Before we moved to Oregon, I had my doubts about rocks giving water. I'd seen wet rocks after a rain, rocks that seeped and even dribbled water, but nothing that could water 12 tribes and their flocks. But if you've driven highway 205 after a rain, you've seen the rock wall by West Linn that positively gushes water. That's rock with enough water for the Israelites!

The rabbinical commentary on today's Exodus passage points out that God is not angry. After all, these are God's people, and if they're thirsty and the need is not being met, it's up to God to do something about it. No, it's Moses who is angry. Israel blames him for taking them away from their so-called lives of ease and plenty in Egyptian slavery. If only they had prayed, the commentators say, instead of complaining to Moses. Why didn't they? Fresh from slavery, maybe they thought they deserved thirst, or maybe they were afraid they'd be punished if they went directly to God. They didn't know the right words and Bible verses to make "successful" prayers. That's what they'd hired Moses to do-do God for them. He had the seminary degree, the black robe, the books. His job was to pray, and if there isn't enough water, he's the one they could see, so he should take the blame. Complain to him. Besides, when we prayed before, the boss told us we weren't doing it right and publicly humiliated us. Still slaves, but to their past.

That Israel was stuck in the wilderness 40 years wasn't because Moses wouldn't stop to ask for directions, as the old joke says. Maybe it took Israel that long to figure out they were no longer slaves, that faith isn't supposed to be passive. Just tell me what to do, what to believe. When was the last time a slave volunteered? Slaves do not put things together or ask questions. Slaves are suspicious of new things, they like routine, knowing what to expect because they've always done it this way. No change, no innovation, no doubt. Passive, but at least predictable. It may be pain, but it's familiar pain.

The slave days are over. Time for a new order, new way of being, new expectations. Which means Moses goes first. That's what leaders do-go ahead. Moses and the elders go ahead of the congregation, and God waits on the rock. God visible is ready to bless Israel with the one thing they need more than anything else right now. And it comes gushing out of the rock. This event was a big deal, so big that Moses names the place so no one forgets. He calls it "Test" (Massah) and "Quarrel" (Meribah). Did Moses choose those names out of grinchiness, because Israel really salted his socks and he wanted to verbally punish them for their slave-like passive-aggressive, stubborn and untrusting complaining? Or did he give those names to remind Israel ever afterwards of God's grace, a grace that comes despite all provocation to the contrary?

I think it's grace. That the names come out of Moses' sense of God's grace sheds light on that surprising turn in Jesus' conversation with the Samaritan woman. Living water to worship-what was that all about? Jesus dismantles the woman's understanding of "water," and then confronts her with a new understanding of herself. Her boat was already rocking with the radical notion that she might be a person worthy to have conversation with someone, when suddenly the man makes a judgment on her life. Without directly knowing about it. What he says calls into question her whole world. He must be a prophet, God's spokesman. No one else could have such knowledge of her life, and in the very knowing it, to inspire in her the desire to reform, the hope that she could change. Only a prophet could do that-someone who speaks on behalf of God.

Samaritans knew God had promised another Prophet-like-Moses, someone to settle legal questions and teach the law. Now the prophet shows up and talks with her! The Pope is also Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and he shows up in Estacada to teach the Resource Center clients how to get off food stamps. The Samaritan woman learns that Living Water is a brand new way to see God's Law-what everyone already knew was the source of wisdom and life. This Living Water was like the water that gushed from Moses' rock. Of course the appropriate response is worship.

Rick and I saw the current show at the Portland Art Museum, People of the River -as in the Columbia River. The show exhibits several hundred years of art in stone, weaving, leather, beads, wood. It is so breathtakingly beautiful that I wept. I wanted to fall to my knees in gratitude for the experience. I'm not saying that art is like the Living Water offered by Jesus, but there are human experiences of such power and beauty, that worship is the only response capable of carrying their truth. When I was in school, we said poetry "takes off the top of your head." What we meant was, these words express the heart of one's experience of truth, in such a concise and beautiful way, it's as if the top of your head is peeled off. Worship also takes off the top of your head. That's the Samaritan woman's response, why she thinks "worship," when she hears the gracious truth that she is already known-but also loved.

When Jesus offers worship "in spirit and truth," he doesn't mean "spirit" as in "Holy Spirit." He means community-forming spirit, and "truth" as in "what it takes for us to grow and get more holy." This is worship that calls us, that responds to God's call, worship that forms a people. Did you ever think that you came to church on Sunday morning because you were invited? And that the Person inviting you was the One you were worshiping? That puts a different spin on Sunday morning breakfast conversation-do we go to church today or not? I don't know, I get up early five days a week, I'm too tired. Let's do something fun. What is this-school? Do they take attendance? I sit all week long, why do I have to sit and listen to someone talk when I have a day off? Community forming, in response to God's call. Which is why the woman fearlessly rushes into the town to gather the people who had been shunning her. She needs them as much as they need her. "Worship in spirit and truth" means faith formation, and faith formation means community.

Kathleen Norris in her book, Amazing Grace, writes about the role of worship in her conversion. She writes, "We praise God not to celebrate our own faith but to give thanks for the faith God has in us." The woman at the well connects water and worship through the truth Jesus told about her life-the truth that God has faith in her. His conversation with her presupposes she is a real human being, of all things. Not an object-of prejudice or for useful work. Not despised-for who she was and what she'd done-not a sinner. He takes seriously her theological concerns, her questions about God and nationality and neighbors. And when he tells her truth, she can stand to hear it, in all its harshness and pathos and pity, and she needs to worship in response. She is so grateful that God is bigger than even her sin.

Worship is about praising God, as Norris says, "not to celebrate our own faith but to give thanks for the faith God has in us. To let ourselves look at God, and let God look back at us. And to laugh, and sing, and be delighted because God has called us his own." We are called as God's own. We delight God. And God invites us to move beyond who we thought we were. To become more and more God's people-through worship. We gather together to experience God's own delight in us, God's faith in us. And as we do, we experience our own delight in God.