Lent 3

John 4:5-42
So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 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.) 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.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 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.” 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.” Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 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. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 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.” Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”
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?” Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” They left the city and were on their way to him.
Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. 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. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”
Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. 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.”

Prayer:
May the words of my mouth and the images of our deepest heart and soul together be acceptable in your sight, pleasing to you presence, and inspiring in our very lives separate and communal. Amen.

The first sermon I ever preached was titled, “Can I Get A Witness?” In it I reflected on what I think is a lost art in the post-modern church: witnessing. I call it art because I believe it is a form of performance art that we are gifted for in the course of a lifetime or for a brief moment. I call it lost because Christians long ago and not so long ago have had as part of our tradition both for public worship and for small group life the act of witnessing to our faith. We use the word, even, in the liturgy for death and resurrection, but at what other times do we share publically—either in a large gathering or among our closest confidants—the art of witnessing?
We could spend our time together going through definitions of types of witness or appropriate public witness or the marvels and dangers of witnessing, but I simply want to open Pandora’s box today and see what sort of stories may begin to bubble to the surface of your lives and our life together.

We have today, in the middle of our season of Lent, one of the New Testament’s great witnesses in the woman Jesus meets at Jacob’s well. In the middle of the church’s season of penitence and reflection, a time which many of us take into the innermost parts of ourselves away from the influence and judgment of the community. What can we learn from this woman and her encounter with Jesus, her life-changing, enriching, flabbergasting encounter with the Messiah?
“Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony. ‘He told me everything I have ever done.’ “ It is her testimony which seems to inspire belief among a people for whom Jesus did not obviously come. The Hebrews, the nation God created from Abraham, had suffered division after the death of Solomon, recorded for us in 1 Kings 12. There we see Israel and Judah emerge as separate kingdoms, each suffering the threat of being toppled by “foreign” kings and governments. The capitol of the new kingdom of Israel was Samaria! Think of what took place between 922 BCE and the time of Jesus and the writing of the New Testament. The city which once housed the king of Israel now was home to a group of folks who were now despised by Jews over a disagreement about who had the oldest copy of the law and the purity of the people of God—purity in this context involving the infiltration of other peoples (not Hebrew) in the city of Samaria, something prohibited in early Jewish tradition. We see it at work even in the way the writer of John’s gospel sets the stage for this story: even within a Samaritan city Jesus finds himself rescued from Samaritan soil as he stops on a plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph eons ago. The well there was even called Jacob’s well and continues to be recognized today by Christians, Jews, and Muslims as the place where this holy conversation took place.

So there is a great message of inclusion in this passage, and the woman’s witness not only to that inclusiveness but also to the personal way in which that affects her life is profound enough to persuade other Samaritans, other outcasts, that Jesus is the Savior of the World, along with their encounter with Jesus, himself.

Acclaimed professor and preacher Dr. Fred Craddock says this about this story:
[The woman at the well] is a witness, but not a likely witness and not even a thorough witness. "A man who told me all that I ever did" is not exactly a recitation of the Apostles Creed. She is not even a convinced witness: "Can this be the Christ?" is literally "This cannot be the Christ, can it?" Even so, her witness is enough: it is invitational (come and see), not judgmental; it is within the range permitted by her experience; it is honest with its own uncertainty; it is for everyone who will hear. How refreshing. Her witness avoids triumphalism, hawking someone else’s conclusions, packaged answers to unasked questions, thinly veiled ultimatums and threats of hell, and assumptions of certainty on theological matters. She does convey, however, her willingness to let her hearers arrive at their own affirmations about Jesus, and they do: "This is indeed the Savior of the world." John immortalizes her by giving to her witness a name which is the very term with which he began the Gospel. The Samaritan woman, the Greek text reads, spoke "the Word." *

Her witness is enough. It’s not a movie, or a hit song on the radio, although there are some powerful witnesses out there if we are listening to what they say. But one sentence is enough to stir the hearts of people who probably didn’t want to hear anything she had to say anyway. It’s enough; it is complete in the sense that it brings the question of faith out of the mouths of people for whom this Jesus did not supposedly come into the world to save. It is not an eloquent creed or statement of faith adopted by a large body of church because of its poetic language. It is not a universal experience: not everyone Jesus encountered received a recital of his or her personal life, decision, and actions from him. It is simply a witness to the power of his presence, the assurance that this one who offers far more than well water—like respect and healing of this woman’s broken relationship with her community and her broken understanding of what a loving relationship is about—this is not just one; it is THE one. The one that the world, not just the Hebrews, but the whole world has been waiting for. This is the Savior of the world. It’s so simple: he knows me and yet has never met me. He must know all; he must have the presence of God, he must be God! And he’s still out there; you could meet him, too. You could experience what it’s like to be in his presence. For me it was like being at home.

She certainly wasn’t Billy Graham or Joel Osteen. She wasn’t even Barbara Brown Taylor or Tom Long. She was not a renowned preacher or evangelist. She was simply a witness to what songwriter and singer Ben Gibbard calls the place where “soul meets body.” His song by that title betrays, I believe, the thoughts that must have been raging through the mind and testimony of this woman as she thought back over her encounter with Christ:

I want to live where soul meets body
And let the sun wrap its arms around me
And bathe my skin in water cool and cleansing
And feel, feel what its like to be new

Cause in my head there’s a greyhound station
Where I send my thoughts to far off destinations
So they may have a chance of finding a place
where they’re far more suited than here

I cannot guess what we'll discover
We turn the dirt with our palms cupped like shovels
But I know our filthy hands can wash one another’s
And not one speck will remain **

So, for us then: how can we reclaim the practice of testimony, especially in a time when the church is drawing lines in the sand for who is and who is not allowed to participate? How do we practice witnessing with others about the inclusive love of God that knows even the very deepest places of our hearts and souls and urges us into relationship with God?

In the midst of Christian witnesses that make us cringe or blush with embarrassment over what some folks try to pass as Christian “truth” and bold claims on the mind of God, it is hard for us to take even one step forward toward speaking our own experience of the love of Christ and the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives—a presence than it sometimes not definable in terms we have devised or a love that is more often than not un-bound by the criteria we put on who and what deserves love. Let’s at least share the faith in prayer that our governor seems to have when it comes to the seemingly impossible. What if we gathered friends and neighbors on the steps of St. Paul to pray for the living water to quench the spiritual draughts we live in day after day, week after week, month after month?

Let’s not leave it just to the poets who want to sell records or the people who have been lucky enough to figure out how to market their original thoughts and make a living doing it. There is nothing wrong with either of those things; but let the church stand up in the midst of all those things and tell our stories—our stories of being known and loved by God when no one else loved or would take the time to know us. Let us tell the stories of how we have met God while we were hiding out from the rest of the world in shame or under the attempt of our society to shame us for who and what we are. Let us tell our stories of acceptance in the hands and heart of Christ; let us tell our stories of things that could only have happened in our lives with the work of the Holy Spirit of God at work behind the scenes where we thought we were the one-man or one-woman show. Let us tell our stories.

Let us gather at the well in the middle of the day and bathe our skin in water cool and cleansing, the living water than never runs dry, and feel what it’s like to be new, to be born all over again, and this time in love where it was absent or grace where it felt scarce or forgiveness where it was withheld. Let us tell those incredible stories that have brought us to church and that keep us here when we could be so many other places at 10:55 on Sunday morning.

And like the songwriter says, we cannot guess what we’ll discover—about each other, about ourselves, about faith. It just might happen that your witness, no matter how seemingly simple, could save the life of someone sharing the pew with you, the most unexpected witness, the living Word of God.

May it be for us, friends. May it be.

Amen.


*“The Witness at the Well”. Christian Century, March 7, 1990. p. 243
**“Soul Meets Body” Ben Gibbard, Plans: Death Cab for Cutie, 2005

Well, I've finally gotten up the courage...

...to put my stuff out there.   So, this will be the place where I post my sermons.  If you're reading along, thank you thank you thank you!  I'm glad you've found me, and I hope something I have to say will be helpful to you along the way.  

I'd love to see your comments.  I look forward to reflecting with you.

Peace,

Susan