Sermon Text - Feb. 27, 2008
"Characters We Meet Along the Way (to the Resurrection) - The Woman at the Well"
Rev. David Kratz
John 4:4-42
Come and see, that's what the woman said as she left her jar by the well and went to see the people of her town. Come and see a man who has told me everything I've ever done. He couldn’t be the messiah could he?
Come and see; that’s what I want to do for the next few minutes to linger over this story that is a long story and, as with a lot of long stories, we get impatient to get to the point. Come on, make the point. And there’s lots of good points here, lots of great one-liners. The one I particularly like is that one where Jesus tells the woman about eternal life, the gift that he gives is eternal life, and it will be like water that gushes up inside of you.
It’s an interesting image about eternal life. A lot of us think that eternal life happens after you die. He was a good guy, he’s going to be with Jesus forever. And God wanted her for all time we say. As if somehow God’s eternal life was somehow there than in here. We’ve heard of bubbling personalities, but this is life, a different kind of life that comes from the inside those places in our lives that we often don't look at that are dried up, or burned out or hollow at the core like that tree.
It is the very places that we don't want to look or feel like there's nothing there that God’s eternal life springs up. And we become alive from the inside out site. The other line that I like in there is the one about worship. You shall worship God in spirit and truth, isn't that a wonderful line, you could talk about that forever. That’s what worship is supposed to be about – we are people who want to worship God. This particular God we’ll worship in spirit and truth.
A little later almost at the end of John's Gospel, Jesus will have a conversation with a powerful male person, a Roman governor. He will say that his work has come to testify to the truth, and Pilot who is that male Roman governor, will ask a question that we often ask whether expectantly or cynically, what is the truth? Along the way Jesus says interestingly, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”
Another important line, or point of the story, is right toward the end where Jesus says to his disciples, “the field is ripe for harvesting.” It’s been an image that has been used in evangelism, a church reaching out to other people for generations maybe at least centuries, in fact. It is the image of reaping in the people that have been touched by Christ in their lives. It is kind of harvesting, bringing them home as it were.
Although it has different applications – one summer after I did my freshman year in college, I sold encyclopedias for a brief time. And our group leader was taking us out one day and we were driving around a suburban area, a middle class place, and he says, “look at it boys – a field ripe for harvesting!” Meaning we got blocks and blocks of suckers who are willing to pay $400 for a Collier’s Encyclopedia.
That is to say that one of the problems with getting to the point is that sometimes you sometimes miss the story. It would be like gold diggers, the Spaniards that came over to Latin America, and they knew exactly what they wanted from the New World, and they got all the gold that they could and sent it back home. Many of them went back home, leaving disease behind them. And what they missed, of course along the way, were the people that were there, the places and the beauty of it. But they got what they wanted and how often that is when we go to get the point of the Bible.
We often find the points that we want or we reject the ones we don't. We clip and save the ones we like, put it in our little memory bank, and then we discard the ones that don't quite fit our worldview. We have that idea of Jesus too, don't you think? Those of us who are progressive, we like to see Jesus as the one who is inclusive and reaches out all people. More conservative people think, Jesus is the supporter of family values – the one who is going to make things right – good, bad, separate the sheep and the goats.
So we clip and save our Jesus, the one that makes us feel most comfortable in our world. And sometimes we go back and look through the pages in the clippings of points that we've taken along the way and say, “that is an interesting point isn’t it?” But we don't live there really, we don't live in our memory books, we just go and visit when we need a little refresher.
This woman, who leaves her jar at the well, invites us not to just clip and save but to comment, listen. Because the thing that we fear most, of course, is that we will be changed like she was changed. She was changed in this story we could see it in often as this story is talked about as a conversion experience. Although it's not like a lot a conversion experience we think about – Billy Graham in all whole stadium full of 50,000 people singing “Just As I Am” as you walk down. Or maybe, more like my story where we went where youth for Christ rally and walked down the aisle after a story that scared the hell and into me. And I met with a guy and a sweaty little room – a stranger that called himself a counselor whose only purpose really was to get me to say yes. And then there was anything else, because his job was done and my life was going on.
This was a story, if we could come and linger with it for a while, is a story about a conversation that went on. One-to-one conversation between a man, a stranger, and a woman at the well and in the process of the conversation her life was changed so that she felt loved and accepted and known in a way that she had never been known before and she was willing to tell somebody about it.
Come, come and see a man who told me everything I've ever done. Sometimes the best kind of evangelism is the kind where we talk about our lives. What really happens to our lives, because we are changed, not because somebody demands it but because somebody loves us in it. It's a story of evangelism that has a wonderful invitation to it. Come and see a man who told me everything. He couldn’t be the Messiah, could he?
It’s not demanding, it's not threatening, it doesn’t say you’re gonna go to hell if you don't believe in Jesus as your Lord and Savior. It doesn't say Jesus will promise you everything you ever want in your life, if you just say yes. It says, “could be the Messiah, you can say yes, you can say no.” Some people maybe said, “oh no, I don’t think he is – well, maybe he might be.” It is an invitation that is not based on certainty or insecurity but on experience of wanting to tell a story to have a conversation about life and what matters to us. It is the kind of conversations that we run away from most the time. And yet it is a conversation that needs to happen. If all of the dry places in our lives are ever going to meet each other someplace, don’t you think?
It didn’t start that way of course, it started by a strange man coming to a well, at noon day and met a strange woman, who is also coming at midday, when all the other women in town came at the crack of dawn. Barbara Brown Taylor in her commentary on this paragraph says this is a three time loser. She was first of all a woman, who in those days really had nothing going for them, or very little. People didn't listen to what they said, never allowed them to testify at trials, they were in many ways invisible. This woman was also a Samaritan, and that in those days the Samaritans were like leftover cousins that you never invited to the family meal because they were kind of half-breeds. There was a long history of theological and practical things that kept them separate in which Jews just never did, as the story says, talk to Samaritans.
And then a third thing is Barbara Taylor think she was a fallen woman, that her story about having five husbands, and the one man she was living with now wasn't one of them. That she was a walking scandal and so that's why she came at noon time and everybody else came at the crack of dawn.
I’m not quite sure I agree with that. I think sometimes we make her a center so that she is the object of our evangelism rather than the first evangelist. We can disregard her because she was a sinner. Sometimes that's the way the good people like us are – we don't think that we have much really interesting about our lives, we’re not a recovering addict. But sometimes we like to think that those people need help and we on the other hand just live with our broken relationships and our mistakes that we don't want to tell anybody about, the way we for people that we loved.
Those kinds of things that make our lives so painful, and yet so true about us. In any case she was a person that was an outsider in her own town, let alone as a Samaritan and as a woman. And they talked there – that is an important thing it is the longest conversation that Jesus has with anybody. Longer than with any of his disciples, longer than with any of his family members. She is the person that he sees, and stays with and talks. It’s true a lot of their conversation hits and misses, they don't seem to be on the same page talking about the same kind of water, but he doesn't let her go and she on her part doesn't let him go without keeping the conversation going.
And then he asks her to go get her husband and she tells him that she doesn't have one. And he says to her of course, you've got five and this is not one of them. And you're going to go to hell and fry there forever because of it. No, he didn’t say that – what he said was you've spoken the truth. You’ve spoken the truth, as if true speaking was the most intimate language that we know. As if telling the truth brought us closer to one another than any other kind of intimacy.
Barbara Brown Taylor thinks it was such a powerful moment that she couldn't hold it. She could stay in the light, she wanted to talk theology. You’re a prophet, I got a question. She says in the end, I know the Messiah is coming. He says, I am he.
And there is in this moment in the noonday sun, these two people, this three-time loser and this Messiah, who comes to full disclosure Taylor says. As she tries to get out of the light he moves in. As she tries to deny who she is he discloses more of who he is and so in the end these two people crossed all of these racial and gender and cultural boundaries to find each other, together, looking at each other, naked in the sun as it were, in this moment of no knowing. And she says that's how it still is, when we are most honest Christ comes to fill our emptiness as we tried to run away, and Christ keeps the conversation as we go done.
If we continue to stay together, we will find ourselves with that eternal life bubbling up in the places we least expect it, because we were willing to stay there long enough to talk. Amen.