"The Second No Well" - Sermon for 3rd Sunday in Lent, 3-8-26

Is the Lord among us or not?

†

In the summertime, when I was a boy, playing outside, I would drink from the hose. Inside, mom gave me a small dixie cup like this, and I had to re-use it until its waxy coating became translucent and its bottom nearly fell out.

In Flint, during the lead-in-the-water crisis, everyone drank water packaged in plastic: single-use, half-liter bottles and gallon jugs were most common. No point in refilling used bottles with bad water.

Nowadays I see people carrying refillable water bottles everywhere they go. Some are fancy, some are trendy, some are nearly the size of beer-kegs. We dare not risk dehydration, I reckon.

So you will understand the wonder the Samaritan woman took in Jesus’s offer of living water, her very own internal, eternal spring. No flaccid dixie cup next to the kitchen sink, no plastic trash to recycle, no steel bottle welded to hip and lip. No bucket. No well. Sign me up, too!

Water plays an important role in salvation history. The Mighty Wind covering the waters on Day-One of Creation, Noah’s Flood, Moses’s Red Sea Crossing, Jesus and John at the Jordan, and the water plus blood from the rock of our crucified savior’s side are but a few examples. And, like the Samaritan woman at the well – the Orthodox Church has named her: the Greeks call her Photini, the Russians, Svetlana – like Photini, the wandering Israelites were thirsty. Dehydrated and quarrelsome, they complained against Moses, who turned to the Lord, who brought water from the rock at Horeb.

The Church long has held that these water stories prefigure baptism. In a letter to the Church on Eucharistic Liturgy, the late Pope Francis taught that the eventuality our baptism – yours, mine, and everyone else’s – our baptism in water is the sole reason God created water. Every other use of water is an afterthought. Think about that for a moment! … And, of course, the pre-eternal purpose of water is joined by the pre-eternal purpose of the Incarnation of the Son, whose body and blood, sacrificed on the altar of the cross, becomes for us the Bread of Life and our Spiritual Drink.

These mysteries of faith ask of us spiritual imagination. How can a bit of water poured over our heads become a spring of water gushing up to eternal life? How can a slip of bread and sip of wine keep us in eternal life? How can it be that God’s creation is not for creation’s-sake, like some model train metropolis, built in God’s basement, but is so we can spend eternity with God? Along with Photini – whose name means ‘enlightened-one’ – we are within our rights today to say to Jesus, with incredulity and cheek, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep.”

However, unlike Photini – who was baptized by the apostles on Pentecost and credited as their evangelizing and martyred equal – we have the benefits of the Sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist today. Baptized, we have a share in Jesus’s Living Water. Communed, this holy and sacrificial meal of Jesus’s Body and Blood is given to us every time we gather in his name.

And, remember, these liturgical, sacramental acts are not of our creation. Sure, we prepare them and practice them and perform them – we are doing this right now – but we did not invent them; neither do they belong to us. The liturgies we celebrate are the property of the Holy Trinity. It is by God’s grace, and by our adoption into God’s family through the Pascal Mystery – the incarnation, passion, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus – that the Holy Trinity invites us to the table.

In what we do today – right now! – God gives us as the closest thing to heaven on earth that we can experience. Our mortality constrains us, for now, to worship God on this mountain and in this Jerusalem. The fullness of spirit and truth that Jesus promises is here, and yet at the same time it lies beyond what our spiritual imaginations can fully comprehend … but, in this and every liturgy, we imagine nevertheless.

Makes you want to show up for Mass as often as you can, doesn’t it? And to bring another Samaritan with you.

The Lord is among us. Amen.

†

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

3^rd Sunday in Lent A – March 8, 2026

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“The Second No Well”