Thirsty

Robert E. Hall
Tarrytown United Methodist Church

March 7, 2010

Text: Isaiah 55: 1-9 and Psalm 63: 1-8

One summer day in the early 1950s (when I was about 10 years old), Sonny Turner and I decided, without consulting our parents, to ride our 24 inch, one-gear, coaster brake Schwinn bikes all the way out to Worth Ranch, the Boy Scout camp, some five miles north of Palo Pinto. Worth Ranch was and still is beautifully situated on a bend in the Brazos River. We knew the Scout Camp Superintendent and maybe he would show us around.

We had not reckoned on the fact that temperatures exceeding 95 degrees would make the trip difficult---if not impossible. We took along several WW II issue canteens of water. We drained those in the first two miles. Pedaling on Farm to Market Number 4 felt different on a bike than riding in a car. The baking pavement stuck to our tires. Jumbo grasshoppers appeared the size of squirrels. Ranchers in pickups just laughed and shook their head when they passed us. By the time we reached the dirt road that cut off to the west to the Ranch, we had no desire or energy to go the extra two miles. And then we had to ride all the way back home.

By the time we got back to my back yard, our legs felt like rubber and we were seriously parched. We turned on the water hose and drenched ourselves and drank until our bellies were extended. We laid there on the Bermuda grass in the shade for a long time. Water never felt or looked so good as it did on that hot summer afternoon.

When I read from Psalm 63--- “My soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water”--- I think of that bike ride. If longing for God is anything like the thirst I felt that day; and if the joy of “beholding God’s power and glory” is anything like our homecoming on that day----then I can only say, as the woman at the well told requested on Jesus, “Give us this living water always!”

Come to think of it, thirst for God is both a physical and a spiritual experience-----for neither you nor I can be divided neatly into two parts: You and I are inseparably, organically one. This may be why, when we exercise our bodies, our spirits and minds are lifted; and when we pray or sing or meditate or contemplate, we feel physically renewed. In the words of the old church camp song: The head bone is connected to the neck bone, the neck bone is connected to the shoulder bone, etc. etc. all the way down to the big toe----and everything in between.

Think of it, praying is often done best when on the run, or walking, or working or planning, or on the knees, or lying in our beds at night. Praying---- spiritual thirsting---is a physical, earthy talking and listening: our tongues are moving: it is a physical action. When we sing----and most singing in church is praying---we breathe in and out, our chests and stomachs tightening and releasing; our vocal chords vibrating. (Our ancient brothers and sisters knew this when they described used the same word for breath as they did for spirit!)

So when the psalmist speaks of thirsting for God as in a dry and weary land, he is not speaking only of ideas or thoughts of God but of feelings which interplay with our muscles, the cells of our bodies themselves participating, longing for God’s presence.

Thirsting for God can lead us to turn from the hurly-burly of life for a time. The story of the transfiguration of Jesus comes to mind. Jesus’ glory shone forth. But, contrary to Peter’s desire to stay on the spiritual mountain----to build booths to capture this spiritual high----Jesus led his disciples back into the physical world of human need----and they were met immediately by people needing cures for their physical-spiritual-emotional selves.

God may certainly be experienced in those moments when the spirit is engaged, but God is most often found in real, common, everyday human experiences. Heaven and earth interlock: we earthly-spiritual beings commune with God with all we have got: thoughts and words and movement: and all the five senses help us sing for joy.

Jesus was a man of the open road, who ate and slept as often as not under starry skies: he was a physical being in whom God dwelt. He thirsted and hungered for God, too----as is evidenced by the many times, especially in Luke, when Jesus went apart for a while.

Our thirst is for a compassionate, forgiving and renewing God. And the Good News is that “God’s mercy is close at hand, freely available to any who will draw on it.” Did you hear that word “freely?” God will abundantly pardon (forgive, wipe the slate clean). “Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to the cross I cling.”
Put your money away: God’s love can’t be bought. And the love that is God can “satisfy our innermost beings….and even permeate the night hours.” (Texts for Preaching Year C, page 209-212)

We are manipulated to measure ourselves by our talents, our responsibilities, our titles, our successes, our rankings. Here is the contemporary application of this world being “a dry and weary land.” There is certainly a place for marking achievements and knowing the satisfaction of achievements. “But in a world filled with competition for our affections, our allegiance, our energy and our love, Psalm 63 challenges us to cultivate our [passion] for God.” (Lindsey P. Armstrong, Feeding on the Word, pp. 80-84)

We thirst and hunger for a transcendent power, One who is not created but who creates all things.

Karl Rahner, one of the great Roman Catholic theologians for the 20th century, wrote about this cultivating:

“Be still for once. Don’t try to think of so many complex and varied things. Give these deeper realities of the spirit a chance to rise to the surface: silence, feat, the longing for truth, for love, for fellowship, for God…..Then something like a primitive awareness of God can emerge…..If we do not [try this kind of stillness] then our religious life remains of a secondary character….or we talk of God as if we had already slapped him on the shoulder. We feel like we are God’s supervisors and more or less equals.”

To over-use the biking image, we so often impulsively take off on various trips which wear us out----and we often have the dickens of a time making it back to home ground, into safe places, into the refuge of God’s arms.

It was Augustine who wrote that “our hearts are restless until they rest in God.” To bring our souls---our inmost selves---to feast on the richness of God’s creative and redeeming grace can nourish us and keep us balanced in our lives. This may be why Jesus told us that the first commandment is to “love the Lord our God with all of our heart, all your mind, all your soul and all your strength.” This is not a law to be followed but a path to be followed and practiced. Jesus was laying another burden on us but telling us how to be free.

We tend toward living on the surface of things. Thomas Merton describes this state:

“When we live superficially, we are always outside ourselves---not ‘with’ ourselves, pulled in many different directions. We find ourselves doing many things that we do not really want to do, saying things we really do not mean, needing things we do not really need, exhausting ourselves for what we secretly realize to be worthless and without meaning….The most important question is not ‘Am I happy,’ but ‘Am I free to live for the things I want to live for.’” (Quoted by  in Christian Century,       )

Ellen Charry wrote “We really need God and God is really good for us….The triune God of Christian faith provides an ‘onramp’ to a happy and productive life that can address some of the negative effects of late modern life from a spiritual vantage point…..[so that] ‘we see God more clearly, love God more dearly, follow God more nearly, day by day.’” (Ellen Charry, “Spiritual Formation by the Doctrine of the Trinity,” from Theology Today.)

Seeking God can seem like a pointless exercise, for such searches seem never to lead us to certainty. It is part and parcel of our human condition that we question the existence of such a God. Doubt and faith are partners as we move forward through life----so don’t be spooked if you believe and disbelieve! There are days when we are overcome with joy because of God’s goodness; and there are days when we are angry, wondering where God went when we needed an intervention!

One writer calls these questions the “riddles of life.” “The distance between God and us is not only a matter of the heart but also the intellect. We cannot understand completely the ways of God….” (Texts for Preaching, Year C) Isaiah deals with this problem by pointing us to the unfathomable greatness of God:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Faith in this God does not mean we get to have all the loose ends tied up neatly. Faith is a relationship, and, like all relationships, there are breakthroughs and there are regressions; there are conflicts and there is making up. Whatever else faith is, it is that launching out into deep waters, trusting that God’s steadfast love and grace is so much greater than any of the alternative powers of this creation that we can live abundantly, come what may.

In the words of another Catholic theologian who is a bright and hopeful voice on the relationship between science and religion:

“Christians believe in the reality of a transcendent mystery, the origin, ground and destiny of the universe. We name that great mystery God. In Christian thought the all-encompassing origin, ground and destiny of the universe is called “Father,” whom Jesus addressed intimately as Abba. Along with the faith of Israel, Christians understand this God as one who makes and keeps promised, breathes existence into all things, opens up the future, and makes all things new, even to the point of defeating death…..A Christian understanding of God provides human minds…..with limitless breathing room….” (John Haught, Christianity and Science, Orbis Books, 2007, page 13, italics mine))

We thirst, we worship, we pray, we sing with all our heart and mind and soul and strength, thirsting and hungering for the One who is the “Beyond” in the present realm, the great “I Am Who I Am,” the one before whom barefoot Moses, in the desert, knelt in awe and openness.

Such confidence in a great and good God makes possible for us to gladly hear Isaiah’s challenge and invitation:

“Seek God while he is here to be found, pray to him while he is close at hand. Let the wicked abandon their way of life and the evil their way of thinking. Let them come back to God, who is merciful, come back to God who is lavish with forgiveness.” (The Message, a translation by Eugene Peterson))

We really are not very good at seeking God! But in God’s presence we are all amateurs. Ranier Marie Rilke wrote one of my favorites aphorisms of all time:

“If the angel comes, it will be because you have wooed him by your resolve to be always a beginner.” (Source Unknown)