March 27, 2011

One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that no matter how much we bring to God—our questions, fears, hopes, and needs, God has a way of transforming it all into something quite different. Take me, for example. In my former parish, I was the person who was always thinking ahead—urging staff to look at the long-range planning calendar, to make sure we had all of our ducks in a row, or service bulletins, well in advance of Holy Week, to take just one example.

And I was getting there. We had a liturgy planning meeting on the first Sunday of February to look at Lent and Holy Week, to begin laying the foundation for a solid and cohesive Lenten program. I was doing some reading—a serious theological monograph that had aroused considerable debate and reflection in the last year or two. Then events overtook me. They overtook all of us. A month later, we were scrambling to put together a plan for confirmation classes; I barely knew what we were going to do liturgically on Last Epiphany or Ash Wednesday and 1 Lent. All of our plans were in the trash and were improvising from moment to moment.

But in those moments, I also began to catch sight of what Grace might become and how we might reach out in new ways to the community and the world. A place of sanctuary and respite, I called it when we began to open our doors in the midst of the protests. And that book I was reading? After taking both progressive and conservative Christians to task for their political engagement, the author, James Davidson Hunter calls on Christians, individuals and institutions to be a “faithful presence” in the world. I don’t know what the future holds, but I do know that what Grace will become will be quite different than we had imagined even a few months ago.

Grace happens. We bring all kinds of expectations and assumptions to God, we bring our needs and hopes, and God has a way of turning all of that, and us, inside out. That’s what happens in the story of the Samaritan woman.

With today’s Gospel we arrive at the second of a set of stories from the Gospel of John that we are reading during Lent. Last week we heard the story of Nicodemus, and this week we have the story of the Samaritan woman. The two stories are similar in several respects, but it is the differences between them that are especially revealing.

In the first place, we have two very different people who encounter Jesus. Nicodemus is the consummate insider—a Pharisee, a leader of the Jews, a member of the High Court of the Jewish community, the Sanhedrin. The Samaritan woman is the ultimate outsider. She’s a member of a community hated by the Jewish community of Jesus’ day. The revulsion stems from the Samaritans having built their own temple, on Mt. Gerizim. They regarded themselves as descended from the Israelites who had lived in the northern kingdom and were crushed by the Assyrians in the 8^th c. BCE. The Jews hated them in part, too, because they viewed them as syncretistic and ethnically impure. Of course, besides being a member of this hated community, the Samaritan woman was probably an outsider in her own community, having been married five times, and now living with a man not her husband.

There are other differences, too. Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night; he initiates the conversation with Jesus. By contrast, Jesus first addresses the Samaritan woman when she comes to the well, and his approach to her shocks her. Nicodemus is puzzled by, and refuses to explore the ambiguity of Jesus’ statements to him—Did Jesus mean “You must be born again, or you must be born from above? The woman, equally puzzled by similarly incomprehensible speech by Jesus, asks him what he means, and asks for the water about which he speaks. Nicodemus vanishes from the scene to return later in the story, the woman leaves Jesus, but brings her whole village back to meet him.

The Samaritan woman, the “woman at the well” is traditionally regarded as a penitent sinner, but the gospel story is much more complex than the usual tale of a sinner coming to recognition of her sins, asking Jesus for forgiveness, receiving Jesus’ forgiveness, then amending her life. The story itself takes place in at least 3 acts. The first depicts the encounter of Jesus with the woman at the well. It contains a conversation that operates on two levels. The woman is speaking about water; Jesus speaks about eternal life. It ends with the woman beginning to see that she is not talking with just anybody.

The second act is a dialogue between Jesus and the woman about her. Jesus lets the woman know that he knows her, he knows that she has had five husbands and is now living with someone outside the bonds of marriage. That revelation begins the process by which the woman comes to suspect that she is speaking with the Messiah and indeed, Jesus identifies himself as the Messiah.

The third act shows us the point of the story. The woman leaves the well, leaves her water-jug behind, runs back to town and tells everyone what has happened to her. The townspeople then, invite Jesus to stay with them for a few days, and come to believe in Jesus, that he is the Savior of the world. In other words, in John’s gospel, the Samaritan woman, the woman at the well, is the first missionary. So you see, this story isn’t about the woman’s sin and repentance. Indeed we don’t know if she considered her marital situation to be sinful. We don’t know if she asked Jesus for forgiveness. We don’t know if she went back to town and married the guy.

When she runs back home to tell the town about the man she met, she says, “Come and see a man who has told me everything I have ever done!” I wonder about those townspeople. What did they think of her? She couldn’t have been the most popular woman around. After all, if 1^st century Samaritans were anything like 21^st century Americans, the woman with 5 ex-husbands who is now shacked up with a sixth man is probably not going to be a member of the in-crowd.

That, I think, is why this story is so powerful to us. We identify with the woman at the well, with her life before her encounter with Jesus and with the easy, unremarkable, painless way her encounter with Jesus takes place. He offers her eternal life, she accepts it, end of story. We would like our own lives to be just as simple. We have our sins, we receive forgiveness, end of story.

But life is more complicated than that. Forgiveness and reconciliation are more complicated than that. Sometimes, we are unable to forgive ourselves, unable to accept God’s forgiveness. Often, we are like those townspeople, in whom I sense something of a rebuke of the Samaritan woman when they say to her, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves.” Sometimes, we are so limited by our experiences and the rituals of sin, absolution, and forgiveness, that we can’t even feel the new life that wants to burst forth from us.

The kind of life that we are offered in Jesus Christ—streams of water gushing up to eternal life, is so transformative and unexpected that it breaks through all of our defenses, all of the dikes we set up to protect ourselves—even when those dikes are something like traditional categories of sin and repentance.

Lent may be a time of repentance, but it is also a period of preparation. It’s an opportunity to strip away everything that prevents us from experience with fullness the joyous resurrection of Jesus Christ. As individuals and as a congregation, we need to let go of our defenses and the barriers that prevent our full reception of God’s grace.

The Samaritan woman brought her jar to the well to fill it with water, part of her daily routine, something she had done hundreds or thousands of times, without thinking anything of it. At the well, she encountered the living Christ who gave her water that filled her completely. Like her, we need to leave our empty jar at the well, so we can receive the living water Christ offers us and then, offer that same water to everyone we encounter.