Sermons for the Month
A Woman Came to Draw Water…
DATE: March 3, 2002
TEXT: John 4:5-42“To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN During the season of Lent, we take a detour from this year's focus on Matthew's Gospel to hear how the evangelist John presents the story of Jesus and the people whom He encountered. Each of the 4 Gospel writers has a unique way of seeing and a unique style of writing, and John's is strikingly different from the other three. John is not in a hurry to "get" us anywhere, and he starts with a simple story and meanders around, going deeper and deeper into the underlying theology. John takes an idea or an image, and plays with it, develops it like an artist or a poet, and the next thing you know, he's used an entire chapter to get across a single thought. Clearly, John is the Gospel for right-brained people. Today John gives us the story of a woman who has a surprising encounter with Jesus. Jesus and his relatively new disciples have celebrated the Passover in Jerusalem and are heading north through Samaria back to their home territory of Galilee. It's like going through Kentucky to get back home to Ohio from Florida, except that unlike Kentuckians and Ohioans, Jews and Samaritans large despised one another. It all started centuries earlier, when the Israelite people of Samaria had begun to intermarry with non-Israelites who had been forcibly relocated there by the conquering Assyrian empire. The purer-blooded Jews of Judea came to consider the Samaritans to be half-breeds, and were known to make less-than-kind remarks about the Samaritans' ancestors. Furthermore, as the Samaritans came to feel unwelcome in Jerusalem, they had built their own temple on Mt. Gerizim, and to the Jews, this was further evidence that the Samaritans didn't even know how to worship properly, and were as bad as complete pagans. The name-calling and prejudice on both sides became uglier as the centuries went on, until many Jews would rather add a few days to their trip by walking around Samaria rather than set foot in it. But not Jesus. He's walking right through the heart of Samaria, right at the base of the hated Mt. Gerizim and its temple; and at the sixth hour, a.k.a. "high noon," he stops just outside the city of Sychar, at the old historic well which still served as a source of the city's water. Jesus sends his disciples into the city for some carry-out, and he stretches out beside the well, waiting to see who might happen by. And before too long, a woman came to draw water. The first surprise in the story, which I think surprises the woman too, is that Jesus talks to her; first, because he's a Jew and he's supposed to scrunch up his nose as if she smelled bad or something; and secondly, because men in those days, decent respectable men, did not talk to women who were strangers to them. Thee second surprise is that she answers Jesus and continues the conversation, because women in those days, decent respectable women, did not talk to strange men. It's a hint that this is NOT your average respectable woman, which might also explain why she's out getting her water in the hottest part of the day, when no other women will be around to very pointedly ignore her. Perhaps her initial assumption when Jesus struck up a conversation was that he was interested in shall we say, "doing business" with her, and maybe as she kept the conversation going, she was trying to figure out how much to charge to make up for his being a Jew. How confusing it must have been when Jesus just kept talking about the water, and then suddenly offered to give her a gift of living water, a spring of water, so that she would never be thirsty again. What, you mean instead of cash? Hm-m-m, her own private water source? She was intrigued. If you've ever gone camping and had to carry water from a common pump, you know what a pain that is! Imagine having to do that every single day, carrying home enough water for cooking, cleaning, washing up, and drinking - no wonder she wanted to hear more. T where Jesus, as John tells it, moved the conversation to a deeper level. "Tell you what, you go call your husband out to talk about it," Jesus tells her, and confused, she stammers, "I don't have a husband." "I know you don't have a husband," Jesus says, "you've had five. And you're not even married to the guy you're living with now, isn't that right?" Now, to me the biggest surprise in the story is what comes next. I would have expected that when she was able to pick up her jaw from the ground, she would have drawn back, the atmosphere gone suddenly very chilly, that she would have pulled her dignity back together as best she could, snapped at him, "and just what business is it of yours, buster?", turned her back and walked away, water or no water! That's not what happens. Instead, in response to something she hears in Jesus' voice, something she sees in his eyes meeting hers, maybe something in his presence at the well in the middle of the day when only the losers and the loners would happen by, makes her forget all about the idea of an easier way to obtain bathwater. Suddenly, she wants to talk theology -- who'd have thought it! Turns out this Samaritan woman has spiritual questions and concerns; she's waiting for the promised Messiah to come and to show her the way to God; turns out she's ready and eager to be filled with that living water Jesus promised. Who'd have thought that! And by the end of the story, this woman, an outcast person of a nation of outcasts, this woman who one might have thought from her marital history has a lot to learn about righteousness and faithfulness and keeping covenant - SHE is the one who becomes a believer, a follower, and a faithful and eager witness to Jesus, the Messiah, who sought her out, treated her with dignity and love, looked her in the eye and didn't pretend there were no sins there worth addressing; but also communicated to her forgiveness, and offered her a new purpose, a new vision, a new way to be. And that same gift is for us, too, which is of course what John wants us to realize as we are pulled into the story, the gift of God's grace represented here be the sign of water. Water was and is a very vivid symbol to the people of the Middle East, where water is often scarce and therefore precious, where no one would dream of using it for something so frivolous as washing a car, or to watering a non-edible lawn. Even we who live in garden state of Ohio can appreciate how very basic water is to our lives. Our own bodies largely are made up of water; we don't need to dehydrate a great deal before we become seriously sick. Water is essential to the growth and production of our food. Water pours over us in the shower and makes us clean, and a pool of water on a hot summer's day is an irresistible invitation to play. Water also changes the landscape. Just a relatively small stream of water carved out the magnificent Cuyahoga Valley; a surging torrent of it breaks down barriers. Water overflows its channels and makes new ones; it can destroy, and drown. But then so does God's grace. Jesus offered the woman this living Water of the powerful Grace of God; and in part that was a word of judgement; parts of her life needed to be swept away, drowned and destroyed, her life needed new channels in which to flow, needed the buds and blossoms of new life. She could have refused Jesus' offered gift - out of pride, or out of fear, she could have thrown up the sandbags to prevent its force from affecting her life, and Jesus would have respected her decision, though I suspect he might have found a way to "coincidentally" run into her again on another day. She could have turned to Jesus a heart as resistant as concrete, so that the water ran right over it without making any impression. But instead, the Samaritan woman opened herself up to the living water, the living Word; she let is sweep thru her life, overwhelming the old attitudes and expectations, scrubbing out the corners of her heart, renewing and refreshing and restoring her to a life of faithfulness to God and confidence in her Lord, Jesus, the One for whom she had been waiting all along. The grace of God comes to us, joined to the sign of water empowered by God's Word. His grace washes every day of our life in Christ, as in confession and the showering of God's forgiveness we splash again and again in the refreshing, renewing pool of our baptism. The grace of God soaks down into soil of our hearts through Scripture and the Lord's Supper, through prayer and praise, nurturing the tender roots of new learnings and growth, flooding and washing clean the ugliest, filthiest, ickiest places within us. Let's not be putting up the sandbags, but like this woman of long ago whose story lives for us still, let's pray for the willingness to welcome God's watery gift, that our lives might be made new, and healthy, and strong; that with spirits green and growing, we too might blossom with faithfulness, with love, with joy, and with eager witness to the Lord, the One for whom we've been waiting all along. AMEN