March 15, 2020

 March 15, 2020                  Exodus 17:1-7                    Romans 5:1-11                  John 4:5-42

                As the Israelites wander in the wilderness, they get thirsty.  Then they get grumpy.  Then they get angry.  Then they start yelling at Moses for trying to kill them in the wilderness.  Poor Moses.  He tried to say this was all a bad idea.  He’s wondering how he got in this situation in the first place.  He goes to God and asks, “What gives?”  Then he blames God for trying to get him killed—the people are about to stone him.

                God takes their stone idea and puts a twist on it.  God suggests going to a large stone and striking it with the amazing staff that parted the red sea, and some water will come out of the stone that the people can drink.  Moses should bring some elders with him.  Every time Moses complains to God, he’s feeling alone and overwhelmed by the needs of the people.  God instructs him to get some helpers.  This happens other times in the Exodus story, too.  When you’re overwhelmed, get some helpers.

                Our hearts, too, can be like stones.  Another way of saying “afraid” is “petrified,” made into stone.  When we get angry or afraid, we freeze, we get hardened, we get petrified, and our hearts close off.  It’s a protective measure.  We’re putting up the barricades so we don’t get hurt.  But God is trying to give us gifts that we can’t receive if our hearts are closed off or stony.  God was trying to give the Israelites a new identity as a free people, a new trust in God, a new place to call home and live in abundance in blessing.  Imagine God’s hurt and surprise when they don’t appreciate this gift, but complain about short-term little things like water!

                In the Romans reading, we are reminded we are ungodly, unrighteous, and weak.  Our hearts are stony.  God has been trying to give us love and we just complained.  So God took a staff and gave our hard hearts a smack that broke our hearts open.  That smack is the suffering that we endure.  If we never suffered we’d be unbearable.  Because we have suffered, we have to get a thick skin and bear people who try to get our goat.  Because we have suffered, we have compassion on other people who suffer.  Because we have suffered we look at the big picture and where we’re headed, rather than the everyday injuries and discomforts we face.  And our suffering links us to Jesus, who suffered as much as any human ever did, not only physical injuries, but mocking and rejection even from his own, so called, friends.  Even contemplating Jesus’ suffering is a smack on our hard hearts when we realized that he died for us, even as we were causing his suffering, even when we were his enemies.  Suffering cracks open our hearts and reveals the mushy middle, the love, the compassion, the hope. 

                  So now we come to this Samaritan person, a relative of the Judeans, a cousin, related, but a little off track.  She’s a woman, so it’s her job to draw water.  It was about noon.  It’s the wrong time to draw water.  It’s hot out.  The sun is high in the sky.  This woman comes at noon for a reason, and probably the reason is that she is avoiding the other women who also come for water.  Why?  They may well have shunned her.  This woman is already cracked open.  She already has a broken heart.

                Jesus finds himself in need, incomplete, vulnerable, broken.  He’s thirsty in the wilderness.  He doesn’t have a bucket.  He didn’t bring his reusable Starbucks mug.  Jesus is lacking in something he needs.  And he doesn’t look down on this woman or treat her like she’s broken.  Jesus treats this woman like a whole person—she’s a woman, she’s a Samaritan, she’s at the well at the wrong time, yet she has more than he has, access to water.  So he goes outside of all conventions and speaks to her.  He asks her for a drink of water.  Does it remind you of Jesus on the cross when he says, “I thirst.”

                The woman is surprised.  She’s surprised a man is talking to a woman.  She’s surprised a Judean is talking to a Samaritan.  She just says it plainly, “How is that you ask me to give you a drink?”  Jesus implies that he has something to give her if she only knew to ask.  Is it meant as a trade?  Is it meant to acknowledge that she has a broken heart, that she has suffered, that she also is in need, as we all are, but rarely acknowledge it? 

                The woman is curious.  The greatest person she knows of is Jacob who provided this well.  It gives water to everyone who has a bucket, Judean or Samaritan, men and women, people with hard hearts and broken hearts.  It’s a pretty nice gift and over thousands of years this well has provided for all who are thirsty, it has met the needs of the great people in history, to this current day of Jesus.  This woman wants to know if Jesus thinks he is greater than Jacob. 

                Jesus doesn’t need to compare himself to anyone else.  He speaks of meeting a need within people, not just for the short-term, but for always.  I love the way is phrased in Greek, “The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water leaping up to eternal life.”  Leaping is a much better word than gushing.

The woman of course would like to have some of this water, but she’s still thinking it would meet her need only for water.  There are other needs in her life, such as social connection and affection from others in her community that are unmet.  She’d like this water so that she could continue to avoid these people that have caused her so much pain.  But Jesus gets to this pain when he asks about her primary social connection, her husband.  She doesn’t try to hide anything.  She’s at the well at noon.  There is full sun on her life.  It’s very different from Nicodemus.  She admits she is lacking in this primary relationship and her love life hasn’t exactly been smooth.  We don’t know if she was divorced or widowed or exactly what went wrong, but we can know from the times that certainly most of it, if not all of it, was out of her hands.  She had no say about who she married when and that she’s with a man she’s not married to is also out of her control.  To survive, a woman needed a male relative to take care of her.  She had very few ways of surviving on her own.

Instead of being ashamed that Jesus knows everything, she’s pleased.  She has found a prophet, and not only that, a prophet who, knowing everything about her, still asked her for a drink of water and had a conversation with her like equals.  They are two people with broken hearts, in need, talking to each other in broad daylight, unashamed and even joyful. 

Since she’s finally met a prophet, she has her questions ready, “End this debate between Judeans and Samaritans, where is the right place to worship?”  Jesus says it isn’t about where one worships, which is going to keep certain people out, put up barriers, put up stones between people and God.  Instead, it is about worshipping in spirit and truth.  This is accessible to anyone, as long as that person has an open heart and not one of stone. 

The woman makes a faith statement.  Even in all her pain, maybe even because of her pain, she has endured, through 4 or 5 marriages.  Her suffering has produced character in her—here she is face to face with Jesus, unafraid to ask her questions.  Her character has given her hope.  She’s stood up despite her shame and found a reason to hope.  She knows, she has faith that the Messiah is coming.  She has faith that the world will be made right.  She has hope that she will be swept up in his reign of justice and love.  She has hope that all things will be proclaimed, even to Samaritan cast-offs.  And as she says it, her hope is welling up, it is leaping, and he answers, “You have seen what no one else could see.  I am he, the Messiah, speaking to you, right now.” 

She’s standing there stunned when the disciples return.  She leaves her water jar there.  She doesn’t need it.  She has the living water.  She is walking back to town, and all these thoughts and feelings are overwhelming her.  She’s walking, then running.  Then she’s proclaiming and testifying.  Her broken heart opened her to being able to see Jesus.  Now she’s filled with the Holy Spirit and can’t stop telling the good news to her neighbors.  Her relationships are mended with her neighbors.  The Samaritans’ relationships are mended with God.  They recognize this good news is for them.  They have their own broken hearts, and find themselves filled by this message of relationship and abundant grace and hope.

We come to Jesus with our broken hearts.  We are thirsty.  We are in need.  We can’t do everything for ourselves.  We are weak and sinful and ungodly and that’s why we need Christ.  We name at confession the things we’ve done to hurt others and hurt Jesus.  We name our need and our longing to be close to Jesus.  We come with our bad habits, our anger, our indifference, our greed, our fear.  It feels so good to be honest.  We don’t have to feel ashamed.  Jesus already knows, and even when we were sinners, died for us, so we wouldn’t have to carry that burden.  He gave us living water, leaping up to eternal life, in baptism, and every darned time we wash our hands these days.  We see him for who he is, our Messiah, and its stunning.  It’s overwhelming.  We can’t keep it to ourselves.  We encounter other people with broken hearts, and we treat them the same compassionate, respectful way Jesus treats us.  We let that living water flow through us so they can see that there is enough to meet all our needs, and we invite him to stay a few days and tell us himself of God’s love for people with broken hearts.

                The Samaritan woman meets Jesus at the well.  She’s come there at noon—not the usual time to draw water.  Drawing water was done in the cool of the morning.  It was a social event for the women.  This woman is on her own.  She doesn’t have any friends.  She’s avoiding the others.  It’s probably complicated but part of the explanation may very well be that she’s had so many husbands, that she’s had so many rocky relationships.  Others have been practicing social distancing so they don’t “catch” this woman’s bad luck or poor relationship skills.  She’s considered unclean, contagious.

                The Israelite people had kept themselves safe and thriving for thousands of years at least partly because of their cleanliness laws, and the Samaritans, their cousins, kept many of those laws.  There are certain things you can eat and others you can’t or you will be unclean and you might be contagious.  If you bleed, you have to be quarantined.  If you have a little psoriasis, you have to be quarantined, because it might be leprosy.  Even cloth and wood could be diagnosed with leprosy, potentially infectious and there were all sorts of rules for how and when to dispose of it—by burning, and for quarantining people until they could be tested by the priest and certified free of the disease.  When you have a vulnerable people, living in tribes close to one another, traveling through strange lands with all kinds of diseases and other ways of living life, these laws were protections for most of the people.  Even Jews and Samaritans practiced social distancing so they wouldn’t “catch” each other’s contagious religious and cultural differences.

                We are living in a time of pandemic.  Our schools are closed.  People are afraid of catching a potentially deadly disease or passing it on to someone vulnerable.  Restrictions are in place to protect vulnerable people and to keep from overwhelming our healthcare system. 

                There are casualties and costs of social distancing, and this Samaritan woman is one of them.  She is alone.  She doesn’t have anyone to talk to.  She is without a friend. 

                Jesus upset everyone, because he didn’t look at other people as sources of contagion.  He touched dead people.  He talked to women alone at the well at noon.  He invited tax collectors to be his disciples.  He touched people who were blind and lame and leprous and offered them healing.  That freaked people out. 

                I’m not saying that we should ignore social distancing suggestions.  Wash your hands.  Don’t touch your eyes, nose, and mouth.  Don’t shake hands with others for a while.  Protect yourself and your family.  But rather than seeing other people as a potential threat or source of contagion, let us see them as God’s precious children.  Let’s take care of our neighbors.  Give a call to someone you haven’t talked to in a while.  We’re going to start writing letters at my house and sealing them with water.  Apparently the virus can’t live on paper for more than 24 hours.  Take a look at any supplies you’ve stockpiled and consider bringing some of that food or toilet paper to the FoodBank.  Check on your neighbors.  Go for a walk—take care of yourself, get your exercise, enjoy this beautiful world God made.  Read a book and get informed about a subject you’ve always been curious about.  Offer prayers for people in every country.  It is inspiring to think of all the people praying in the world at this time.  We all have something to learn from this time—new healthy habits to form, new bonds in relationship, new priorities.  This is not time for panic—it is an opportunity to put our trust in God and the science God gave us to understand and be rational.  It is an opportunity to die to what was not serving us well.  It is an opportunity for new life.  And God is with all of us, the living waters leaping up to eternal life, the life of God’s son poured out for us and inspiring us to pour out our lives for one another.