Obey Your Thirst!

(This is an excerpt of a sermon preached on Sunday, March 27, 2011 at New Covenant Worship Center in Baltimore, MD)

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God? (Psalm 42:2)

In the Scripture text, we find that the writer in the Psalm is one who is obviously yearning for a closer relationship with God. He is seeking and searching for something more, something deeper in his spiritual walk. And so he begins abruptly with the metaphor of a thirsty, panting deer. The deer is frantically searching the desert for a stream of water.

With the same intensity as the deer seeks water, the psalmist seeks after God. He is speaking to a need that is common among all of us. An integral part of the human plight is a need to know God and to experience God. This is what St. Augustine spoke of in his prayer, “Lord you have created us for yourself, and our souls are restless until they find their rest in thee.” All of us in some way have souls that are restless.

Here, the psalmist offers the image of a deer that is thirsty. Though the psalmist points to the deer’s longing in the midst of physical thirst and danger, this metaphor offers a profound spiritual image- our relationship with God is as essential to our spiritual well-being as water is to our physical well-being.

I would venture to suggest that all of us have found ourselves at the point of being thirsty. Being thirsty places us at the point of needing to address one of the basic needs of life. The fact is that we can’t survive without water. Without water we would die. To be thirsty is to experience the most basic and profound of human needs. It has been suggested that thirst is such a powerful longing that it displaces all other human desires.

This image of being thirsty may be lost on some of us in a day when there is so much that substitutes for the basic elements of life. Even knowing what we thirst for – what we need most essentially in our lives - is often lost amidst the things that grasp our attention.

Growing up, my paternal grandparents lived across the road from a well. I can remember playing outside in the hot summer sun, and there would come a point when we knew that it was time to stop playing, for we were thirsty.

We knew that it was time to go to the well, and pump it until water came out. We’d pump and pump, and there was nothing like the sight of seeing water begin to flow out of the well, and knowing that our thirst would then be quenched.

We reflect upon this matter of being thirsty today because in this day and age, we thirst for many things. Some of us have schedules that are so full that it leaves us thirsty for time with God. Some of us have religion in our lives, and yet our relationship with the Lord yearns for intimacy.

Some of us thirst for recognition from others as a way of masking our deeper need for self-esteem. Some of us thirst for relationships – only to find ourselves being exploited and abused and unable to deal with our profound loneliness. We thirst for material things and find ourselves mired in a form of “affluenza” which Marion Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund defines as our possessing too much that is worth too little. We thirst.

What are you thirsty for? What are the things that you most desire in life? What are your heart’s desires? What are the things that you seek after?

Over the course of history, there have been persons who have thirsted after the things that would make our world better, the things of God:
• Martin Luther King, Jr. thirsted for racial equality.
• Mohandas Gandhi thirsted for peace and justice.
• Mother Theresa thirsted for truth and fairness.
• Dietrich Bonheoffer thirsted for true discipleship.
• Rosa Parks thirsted for her dignity.

Christ beckons each of us to obey our thirst. This should be good news for us today. In the midst of failing economies, political disappointment, violence and wars, broken homes, lost jobs, and diminished stock portfolios – Jesus is the living water. In the midst of fears, doubts, despair, dread, disillusionment, disappointment – Jesus is the living water.

What are you thirsty for? Are you thirsting after God? Our response to the presence and power of God should be to obey our thirst, and seek God where he can be found.