True religion lives at the border of body and soul. Faith that accounts for only one and not the other, or overdoes attention to one or the other, is neither compelling to outsiders nor fulfilling to insiders. But when body and soul meet in a bond of love, it’s a healing and holy union.

We have two stories from Scripture today that lead us to the border and point us to what is whole and holy. First, Exodus 17. The children of Israel thirst. They’ve been walking in the desert for God knows how long. No maps. No oases in sight. Their bones are drying out, and they need watering.

This is no small problem, and it isn’t one we ought to dismiss as just another sign of how the children of Israel were really called that because they were just so childish, complaining about needing water when God has already carried them through the waters of the sea to get them out of Egypt. But, have you ever been really thirsty? I mean the kind of thirst that threatens your life, the dehydration that messes with your mind as well your body?

When I was a kid playing high school football, coaches used water breaks as incentive to get us to work harder. If we didn’t satisfy their thirst for our effort, they would deny us water. Then news reports appeared of players dying from dehydration. Coaches wised up.

The soft drink company that makes Sprite ran commercials for a time with the slogan Obey Your Thirst. Of course, no soft drink really quenches your thirst like water, although sport drinks like Gatorade do replace critical electrolytes that that body needs in good supply. At the University of Miami we drank water or some knock-off product instead, because Gatorade was developed by scientists from the University of Florida, our archrivals, don’t you know?! We didn’t want to give them any credit for quenching our thirst. Silly. But, hey, this is college football; it’s not the MIT math team.

Water is probably the next big thing in geopolitics. Our own Bob Geary has been working hard on this in his retirement, helping people think strategically about the growing and pressing need for clean drinking water in a world with an expanding population and fickle weather patterns. He has helped his alma mater, Texas A&M, develop the first water engineering school in the world, with a strategy of bringing promising students from all over the world who come to study and then go back to government jobs in their countries in order to keep this priority high. If you think oil has been a global problem, wait until the water crisis hits.

Our partnership with a community in Busia, Kenya, took a giant leap forward when we were able to drill a water well with a filtration system. Malaria and so many other water-borne diseases have afflicted these people’s health and hopes because they did not have simple access to clean water or the knowledge to cleanse the water before use.

If God wants human life to thrive on this planet, God must be interested in slaking human thirst at the most basic level. And if the church thinks this is some worldly concern that doesn’t concern us, then the things that concern us will not concern the people who can’t yearn for spiritual water until they can drink up and think straight. There was a time when the church thought it was being faithful to the Lord when we attended only to the soul and left matters of the body to worldly powers like governments. Today we know that the church has to live at this border between body and soul, attending to both in the same way that God does, that Moses did, and that Jesus did. If all we care about is the soul, we are really being unfaithful by failing to do justice and hold worldly powers accountable for their responsibility to see to the well-being of every person.

If we are concerned about the basic welfare of our neighbors, wherever they are, then we also have to become savvier about how to do that. I get tired of hearing Christians talk about praying for things they have no intention of doing anything about. Look at what Moses does. When the people go to Moses to complain about having no water, Moses goes to God to learn how to find water and make it flow. It would be easy just to call this a miracle and say this is the way God works: all we have to do is ask God, and God will provide. Well, usually the way God provides is by revealing to us the secrets of nature and the technologies that can make nature work for us instead of against us. When God tells Moses to go to a rock and then strike it with a rod, this is an image to us of how God is still at work in leading us to the truths that science and technology uncover. Whenever a discovery about nature is made, our tendency is only to credit the human explorer and not the divine revealer. But this is just as much a means of God revealing God’s glory as reading the words of Scripture.

A water engineer who figures a way to deliver clean water to those who need it, or an agricultural inventor who develops a heartier strain of grain that is drought-resistant, or a church mission volunteer who teaches people in a Kenyan village how to avoid disease by boiling water: all these are Moses striking a rock and seeing nature pour forth to revive the bodies of those whose life is in danger.

One side note in this story is really central: notice that it’s the people of God who are said to be testing God to see whether God is really among them. They put God to the test to see whether God will provide them water in the desert. As if God doesn’t want them to survive or even thrive?

It’s one thing to pray and ask God to provide for your basic needs. But when your needs are not being met in the way you expect, it becomes a sin for you to question whether God has good or evil intentions toward you. It is a breach of trust to put God’s love on trial. Massah and Meribah mean testing and quarreling. Question God all you want over whether justice is being done in the world, but don’t put God in the dock and make yourself judge and jury. That is God’s place, not yours. Trust the goodness of God and live out of it.

But if all the church does is humanitarian work, it is no more than a relief agency alongside UNICEF or similar organizations. We have more to offer and must offer it. Like Jesus at the well in Samaria, we have to lead people to that living water that quenches the thirst of the soul, too.

The woman at the well is ripe for Jesus’ gift of living water, because she is spiritually thirsty enough to want it more than anything else. What is spiritual thirst? It is the desire for a relationship with God that satisfies forever. God has made us this way, given us a spiritual thirst that can be slaked only when we drink deeply of the Spirit of God. Faith delivers what nothing else can in the way of giving meaning to life.

Look at how this woman exemplifies all the ways we tend to our spiritual thirst, only to be thirsty again and again. She has married five times and is living with a man not her husband. The text doesn’t say directly that her conduct was untoward, but it does say that she went alone to the well in the noonday heat, which probably tips us off to that. Some people move from one relationship to another looking for love. They suffer an unquenched emotional thirst. They may be looking for love in all the wrong places. Until you come to know in your soul that the God who made you loves you unconditionally and that no human love will ever substitute for that but can only be a sign of that love, you will always be thirsty. This woman with a colorful romantic history thirsted still.

She was a Samaritan, too. She found identity in her particular religious tradition and believed that her denomination had the whole truth. We worship on this mountain, she said. She might as well have said, we read out of this prayer book, or we celebrate Communion this way, or we baptize like this. When you are trying to quench your thirst for God in your identification with your religious tradition instead of finding in your religious tradition the well of living water that satisfies your spirit, you will always be thirsty. Jesus is not only the love that satisfies the lovelorn; he is the river of life that flows deep beneath the surface of our separate wells. Regardless of where you let your bucket down, when you bring up the water of eternal life, it is one and the same Jesus who satisfies.

She was poor, too, which may account for some of her romantic history, since women then, and too often now, married for security more than love. Poverty often leads people to make short-term decisions that are bad for them in the long term. They want to have something right now instead of learning to wait and persevere for the long term until they have what satisfies. Stealing something in a department store that you can’t pay for but want to have now is just one example. Stealing in a corporate deal, in which you take advantage of someone else to your own benefit, is another. Poverty of spirit is not limited to poverty of the flesh. What’s behind it is the feeling that you are somebody only if you have enough stuff. But that will always leave you thirsty.

Lust, says Frederick Buechner, is the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst. Jesus offers us living water that will never leave us thirsty again. But we don’t usually seek it until we are thirsty enough and tired enough of being thirsty enough that we want it with all our being—body and soul.

Here’s the sad truth: no one ever really drinks deeply of the water of life that Jesus alone can deliver until they become aware of their thirst. All these evangelism programs that the church comes up with that are meant to talk people into being interested in accepting Jesus as their Savior fall flat because we are trying to lure people to the well instead of waiting for them there. Nobody walks an aisle in a church because I preach some sermon that makes them all of a sudden want to have what Jesus alone can give. Some of you even feel sorry for me when nobody comes forward at the invitation time. But here’s the thing: I don’t care if any of you responds to me; and if you do respond to Christ, I don’t care if you do it in church when I tell you it’s time. We are not in the religion business; we are just people who have tasted the living water and want to share it. We care deeply that you know that when you thirst, we will pass you the bucket or strike the rock so that you too can find the living water. We care deeply that you come in your time and God’s time to drink of deeply of God’s grace.

So obey your thirst. God gave it to you, after all. And only God can quench it for good—and for good.