PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Psalm 63:1-4                                                                           My Soul Thirsts for You

Sermon August 16, 2009:  People’s United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

 

            There is a thirst that no liquid on earth can quench.  It wakes you in the middle of the night.  It penetrates your feelings and even your physical body.  It’s like this past Monday’s weather, when the temperature soared to 100 degrees, and everything you tried to do outside—even walking to the car—dragged you down:  except this thirst is interior, within your own being.  And nothing on earth can assuage your restless discomfort.

            Everybody feels this thirst at some time in their lives.  Many try to quench it with self-indulgence, others use whatever personal strength they have to climb some ladder—success, or stardom, or even physical strength—and climbing the ladder numbs this inner thirst, closes the mind to the desert of the heart, makes everything look great on the outside.  But neither gluttony nor pride can satisfy this deep desire.  There is a thirst that no liquid on earth can quench.

            This is what Jesus was referring to in the Fourth Beatitude:[1]

 

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst

for things to be set right,

for they will be filled.

 

Talking with the woman at Jacob’s well Jesus again referred to this thirst when he told her:[2]

 

“If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to

you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he

would have given you living water….  Those who drink of

the water that I will give them will never be thirsty… [It] will

become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”

 

Jesus was in touch with that which quenches this deep thirst.  And on the cross, his body dehydrated by hours of perspiration and blood loss, Jesus gave the heart’s expression to this thirst.  Isn’t this what he meant when he said in a raspy whisper, “I am thirsty.”[3]  Yes, certainly thirsty in the physical sense; but even more, thirsty for inner hope—he touched your own thirst in that moment.  This is the thirst that nothing on earth can quench. 

 

            It was this thirst in me that led me to make a private retreat last week, at a Quaker retreat center near Philadelphia.  I am required to do a certain number of hours of continuing education each year for my ministerial standing; and in years past I’ve gone to seminars, continuing education events, classes; but this year I had a different need.  There were certainly plenty of continuing education classes available.  My seminary in Pittsburgh had a program planned that looked interesting.  The UCC seminary in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, actually responded to a suggestion I made last year:  this June one of the professors taught a course in Christian reiki.[4]  But my soul’s thirst wouldn’t be quenched by sitting in classes this year:  I needed to engage in that deep, silent resting in God’s grace that Quakers and Catholic monks and more and more Protestant mystics know so well; so I wrote a proposal for a personal retreat.  My proposal was approved, and that’s what I did for my program this summer.  There is a thirst in the human heart that can be assuaged only by the Spirit of Christ. 

            Back in the 1930’s, after Albert Schweitzer’s medical mission work in Africa became well-known around the world, an American doctoral student contacted him.  The young man was getting ready to write his doctoral dissertation in philosophy, and he wanted Albert Schweitzer to mentor him.  Well who wouldn’t!  So he went to Lamborene, to the Schweitzer clinic.  Why?  The professors at his American university had written more books in philosophy than Dr. Schweitzer; and the library was back there, not in central Africa.  Why did this student seek out Dr. Schweitzer?  Because those professors’ lectures, and those books in the library by Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Kant and Russell just didn’t quench the young man’s thirst.  In Albert Schweitzer, who did have a doctorate in philosophy, he found a way to approach the spring of living water.  Schweitzer put him to work building a bridge over a ravine, so the sick could get to the clinic more easily.  Somebody asked Schweitzer why he put the student to work on a bridge, and he answered, “I think doing something to help others does prepare a person to write a dissertation.”  There is a thirst that every one of us knows, if we’re in touch with our inner selves. 

            I received an email this past week from a college student I know who has just returned from touring Spain.  He and I have been carrying on an email correspondence about atheism and faith.  He’s a senior in college now, and his college requires a senior thesis before graduation; so he’s trying to plan his paper.  I don’t know whether he knows the story about Albert Schweitzer and the doctoral candidate, but last week in his email he said, “I’m going to be in Dover soon, and while I’m there I’d like to do something useful for somebody.  I don’t want to go through training to do political advocacy or work on the census:  I just want to come and do something.”  And he asked me if I know a project he can do, so I’m looking around for something comparable to Schweitzer’s bridge project for this young man.  But why all the emails?  Why the request for a service task?  Because he’s thirsty in his soul—that’s why.  He has reached a level of moral maturity where the inner emptiness is making itself felt.  There’s an old saying, “God is not finished with me yet”; but for this young man we might say, “God is just getting started on him.”  There is a thirst . . . .

 

            How does this thirst get quenched in you?  What can you possibly do that will be like a cup of cold water on a hundred-degree day?  Building a bridge or making a silent retreat, reading a book or making peace in your family  is not what everybody needs to do.  If there’s anything worse than this deep thirst, it’s   not knowing how to get the refreshing water.  I think we have a dowsing rod to find that water, and it’s right here in Psalm 63:

 

O God, you are my god—before morning dawns I seek you.

My very self thirsts for you, my body pines for you,

as in a desert   dry and languid, where no water is.[5]

So have I looked upon you in the sanctuary,

beholding your power and glory.

Because your grace is better than life

my lips will praise you.

Thus will I bless you as long as I live;

I will lift up my hands and call on your name.

 

And the psalm continues:

 

My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast,

and my mouth praises you with joyful lips,

When in bed I think of you,

and meditate on you in the watches of the night.

For you have been my help,

and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy.

 

            I believe it was the nineteenth century British Catholic theologian John Henry Newman who once said that there is an empty space in every human heart, the shape of God.  That “empty space” is where our deeper “thirst” comes from, and it can be quenched only by welcoming the Eternal.  When you do that, you become an incarnation of the love God that was expressed perfectly in Jesus of Nazareth.  Paul called it, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”[6]

 

            There is a thirst that no liquid on earth can quench.  There is a thirst like a burning desert, and if you don’t attend to it your life goes into selfish self-concern.  There is a thirst for the Spirit of God within you, and only the Spirit will assuage it. 

            You may get there in a retreat, or building a bridge, an inspirational book, a family reconciliation, or in some other way that is open to you; but if you don’t get there, you could die in this wilderness of heat.  And going there is the pilgrimage that is your life.

AMEN