A Note from Pastor Bill

Dear St. Luke’s Saints:

Scientists tell us that the earth is made up of 326 million trillion gallons of water. (That’s 326 with 18 zeros after it!) Of that amount, 98% is in the oceans and unfit for human consumption unless desalinated.

That means that 2% is fresh water. But 1.6% of that fresh water is frozen in the polar ice caps and in glaciers. Another .36% is in underground aquifers and wells, and just .036% in lakes and rivers.

When it comes to the human body, we are 65% water, a fact I understand well when we place a person’s cremated remains in our St. Luke’s Memorial Garden. The containers from the funeral home all weigh about 10 pounds.

Wells were (and still are) life for people trying to live in the wilderness and desert areas of the Middle East. The image of water is what is behind the Hebrew’s promised hope of “a land flowing with milk and honey.” To have milk in a land presupposes cattle, and you cannot have cattle unless you have grass on which they can graze, and you cannot have grass unless you have water. Similarly, if your land is going to flow with honey, you must have bees, and in order to have bees making honey, you must have flowers, and in order to have flowers, you must have water. For a refugee people living in a dry and dusty land, the promise of a land with water seemed like the promise of paradise.

Wells were social gathering places in Jesus’ day, primarily for women, who carried the water to their homes. In our scripture lesson this week, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman who has come alone to the well, perhaps not welcome to be with the other women. He violates social and cultural norms by speaking as a Jew to a Samaritan, and by speaking as a man to an unaccompanied woman. Perhaps that is no surprise, since Jesus was always doing things like that. The memorable part of the story is not the occasion of the conversation, but the topic discussed: water. Some kind of “living water” that slakes a spiritual thirst.

If you’re thirsty for something that doesn’t sell for $1.09 in a plastic Zephyrhills bottle at the 7-11, be with us this weekend at one of our six services: 3 in the sanctuary, 2 in the gym, and 1 at the St. Luke’s HopeSpring site. Read John 4:5-42, and come wet your whistle.

With faith, hope, and love,

Bill