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3rd Sunday in Lent
February 24, 2008 Sermon by The Bill Van Oss, Rector
                                                                                       Readings                                                                                    

A few years ago, there was a tsunami off the coast of Kenya. The waves caused modest destruction to a few miles of the coastline.

One of the creatures greatly affected by the storm was a baby hippopotamus. It seems this baby hippo was living with its mother in the shallows at the mouth of the Sabaki River.

When the tsunami waves came, the baby hippo was washed out to sea. The mother hippo was never found. So some rescuers took the orphaned hippo to an animal facility in the port city of Mombassa. There the baby hippo was placed with other hippos.

The trouble was, the other hippos wanted nothing to do with this new arrival. Instead, the baby hippo, now nicknamed Oscar, befriended a 100-year-old tortoise.

Within only a few days, the old tortoise adopted the baby hippo as its own. Hippos form a very strong social bond with their mothers and it seems the old tortoise was happy to play that role.

Said one ecologist at the wildlife sanctuary: “It’s incredible. A less than-a-year-old hippo has adopted a 100-year-old tortoise and the tortoise seems to be very happy in his new role as a mother. After it was swept away and lost its mother, the hippo was traumatized and looked for a surrogate, but none of the other hippos would have her. Fortunately, the old tortoise would. They swim, eat and sleep together. The hippo follows the tortoise exactly the same way it would follow its mother. The creatures have bonded.”

Two creatures, a hippo and a tortoise, seemly so different, are brought together by their need for companionship and affection.

Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well in today’s Gospel. Jesus is exhausted and alone, sitting at the well in the heat of the day, and he is very, very thirsty.

The Samaritan woman was likely shocked when Jesus spoke to her. Jews were prohibited from having any contact with Samaritans, and male Jesus were forbidden from speaking to a woman in public. These were both cultural and religious restrictions. Jews and Samaritans and men and women were seen to be as different from each other as hippos and tortoises – opposites – the chosen ones and the condemned, God’s chosen people and people scorned and rejected for centuries.

But Jesus does not allow those cultural and religious differences to divide and separate. Jesus focuses on what brings him and the Samaritan woman together: their thirst.

They both thirst, and their thirst bring them to the well. They both have needs. Jesus needs her bucket in order to reach the water at the bottom of the deep well, and she needs Jesus’ acceptance of who she is.

Different in every way this Jewish Rabbi and this Samaritan woman, and yet very much the same: they both thirst for acceptance and respect, acknowledgement and meaning in a world that had constructed walls to divide and separate them. So many walls and divisions were in place to insure that this Jewish man and this Gentile woman would never come into contact with each other, never even speak a word.

But they were both thirsty. Jesus’ journey had been long and tiring. People were constantly making pleas for help – for healing, forgiveness, bread, on and on.

The woman also was thirsty. She had had a hard life, searching for meaning and fulfillment in all the wrong places, in a line-up of losers, there were things about her life of which she was ashamed. But Jesus does not lecture or condemn her. Instead He invites her to drink of living water. He invites her to drink of God’s life and Goodness. Only that will satisfy her deepest thirst.

Jesus and a Samaritan woman as different as a hippo and a tortoise, came together at Jacob’s well because they were both thirsty. Jesus thirsted to offer the Living Water of the Life of God, and the woman thirsted for the Life that God intended for her.

We gather together this day as people different in so many ways, but in one thing we are all the same: we all thirst.

We thirst for acceptance and respect, for mercy and forgiveness, for meaning and fulfillment, and most of all, we thirst for love.

And God stands ready to offer Living Water, the water of Life, to all who thirst. God stands ready to offer communion at this table for all who hunger and thirst for new and abundant life.

Jesus teaches us that Communion with God and each other is what will ultimately satisfy our thirst. All who thirst are invited to come to the water, where we may drink of the life and love of God.



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