Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the third Sunday in Lent, March 3, 2002, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.Exodus 17:2-7; Romans 5:1-5; John 4:5-14, 19-21, 23-24 Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.
–Romans 5:3-5
Hope is one of those worn-out, broken-down words that I wish I could erase from our vocabulary and start all over again. We have no idea what it means anymore. We have no idea what it is, where it comes from, how it works. Yet we say it all the time and think of it (and therefore of ourselves too, I suppose) as deep and meaningful.
If someone presses us for a definition we're likely to say hope is an optimistic outlook or a vague sense that things will turn out all right. We'll intone about how you gotta have it and you should never do anything to take it away from anyone. I wonder if we dare to step away from these pious generalities and take an honest, searching inventory of our own souls to see what hopes are in there.
Try it. If you actually spell out the things for which you hope, even silently to yourself, it feels like you're tempting fate by naming the things that could destroy you, ruin you, break you. Better to keep them secret, maybe even from yourself, than expose them in the light which might reveal how frail and improbable they are.
A thing you hope for is by definition a thing you cannot count on. I hope for a long life and a good old age. I hope material comforts will not be taken away from me. I hope to be treated with respect whether or not I deserve it, and I also hope I deserve it. I hope to be at peace with my life, with my companions, and with my death when it comes. I hope to see human beings, including myself, do a lot less harm to each other and a lot more good for each other than I have seen done all my life. I know very well that I can't count on any of these things, but if I didn't hope for them I don't know how I'd go on.
What about you? What are the things without which you don't know if you could go on, but you know you can't count on them? Those are your hopes.
And once you've named them, consider how it works. We think of hope as an asset you have to have in order to get through painful times, but Paul has turned that around, hasn't he? Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us. If he's right, you can't have hope until you have suffered, and suffered for a while, too — long enough to build first endurance, and then character, and then, finally, hope.
So real hope is hard-won, and if it's not hard-won it's not real, and worst of all, we must all pass through a time of suffering without hope, in other words despair, in order to arrive at hope. Is that how you arrived at whatever hopes you have? If not, beware: Your hope may not be like the hope Paul's talking about. He says hope does not disappoint us. Can we say that of our hope?
The Israelites followed Moses out of Egypt with high hopes, betting their lives on the hope that the trek into the wilderness was going to be a homecoming. That hope disappointed them. They went all to pieces the first time they ran out of water. Is the Lord among us or not? They required immediate reassurance and immediate water. They couldn't tough it out. Toughing it out requires hope, and theirs had evaporated like water in a desert.
When you begin to take this kind of clear-eyed look at hope, you discover that there's not nearly enough of it around, and a whole lot of hopelessness, most of it carefully disguised or kept under wraps. And a lot of the world's worst behavior originates in that hopelessness.
Jacob's well is an ordinary well; it doesn't give you water, you have to pull the water out with a bucket every time you need some. The only thing special about it is its history: The patriarch Jacob, also named Israel, got water there. A woman of Samaria comes there to draw water, a thing that most of us have little or no need to do. A strange Jewish man is sitting there minding her business, which makes him doubly strange, because they live in a world where people are supposed to avoid people who aren't like them. Sounds a lot like our world.
But the strangest thing about him is the way he talks about water. Living water, he calls it. She doesn't get it. She thinks he's talking about running water. Running water is a miracle in a civilization that has no plumbers, unless you stumble on a spring or a creek, rare treasures in a desert climate. Well water doesn't run, but there is a legend that this well once did, for old Israel, Jacob himself, from whom Jews and Samaritans are both descended. For Jacob it became a fountain. Then it went back to being a well. But this weird male Jew says he has a permanent gusher at his disposal, and listening to him, the female Samaritan begins to suspect he's talking about something more than water. He's talking about a hope that will not disappoint.
This had to happen at Jacob's well. It couldn't happen at any other. Jacob, who loved Rachel and endured all those years of waiting before he could take her home with him. Jacob, who lost his favorite son Joseph, mourned him for decades, then found him again and died in his arms. Joseph, whose brothers got rid of him and then had to plead with him for their lives. Jacob or Israel, grandson of father Abraham and father of the nation that Egypt enslaved, that Moses set free, and all the rest: War, peace, triumph, tragedy, captivity and homecoming, the whole history of Israel is in that well and in that man and woman who stand at it talking, and it's the source of the living water.
In times of pain the people of God remember what God has done in past times, and then they know that God is still doing those things and will do them again. That's the living water. That's the water we drink. If we remember, we can live. And that's why we eat and drink at this table, too.
Amen