Woman at the Well

Transcribed from the sermon preached May 29, 2011 

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Scripture Readings: Exodus 17: 1-7, john 4: 1-30, Romans 7:14-25, Romans 8: 1-6

 
I love this passage in John for a number of reasons, and I have preached on it multiple times, evoking several different subjects. I love the idea that one day we will stop bickering over whether to worship God on this mountain or that, and instead worship in Spirit and in truth. It is not about doctrine or blood or location, but spirit orientation.

I like that Jesus is so welcoming and inclusive of this outcast woman who doesn’t come to the well at the same time as the other women. And more, she is a Samaritan so she is double out. But Jesus relates to her, shows forgiveness and compassion. Amazed, she returns to spread the good news of the Gospel while the disciples sit around discussing whether or not Jesus should even be in contact with this woman.

So it works both as a political and theological statement on where we should worship God, and as a statement on the inclusivity of forgiveness and who can preach the good news. As objective scholars, we can make several strong points for the progressive side.

But it can also speak to us on a personal level. Rather than looking from on high down on John’s letter and observing the woman at the well, we can place ourselves within the story, as the woman at the well.

We are not sure why she has had five husbands or partners in her life. One may speculate at what John is trying to signify, at connections he may be trying to make to Old Testament women like Tamar who keeps acquiring other husbands to birth a child for the first who died. But lets assume for today that she wasn’t entirely proud of herself, and that she came to the well late because she wanted to avoid others at least as much as they might have wanted to avoid her.

When we have messed up and know it, when we run smack into the fact of our own sinfulness, and all the work of  surfing and yoga or smoking or drinking or drugs or sex or whatever is no longer sufficient to hide the fact, then sometimes we would rather be alone. We would rather not face people. We would rather come to the well a little later on. Feeling low, sinful and ashamed, we judge ourselves unworthy of good company, unworthy of the love of all those good folks who come at the regular hour. Now we know that all those other folk are not perfect, but somehow when we are in the mood to feel bad about ourselves, we like to project attitude onto other people.

In psychology we call that transference: it is what we do when we see a cop in the review mirror. Now the cop may be thinking about his relationship with his wife, or about donuts, but regardless of what he is thinking about, we think he is zeroed in thinking about us. When we feel bad about ourselves, we transfer the bad feelings we have about ourselves onto other people, so whether they are thinking badly about us or not, we think they are. Like nutso Dostoevsky we write a drama of Crime and Punishment in our head and the players are out to get us because we know we are guilty.

Now usually there is some small justification for our paranoia; we have in fact been pulled over by a cop in our review mirror, we have met people with prejudice or who are mean or judgmental. And perhaps we have done something wrong and we know someone somewhere must be hunting down the culprit. So there we are alone, or so we think. Then this guy comes along and asks us for a drink of water. “You don’t really want my help,” we say. “Ah, you are Jewish, I am Samaritan; you are a man, I am a woman.”

But those are just surface issues. Sure they are important in their own way; they are excuses for social separation and even exploitation. But the differences could not exist, as in the conversation immediately before this one, with Jesus and Nicodemus, and we may very well feel just as ashamed and unholy or unsaved. Nicodemus like the Samaritan woman is out and about on his own, he sneaks into talk to Jesus at night because though he is a man and a Jew of high status, there is still something missing in his life, he is still thirsting for something, he is still hoping for a new beginning.

Jesus is not worried about those issues of separation. Now there is another tactic of separation or diversion coming up. It is the  “lets have an intellectual conversation tactic.” Knowledge is good and so is dialogue and this is a common issue being milled over today, so lets talk about where the best place to worship is. Now last week I spent a bunch of time sharing how I was uncertain how to reconcile differences of culture and religion, of the destruction of indigenous culture and surfing in Hawaii, and my own identity as a Christian minister. In a way I was kind of milling over the same question as the woman at the well; “should we worship God at the beach or in the Church?”

But sometimes lifting up confusion about one issue is a good distraction from something else that is plain and clear: i.e. we are sinners in need of repentance and forgiveness. Now we can spend a good deal of our lives focusing on work, on collecting water, or talking about water, or art, or music, or sport, or TV, or Video games, but deep down life is about relationships. And if we are humans then there will come a time when we realize we have messed up royally. Now we don’t need to argue about the law, about what is sin and what is not sin, for when we are there, when we are part of the hurt, we may not know why, but we know that we have sinned.

Paul cries out in Romans 7:
[15] I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.
[19] For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.
[20] Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. [24] Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

There will come a time when, whether we have worshipped God at the beach or in a church, on this mountain or on that, we will hope and pray that the God we worship is a forgiving God. And that through that forgiveness there is also redemption, a way which will be made out of no way, water from a rock in the wilderness, new life and passion for a lonely and thirsty soul.

And for that we need not speculate. No confusion here. When we find ourselves with no way, the question “is Jesus the only way?” is no longer intellectual speculation but a matter of life and death. When we need forgiveness and Jesus is there, that is all we need to know. Fill my cup let it overflow. Jesus is the way when there is no way. Jesus is the vision of truth when we a blind. He is living water welling up to eternal life. 

Now here is the thing about repentance. It is tough to stay strong while we break free from the sin and head out to the promised land. We quickly run into wilderness, a dry and parched land. And the devil will tempt us in many ways. The devil will call us back to what we knew before. Changing direction toward God is like reforming health care. The devil will use scare tactics to get us to go back to what we already knew. We may not have been free with those old comforts and habits, but at least we had something to eat and drink? The other thing that happens after we have dug ourselves a hole is that we realize how far we have to climb just to be back on level ground. The details and the effort just look overwhelming. We feel like saying, to hell with it! Someone said, “Hell is truth seen too late.” The devil wants us to postpone going with God until we think it is too late, and when we see the details we will want to turn back – to say – to hell with it.

But if the Bible is right, we don’t have to take care of the details, we just have to have faith. We have one job, one cup of water to drink, the living water of faith.  So there comes a time when we run into our own fallibility, our own sinfulness. And at that time, it is not about theology, or politics or knowledge or location, gender or race or nation, when it really comes down to it, it is about faith in a loving and forgiving God and that god’s ability to empower us to move with Her Spirit forward to a new day, a new life. So it is a Spirit orientation as opposed to a flesh orientation. Paul’s term flesh is not just physical, but focus on the letter of the law to see how we can stay legal and get away with as much as possible, pay our taxes to God but find all the loopholes possible. Spirit or faith orientation will not burn a bunch of time and detail about what is legal or what is not, but approach each day with the intention of the Spirit, with the Spirit as our guide.

Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Say Paul, and he goes on, Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! [5] For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. [6] To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.

There is therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of Life, in Christ Jesus has set us free from the law of sin and death. Thanks be to God.

We join together to sing that old hymn, Amazing Grace. The author, John Newton, was a captain in the clave trade with no faith in God. Then one night in a massive storm at sea, he found himself calling out to God for mercy. From this time on John opened his heart to the Grace and Spirit of God; he eventually quit the slave trade, became a minister and wrote this most famous hymn:

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost but now am found,

Was blind but now I see.