Sermons

Living Water Pulses Through Us

Sermon—12 March 2023 | Sarah Werner

John 4:1-42

I want to share some stories this morning about water, holy places, and how living water helps us find a home in the world. Water makes up over half of the substance of your body, and three-quarters of your brain is water. Water literally is life, as the saying goes. When Jesus arrives at the well in the middle of the day, he is likely just as thirsty as the next human, parched from the brilliance of the desert sun. But what he eventually offers the Samaritan woman is something quite different, the living water of the kin-dom of God.

This passage from John is a powerful one, getting to the heart of what it means to follow Jesus and to be nourished by living water. It is the longest theological conversation Jesus has with anyone in the gospels, and it is with an unwed Samaritan woman, the ultimate outsider. But I have to start by saying, this story makes me...

Pilgrimage: Beginning, and beginning again 
Texts: Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7; Matthew 4:1-11
Speaker: Joel Miller

In the last two decades geneticists have confirmed the sublime dream of poets and prophets: That the human family really is one family – we all come from the same lineage, descendants of Africa.

And when it comes to our differences, the anthropologist Wade Davis is fond of saying something like this: “The other peoples of the world are not failed attempts at being you.  They’re not failed attempts at being modern.  Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive?” (Quote from The Tim Ferris Show #652, podcast interview)

It’s a big question: What does it mean to be human? 

It’s hard to know what’s going on inside the heads of animals, but it’s very possible we’re the only species bothered by the question of what it means to be ourselves.  It’s not the kind of question easily answered in a few sentences, or a few books or documentaries.  It is the kind of question we inevitably...