The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA
February 24, 2008
The 3^rd Sunday of Lent
Scripture Readings:

Hebrew Scriptures – Exodus 17: 1-7^1
1From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the LORD commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. ²The people quarreled with Moses, and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the LORD?” ³But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” ⁴So Moses cried out to the LORD, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” ⁵The LORD said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. ⁶I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. ⁷He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the LORD, saying, “Is the LORD among us or not?”

Gospel – John 4: 5-42²

⁵So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. ⁶Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.

⁷A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” ⁸(His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) ⁹The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) ¹⁰Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” ¹¹The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? ¹²Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” ¹³Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, ¹⁴but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” ¹⁵The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

¹⁶Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” ¹⁷The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; ¹⁸for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” ¹⁹The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. ²⁰Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” ²¹Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. ²²You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. ²³But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. ²⁴God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” ²⁵The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” ²⁶Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

²⁷Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” ²⁸Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, ²⁹“Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” ³⁰They left the city and were on their way to him.

³¹Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” ³²But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” ³³So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” ³⁴Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. ³⁵Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. ³⁶The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. ³⁷For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ ³⁸I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”

³⁹Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” ⁴⁰So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. ⁴¹And many more believed because of his word. ⁴²They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”

“Is the Lord among Us or Not?”³

It’s not by accident that scripture has so much to say about water. Deprived of moisture, plants shrivel, wither and die; the earth strangles, returns to dust and is carried away by the wind. Human beings become like fish out of water: our throats parch, our breathing rasps, we quickly waste away and die. But our greatest thirst is not for water. We thirst for wisdom, understanding, love – the chance to love others and to be loved by them. The story of Jesus is a story of someone who was able to quench all of these thirsts, and Lent is an invitation to us to savor a delicious draught of his gift of living water that will last us a lifetime.

“Living water” in the Ancient Near East was actually a phrase used for water that flowed, clearly and cleanly, and so was drinkable – as opposed to water that became trapped, confined, could not flow, and so became polluted. Potable water, we know, is absolutely essential to life. Our bodies can last for days without food, but not without water. Every day we see people carrying bottles of water with them to their places of work and recreation. Whenever national security is tightened, because of a possible terrorist attack, our water supplies are guarded as surely as are the airports and government facilities. The reason for all of this is evident: our bodies consist largely of water, and dehydration is a terrifying threat to our existence.

So it’s no accident that the authors of the Bible should use water as a metaphor for the life-giving aspects of God. Jesus and the woman at the well begin their conversation by talking about physical water, but soon after that Jesus changes the dialogue’s direction and refers to the kind of sustenance that leads to eternal life. Whoever drinks from the water of the Samaritan well will become thirsty again, he says, but those who take in the kind of “living water” that he’s come to give will never again be thirsty.

What is it in our own life that’s like the water of this well – water that will only satisfy us for a time – and how will we know the difference, when we taste it, of the “living water” that will never fail? You tell me, but the kinds of deep yearnings that have brought you all to this place this morning, will tell you where you are being led to drink.

“Why do you find fault with me? Why do you test the Lord?”⁴ With these questions, uttered by a distraught Moses to the ragtag band of former slaves who are supposed to begin the new nation of Israel, the greatest of lawgivers points his finger squarely at each of us, too, putting that same gesture as a very basic question: Why is it always somebody else’s problem? Why is it so hard for us to take final responsibility for our own actions?

It was understandable that the Egyptian slaves would complain that they were forced to make bricks without its most important ingredients. Who could blame them? And it was understandable that they would grow restless when they realized that this particular desert was empty of a very important commodity – water. But when they ask their leader for a drink, he accuses them of blaming him for the lack of water. It’s hardly his fault that the water isn’t available – still, he did bring them out into this blasted wasteland and promise them a great future. It seems as if you’ve got to blame somebody.

“Is the Lord among us or not?”⁵

When this Samaritan woman met a young Jewish rabbi at the well, she hardly imagined that her life was about to change so dramatically. She only saw another man, and a Jew, who was so stupid that he’d forgotten to bring anything to the well with which to draw water. Just like a man, she must’ve thought at first. But it turned out that he wasn’t the thirsty one. She needed a drink in the worst way, but the kind of water that she needed didn’t come from a well. She begins the conversation with Jesus by accusing him of being ill prepared to meet even the most common need, but she ended it wondering whether or not she’s just had an encounter with the long-expected messiah of Israel and Samaria.

When his disciples returned to find their beloved leader in intimate conversation with a ritually unclean, always to be shunned, intrinsically disordered Samaritan woman, you can only imagine how shocked they really were! They must’ve grumbled to themselves much like their ancestors did before Moses: “We can’t leave him alone for a minute! The next thing you know, he’ll want us to share a table with this…this woman and that rabble that she claims as her people. We were better off in our own villages where we were safe from this kind of thing! What kind of rabbi is he?”

Human nature is very peculiar. We don’t like to change. It makes us uncomfortable. We’re grownups, after all; we know how things are supposed to be! Familiar pain is often seen as preferable to change of any kind.

Change means uncertainty, and we don’t like to be put in situations in which we don’t know how to react. Like the disciples, we’ve been well taught; we know what feels right, what’s familiar and comfortable, and we want it to stay that way!

Change is also risky. Moses followed an unknown God into a trackless desert because he trusted in a vision that would carry Israel into a new way of life. He knew the risks but he did it anyway. We might be willing to risk a buck on the state lottery, but we don’t want to risk anything involving God – at least not the God we find revealed in Jesus.

This is why Jesus had better luck with outcasts and Samaritans, with lepers and gentiles, children and slaves. The religiously orthodox had a hard time hearing what he had to say. They were much more concerned about what they might lose. The Samaritan woman had nothing to lose. When the enormity of what had been revealed to her washed over her, she ran all over town, telling everyone she met about Jesus. She was in so much of a hurry she even left her jar behind – and those were expensive! Because of her other Samaritans came to trust in the message of this rabbi from Nazareth named Jesus.

Twenty-some-odd centuries after Jesus we’re still a quarreling and thirsty people complaining about the state of the world, the state of our nation, our county, our community, our neighborhood, our church. We’re still looking for the easy way out, for a guarantee that we’ll be the ones who get into heaven if we just say the prescribed prayers, follow the rules, and do what we’re told. We’re still separating ourselves from “those others” – the un-churched, the overly-churched, people who speak a foreign language, people without a good education, people with more money than we have, people with less money than we have.

It’s ironic but that’s how the Spirit of God works. We keep being showered with blessings even as we complain! We keep being sent prophets calling us to live in peace, to clean up our environment, to care for the poor and oppressed, to do justice, love mercy, walk humbly…and, yes, from time to time we’re even blessed by those who will risk death so that we might have life. We keep being dragged off into wildernesses, led to wells filled with living water, and yet still we ask, “Is the Lord among us or not?”

In her book This Is My Body, Marjory Bankston retells the story of the Samaritan woman at the well, but from the point of view of the woman. She recalls that the “five husbands” Jesus mentions were actually her husband’s brothers who, according to the Levirate marriage laws customary at that time, passed her from one to the next, trying to fulfill their duty to raise up an heir for the eldest, who had died soon after their marriage. Ill-treated, still childless and so ashamed, the woman now lives at the margins of the village society with a man to whom she is not married – but at least he’s kind to her. She goes to the well in the noonday heat instead of during the cool of the early morning to avoid the gossip, taunting and stares of the other women of the village. At the well she meets Jesus, who asks for a drink. In poetic prose Bankston writes about the encounter this way:

So I gave him my ladle.

He simply ignored the rules

and drank naturally from the bucket

as though he were in his own home!

He gave thanks for the water and for me.

I was stunned for a moment.

….

[He] let me know that I touched him deeply

with my honesty and my questions…

I was only doing what seemed natural:

sharing the living water that I found inside.⁶

The woman’s life, though, is changed forever. In the simplicity and naturalness of her gesture of hospitality, she meets Jesus in their common humanity.

Those of us who are into the middle of our Lenten study book, Re-Imagine the World: An Introduction to the Parables of Jesus, may have been reading the account of another Samaritan in the story that Jesus told in response to the question “Who is my neighbor?” As the author points out in response to that question, Jesus always seems to be directing us toward the point of view of the one who is in need of help, that if we really can come to “re-imagine” a new world, it will be…

…a new world in which the wall between us and them no longer exists and even more that one of them can come to the aid of us.⁷

What’s more,

Not just individuals have to cross the line, but communities have to cross the line. Yet the crossing of that line always begins with the first Samaritan whose heart is moved by a Jew. Such people are initiating a new world for all of us.⁸

It’s a good time, then, for us all to reflect on this well in Samaria – in that area of the world still torn apart by fratricidal conflicts. The fighting in Lebanon, Syria and Israel – let alone in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East – today is symbolic of a well that has gone dry, of the law written on stone but not yet in human hearts. Our lives demand a new living water, a new flooding of love through the power of the Holy Spirit. It’s fitting then, during a season when we may be most reminded of our sin, that we need to crack open the rocks of nationalism, sectarianism, racism and homophobia to release the torrent of creativity that lies buried underneath our deepest prejudices. Here, midway through Lent, we’re offered a lesson as ancient as the well itself, and that is this: there will be no putting on of the new without laying aside the old; there will be no rising without a dying.

* * *