THE THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT
Exodus 17:1-7
Romans 5: 1-11
John 4: 5-42
Year A
Gypsy Rose Lee once said, “God is love – but get it in writing”.
The children of
The Hebrews had actually
found a sense of security in slavery. Feeling hopeless in a hopeless place they
cried, “Is the Lord among us or not?”
We have more in common with
them than you might think. Truth to tell most of us don’t
really expect much from God. Maybe that’s why most divine/human encounters
don’t happen at church. More often than not people who talk about getting
nabbed by God say it happened at the office or standing at the kitchen sink.
And when it happens it always complicates our busy lives.
Maybe that’s why Catholic
novelist Walker Percy said, “God is dead
for most of us because we dread for him to be alive”.
One college student,
struggling with a life-transforming spiritual experience he had one night, went
to speak to the college chaplain. The chaplain said, “Had you been trying to get close to God the evening you describe?”
The student answered, “No. I was trying
to get close to a woman I had met in the rathskeller.”
He’s got a lot in common with
the woman Jesus met at the well in today’s gospel. Then as now the
Mediterranean world was divided according to gender. For a man to speak to an unchaperoned
woman in public was unthinkable. Plus that, conventional rabbis didn’t waste
time trying to teach theology to a woman. But this person isn’t just a woman;
she’s a Samaritan.
The animosity between Jews
and Samaritans was not just a cold stand off; it was bitter hatred. The
Samaritans were looked down upon for many reasons. For one they had
intermarried with the Assyrians, thus losing their pure “Jewishness.” They were
not to be associated with in any way. They were not to be touched nor anything they had handled touched. In fact, the Jews called
them ‘dogs’.
Additionally this woman
carried a lot of baggage. Respectable women went to the well in the morning, when
it was cool, where they could greet one another and share the news. But this
Samaritan woman came to the well at high noon. The heat was deadly, but it was
the surest way to avoid cold shoulders and hateful stares.
The disciples had gone off to
buy food, leaving Jesus alone in this desert place. Yet Jesus asks this woman
for a drink! He has no qualms whatsoever about communing with her in this
forbidden way. The woman is stunned and brings up a whole laundry list of
religious differences. Then, sensing the depth of her own thirst, Jesus says he
is aware she is living a promiscuous life. She says, “I thought we were going to talk religion. Why are you getting
personal?”
Jesus sensed that deep down
she wanted something better than an argument. Old disputes did not matter. So
he told her about God and how God had come close to her in him. And the woman
went away and told all the people in her town that this man from
It is astounding that it is
to this Samaritan woman that Jesus discloses who he is. But then, generally
speaking, Jesus seems to have better luck getting through to outsiders than to
insiders and this woman is the very embodiment of the outsider. The insiders
know a great deal about religion but are completely confused by Jesus. He made
some of them so angry he ended up getting himself crucified because he insisted
that Roman soldiers, Samaritans, loose women, prostitutes, tax collectors and
prodigal sons were beloved by God and welcome to sit at his table of plenty and
Living water.
That’s the gospel we are
called to share and proclaim. Sadly, that’s not how it always is.
This week five of the thirty
eight Anglican Primates informed the Archbishop of Canterbury they will not be
attending this year’s Lambeth Conference because bishops of the Episcopal
Church have been invited; adding they have not been able to take Communion with
the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church since February of 2005. Not able?
Actually ‘unwilling’ would be the more correct word.
Our Presiding Bishop said she
was saddened by this decision and said:
“The gathering will be diminished by their absence,
and I imagine that they themselves will miss a gift they might have otherwise
received. None of us is called to ‘feel at home’ except in the full and
immediate presence of God. It is our searching, especially with those we find
most ‘other,’ that is likely to lead us into the fuller experience of the body
of Christ. Fear of the other is an invitation to seek the face of God, not a
threat to be avoided.”
Like our Samaritan sister all
of us have struggled to find our way. We have made missteps and like her we are
often comfortable with the words of religion, but sometimes fail to connect
them to the living Lord; the Messiah we hear of in today’s Gospel; the Messiah
who crosses boundaries and breaks down barriers; the Messiah in whose presence
you know who you really are and through the grace of God loves you beyond your
wildest expectations. And when something in us gets touched by the love of God
in that way, the only thing we can do is to say “thank you” with our lives.
The Samaritan woman is honored
in many cultures. In Eastern Orthodoxy she is known as St. Photini, or
Sveltlana; a name meaning “equal to the
apostles” - because she redefines for us who is a Christian; a Christian
being someone who is willing to be open to the possibility that something is
afoot in Jesus; that although you may not have the time or the inclination to
go searching for God, God might just be searching for you anyway.
Like the Hebrews, we are led
from bondage to liberation by stages. Alan Jones, Dean of Grace Episcopal
Cathedral,
Our “yes” to God Dean Jones says, is “an
act of love, a cry of wonder, an act of worship” that can heal the hardened
heartache of the first two stages of our life journey with God. Then, and only
then, can the child of God, like the Hebrews, like the church, move out of the
desert and the desolation that accompanies it, and be made new by the Living
Water of the Spirit of God.
AMEN
The Rev. Virginia L. Bennett,
D.Min.
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church