March 12, Lent 3A (Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 95; John 4:5-42)
Water dominated the imaginations of our ancestors in faith, whose stories often called for either a canteen or galoshes.
Maria. Katrina. Sandy. Mitch. China. Bangladesh. Ethiopia. The Dust Bowl.
Water is one of those things: you can’t live with it; you can’t live without it. Too much will cover everything with terrifying, monstrous waves and leave a soggy, smelly, mucky mess behind, often with lingering issues like cholera and homelessness. Too little water and the plants shrivel up; the ground cracks and mingles with the air; the people die in short order unless they can find a place to relocate—a place with water.
Water dominated the imaginations of our ancestors in faith, and the telling of their stories often called for either a canteen or galoshes, a miraculous spring or a lifeboat. A watery chaos covers the unformed land in Genesis, yet God moves over it effortlessly, in the form of a breath. A genocidal flood devastates all creation, saving only a righteous few, killing all the wicked ones. (Is that a better reason for a genocidal flood than in Mesopotamia’s flood tale, in which the deities drown all the humans because they are so darned noisy?)
