River of the Spirit

River of the Spirit (John 7:37-39)

Rob Tennant, Sunday, June 12, 2011

Thursday afternoon this past week, I was working on this sermon. Ideas weren’t coming. So I went for a walk. I thought activity would wake up my sleepy mind.

You may remember Thursday. Humid. 94 degrees. I did not want my bald head sunburned, and did not bring a hat. So I got a costume cowboy hat out of the 4’s and 5’s Sunday school room. I must have been a sight – sweating profusely, with a child’s cowboy hat sitting atop my head, I walked along in Southern Village reading my Bible out loud as I sought inspiration.

Not many people were out – most joggers and walkers do there thing early when it is cool. I did pass one guy. He was in slacks and a dress shirt. I guess he ride the bus home from and was walking from the bus stop. He was sweating through his clothes.

As we walked toward each other I thought, “How can pour living water onto him?” I don’t know what his thoughts were. As we passed one another, he gave me a weird look. I can’t imagine why.

Is it odd? (I don’t mean walking around in unbearable heat in blue jeans wearing child’s cowboy hat reading the Bible out loud as I walk. I know that’s odd.) I mean is it odd that seeing someone I would think, how can I pout living water onto him right now, in this moment?

Jesus says, “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.”

Candy, my wife, had living water poured on her several years ago. She was in the hospital recovering from surgery after her appendix had ruptured. She felt vulnerable and scared. I should have stayed, but I thought she was fine. I went home. After I was gone, she felt very alone. That’s when God poured out a river on Candy.

It came in the form of the night nurse, a little lady with an annoying, high-pitched voice. She had an exceedingly cheerful disposition and it quickly became clear that she was a Christian. She and Candy were sisters in Christ. She held Candy’s hand. She prayed with her. Now, seven years later, Candy still remembers her, a nurse who was an angel, who encouraged her through a scary time.

I like that story because it was blessing to my wife. I also like it because it’s something each of us can do. We can pour out living water by being positive, encouraging, and cheerful. The nurse probably wasn’t appreciated by all her patients the way she was by Candy. Every time we show love the way she did, we won’t impact people. But, we never know when we will come across someone who is alone, scared, uncertain, hurting. So, we make it a practice to be positive, available, joyful with everyone. We’re ready in the moment when the Lord will speak through us as He spoke his love to Candy through that nurse.

What is living water? Hope for the one who’s a lost a job.

What is living water? Someone to listen and love when life is unbearably hard.

What is living water? It is keeping the faith along side a person who has lost the faith. We keep the faith for our friends and for strangers who are broken. We let them know they are loved and that God has not given on them even if they have given up on God.

What is living water? It is the undeniable reality that God is in this moment no matter what this moment is. Everyone in our church family has gone through pain – some are going through it right now. Everyone we meet outside the church in the daily comings and goings of life has been hurt. Some are weeping even as we meet them. We don’t know what their pain is. We just see them be rude to us as we wait in line. We just see them be impatient with the check-out clerk at the store. We don’t know the story. So we practice joy and encouragement, patience and generosity. We do it not because of the other, whether the other is a friend, stranger or enemy. We do it because of what Jesus is to us – Savior, Lord, Guide. Because he gives us life, we pour life out onto people – all people.

The problem is believers do not always do this – pour out life. Christians are not always cheerful and joyful. People who claim to be Christ-followers are not always ready to give love, to give blessing. We are sometimes cranky or grumpy; sometimes prejudiced; sometimes foolish; sometimes impulsive; sometimes jealous. The believer is not always poised to share Christ.

Furthermore, there was a problem when Jesus made his statement at the Great Festival about rivers of living water flowing from believers and the narrator names the problem. He says Jesus was talking about the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit had not yet come. The way it reads in the New Revised Standard Version, as yet there was no Spirit).

How then does the narrator of John’s Gospel get us to this statement of Jesus, a statement that could not yet be true? Jesus told his brothers he would not attend the Festival of Booths. Then he went, but secretly. He tried to keep a low profile. But as soon as he began teaching, people were astonished at his wisdom, knowledge, and authority. The crowds buzzed with excitement even as some religious leaders seethed with hatred. They hated that he was smarter than them. They hated that he interpreted the scriptures better then them. They were enraged that the crowds would listen to him instead of them.

On the last day of the Festival (v37), Jesus cried out. He didn’t whisper. He did not speak in elusive code words that only the initiated would understand. He did not reject some in the crowd while blessing others. Jesus cried out for all to hear.

“Let anyone who is thirsty come to me.” He summoned seekers, and he indicated that anyone could be a seeker. A thirsty person has not found the water yet. He won’t stop looking until he does. It’s water or death. The spiritually thirsty person knows without doubt the only satisfaction he can find in is in God. Jesus invites all God-seekers to come to him for satisfaction. This is for all who know they have a deep need that nothing can meet. Jesus will meet that need.

Next he says “Let the one who believes in me drink.” Those who already believe he is the Son of God, the Messiah, the Savior, the believers are invited to drink of Jesus. We are invited to walk in his ways, receive his love, and live our lives on the terms he gives. This invitation goes to all people – it did when Jesus said it and it does now. Jews and Palestinians, Afghan Taliban members and American soldiers, liberals and conservatives – all people are invited to come to Jesus.

To review … at the festival, Jesus spoke out loud, to be heard. Jesus invited those seeking God to come to him. Jesus invited those who already believed to also come to him. When we are in Him, and he is in us, we get filled to the point that He pours out of us.

The prophet Isaiah said, “Everyone who thirsts come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! … Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich foods” (55:1a-b, 2c-d). Also the prophet Zechariah, who speaks of the day the Lord comes. “On that day, living waters shall flow out from Jerusalem … it shall continue in summer as in winter” (14:8). In Jesus, the Lord has come and the living waters are flowing.

He told the woman at the well,

Those who drink of the water I give will never be thirsty. The water that I give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life (John 4:13-14).

Jesus fills us and then fills others through us. The idea that God provides and then blesses others through His people is as old as God is. Grace did not begin with Jesus. The coming of Jesus is the most significant gift grace in a long history of gifts of grace because after Jesus came all the previous gifts of God, given through Israel could be understood. Because Jesus came and comes to each of us, each one of is a child of God, and each one is empowered to pass on the blessings of God.

How? I have shared that sometimes Christ followers are crabby and unavailable. That’s true of all of us. So how do we become the point from which the living water flows? I have already mentioned John’s observation that when Jesus said this, it wasn’t yet possible because the Holy Spirit had not come – at least not in the person way we understand the Holy Spirit coming on believers in this post resurrection age. So how does living water pour out of us?

We aren’t the source. God is. In fact, we need it as much as the woman at the well, as much as the anxious person lying in a hospital bed, as much as the tired person walking home from work, as much as the person who reads the news of disasters and terrorism and wars and wonders if the world is about to end. We are fragile broken people, all of us. We need living water.

Yet, if we are believers, Jesus not only says we will be filled and never thirst again. Jesus says, living water will pour out of us. How? How do we get to that point?

Since Jesus stood up on that last day of the festival and cried so all would hear that seekers and believers alike could to him, a couple of crucial things have taken place. He died. He rose from death. He ascended to be at the right hand of the Father with the promise that at the judgment, he would be back to all who believed in Him to be with Him for eternity.

Then we come to the book of Acts. The narrator said in John 7:39, “For as yet there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified.” By the time we get to Acts 2, Jesus had been glorified.

There we read,

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. ²And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. ³Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. ⁴All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

⁵Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. ⁶And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. ⁷Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? ⁸And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? ⁹Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, ¹⁰Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, ¹¹Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.”

“Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.” The narrator in John 7 says this statement of Jesus is about the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God. The river that flows out is God flowing out of us. How does that world become a better place? It happens with God at work in His church; God at work in individuals who have given their lives to Jesus.

In our deepest need we are satisfied when we seek Jesus. No matter how hard life gets, we come to Him. He has invited us. When we do, he doesn’t just fill us. He pours out of his, His Holy Spirit, onto the work around us.

The Holy Spirit is here, in this place, in the world. We go out seeking Christ. And we go out, looking at the world with open eyes, so when we see someone on the path or in the normal places life, we constantly ask, “Holy Spirit, how will flow through me and pour out a river of living, life-saving, life giving water on all those I meet?” Most people aren’t ready for that Holy Spirit River. But we will come across those who are. When we do, we’ll be ready to play our part, and the Spirit will flow through us and pour life – eternal life onto all who will receive it.

AMEN

Baptism Sunday!!

We had baptism Sunday. One new member was baptized and two others (who had previously been baptized) shared their testimonies. It was an awesome service.

Below is the sermon I gave.

What Makes a Person? (John 4:7-30)

Rob Tennant, HillSong Church, Chapel Hill, NC

Sunday, March 27, 2011

3^rd Sunday of Lent, 3^rd week in Church-wide emphasis

When we think of Kobe Bryant, what do we think of? Basketball Player. Some may remember his legal trouble from a few years ago.

Roy Williams: basketball coach. That’s very different than basketball player. And he’s not just any coach. He’s the Tar Heels Coach.

Justin Bieber: teen idol, pop star. Many of you are saying “Jusin who?” But the teens know exactly who he is.

Barak Obama: President. Depending on your politics, good thoughts may come to mind, or angry, disgusted thoughts. Everyone would agree he is our current president and from there the opinions go their separate ways.

What makes a person? Is there more to Kobe than scoring 35 points, or more to Roy Williams than leading a team? Is there more to Mr. Obama? Is there more to Justin Bieber than … well, … anyway.

What person? What defines someone? What defines me? My sermons? My wife or kids? What defines you?

Methodist scholar William Willimon says in baptism, the church defines a person (Peculiar Speech, p.7). The baptism shows that the individual is washed clean of sin, spiritually gifted, chosen by God, called by God, and named by God.

Baptism is an expression of what God has done in Jesus Christ in the life of a specific individual. Here’s the gospel in general terms : Jesus is God in human flesh. He came because God loves us, but sin separates us from God. So, in Jesus, God came, forgave our sins, died our death, rose, and invites us to resurrection. Everyone who believes in Jesus Christ and acknowledges Him as Lord is saved from sin, preserved for eternal life.

Then it gets specific. It’s not everyone. It’s Alexis. Brandon. Rob. In my baptism, Jesus died for me. In his baptism, Brandon acknowledges that Jesus forgives his sins. In her baptism, Alexis proclaims that her hope of eternal life is in what Jesus did for her.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal says, raised a Hindu, he spent several years reading the Bible and reading books by authors like Chuck Colson and C.S. Lewis before Christianity became his own. He’s very much an intellectual. He understood Christianity. But in a movie about the crucifixion and he saw the actor portraying Christ on the cross. It sunk in. He said, Jesus was on that cross because of Bobby Jindal’s sins (Christianity Today, March 2011, p.51).

The baptized individual was first baptized in the spirit of Jesus Christ. Jesus washes each one who comes to him in faith. We are washed clean of sin, spiritually gifted, chosen by God, called by God, and named by God.

Willimon says, “When you join the rotary club, you get a handshake and a lapel pin. When you join the church, we throw you in the water, and half drown you” (Peculiar Speech, p.32). On a more serious note, he says, “Baptism represents a radical break – the one baptized has left the powerful cultural context of her former life and entered a new life in new surroundings and a new community” (p.58). In baptism, we enter a lifestyle that does not come naturally; rather it is a “submission into a project greater than our own lives” (p.65). Jesus is the one who does it. The literal trip to the pool is recognition of what Jesus has done in the heart of the one being baptized.

The story of the Samaritan woman shows the baptism journey, from separation to joining the family of God. The story begins with brokenness.

Drawing water from a well is tiring, hard word. Most students of ancient culture assume groups of women would do this in the early morning when the day was still cool. It was a social time, a way of starting the day as a part of community, a group of people sharing life together.

One woman wasn’t part of that. She came alone, with the noon time sun beating down on her. Maybe she had come earlier also and now she had need of more water so she came again. Maybe she wasn’t a social outcast at all. Then again, maybe she was. John leaves it for us readers to decide.

The gospel does tell us she was a Samaritan woman in a Samaritan town. And Jews did not share things with Samaritans. This parenthetical notation hints at what other writings openly state. Jews hated Samaritans and vice versa and everyone in both cultures knew it. Furthermore, in both cultures, men alone, did not speak with women alone in public.

This is how far Jesus was from this woman. They were a solitary Jewish man and a solitary Samaritan woman at the well when people did go to the well – the hottest time of day. This is the longest single conversation Jesus has in the gospel. Why? Jesus came to demolish the hateful rules humans devise to separate and keep certain individuals down, in the dust.

Jesus and the woman did not discuss baptism but they talked about water. Jesus offered living water. She would never thirst again. Eternal life would burst forth in her. Jesus pours out his life for all who will drink; for all who will see him as who he is – God, savior, Lord.

The woman couldn’t see everything about Jesus – no one in John did. She saw enough to say, “Sir, give me this water.” She asked for what Jesus offered. She listened as he spoke because he, a Jewish man simply speaking to her an outcast Samaritan woman was unusual. She listened and said, “I see that you are a prophet.” Eventually, she ran to the village, the people who left her to go to the well alone. She wasn’t avoiding them anymore. She evangelized. She said, “Come and see. Could this man be the Messiah?”

The woman was in the process of being baptized in the Spirit. As an overarching theme that includes Spirit baptism, water baptism, and new life in Christ, Baptism assumes that people are broken. She had had five husbands, most likely had no children in a culture where a woman’s worth was tied to the sons she bore, and now depended on a man who was not her husband for all her needs. She was broken.

We are broken. We are unmarried. We are divorced. Our spouses have died. We are orphans. We have children who do not come to faith in Jesus. We have children who are diseased. We are unhealthy. We have parents who have Alzheimer’s disease. We have parents we’ve been mad at for 20 years. What does baptism assume about the world? Baptism assumes the people in the world are broken and in desperate need of Jesus.

What does baptism assume about the way the world should be? Jesus knew the conventions of the day. Men with his background dare not speak to women of her background in public. Why did Jesus so flagrantly violate propriety? Jesus did not come to live in the world, but to change the world. He started a conversation about water for one reason; he wanted to give her living water. He wanted her to be saved from sin, saved from a life of rejection. He wanted her to enter the community of the baptized.

When the woman goes off to the village to tell everyone the Messiah is right there among them in Sychar, Jesus says to disciples, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. … Look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting” (4:34a, 35b). He wanted to rewrite that woman’s life story and he wants to rewrite ours, yours and mine. In baptism, Jesus begins a new narrative, and we are invited to enter the story he’s preparing for us. What does Baptism assume about the way the world should be? Baptism assumes that we are broken, but brokenness is not meant to be our story. There is another story we should be living.

What does baptism make possible? First, baptism makes the new story possible. Do we define the Samaritan woman as a ‘Samaritan’ or as a woman or as one who failed at marriage five times and now goes to the well alone every day? Not any more. Now, she is the one who talked with Jesus. It is to her Jesus said, “God is looking for true worshipers who worship in him spirit and in truth.” Now, she is the one who evangelized an entire village with an excitement not often seen in people who have been in church so long they take God for granted. Baptism makes a new story possible.

Baptism also makes a witness possible. The new story is only good news when it is told. She said, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!”

Alexis says, “Let me tell you about the day I was baptized at HillSong. More importantly, let me tell you what Jesus did in me that led to my baptism.”

I say, “Let me tell you about everything my Dad and Mom and Grandparents and Sunday school teachers taught me in 1978, 1979, 1980. It all came together in the compassion a counselor showed me at the Detroit Baptist Camp in the Summer of 1981. Let me tell how somehow in my 11-year-old mind, I knew that camp counselor was being used by Jesus to call me to himself.” And you tell your story. Baptism gives us a testimony.

What does Baptism make impossible? Who could possibly be farther from God than an outcast Samaritan woman? How about an intellectual writer raised in abusive fundamentalism by oppressive, hateful preachers that him to doubt the existence of God? Or, an Egyptian, an Islamic intellectual? Jesus reached that Samaritan woman by violating conventions and talking to her. Jesus reached the Christian author Philip Yancey in spite of the fact that Yancey’s biggest doubts about God came from his childhood church experiences. Jesus reached Mark Gabriel in Egypt when a Christian pharmacist slipped him a copy of the New Testament and Gabriel read the whole thing in a night. He was imprisoned and almost by his own father, but Gabriel renounced Islam, accepted Christ and escaped Egypt. And he had no missionary or pastor leading, just the Word and the Holy Spirit.

What does Baptism make impossible? Baptism and the stories around baptism – people being born again – show that it is impossible for us to be out of God’s reach. Someone can choose to reject Jesus. We this often in the Gospel of John, highlighted with the betrayal of Judas Iscariot. But, we are never out of Jesus’ reach. Even after Peter was arrested in his own depression for denying Jesus, the resurrected Lord reached out to him. Baptism shows the extent to which God will reach for us in our brokenness. It is impossible to be out of his reach.

What new culture does Baptism create? Baptism creates the born-again culture. Throughout out Paul’s letters we find references to putting on the new self; clothing one’s self with Christ; in Christ we are new Creations. This is the movement from lonely Samaritan woman at the well to “Sir, give me this water.” From “I have no husband” to “Could this be the Messiah.”

My movement from cultural Christianity that has more to do with where I grew up than what I believe; from that to Jesus is mine, and I am his. I am not defined by the name “Tennant” or the state of Michigan or my English heritage. I am defined by Jesus on the cross, Jesus resurrected, leaving the empty tomb behind.

You are not divorced; failure at marriage; dying of disease; beleaguered parent of a wayward child. Those realities may be aspects of your life but you aren’t defined by them. You are child of God. You are one of the baptized, those washed and made clean of sin. You are a new creation.

The verse to hold on to as we close is a part of the Samaritan woman’s testimony to us. In John 4:15, she says, “Sir give me this water of eternal life.” That is our prayer as we go.

If you have never been through the water baptism, step out today. Today, receive Jesus for the first time. Ask him into your life, and His Spirit will come and wash you clean and make you new. Let today be the day everything changes as in Christ you are born again. Say, “Lord Jesus, I need this Living water. Lord Jesus, I want to be defined this way: I am a child of God.”

If you have been baptized, this is your prayer. Many are baptized, but continue living the old life, settling for water and things and pleasures and security and answers that do not satisfy. So today, my fellow baptized one, step out. Pray, “Lord Jesus, I need living water. I don’t want to be defined by my role in the family or my job title or the church where I have my membership. I want to be defined this way: I am a child of God.”

Pray this way continually – every day of life. God will give us a story to tell and when we tell it we are witnesses and through our witness, the Holy Spirit draws people to Jesus into the community of the Baptized.

AMEN