03 Lent 08
February 24, 2008

Psalms 95:1-11 (NRSV)

John 4:5-42 (NRSV)


The Juiciest News

We don’t have the town well anymore here in Deltaville. I don’t expect there ever was one. But there is and perhaps always has been some places the populace goes to share gossip and to keep up with things. I worked at the Little Sue, now the Seven-11, when I first moved to D’ville. I didn’t always work in the morning, but when I did, I saw a lot of the key characters of the town. The Little Sue was just part of the morning routine, where you got your coffee, your breakfast sausage on a bun, your slice of breakfast pizza, the new pack of cigarettes or snuff. But most of all, you got the scoop, the latest, the juicy dirt.

Of course, sometimes, one of the morning regulars would become a part of one or more of the juicy stories.

That regular would suddenly disappear.

This is why there was a solitary woman coming to the well at noon all those years ago in Samaria. Most people in villages like that go to the well first thing in the morning. This woman comes at noon. She has been the object of a lot of the juicy stories.

Jesus himself is at the well for not entirely happy reasons. He’s been targeted by the powerful religious leaders in Jerusalem as a troublemaker, and he’s basically fleeing to Galilee. The gospel notes that the time was around noon, and that Jesus was thirsty. Much later, there will be another day, and on that day, around noon, Jesus will again confess his thirst.

One of the first things I want to point out about this story is the weight of tradition that is clearly hanging over the whole story. The woman’s defiance of conventional righteousness, Jesus’ defiance of the religious authorities, the ancient history of the well, and the question of the Jews and the Samaritans.

Tradition! The Jews began with the patriarchs, Jacob and his sons, and the setting of this meeting is the well Jacob gave his son Joseph. After the sojourn to Egypt, the Jews returned to the land and again inhabited it, and there was a great period of glory in the early years. But the story soon soured and the kingdom was split in two, North and South. The Northern Kingdom was eventually overrun by the Persians and the Jews were exiled to Babylon. There they intermarried with the Persians. When they returned to the land, they were cast out of the Jewish community as half-breeds. They also continued to worship at the traditional holy places of the patriarchs rather than in the temple at Jerusalem.

Tradition! Add to this the traditional role of women. The Pharisees of Jesus’ time were called the bruised and bleeding Pharisees. The reason for this was their habit of closing their eyes whenever they saw a woman, causing them to run into things or fall over stuff.

So when Jesus begins to speak to the woman, the whole of Jewish history is bearing down on them in the form of a million traditional taboos and rules and ancient stories.

But this Samaritan woman has a lively understanding of her heritage as a descendant of Jacob and Joseph, and she has a real expectation and faith that the Messiah is going to come. At the same time, she has to deal with the Jewish tradition of excluding her and her people as unclean. She is also keenly aware that life often takes a person outside the realm of conventional righteousness.

The Samaritan woman has what I would call a borrowed faith. When I was a kid, I remember once asking my mother what she believed, and she said, “I believe that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” And she became very emotional. That impressed me tremendously. From that day forward, I was not quite as ready to mock Christian faith. I believed because my mother believed.

This is the first stage of faith, the faith we receive from someone we love, our mother or father usually or some other hero of childhood. This can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the message being transmitted.

Someone made the distinction: “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” There are traditions that are living traditions. Our holy communion is an example. But there are traditions that are really dead, like sexism. An older member last week at the late service made note that all the deacons and elders serving were female. He could remember a day not long ago when women couldn’t serve in either role. This was a received tradition. It was found however to be traditionalism, a dead faith. Women clearly were leaders in the churches of the New Testament.

I guess you could say there’s tradition, and then there’s baggage.

We lug our baggage around like the great water jar the woman lugs each day to the well. But the source of that tradition wants us to drop our baggage, to free us from the water jar, to give us water that quenches our thirst forever.

For everyone with that borrowed faith, there comes a moment when what was borrowed becomes what is personal. There comes a time when we meet Jesus himself.

People sometimes talk about have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I resist the language because I work with a lot of what some are calling the “de-churched.” The de-churched are people who have had a really bad experience with people claiming to be Christian and with organizations claiming to be the church. Such people and organizations sometimes lay claim to traditional Christian language and the moment one of the de-churched hear certain phrases, they turn right off. Simply rephrasing the language can actually open the door to someone who might otherwise have been lost.

But when people talk truthfully about a personal relationship with Jesus, they are talking about an encounter, a real meeting. Most of us who have had this moment of encounter know just what it feels like. Jesus says to the Samaritan woman, “Go get your husband.” The answer of the woman is very nuanced. “I have no husband.” And Jesus goes on to tell her everything she ever did.

It’s that moment when you feel like God is looking right into the darkest room of your soul. It usually comes through another human being or through an encounter with God’s word, or perhaps in a moment in the wonder of nature, but the experience is not usually about all that is good about you.

For me it came in a friend’s apartment years ago when I was homeless in New York City and he had put me up for a few nights. I had begun to attend church, and a spiritual director had assigned me to read Psalm 139 and to pray after I read it. I saw in my mind’s eye a vision of the Lord on the cross and had the clear understanding that he had been with me all along, despite everything I had done, good or bad, and that he was still with me and indeed loved me.

From that moment on, I ceased to have a borrowed faith. I had met the Lord and saw it as my job to tell others about him. Moreover, I realized that to give myself to obedience to God meant that I would never again truly want for anything. I had living water to drink, and food the world does not know of.

God has been very, very patient with me, and continues to be. Jesus looks at this Samaritan woman after what appears to be a whole lifetime of what the world might call sin, and still makes his offer.

God has been at work in everyone’s life, preparing them. It’s hard sometimes to see that, but Jesus frequently alludes to it. The hard work is in the harvesting. But this work is what Jesus is speaking of when he speaks of the food the world doesn’t know.

You’ll notice in our insert, we list the staff of our congregation. At the bottom of the list it reads, “Ministers: every member of the church.” We’re accustomed to thinking of ministry as a profession only a few people can enter into. But ministry is really the work of all the baptized people of God. It’s the work the Samaritan woman does when she goes around the town with the juiciest news of all: “He told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?”

And you’ll notice, she left behind her water jar. She didn’t need it anymore.

Amen.