John 4.5-42 24 February 2008
“OUTSIDERS LOOKING IN”
Last Sunday in John’s Gospel we heard Jesus receive Nicodemus, the ultimate religious insider. Now, as you envision Nicodemus, picture that guy who used to teach Sunday School, serve on the Deacons, and who imagines he could name every face at the church dinner. He was raised in the church and he is always there working. Yes, he might act a little too proprietary about the church, like it is his. But if you need something, he is the one you call, and always it gets done.
This Sunday in John’s Gospel Jesus engages the Samaritan woman at the well, the typical religious outsider. Now, as you see this woman at the well, picture her leafing through the religion and spirituality section at Borders bookstore. As she hesitates between How to Know God by Deepak Chopra in one hand and How to See Yourself by the Dalai Lama in the other, that is her moment of worship. Her grandma used to attend church, but she extemporizes her faith as she goes. She improvises between spiritual paths almost like she is sampling ethnic cuisines.
Significantly, John calls her as Samaritan four times. Samaritans were outcasts to Jews whose worship centered in Jerusalem. More than anything else, Jerusa-lem Jews resented their penchant for mixing and matching their faith as they went along. Theologians call this syncretism. It typifies many seekers today who dub themselves “spiritual, but not religious”. So the woman at the well might call herself a Jew. She knew who Moses was. But it was a thin veneer for whatever religious convenience might happen along at the moment. Tomorrow it might be crystals in Sedona or Jungian archetypes or being wooed by a celebrity’s wide-eyed interest in the Kaballah. As an outsider, she was to a regular Jew like a dis-tant spiritual cousin whose blood kinship the well-thought-of family would deny.
We sense the centuries-old, socially insulated and spiritually deep gap between her and Jesus. John emphasized this distance in v. 9: “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.” Her questionable marital status only compounds that distance. Then again, you know Jesus. He was ever criticized by the so-called respectable of his day for company he kept. And when they hammered him for the circles in which he moved, Jesus replied that he came “to seek and save the lost.” Jesus has a thing for the wandering, the drifting, and the rootless.
It is one of the most lively, interesting conversations in the Gospels. Jesus asks her for a drink of water from a historic well, going back centuries to the patriarch Jacob. She is so startled that he would even speak to her that his presence piques her curiosity. And his basic request for water spirals into a far-flung and personal exchange, full of veiled meanings and lofty promise. No, She wasn’t prepared for a theological discussion as she went about her chores. She wasn’t looking for a savior when she made her daily noontime trip for a bucket of water.
But Jesus took the initiative to close this large, looming chasm separating them. As he made himself vulnerable to her with his thirst, he helped her access what she was most thirsty for. And what pure and living water promised to sustain her. By the story’s end, her joy is so overflowing at having met and discovered the one she had longed for all of her life, the one all of humankind had awaited since Eden fell, she was inviting the living trust of many others in Jesus as the Christ.
The encounter between Jesus and this religious outsider is worth pausing over and reflecting upon at this moment in our history here at Dennis Union Church. After all, we are poised to occupy our beautiful new space we have built not only for ourselves, for our children and for partner groups consonant with our ministry.
We have also built because our old building was so cramped that there wasn’t always room for the “unchurched” like this woman Jesus encountered at the well. Did you know that once a sanctuary is 80% full, visitors feel ill at ease entering and sitting down? The effect is well known; it’s called plateauing. When a church feels too full, a new guest fears sitting in a someone’s favorite pew or that they will get paraded all the way to the front to be stared at by everyone. And that terrifies most new seekers visiting a church. We insiders forget how much cour-age it asks of outsiders to visit a church, to be a stranger among us. But by your willingness to build and make room here you have reached out to welcome them.
What other lessons does this encounter in John teach us about our posture for the seeking and the unchurched, the visitors and the guests who might visit us?
Let’s be sure to focus on the presence and witness Jesus brings to this woman. Jesus treats the Samaritan woman as made in God’s image. Isn’t it something how far respect will go? In John, we see Jesus reaching out to her and meeting her on her ground, speaking her language, conversing in terms where he could convey the truth of what God was then doing in the world without barraging her.
That is what Jesus was up to when he was riffing off the image of water, the sub-ject and substance that had brought them together. I mean, who wouldn’t want to drink deeply from pure, refreshing streams that might satisfy us unto eternity? It’s a vivid and attractive way of describing and celebrating the promises of God.
When we speak of our faith to others who have different or little discernible faith, we do well to avoid frontloading our dialogue with technical theological verbiage. Yes, we can talk about seminal Christian ideas. But let’s not start with words like sin and contrition, repentance and reconciliation, salvation and redemption. My experience is that many unchurched—and even many folk inside the church—have stereotyped and caricatured reactions to these valid time-honored concepts because of how well-meaning but deluded Christians have painfully warped them
So start we start with the concept. We work back toward the word, when they are ready to receive it as gift, instead of feeling threatened by it as pious oppression.
Is that simply deception? Hmm. I for one consider it sensitivity and respect. For high-flown religious vocabulary threatens many unaccustomed to hearing it. Start with the meanings and work back over time toward the words. It is also true for us that we insiders best grasp the ideas of our faith when we can convey their meaning without waving words in people’s faces. In divinity school professor Bill Muehl assigned us to preach a sermon on grace without using the word even once. Now that was a tough assignment, one geared to prepare us for outsiders.
So Jesus begins with respecting this woman, meeting her on her own ground, speaking to her in inviting, non-threatening terms. But he manages to pull this off without compromising the essential convictions of what it means to be faithful. In other words, he was fully honest with her as he needed to be. Was the temple in Jerusalem a purer font of spiritual waters than her Samaritan font? Yes, it was, because the temple in Jerusalem had not muddied itself by drinking from the creek of every philosophical nostrum and rivulet of every spiritual fad flowing by.
Jesus also speaks directly to her personal ethics around fidelity. You and I live in a world where the swapaday values of popular culture easily make people feel aggrieved if we haven’t fallen in love in several different directions. The message is out there that’s what we need. Jesus articulates the value that rather than resent God that we don’t get a multitude of partners, we might praise and thank God that we are given one just for us, and to treat that one as God’s special gift.
Jesus meets her where she is, speaks in images close to her, but backs off not one inch. So what does this mean for us here today? As we welcome outsiders, we can’t give away the store. Certain items are non-negotiable. For example, as Christians, we hold that something happens when we assemble as community to worship and serve God. This doesn’t happen as we live in a spiritual bubble. So walks in mountain meadows with deep feelings of oneness in creation are fine. And perusing the religion/spirituality section of Border’s is fine too. But they’re not so central to God’s purposes as what happens when we gather to praise God or to serve together as instruments of God’s purpose in the world. As I heard some-one ask those who profess to worship God by reading the paper at Starbucks on Sunday morning: “Did they take offering for the poor?” The church as community remains the basic unit of our faith, not our fanciful individuality. Still, Starbucks, Jim Scovil in Mashpee reminds us, is a fine place to meet and engage outsiders.
Actually, with our new building opening and our desire to fill it, one big temptation for us will be working from a consumerist mindset to market to outsiders’ needs. That is a temptation because in America consumerism is the air we breathe and the water we drink. “Where do you itch? Let us scratch it. What are your needs? Let us meet them. Come to DUC. Our superior ‘product’ is just what you need. “
Notice this about our Gospel story today. The Samaritan woman had needs, yes.
But she only dimly understood them. Jesus redefined her needs and then helped her meet true needs rather than imagined needs. She had no idea of her need for living water till Jesus revealed it. The body of Christ works like this. We invite children of God to share our journey. We don’t market to phony needs of people who feel lost so we can, for example, meet our need to get certain things paid off.
To close, ever notice in the Gospels that Jesus has better luck with outsiders—this woman’s spiritual life took off---rather than with insiders—Nicodemus didn’t really ‘get it’ till Jesus was dead. The insiders seek out Jesus and he gets nowhere fast with them. But Jesus himself finds the outsiders and things begin to happen fast. It’s no exaggeration to say the gospels are prejudiced to outsiders. “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost,” Jesus’ said to complaints about the time he spent with the uninformed, the unfaithful, and the uncommitted.
It is natural to prefer insiders who are friends. We gravitate to them at Coffee Hour. But what room do we have in our hearts for the outsiders? If Jesus’ posture and parables mean anything, they are front and center, not merely afterthoughts. Amen.
O God, we have heard today how at Horeb you caused water to come from a rock. And how at Sychar, Jesus came to drink with a stranger from Jacob’s well. When throats grow dry or your people feel parched, you lead us to streams of grace, bringing refreshment and new life. We have taken that water and set apart in Christ’s name, knowing that in him we need not ever thirst again. Cleansed of our sin and justified by Christ’s faith, in him we receive the promise of your grace.
Hear our prayers for all those in pain; may they persevere with greater patience and strength. May our arms enfold them as we support them in their trials. May our presence be of comfort as we walk alongside in the dark night of the soul. May we learn side by side as sisters and brothers what it means to trust your love. May it begin to dawn on us, through Jesus’ suffering love on our behalf, to what extent you’re willing to go, O God, to relieve our estrangement and distress.
Accordingly, Lord God, we remember Ann Acker and family as we plan to remember Don here; we remember Emily Levine as she misses her departed husband Lawrence; we remember those who feel alone, abandoned, forgotten.
