I am certain my sermon this week was based a bit upon things happening in the wider world. In our communion, there was a great deal of discussion about how Anglicans relate to God as the Gafcon folks became GAC. Some of their criticisms about TEC were fair, as Presiding Bishop Michael shared during his visit to Tennessee during the end of his tenure. Other parts, though, embraced Reformed theology far more than our spiritual ancestors thought wise.
In the wider Church, there has been great discussion about the effort of some in the war with Iran to cause Jesus to return, as if human beings can force God to do anything. And then there’s the whole discussion about whose “Christian” theocracy should determine the Christian principles that should guide our government’s dealing with economic, social, and other aspects of life.
And I had to laugh a bit at God as I was getting ready on this, my least favorite day of the year when we give up an hour of sleep to “spring forward.” There is a local evangelical pastor who does a bunch of 30 second spots. This morning, he ran one that, if I heard it correctly, asserted that if we evangelize in the wrong way, we are condemned to hell just like the non-believers. I chuckled because I knew the pericope we were reading from John’s Gospel today and how Jesus’ method would have apparently earned Him condemnation in the mind of this pastor.
One last note of encouragement, ladies, if you are engaged in conversations with those who do not know what to do with your role in our church, this is another one of those arrows in your quivers. The story takes place after Nicodemus’ nighttime visit with Jesus. When Nicodemus leaves, we are not sure where he stands in his relationship with Jesus. By the end of John’s Gospel, we know Nicodemus argues that the Sanhedrin should not violate its own laws to put Jesus to death and that he provides the spices for the women to prepare Jesus’ Body for the tomb. Contrast the end of Nicodemus’ visit with the Samaritan woman, though, and ladies should be encouraged how Jesus invites women as well as men to the work of God.
John’s story picks up as Jesus and the Apostles and disciples are traveling through Samaria. Whenever I bring up the animosity between the Jews and Samaritans, people always ask for more information, so I will try to anticipate many of the questions today. Samaritans were despised by those from the Southern Kingdom because they ignored the clear instructions of God. Remember way back when there was a Northern Kingdom and Southern Kingdom? Good. I see lots of nods. One of the efforts of the Northern Kings was to diminish the role of the Temple in Jerusalem. It is hard to get your citizens to believe that you are ruling in accordance with God’s will when your citizens have to travel to the capital city of the Southern Kingdom to worship God properly. Sounds like modern politics, huh?
The Northern kings did a couple things to make sure their people did not think the Northern kingdom was dependent on the Southern kingdom. The big move was the building of alternative worship sites in Bethel and Dan. Right below that, though, was the removal of the history books, the prophetic books, the wisdom books, and everything else in what we call the OT except for the Pentateuch, the five books written by Moses. Again, it was a kind of propaganda. If your people do not know what the prophets are saying about Jerusalem, they will not know its import to God.
Of course, kings may plot and plan, but so do High Priests. If you know the history of the two kingdoms, you also know that the High Priest in Jerusalem brought an army and burned those alternative worship sites in the Northern Kingdom. We live in the South 150 years after our own burning, so we can all easily imagine how the Samaritans felt about that.
To complicate matters and relations, Assyria rolled through the area and conquered the Northern Kingdom. Most of the citizens were carried off to distant lands of the empire. We modern people like to think ancient peoples were stupid, or rather we are much smarter, but governments were pretty shrewd. Whenever a nation was conquered, most were carried off and placed in other conquered nations as a distinct minority and other conquered peoples were imported to and settled in the newly conquered area. The idea behind all this was to keep the possibilities of riots and revolts low. If everyone in a city or town spoke a different language, it would be hard for them to organize and plot together. Add an oppressive law enforcement and a few soldiers, and one had the recipe for oppressive peace.
Even as Assyria carried most of the residents in the Northern Kingdom off, it imported others to the Northern Kingdom. 2 Kings tells us that the five nations imported into the Northern Kingdom by Assyria brought with them five gods, though sharp readers will recognize they brought the worship of seven gods with them. More on that in a couple minutes. The residents of the Northern Kingdom eventually began to marry the sons and daughters of those who had been imported into the territory. We all know that Israel was forbidden to marry outside the tribes, so the residents of the Southern Kingdom used this as yet another reason to look down on their brothers and sisters who remained in the North. That’s the quick background for today’s Gospel lesson.
Jesus and His disciples are heading north. Usually, good Jews would avoid Samaria and travel around it, but Jesus led His disciples through it. When He gets to the well, He needs a rest. Were we reading this during the season of the Incarnation, I might speak of His humanity more in this passage. John tries to remind us that Jesus is fully human and fully divine. He can do great works of power, but He also gets tired and rests, just like us.
Jesus remains at the well while the disciples go looking for food. That was a bigger challenge than we might expect because they will be as uncomfortable eating food prepared by Samaritans as Samaritans will be to sell Jews food they have made, unless it is not fit for them to eat. A woman approaches in the noonday sun to draw water. Much hay is made about this. She should have been doing it at dawn and at sunset like any good Mediterranean woman, but here she is, fetching water in the heat of the day. That fact has provoked a number of teachings and assumptions that simply are not in the text.
Jesus asks her to give Him some water. She is shocked that He speaks to her and voices her incredulity. Jesus responds that had she known who He is, she would have asked for living water, and He would have given it to her.
I do not know that I intentionally remind us of the value of living water enough to have impressed upon you Jesus’ offer here. Living water, water that comes from bubbling springs and rivers and streams, was needed for purification. Water was valuable in an arid region like Ancient Israel, but living water was altogether far more valuable. The Samaritan woman at this point has no idea who Jesus is. But He is offering her something no self-respecting Jew would ever offer to a Samaritan woman. So she reminds this Jewish man that Jacob, himself, dug this well and left it for his family and flocks. It is a not-so-subtle way for her to claim the same ancestry as this man sitting on the well and speaking to her.
Undeterred, Jesus points out that whoever drinks from the well will be thirsty again, but that whoever drinks from His living water will never thirst again. The woman, whose job it is to get water every day, is focused on the practical rather than the symbolic or spiritual. She asks Him for that living water so that she will never be thirsty nor need to come to the well to draw water.
Rather than explain Himself to her at this point, Jesus shifts gears in a way that would drive the pastor from the commercial this morning nuts. Jesus tells her to go get her husband. The woman responds that she has no husband. Jesus acknowledges the truth of her statement and what she omitted, that she has had five husbands and the man she is with is not her husband. Again, much hay is made over this woman and her five husbands. We do not know why the woman has had five husbands. Is she widowed? Is she divorced? If the latter, we do not know why she was divorced. In the pericope, she clearly knows a good deal about the Samaritan and Jewish history. One of her underlying claims is a practical one. We are no different than You. We come from Jacob. More importantly, she recognizes that Jesus is a prophet. There is no way an ordinary Jewish male would have come to know this about her–an ordinary Jewish male would have had zero interest!
This is a word from Brian and not necessarily God. But I wonder, given the symbolism in this encounter, that her five husbands are symbolic. Those who know the history of Samaria well will know that the nations settled there by Assyria brought with them five gods. As we will see, Jesus will patiently explain to her that she has limited knowledge. She worships what she does not know, but the Jews worship what they know! Their confusion is not only caused by the fact that they accept only the Pentateuch but that they have been introduced overtly and subtly to idolatry by the intermarrying.
Now she gets to the practical heart of the division between the two nations. They both worship the same God, the God of Jacob, but the Jews insist that proper worship has to happen in the Temple. Jesus instructs her and us that the time is coming soon when the Temple and High Places will not matter. Sometimes, we like to think of this as yet another prophetic utterance regarding the destruction of the Temple in AD70. I suppose it could be, but I think it misses the real point of what Jesus is instructing. Thanks to His upcoming Cross and Resurrection and Ascension, this is John after all, we rightly worship God wherever we are! We pray that we do not proclaim Him only with our words but in our lives! And we remind ourselves again and again that He has sent the Holy Spirit, the Living Water of this conversation, to us, that we might glorify Him in our lives.
The woman acknowledges her need of Messiah to explain all things. And in one of those great self-identifications of Jesus, He tells her He is the Messiah. I know y’all get tired of me trying to convey the meaning of the Greek, but there are some newer to us who have not heard it. The Greek ego eimi, I am, is the name used in the Greek OT, known as the Septuagint, as the Name given by God to Moses from the burning bush. Whenever Jesus uses the ego eimi, it has the full force of that cultural understanding and significance behind it. The Greek speaking Jews hear is as the voice from the Burning Bush. For this Samaritan woman, whose culture only accepts the five books of Moses, the significance is unmistakable. Jesus tells her the one speaking to her is Messiah and God!
Yes, there is lots more to the pericope, and we will talk about it again in just three years. The disciples return and are shocked at Jesus’ willingness to talk to the woman. For her part, as the disciples get an agrarian image to describe evangelism, she returns to the village and invites everyone to come and meet Jesus. The end result is that these two cultures, usually like Ancient Hatfields and McCoys from my world, intermingle for two more days. The disciples share what they have seen and heard. Jesus Himself instructs the Samaritans. And, because of Jesus’ instruction, the Samaritans confess to the woman that they believe He is truly the Savior of the world.
I felt called to focus on the Living Water and the right worship today, as I mentioned earlier. We Christians love to fight about right worship with each other. We are Episcopalians and Anglicans, and so we think liturgical worship is inherently better than the smoke machine and laser light shows of some evangelical worship. I could joke and state that our worship clearly is, but would those watching online or maybe visiting understand it a joke. Truth be told, in some contexts, it is far more serious. Some Christians like the liturgy in a language they do not understand; others think worship is simply gathering and praying. I could go on and on and leave us all wonder who is right. The word for worship is used eleven times in the Gospel of John. Nine of those uses are in this pericope we read today. As a Lenten practice, maybe go back and read the story from today and pay attention to those nine uses. What is God instructing us about right worship today?
First and foremost, right worship needs the Holy Spirit. As I mentioned above, living water was Jesus’ symbolic description of the Holy Spirit. John makes sure that we understand that the Ascension of Jesus is as important as His Death and His Resurrection. Jesus’ Ascension makes it possible for us to receive the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit makes it possible for us to worship God correctly and to understand when we are worshipping incorrectly the need to repent and try again.
The challenge comes when we try to figure out right worship. Jesus uses the image of water, in part I think, to describe the amorphous nature of water. If water is poured into a waterskin, it takes the shape of that skin. If it is poured into a clay vessel, it takes the shape of that vessel. If it is poured into a bath or fountain, it takes that shape. So it it is when the Holy Spirit is poured into us. We pray often about God dwelling in us and us in Him, but do we really pay attention to what we are saying? We are all made in His image. And when His Spirit is animating us, we are representing Him well in the world around us. What does that look like?
For us Episcopalians, it looks in part like a Rite 1 or Rite 2 liturgy. It can be spoken or sung; it can have music and a choir. But that is only part of our worship. We remind ourselves again and again, but especially during Lent, that we give up ourselves to His service. We ask Him again and again to equip us and remain with us as He sends us out into that parched world to do the work He has given us to do. We remind ourselves again and again that He gives the meaning to our work. Those who served at Room in the Inn last night know they likely are not going to end homelessness in Middle Tennessee, right? I know, most went home to sleep instead of worshipping with us this morning. Trust me, they know. Yet, month after month they show up. They make beds, cook meals, collect socks and underwear and other clothing, they clean up, and they engage those men in conversation. The point of their work is to give the men they serve a break from the cold in the world, to give them an opportunity for connection, and to remind them they are loved by God. Of course, with God at work in this, other blessings happen. Sometimes our volunteers are inspired by the faith of those whom they serve. They come away amazed and exhorted to do the work God has given them to do that much more. The same happens with Body & Soul, with those whom we serve through Insight, those whom we serve with Discretionary funds, with most of what we do to the glory of God! The ministries are different. Often the people serving in the ministries are different. And yet, God is often glorified in our work.
In addition to the corporate ministries, though, many of us have individual calls. We have tutors among us, we have individuals who gather groups to deal with a particular concern or addiction or injury, we have individuals who serve as shoulders to cry on, or as welcomers to all kinds of situations, we have individuals called to a robust prayer life and others who are able to fund the work knowing they are important to that particular work. We have spiritual matriarchs and patriarchs, women and men whom we recognize as particularly attuned to God, from whom we can seek Godly advice for our particular challenges, fears, or difficulties. The Living Water, the Holy Spirit, looks and sounds and feels like us and all our differences because we were all created in His image and redeemed by His work on the Cross making all that possible. The locus of worship is where we are, where our lives are proclaiming what we say with our lips!
Of course, the best news about all of this is that we who have drunk from the Living Water that Christ has provided us are called to be springs of living water ourselves. We are called to be those in whom the Living Water wells up for those around us who thirst! We are not called to be isolated ponds or wadis or something mundane. We are called to be those vessels through whom God reaches others. Make no mistake, only Jesus redeems them; only Jesus makes it possible for that Living Water to well up in us. But we are invited into that relationship with Him that He might use us for His glory. Unlike the Samaritan woman in the story, we know who it is that offers the drink. We know His desire and willingness to work through us. And, since we are in John this morning, we know that because He has ascended to the Father He can provide us with the Holy Spirit, both as a reminder to us of His enthronement and as an enabler of accomplishing the Will of God in our lives! And so we do the work He calls us to do, trusting He will use us to His glory and redeem our failures.
My friends, this Living Water that gushes up in us thanks to Jesus’ work on the Cross and in our lives, is exhilarating and terrifying. We get to be the people who introduce others to the Savior of the world. We may not think of ourselves as good ambassadors, nor even good brothers and sisters, but that Living Water gushing up in us transforms us into the witnesses we need to be. And reminded of His purposes, His Will, and His desire to fill us with Living Water, we are sent back out into that parched wilderness to invite others into the Life for which He created them!
In His Name and His Peace,
Brian+
