March 8, 2026 | Word Out!
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READINGS AND SERMON
First Reading: Exodus 17:1-7
1From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. 2The people quarreled with Moses, and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” 3But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” 4So Moses cried out to the Lord, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” 5The Lord said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. 6I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. 7He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”
Second Reading: Ecclesiastes 3:10-14
10 I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with.
11 He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover, he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. 12 I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; 13 moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil. 14 know that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it nor anything taken from it; God has done this so that all should stand in awe before him.
Gospel: John 4:5-42
5 [Jesus] came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.
7 A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8 (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus answered her, “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.” 11 The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” 13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” 15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
16 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” 17 The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband,’ 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” 19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” 21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 25 The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” 26 Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”
27 Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” 28 Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, 29 “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” 30 They left the city and were on their way to him.
31 Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” 32 But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” 33 So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” 34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. 35 Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. 36 The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. 37 For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ 38 I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”
39 Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. 41 And many more believed because of his word. 42 They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”
Sermon: Receive the Gift
Grace to you, and peace, from God, the source of life, and from Jesus, who is that light and life in the world. Amen.
This morning, I’m going to talk about how the book of Ecclesiastes was interpreted, our Second Reading for today, in a way that transformed it for me this past Wednesday, by what I heard from our speaker at the Wednesday evening Lenten service. Some of my remarks are accordingly based on hers; her name is Professor, Sarah Koenig, she is an Old Testament professor from Seattle Pacific University.
But before I get to those remarks, I have a question. Show of hands: How many of you know you are going to die? …Okay, there are a few that, no, keep them up! Second: How many of you believe, that is truly believe, you are going to die? …Okay, some hands, like mine, are going down. You may put your hands down regardless.
I asked the second question based not only on my own experience, but also a number of things that I have read, including Tuesdays with Maurey by Mitch album. There, one of the characters says, “Everybody knows they're going to die, but nobody believes it.”
Now, why do you think that is? Why is it the case that, even though we all know conceptually that there will be a final day in our days and years, we don't truly, perhaps, believe or acknowledge it? Is it because the thought is too scary, or maybe it's because the idea is too overwhelming, almost unimaginable, that this dream, this run of consciousness, will someday come to a stop? Or maybe it's because it's too counter-cultural to talk about or contemplate the stark reality of death. The worst-selling book that won the Pulitzer Prize was The Denial of Death, by Ernst Becker, back in the 1970s. There's a reason for it. People are in denial. Why would they read a book about the Denial of Death?
When you think about it, when you give someone a sympathy card, almost always it uses euphemisms for death. It says this person passed away, for example, or consider the increasing trend of calling a funeral or memorial a celebration of life. It's as if the person didn't really die. Or at minimum, we're involved in an open secret that this person has died, but nobody really wants to talk about it. In fact, I would, well, not in fact, but in theory, I would almost argue that in our culture, it's easier to talk about sex or money than it is to talk about death.
So how do people, how do you face the future, with all its hopes, to be sure, but also it's inescapable end? Well, if you're anything like me, and God help you if that's the case, if you're anything like me, you repress it by deferring it. And what I'm prepared to argue here is that that is a fairly common strategy, a fairly common tactic for dealing with the reality of death. The theologian Paul Tillich describes the attitude in one of his sermons. He writes, “Many try to suppress the consciousness of death by putting the expectation of a long life between now and the end. For them, it is decisive that the end be delayed. Even old people who are near the end do this, for they cannot endure the fact that the end will not be delayed much longer. On the other hand,” he continues, “many people realize this deception and hope for a continuation of this life after death. They expect an endless future in which they may achieve or possess what has been denied them in this life.”
Now, regarding the first the tactic, of deferring death to another day, I have a beloved family member who is in his mid-80s, talking about building a house and living there for the next decade, because hisfather lived to be 97, and so will he. In some ways, I wonder, first of all, why did this person get those genes and I didn't—especially since I'm related to this person—but I also wonder what that's about, where we push death and sort of kick it like a can down the road, as if at every stop or every moment where we're invited to consider our mortality and contemplate it, we just say to ourselves, “that's morbid, that'll happen tomorrow, that'll happen next year,” —or that indeed, will happen at 97. The trouble with this perspective is that it's not, at least for Jews and Christians, Biblical. “Indeed,” Tillich writes, “the Christian message acknowledges the time runs toward an end and that we move towards the end of that time, which is our time.”
Don't believe me? Want evidence? Consider Job 14, which we discussed in today's forum. “A mortal, born of woman, few of days and full of trouble, comes up like a flower and withers, flees like a shadow and does not last.”
Or in the New Testament, James 4: “You do not even know what tomorrow will bring,” the author writes, “What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.”
This, in the letters of Paul, is why the Apostle talks about being “saved from death,” because death for him was real. Human beings are created, soul and body, finite. When we die, Paul used the euphemism in Greek for death, which is sleep. “The saints are asleep in the earth until the first day of God's new creation,” he argued, which may be why we say of the deceased, ‘may they rest in peace.’ The last day quickens body and soul in a new creation. That is at least the perspective of Paul, as I read him, and of the book of Revelation, which talks about how the saints, buried, will be raised on the last day and then judged accordingly. Some to condemnation, according to the book of Daniel, others to glory.
Now why do I bring all of this up? I mean, it seems morbid, negative, and depressing, right? Well, for a couple of reasons. First, in case you haven't noticed, we this is—I love these colors—we are in the season of Lent, where we journey with Christ to His cross, where he, like us, will face death.
And in a strange way, I find that comforting. I know that he underwent what me and all of you must face, that is, our own mortality. He tasted death, and then overcame it in the resurrection.
But there's another reason that we talk, or should talk, about death, particularly during the season of Lent, and it ties to our Second Reading for today, Ecclesiastes. This is your takeaway. Listen closely: We contemplate death to appreciate life. Does everybody hear me? We contemplate death, to appreciate life; to live a fuller life, to live what Jesus calls an abundant life, where we take nothing for granted.
Now in our discussion of Ecclesiastes on Wednesday night, we learned the word that Ecclesiastes often uses, one that appears in the opening verses. The word in Hebrew is hevel, which our Bible translation and the NIV translate, respectively, as “vanity” or “meaninglessness.” So the teacher or preacher at the beginning of this book, in the Old Testament, says “Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless.” Now that's an exciting read. Or again, “Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.”
What we discovered on Wednesday night is that both of these translations are inadequate. A better way to translate the Hebrew word hevel is to say fleeting, such that the opening verses of Ecclesiastes read, “Fleeting, fleeting, everything is fleeting.” The original meaning of the word is related to smoke or puff of wind. So the teacher or the preacher opens this text by saying, “Fleeting, fleeting, everything is fleeting.” or “Transitory, transitory, everything is transitory” or “Ephemeral , ephemeral, everything is ephemeral,” or in short, “nothing lasts.”
“Nothing lasts”— an implication of which, for some, might be that things are meaningless or vain, but the actual meaning of the word is “fleeting.” All things in life are transitory. The world is an airport. Everything is always moving, and everything, beyond that analogy, comes to its end.
Acknowledging that in the book of Ecclesiastes can lead to one of two ways of responding. If we read the book of Ecclesiastes through a worldly lens, the response to “Everything is fleeting, nothing lasts” is carpe diem; seize the day; eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. And as you probably can guess, this disposition can be exceedingly selfish and destructive of one's own self or and other people. That's reading Ecclesiastes through a worldly lens.
But what happens when we put on the lens of faith? Suddenly we recognize that everything in life, though fleeting, is a gift. And so instead of saying, “seize the day for tomorrow we die,” we say, in response to the fleeting character of life, “receive the gift that comes from God.” Receive the gift. Consider our Second Reading, Ecclesiastes, 2: 12: “I know that there is nothing better for them—human beings—than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live. Moreover, it is God's gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in their toil.”
Now, when I heard that on Wednesday night, it changed my whole view of Ecclesiastes. You see, I have always loved this book, but for the wrong reasons. I liked it—maybe this isn't entirely wrong—because of the sober analysis it provides of reality, the acknowledgement and recognition indeed, that nothing lasts, that all things come and go, that no one, as the famous pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus says, ever steps in the same river twice. I liked it for that reason.
But more than that, I liked it because I can be a middle-aged curmudgeon. And guess what? The author of this text is a curmudgeon as well. He's cynical. He sees life in a way that doesn't seem consistent with other books in the Bible, which almost made it a book banned from the Bible, for that reason.
But now my attitude toward the book, and perhaps those rabbis who accepted this book into the Old Testament, has totally changed. Seeing it through the lens of faith, Ecclesiastes teaches us, by acknowledging our mortality—everything is fleeting—to receive the gift of life from God, to take nothing that God provides for granted, to “give constant thanks,” as Paul says in one of his letters, “to God,” for the very existence of our being, for the very breath inspired by the Spirit.
And that, at least in part, I believe, is the kind of life, the abundant life to which Jesus calls us in today's rather lengthy Gospel reading. You see, we live by His grace. We are created by grace, just as we are saved by His grace. The Father brings the world into being, and Jesus, through His resurrection, helps bring the new world into being, the life of the world to come, the Second Creation.
Dear friends, this morning, and every morning this week, I invite you with me when you wake up, to receive the gift; to give thanks. For all in this fleeting life that comes to us, food and drink, is a gift of the Lord. Yes, indeed, “This is the day the Lord has made,” as one of the Psalms says, and this is the day that you and I have been graced with fleeting moments of life, all of which come from a gracious and loving God. Receive the gift—and if you like, read the book of Ecclesiastes.
Amen.