The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA
March 7, 2010
3^rd Sunday in Lent

Scripture Readings:

Hebrew Scriptures – Isaiah 55: 1-9¹

¹Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. ²Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. ³Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David. ⁴See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. ⁵See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you.

⁶Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; ⁷let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. ⁸For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. ⁹For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Gospel Lesson – John 4: 5-29²

⁵So [Jesus] 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?”

“Drink Your Heart’s Desire!”

While it may seem like we’ve received more than our share of it over the past several weeks, water is everything. Water is life. As we’ve just learned, those who were trapped in the rubble of recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile could survive without food for an unbelievably long time; but deprived of water – even without serious life-threatening injuries – many died within days. Travelers, from the earliest explorers through to present day back-country trekkers,³ have perished for lack of water. Without water there is no life.
Today’s account of a Samaritan woman whom Jesus met at a well, belongs in this age-old understanding of just that kind of life-giving connection. In his version of the story, John has Jesus asking the woman for a drink of water. Oddly enough, the conversation between these two is the longest that Jesus is supposed to have had with anybody! Now, much has been made of the “progressive” Jesus talking to an immoral outsider – not only is she a Samaritan, she is a woman and out in the public alone. Preachers for years have interpreted this story by assuming that Jesus is issuing an evangelical call to her that goes something like, “Clean up your act, girl, get right with God, and join me in preaching God's word of forgiveness, repentance and love to your neighbors.” But as many biblical scholars have pointed out, this and similar interpretations just may be a misreading of a very important parable.

Let’s just stay with the story for a moment, and with the help of Amy-Jill Levine (a Jewish New Testament scholar) we’re reminded that the woman is not an outsider; the Jewish Jesus is. She’s a Samaritan and they’re on her home turf here. What’s more the woman’s visit to the well in the middle of the day may just be John, the storyteller’s, device about “coming out into the light of day” – and not anything at all about this woman being ostracized by the people of the town. There is absolutely nothing that indicates she’s particularly “sinful” or sexually promiscuous – as some preachers have made her out to be. As Levine says, “The… woman (might be) unfortunate, but she is not sinful…  The only ones who condemn her are…biblical scholars.”⁴ All that we can assume is that she comes to this well for the same thing that everybody else does: water.

Who knows where this water really comes from.  All that the people of the Ancient Near East knew is that if you dig deeply enough you’ll find it. And in an arid land like the Middle East, there’s not much more of a threat to life than to come upon a dry well. You and I may not have the same appreciation for water as those people did. We just drink it, cook with it, wash with it, irrigate with it… and all too often waste it, and then go on living out our lives. But think about it: water is exactly how the creative, transforming power of God comes into our lives. Who knows where it comes from, but it does sustain us, and we go about our days without ever giving it another thought.  Well, today we’re being invited to give it a second thought. We’re being asked to trust this “living water” with our very lives.

As I’ve mentioned here before, “living water” in the Ancient Near East was first just a phrase used for water that flowed, clearly and cleanly, and so was drinkable – as opposed to water that became trapped, confined, couldn’t flow, and so became polluted. Apply those two images to your own life.

Potable water, we know, is absolutely essential to life. Again, 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. And whenever national security is threatened, because of a possible terrorist attack, our water supplies are guarded as surely as are the airports, centers of commerce and government facilities. The reason for all of this is evident: 60% of every adult human being is, for the most part, just water;⁵ dehydration, then, is a threat to our very 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 their shared need for 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.

Whether you or I acknowledge it or not, we are in the presence of the creating, transforming power of God every single moment of every single day, that quietly moves in and through our lives. I think this is exactly what the storyteller whom we call John had in mind when he told us this parable of Jesus asking a woman at a well for a drink.

When this Samaritan woman did meet a young Jewish rabbi at her well, she never imagined that her life was about to change so dramatically. She only saw another man (and a Jew at that) 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 this or any other well at all. Curiously enough, she begins her conversation with Jesus by accusing him of being ill prepared to meet even the most basic human need, but she ends up wondering whether or not she’s just had an encounter with the long-expected messiah of Israel and Samaria.

Here, deep in the season of Lent, it’s a good time for us all to reflect on this well in Samaria – an area of the world that, today, is still torn apart by tribal and fratricidal conflicts. The fighting in Lebanon and Israel today (let alone in Iraq, Afghanistan and the rest of the Middle East) is symbolic of a communal well that has gone dry – of the law written on stone, but not yet in human hearts. Our lives demand a new kind of water: living water – a new flooding of compassion and love that only comes to us through the power of the Holy Spirit.

It’s fitting then, that during a season when we’re traditionally most reminded of our sin, we are confronted by our collective need to crack open the rocks of our nationalism, sectarianism, racism and homophobia, to release the torrent of compassion and creativity that lies buried underneath our deepest prejudices. Here, midway through Lent, and yet with our gaze set toward the rising sun of Easter, we’re offered a lesson as ancient as this well itself, and it’s this: there will be no new life without laying aside the old; there will be no rising without a dying.

So let us drink, deeply – today and every day (as this woman surely did) – of our heart’s deepest desire!

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