Lent 3; Year A, 2005
The Rev. Melissa Skelton

One of the things you may not know about your new rector is that while I was rector, part-time, at Trinity Church in Castine, Maine, I also had my own consulting business. What my business partner and I did was what we called consumer or client “immersions” and it consisted of this: going into homes or workplaces and, with people’s permission, watching what they did as well as conducting in-depth interviews with them to understand what they thought and felt about a whole range of things: from something as prosaic as cleaning house to something as festive as eating in a favorite restaurant to something as emotionally loaded as raising teenagers or living with a disabled relative. “Immersion” in people’s lives as a way of understanding them.

And what was always true when I did these projects was that the simplest questions I, as a stranger, would ask would lead to profound sharing from the person being interviewed. And what was also true was that their profound sharing would cause me to reflect on and understand myself more fully.

Our story from the Gospel of John for today--the story of Jesus’ conversation with the woman at the well--reminds me of some of those conversations, ones that start out splashing around in the shallow water but then plunge quickly into the deep.

First, some perspective on the passage: this passage is the longest talk Jesus has with anyone in the gospels. As Barbara Taylor points out, “It’s longer than he talks to any of his disciples, longer than he talks to any of his accusers, longer than he talks to any of his own family.”

But it’s not just the length that’s noteworthy. It’s the depth of discovery and disclosure that happens as the two speak. Through Jesus’ initiative the woman discovers who she really is, finally declaring to others that she’s met a man who’s told her “all that she has ever done”. This in the reading goes hand in hand with Jesus’ full disclosure of himself fully to her, the first time this happens in the Gospel of John.

Odd, intense and deeply dialogical: what is this all about, and why have we been given it on our first Sunday together as new rector and parish?

I’ve had a lot of time over the past week or so to think about this. And the first thought that came to mind was this: perhaps we shouldn’t try to answer this question at all. After all, what do we know at this point? What do any of us really know about this new mystery into which we’ve been called? Consider this: St. Paul’s: west coast. Melissa: east coast. St. Paul’s: deeply spiritual and interior. Melissa: an extrovert whose spirituality has been joyfully tethered to the active life. What do we know about any of this, about the holy design, if I may call it that, through which we have been joined together?

So please take what I say, the connections I want to make between this story from John and our story waiting on tiptoe to come into being as a kind of imaginative construal, one that we may look back on someday and say: “Sure, that was right on,” or “God, no. This really missed the mark in comprehending what God was up to here.”

And so back to the question: what might this story of Jesus and the woman at the well have to do with us together now?

First, like the woman at the well Jesus spoke to, we don’t have to be made perfect before being made new together. We get to start out together with exactly who we are.

This one is hard for me. Somehow I had imagined that before starting here with you, I would have gone to some kind of “priest spa,” a place out of time and space in which I would work through all my personal quirks.

But thankfully, as St. Paul himself says in his letter to the Romans, our God’s habit is to come to us while we were yet imperfect, while we were still quirky, while we were active in our worst habits. This is the same point that the story of Jesus’ lingering with a triple outcast (woman, Samaritan, iffy marital history) illustrates. We don’t have to have it all together or even to have it for God to cross over whatever barriers we’ve set up in order to come to us, to claim us and to make something new out of us. This goes for us as individuals and for us as new rector and parish.

Second, like the woman at the well, while we may want simple refreshment like a long taste of cool water, what God wants to give us is an experience of living water. Living water is not only deep, it is moving, in the way that a stream or a river or the ocean itself moves. Our story suggests, then, that our journey in Christ together will be more like being carried by moving water than taking a nice, long drink. This, of course, is connected to baptismal water: deep and swirling, source of life and occasion for our death, vehicle for our rebirth into something or someone new. Living water.

Finally, I believe our story suggests one of the ways we will experience this living water together is through conversation with God and with each other in much the same way that the Samaritan woman did with Jesus. By this I mean continued commitment to prayer, corporate and individual and doing something new: letting others know our thoughts both in writing and in the meetings we will be holding in the next three weeks and beyond. This process of speaking, listening, of discernment is the way that with God’s help and in God’s hands we can immerse ourselves, die a little and discover the new life that God wants to give to us.

And, I predict, this will be exhilarating and hard, for it will mean that we will be asked to trust that the Holy One will sustain us in the deep: in our fears, in our frailties and beyond even our most earnest efforts.

The Maine poet Philip Booth, a Unitarian, who began coming to Eucharist during my time at Trinity, wrote this poem early in his career. It’s about taking his baby daughter into the living water off the coast of Maine for the first time. The poem is called “First Lesson” and it’s become one of my favorites, for it describes what I imagine God is saying to me and to us as we give ourselves over to the living water that has always been and is now our life in Christ together.

 

“Lie back, daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man's float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.”