Today, on the Third Sunday of Lent, I am at Southwick Community Episcopal Church. I am continuing to preach the psalms during Lent - today's sermon text is Psalm 63:1.

Wherever I go during this Lenten season, I’m preaching on the appointed psalm for the day. Why, you might ask? Aren’t Episcopal clergy “required” to focus on the gospel reading? No! And for decades, the psalms have shaped my prayer life. They cover every possible emotion in relating to God: not just gratitude and trust and love and awe, but also the harder ones like feeling lost or abandoned or angry or confused. Yet over three decades of ordained ministry, I have rarely preached on them. I’ve taught them in Bible studies, and I’ve prayed them myself, but I’ve only very rarely preached on them. So this Lent I’m going there intentionally and I’ll be back with you in two weeks and do the same.

Today I want to call your attention to Psalm 63. Just the opening verse. And I want to use a translation by Robert Alter which is closer to the Hebrew than we are used to – closer to the Hebrew than what we prayed together. Alter also seems able to retain more of a poetic sense. You ready?

God, my God; for You I search.
My throat thirsts for you, my flesh yearns for you, in a land waste and parched, with no water.

God, my God, for You, I search. This prayer and our prayers are not addressed to a generic deity- not only to the Creator of the heavens and earth. But my God. Our God. The God who loves us, who claims us, who marks and seals us – the One who calls us each by name. The One who knows us better than we know ourselves. And yet the God whom it is not always is near – the God for whom sometimes we must search.

My throat thirsts for you… The word that we heard translated as soul earlier, doesn’t quite get it in English, so Alter pushes us back to the original core meaning of nephesh.  It does mean soul, but in a Hebrew way, not a Greek way. The Greeks tended to be more dualistic. Body and soul; as if those were two separate things. But the Bible is more holistic. We are clay vessels, given the breath of God. We are fleshy souls or soulful flesh. Literally nephesh really does mean throat. If you cut your throat, where your carotid artery is, you are not long for this world. You literally can’t breathe anymore. That’s nephesh. Not a soul inside of our bodies but our life-force. So Alter opts to keep the consistent metaphor: the poet’s throat is parched. The poet’s whole life-force, body and spirit, thirsts for the living God. Only God. Are you with me?

God, my God; for You I search.
My throat thirsts for you, my flesh yearns for you, in a land waste and parched, with no water.

One of the traditional last words of Jesus, from the cross, is “I thirst.” It’s in John’s Gospel the twenty-eighth verse of the nineteenth chapter. It’s where this Lenten journey is headed, to the place of the skull, on a hill outside of the city, to an old rugged cross.  

After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), “I am thirsty.”

Jesus learned to pray the psalms the same way we learn to sing hymns. Now I know that when you talk about hymns in the Episcopal Church this is sometimes a dangerous thing. We have too many books and yes, I know that here at SCEC you use that screen that includes even more music resources!

But you aren’t alone. Across this diocese, even those who think they know and love the blue hymnal really only know a selection within that and within  every congregation I know, people have very different favorites. And then there is Wonder, Love, and Praise and still others love LEVAS. When I served in Holden our Saturday music was closer to your music here and we used a little hymnal called Come Celebrate and the Roman Catholic Hymnal, Gather. This makes it hard to figure out what our core hymns are – and trust me I realize this in diocesan liturgies when the planners will say, “everybody knows this,” but half the people gathered do not.

Neverthless… Even if we can’t agree on the favorites, I bet you all do have your own favorite hymns. Maybe even some you hope that one of those hymns will be sung at your funeral, if you ever stop to think about that. I’m not leaving anything to chance. For me, the one that must be sung when I die is “For All the Saints.” I am one of those people who has my funeral plans all written out on a Google doc. The readings, the hymns, even the preacher. My wife and kids all know this and they also know I update it every now and again, usually around the time of my birthday. While they also know they can do whatever they want, I’ve been a priest long enough to know that it’s helpful to do this sort of thing and in writing. One of the non-negotiables about my funeral is that we’ll end with “For All the Saints.” All eight verses. Occasionally I suggest that it could even be sung all the way through, twice.

So every time I sing that hymn, often at funerals and usually on All Saints Day, I think to myself: this will be sung at my funeral as well. And it brings me a kind of peace to know that.

For all the saints, who from their labors rest, who thee, by faith, before the world confessed they name, O Jesus, be forever blessed.

So it doesn’t seem weird to me at all that Jesus would be singing a psalm as he took his last breath. As he was about to give up his nephesh to God on the cross, he said, “I thirst.” There are many thirsty psalms he could have prayed, but maybe it was this one that he was thinking about, Psalm 63, our psalm for this day.

God, my God; for You I search.
My throat thirsts for you, my flesh yearns for you, in a land waste and parched, with no water.

Or perhaps it was these words, from Psalm 42: As the deer pants for streams of water, so my nephesh pants for you, my God. Or maybe, from Psalm 69: For my thirst, they gave me vinegar to drink.

The word “thirst” comes up seventy-seven times in the Bible. That is not surprising in a desert climate. It comes up a lot in the wilderness of the Sinai Desert, where the people are often both thirsty and hungry. The thing is that after that call of Moses that we heard about in this morning’s reading – out there by the burning bush – that marked the beginning of a four-decade long journey. Moses didn’t just go up to old Pharaoh and say “let my people go” and then Pharaoh said “ok” and then they packed up the moving van and settled the Promised Land. It doesn’t work like that. Even after the plagues and the late night escape and the crossing of the Red Sea with Pharaoh’s army in hot pursuit, what lay head were lots of years of wandering. Forty, according to the storyteller. 480 months. 2080 weeks. 14,600 days.

And probably every single one of those 14,600 days there was more thirst than water in the Sinai Desert. This is why it comes up so often. Yes, the Lord provided manna from heaven and water from the flinty rock. Yes, God was good – all the time. All the time, God was good. But they also must have spent a lot of time hungry and thirsty. They knew what it was like to not take those things for granted. They were learning, as they made that journey from slavery to freedom, how to live life one day at a time. To rely on God, our God, one day at a time.

Thirst. I’m making a big deal of one little word but it’s so very important. Did you know that our bodies are sixty-percent water? If you want to lose weight you can start removing water; but be very, very careful! We take it for granted and we’ve learned how important it is to stay hydrated. But that’s not so easy in Flint, Michigan or in most of the third world.

When I googled the word “thirst” this past week I came up with a hit on a site called www.charitywater.org. That took me to a book called “Thirst” by a guy named Scott Harrison. Maybe you all know about his work; I did not. I literally stumbled upon him by way of Google. But here is what I learned from that website:

At 28 years old, Scott Harrison had it all. A top nightclub promoter in New York City, his life was an endless cycle of drugs, booze, models—repeat. But 10 years in, desperately unhappy and morally bankrupt, he asked himself, "What would the exact opposite of my life look like?" Walking away from everything, Harrison spent the next 16 months on a hospital ship in West Africa and discovered his true calling. In 2006, with no money and less than no experience, Harrison founded charity: water. Today, his organization has raised over $300 million to bring clean drinking water to more than 9.5 million people around the globe.

So, the book is called Thirst: A Story of Redemption, Compassion, and a Mission to Bring Clean Water to the World. I have not read it. You now literally know all that I know about Scott Harrison and his work. But I find his story, and that title, inspiring. I find it encouraging that people do turn their lives around and find meaning even though our culture works against that kind of commitment. I find it humbling to know that every single time I turn on the tap at home and clean water comes out I should pray “thank you, God.” But I forget, because it’s just there and because the thirstiest I usually get is on a hot summer day after mowing the lawn.

In a culture where potable water was not so taken for granted, in the Book of Proverbs, we read:

If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat; and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink. (Proverbs 25:21)

Jesus picks up on that same theme again and again. It comes up in the Sermon on the Mount and it also comes up in Matthew 25, where Jesus says that when we give a thirsty person a drink of water, we give it to him.

People literally get thirsty. We are dust and to dust we shall return, we were reminded a couple of weeks ago. That’s what happens when all that water, sixty percent of us, is gone. That is why we stay hydrated – to be alive. Because without the water and God’s breath, we are back to dust pretty quickly.

But in the Bible, thirst becomes a metaphor for something even more, in both testaments. In John’s Gospel you may remember Jesus engaging in conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well. He asks her for a drink of water but ends up talking about himself as water and says that those who drink of the water he gives will never thirst again. In the last book of the Bible, the Revelation of John, the thirsty are given this water as a gift from the spring of life. The water of life as a gift, no longer just for that first-century woman from Samaria at the well in the middle of the day but for you and for me, For all of us who thirst for righteousness. For all of us who thirst like a deer panting at the river. Water as a gift from God, from the spring of life.

So I ask you, Southwick Community Episcopal Church: what are you thirsting for this Lent and beyond, as you get ready to call a new rector? We live in a culture where our loyalties are easily pulled in many different directions. We come to church on Sunday, but the rest of the time there are bills to pay and soccer practice and Pilates classes, and all the rest. And it’s all good stuff. God is surely in the midst of it all, in the joys and sorrows of our lives. I believe that. Wherever we go, God is there.

We can take that for granted however, like we take tap water for granted. What the Psalmist reminds me of on this day – and what I want to remind you all about – is that we are made to be in relationship with God. And with our neighbor. We all thirst. Not just Christians. Our bodies are made in the same way, in the image of the living God. Believers and unbelievers. Americans and people from every tribe and language and people and nation. Each breath we take in reminds us of our humanity. We are hydrated dust. Our nepheshes need the living God and the gift of living water, from the spring of life.

Lent is about water – the kind we drink in but also the living water that Jesus gives to us in Holy Baptism – claiming us, and marking us, and sealing us, and giving us work to do. By water and the Holy Spirit, we are loved into full and abundant life. And we are called, like Scott Harrison, to a mission in a thirsty world – a mission of redemption and compassion. 

A mission of love.