March 15th Sermon by The Reverend Loree Reed

John 4: 5–42


Years ago, the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann wrote a book called An Unsettling God: the Heart of the Hebrew Bible. I have always appreciated that book because in it I find the God I know; the Unsettling God who is always surprising me. I might start the day by praising this God I think of as high and lifted up – far away from me – and he surprises me with the warmth and closeness of his Presence. I confess to him the ways I’ve fallen short – and he stuns me by his mercy and forgiveness. I pray for what I think I want – and he offers me some utterly new possibility, something I’ve never thought of. Somehow he’s always catching me off guard. It seems to be part of his very nature.
So even in the face of this approaching pandemic, this corona virus crisis, while the news media chronicles the rising panic of people all around us, I find myself thinking, “Don’t count the Unsettling God out. He might yet surprise us. He might yet take this seemingly impossible situation and transmute it into an occasion of unexpected growth and blessing.” Often enough, in the old Bible stories, that’s what he did. Sometimes the crisis was cataclysmic in nature – an invading army coming against a city, for example. And sometimes its scope was much smaller – the story of one child saved, one woman rescued. The story of the Samaritan woman at the well is one of those smaller stories.
This woman is completely caught off guard by her encounter with Jesus. She knows the rules, and as best she can she abides by them. In her world, men don’t speak to women in public – not even to their own wives. And Jews have nothing to do with Samaritans – not ever. So it’s quite certain that a Jewish man should not be speaking to a Samaritan woman. But this stranger she finds at the well at the noon hour isn’t abiding by any of these social conventions. Seeing the bucket she carries, he asks her to draw some water from the well and give him a drink.
Now she’s really alarmed. She knows the price of breaking the rules in this town – and she’s not sure that this chance encounter with this total stranger is worth the risk. So rather than drawing the water for him, as he has asked, she reminds him of the social conventions.
But Jesus isn’t put off by her objection. For he has something other than social convention in mind. “If you knew,” he says to her, “if you only knew the gift of God – and who is asking you for water –– you could ask him – and he would give you living water.”
“And who are you,” she replies, “with no bucket in hand?” In other words, “Who do you think you are?” And then, responding to Jesus’ word that he was offering her a gift from God, she adds, “Do you think you are greater than our ancestor Jacob, who dug this well and gave it to us?” Surely, she thinks, this should settle things. This should put the stranger in his place.
But the inspired Word of God, standing there in front of her, is hardly at a loss for words. “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again,” he tells her. “But those who drink of the water I will give will never be thirsty. For the waters I give will become in them a spring of water, splashing up to eternal life.”
This word Jesus delivers to the woman is so hopeful, so promising that despite herself she’s intrigued. In return for her own sarcasm to him – she had expected some kind of put down. Instead, he has offered her promise and love. So despite her best intentions to remain unmoved and untouched by this encounter she finally drops her guard and says humbly, “Sir, give me this water that I may never be thirsty again.”
But Jesus hasn’t finished preparing this soil to receive a life–giving sprinkling of fresh water. He turns the ground over and breaks it up one more time as he says,

           “All right, go. Go call your husband.”
Well, now he has quit preaching and turned to meddling. For now he has touched on the really large issue in her life – the one that overshadows all the others.

           “I have no husband,” she replies.
“You’re right,” Jesus says. “You’ve had five husbands – and the one you are living with now is not your husband.” He has put his finger on the uncomfortable truth that has made the woman so defensive before him – and before everyone else. But hers is not the loose moral situation modern commentators have read into it. She is not some Elizabeth Taylor of the Samaritan world, trading in husbands as some people trade in sports cars for a newer model.¹ More likely, each of her previous husbands has died. And each time it happened the male next–of–kin, according to the custom of Levirate marriage, has been asked to marry her and take his kinsman’s place. So she’s been passed from man to man until now she no longer has even the dignity of marriage. This is the system this woman has been subject to. And now she has virtually no value in her society.
But in Jesus’ eyes, she is worth something. In fact, she’s worth a great deal – and he means to show that to her. But right now she’s so embarrassed by his reference to her unmarried state she’ll do anything to get him off the subject.
“I see that you’re a prophet,” she says. “Now, let’s see. You prophets like to talk theology. Isn’t it interesting that you Jews worship in Jerusalem and we Samaritans worship on the mountain. Such a fascinating difference! Would you like to comment on that?”²
“Woman,” Jesus says, “the hour is coming, and now is, when it won’t make any difference where you worship. What will matter is whether you are worshiping in spirit and in truth. So in the end, you see, it’s you who makes the only difference that matters.”
She comes back at him, hard.
    “Me – make a difference?” she asks. “To God? Huh!
    When hell freezes over . . . and Messiah comes.”
This is the opening Jesus has been waiting for – not to finish her off with one last laser beam comment, but to convince her, finally, of his love for her.
    “I am he;” he says, softly, “the one who is speaking to you.”
You can imagine the look of confusion – then wonder – then confusion again that clouds this woman’s eyes as she hears Jesus’ words and takes them in. But she doesn’t have to say a word – because just then Jesus’ disciples come back, and they have a whole new set of questions to ask him.
But Good News is not something you can keep to yourself. The woman runs back to the town, unwittingly echoing the very words the disciples said to one another at the Jordan when they first met Jesus. “Come and see,” she says to them. “Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did. He can’t be Messiah, can he? Come and see!”
The living water, you see, was already springing up inside her – splashing out on all she met, washing away her past, her hopelessness and her shame. But water isn’t just for washing away dirt and stains. Water has a way of growing things up, of bringing life and beauty to our lives, of making even deserts bloom.
Years ago I visited Big Bend National Park way out in West Texas. There’s a lot of variety in that park – some barren deserts, some rugged mountains and some rivers rimmed by rock canyons. But the place I remember most vividly is an old homestead right in the middle of the desert where an intrepid couple raised their family in the 1920s and 1930s – because they realized that deep beneath that desert floor there must be water. So they drilled a few wells and put in some windmills to bring that water up to the surface.
Today those people have gone. And the house they built has begun to fall down, as houses do when there’s no one there to care for them. But all around it, all around that homestead there are trees, big trees growing right in the middle of the desert – cottonwoods and fruit trees and even a big oak –/ because the wind still moves the windmills, the water still rises to the surface and – against all odds – that desert continues to bloom.
Amen


¹ Thomas G. Long Whispering the Lyrics; Sermons for Lent and Easter
  (CSS Publishing Co., Lima, Ohio; 1995) p. 35.

² Ibid.
 
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