easily into a life of general benevolence with only minor setbacks while others damn themselves again and again despite a heart-felt will not to do so. Calvin\u2019s God is arbitrary, creating a world where some are saved and others are damned.\u00a0 The imbalance in the world must be the result of divine creation, said Calvin, because God is sovereign and somehow everything that happens, even the bad stuff, is the result of the divine will.\u00a0 Perhaps we do not like this and want to attribute a generous loving spirit to God.\u00a0 But then, given the realities of unequal life, God would have to be blind or inept, or not personal at all, or at least not sovereign.\u00a0 Calvin says, do not close your eyes to the shocking inequalities and injustices of the world and assume that God is really behind the scenes trying, without much success, to make it right.\u00a0 Life sometimes runs out of water.\u00a0 When God supplies the water, as at Rephidim, it often comes at a great price: death before the Promised Land.\u00a0 Sometimes God\u2019s water is a deadly flood, as the Egyptians discovered.\u00a0 God is Wild, knew Calvin.<\/p>\n

Now Calvin and I are not supposed to be talking this way.\u00a0 We are supposed to deflect attention away from the primitive God to the spiritualization of the metaphor of thirst.\u00a0 We are spiritually thirsty, and God can satisfy this spiritual thirst.\u00a0 This is the background orientation for the text from John\u2019s Gospel.\u00a0 Jesus turns his own human thirst at the well into a spiritual interpretation of the thirst of the others for the water of life.\u00a0 The story of Jesus\u2019 encounter with the Samaritan woman is chock-full of boundary-crossing elements\u2014talking with a Samaritan, talking with a woman, describing her dubious sex life without moral judgment, and offering her the water of life when he had originally only asked her for a drink from the well for himself. I presume you have heard a multitude of sermons based on this text about how we have a spiritual thirst that is far more important than physical thirst.\u00a0 Jump from John 4 to John 6 and you find Jesus claiming to be the bread of Heaven, quenching a spiritual hunger that he contrasted with the mere physical hunger satisfied with manna from Heaven.\u00a0 You all know how to think about the spiritual life in terms of the metaphors of thirst and hunger and you have my permission to rehearse in your mind\u2019s ear what you would say if you get bored with the rest of what I am about to say.<\/p>\n

Calvin\u2019s greatest genius was to see that religion is about God more than about us.\u00a0 For Luther, and for most other Christian theologians, religion is mainly about our salvation, including God\u2019s role in it through Jesus.\u00a0 Calvin paid lip service to the salvation problem and wrote many pages about how Jesus is our savior.\u00a0 But the main intentionality of his vision was focused on God.\u00a0 He had the largest conception of God in Western history. For him, God is unmeasurable, glorious beyond imagination, so radiant in beauty that of course God is sovereign. Nothing can compare with God.<\/p>\n

So what Calvin would lift up today from the conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman is Jesus\u2019 shocking dismissal of the tribal and religious differences between the Jews and Samaritans.\u00a0 Forget about whether one should worship in Jerusalem or on the Samaritan mountain. \u201cThe hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him.\u201d\u00a0 Jesus does not dismiss cultic differences, and says that the Jews know whom they worshipp whereas the Samaritans do not.\u00a0 But he relativized cultic differences.\u00a0 Real worship is a spiritual matter that should not be limited to cult.\u00a0 Calvin would read John 4 as testifying to the transcendent sovereignty of God.\u00a0 Just glimpse God and you are blown away.\u00a0 Worship in spirit and truth is something that can only be approximated from a cultic base.<\/p>\n

Of course, this is unmanageable theophany. It seems we need to domesticate conceptions of God for them to be to useful. \u00a0Calvin then turned to the Bible for finite things to say about this infinite and sovereign God.\u00a0 He tried to make out a consistent biblical set of affirmations about God and about commandments for human life.\u00a0 Like his symbolically interpreting predecessors he was reading in more than he was reading out.\u00a0 But he assembled a rather detailed special interpretation of what the Bible is supposed to mean that has organized his Reformed tradition ever since. \u00a0Because we cannot live up to God\u2019s beauty in creation, human beings are utterly depraved, Calvin said; this is not a politically correct position today.\u00a0 Most of us take offense at that part of Calvinism.<\/p>\n

Even worse, by subordinating the project of human salvation to the transcendently beautiful glory of God, awkward consequences such as predestination of some to salvation and others to damnation have followed since the Geneva days.\u00a0 In the Synod of Dort at the beginning of the 17th<\/sup> century the Calvinist divines had to decide whether God offers salvation to anyone with free will who takes it up, or whether God determines in advance whether you are saved regardless of what you think you choose.\u00a0 The former group, led by Arminius, was followed by the Methodists who continue to believe in free will.\u00a0 The latter group won out at the council and so Reformed people, that is, Presbyterians, are supposed to believe in total predestination.\u00a0 This put subsequent Calvinists in a panic to discover whether they were predestined for salvation or damnation. For Calvin, all these sometimes awkward consequences were not half as important as acknowledging the sovereign majesty and beauty of God.<\/p>\n

This transcendent beautiful sovereignty of the infinite Creator cannot be described in words.\u00a0 Some theologians had said that God is the fullness of reality that is whittled down in finite form to create the world.\u00a0 Calvin said yes, but more, God\u2019s creation cannot be understood as the domestication of divinity.\u00a0 It is the wholly new creation of the world that embodies the divine beauty.\u00a0 Every thing in creation is good, if you could but see it with God\u2019s eye.\u00a0 The swell of the oceans, the transience of the sunrise, the special thisness of each bird chirping in the bush, the vastness of the cosmos, the remote radiant heat of the Big Bang, the supernovas destroying worlds, the flooding of the coastal peoples, the parching of the deserts, the wars for dominance, the numbing poverty of our economic system, the blighted lives of the oppressed, the sick with poor care, the dying on our doorsteps, our own deaths coming anytime\u2014all, all, bespeak the strange beauty of God.\u00a0 What a horrible thing to say, we think! Moral protests abound against Calvin\u2019s vision and Calvinists themselves have been at the forefront of movements to relieve suffering and transform the world to a more nearly just comportment.\u00a0 But in a profound sense, perhaps only glimpsed from the corner of the eye, the Calvinist vision says sit down and shut up. It\u2019s not about you, it\u2019s about God. May I whisper softly, Calvin had it right in the long run?<\/p>\n

No one can bear this stark vision of divine glory for long, so think back to the human side, as Calvin suggested at the beginning of his Institutes.\u00a0 For what do we truly hunger and thirst?\u00a0 Forget the metaphor that we are spiritually empty vessels longing to be filled with divine substance.\u00a0 Our ordinary condition is to be spiritually filled with mediocre satisfactions.\u00a0 The ordinary metaphors of thirst for God\u2019s living water can too easily be turned to consumerism: we are needy\u2014so we think of God as the resource to fulfill our needs.<\/p>\n

Calvin blows this off.\u00a0 Forget human needs!\u00a0 Look to God\u2019s glory: this will create a need for satisfaction you had never imagined.\u00a0 Look to God\u2019s beauty: you will be drawn with an infinite passion that will strangely show you beauty in life\u2019s smallest details and worst horrors.\u00a0 Look to God\u2019s sovereignty and you will develop a thirst beyond your parchest history, a thirst deeper than any moral plumb line, a thirst that leaps over any water brook for which you had panted, a thirst that forgets your own proximately valid priorities, a thirst that brings us up short to gape without guile at God\u2019s glory in the \u201cthises\u201d of creation.\u00a0 Calvin dares us to look at God through the corner of the eye, through thick filters prepared for eclipses, and to be blown away.<\/p>\n

Although Calvin in fact gave all sorts of suggestions about Lent and the moral life, suggestions that have their place, his fundamental message was, forget about it!\u00a0 Ultimately, we are not important enough to worry about.\u00a0 So you need more discipline, ok, get a program.\u00a0 So you need to practice forgiveness, ok, get on with it.\u00a0 So you need to confess, oh, duh, yes, yes, we know you are sorry and will do better next time.\u00a0 Or not.\u00a0 For the glorious God in whom we live, it does not make much difference.\u00a0 Forget yourself. Forget whether you are saved or damned.\u00a0 Forget for the moment the need to fix the world. Instead look to God whose beauty will create in you a thirst of inhuman proportion.\u00a0 God beauties forth in all creation.\u00a0 Beauty elicits the thirst and the more you crave the closer you come to God.\u00a0 Calvin knew God does not satisfy thirst: God increases the craving.\u00a0 The whole creation is God\u2019s living water.\u00a0 The more we smell that water, the thirstier we become for God.\u00a0 Forget satisfying the thirst.\u00a0 Intensify it.\u00a0 God\u2019s immense, transcendent, and immanent beauty calls forth the deepest thirst that unites us to God.\u00a0 So, flee from spiritual satisfaction. It\u2019s not about you. \u00a0Increase your thirst. It\u2019s about God. Calvin understood something, didn\u2019t he?<\/p>\n

Amen.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Rev. Dr. Robert Cummings Neville<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Exodus 17:1-7 Psalm 95 John 4:5-42 Click here to hear the full service. Click here to hear the sermon only. \u00a0 I thank Dean Hill for the privilege of sharing as a preacher in our Lenten observance.\u00a0 It\u2019s good to be back in this pulpit.\u00a0 Dean Hill wants us to think through Lent with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[44,27],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2679"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=860"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":861,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860\/revisions\/861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}