Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Lent 3, 2008: February 24, 2008
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
John 4:5-42
Jesus came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.
A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The 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.) Jesus 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.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but 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.” The 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.”
Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But 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. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”
Just 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?” Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” They left the city and were on their way to him.
Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. They 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.”
Most Tuesday mornings these days, I wake up, throw my clothes on and get together my yoga bag which includes s a mat, a towel and a water bottle. I get in the car, drive to Fremont to the yoga studio, check in at the front desk, drop off my sweats and shoes in the locker room, and then walk barefoot into a 104 degree carpeted room. After about five minutes of growing accustomed to the heat, the instructor enters. What follows is an hour and a half of yoga positions—26 to be exact—all done in the heat. It’s a routine guaranteed to tax even the most experienced student; it’s a routine guaranteed to make you sweat.
About a third of the way through the class, the perspiration really kicks in. It begins to pour into your eyes, trickle down the backs of your legs and drip off your fingertips onto the floor. But more powerful than this is the overwhelming thirst that seizes you, thirst for water—any way to get a drink of water.
Thirst has forever been a metaphor for desire or need of every kind. We say we thirst for knowledge, we thirst for answers about life, we thirst for human companionship, we thirst for a palpable sense of God’s presence and care. “My soul is athirst for God, athirst for the living God” says the psalmist. In today’s lesson from Exodus the Jewish people in the wilderness demand water from Moses to slake their thirst but also as a sign of God’s presence with them.
And then, of course, we have the dialogue between Jesus and a Samaritan woman in today’s gospel, one of the longest dialogues Jesus has with anyone in all of Scripture. Jesus, we’re told, is on his way from Judea to Galilee with his disciples, and to get there, they go through Samaria, a kind of forbidden, enemy zone for Jews. Jews, of course, regarded Samaritans as religious enemies over a dispute about where was the best place to worship God—on Mount Gerizim or at the temple in Jerusalem.
Once Jesus and his disciples arrive in Samaria, the disciples set off to look for food, while a weary Jesus sits at Jacob’s well and meets a nameless woman who has come during the heat of mid-day to draw water there. Breaking all cultural norms, Jesus begins to talk to her by asking her for a drink.
But as we saw last week in the dialogue between Nicodemus and Jesus, this is not a conversation that stays in the shallows, so to speak. No, they get into deep water quickly—deep water that has a strong current, carrying the Samaritan woman to a different place than she’s ever been before.
“Give me a drink,” says Jesus. “Give me a drink.” But what he really seems to be doing is inviting this alien, enemy woman to get in touch with her thirsts and to drink from another water entirely. In doing this, he’s also inviting her to wade out into the living, moving water of life with a Messiah that is standing in the flesh before her.
John, of course, does not tell us directly what the Samaritan woman is thirsting for, but we can guess. As a woman in ancient society she may have been thirsting for a sense of worth. As an enemy Samaritan in the presence of a Jew, she may have been thirsting for acceptance. As a woman married five times and reticent to speak about it, she may have been thirsting to be known as who she was. And as a person waiting for the Messiah, she was surely thirsting for that waiting to be over.
What are you thirsting for? What do you need that feels like a thirst for water in a 104 degree room with sweat rolling off you? What cool drink do you wish you could find in the hot mid-day of your life? Or to use the image from our Hebrew Scriptures, what water are you hoping to find in your wilderness that will tell you that God is with you as companion and provider, that your Messiah has arrived?
In our gospel, after the woman’s conversation with Jesus about water and husbands and the fact that the worship of God is no longer limited to the Jerusalem temple or Mt. Gerizim, after all of this conversation, these revelations, the woman no longer tries to draw her own water from the well. We are told that she leaves her water jug behind and goes away to tell others what she has experienced. “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!” she says to the people. “He cannot be the Messiah, can he?”
And so it can be for us—that once we finally get it that God’s acceptance and grace is right in front of us, bubbling up like a spring or flowing towards us like a river, all without our having to create it or earn it, once we finally get this, our need to draw our own water, the way we draw our own water changes. It can become less driven, less frantic, and more aware of and responsive to the thirsty standing next to us.
For in every instance in which we’re lowering our buckets into the well for our drink, we’re receiving what has already been given to us as a gift. The thirsty Messiah who stood in front of her and who stands in front of us, is God’s surety to us that we, especially the alien and hidden parts of us, are fully seen and fully accepted. Only a messiah who himself was thirsty, who himself will be thirsty again on the cross can offer us the living water of such acceptance of ourselves and of other alien and enemy people.
Sometimes our awareness of that acceptance comes all at once in a gush. Other times it seems more like a river or an ocean by which we are standing. In his poem “Ask Me” Northwest poet William Stafford describes the effect of such a body of living water on him.
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
Bill Stafford’s son Kim once asked his father what the river said and his father replied, “Nothing, of course. The river is silent.” But Kim wouldn’t accept this as the final word on the poem in that, in his thinking, even poets have no idea what their poems finally are saying.
And so I’ll hazard a guess; I’ll imagine what the river is saying, something Kim did not do.
The river is saying that though it appears to be still, it is in reality powerful living water that is right in front of us, full of vital energies, hidden currents, “comings and goings from miles away” that we did not create and that, therefore, bears witness to something greater than we are.
The river is saying, “See me. Know that I am here, for in my presence all the mistakes you have made, all the accomplishments that you believe are your life, all who have loved or even hated you fall away and have no power over you.”
The river is saying, “Listen to my voice, listen into the silence and the stillness, for what you will hear there is the voice of many waters, gushing springs, rushing currents, throbbing tides to refresh you.”
The river is saying, “Receive who you are, O alien daughter, O enemy son, O hidden child. Receive who you are. Drink and live.”
Works Cited or Consulted
Kim Stafford, Early in the Morning: Remembering my Father William Stafford
