John 4:1-15
1 Now Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John— 2 although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. 3 So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee.
4 Now he had to go through Samaria. 5 So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.
7 When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” 8 (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)
9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.[a])
10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
11 “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?”
13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but those who drink the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” (TNIV)
“From Ashes to Sunlight: The Phoenix Affirmations” Sermon Series, Week Three
I was worshiping at this particular church in Portland for the first time, and it was a lovely service, I even manage to stay awake through the entire sermon. Then Eucharist is served and I learn that it is a closed table. So, literally every single person in the sanctuary BUT me goes up, and I’m left sitting there as I hear the jingle “The cheese stands alone, the cheese stands alone” play in my ears. It means a lot to me that we practice open communion here—that when we have Eucharist, everyone can partake. But I’ve also seen churches with open communion do an excellent job week in and week out explain how important it is to them that their table is open to everyone. What isn’t explained is why the table is important in the first place. And I have to be honest, that brand of inclusivity bothers me, because it implies that we are including other people in something that is not treated as importantly as it should. Inclusion only truly matters when it makes you emotionally or spiritually vulnerable, or when it makes what you value vulnerable. If we do not value something as much as we ought to, it is no skin off our backs if people are included as a part of it or not. It’s the playground at elementary school revisited—as a boy, I wouldn’t care if a girl wanted to be included in a game of hopscotch, because boys never played hopscotch in my neck of the woods. But if that girl wanted to join our football game, well, it was with kicking and screaming on our part. But really? I admired those girls the most.
And so begins the third week of our sermon series together, “From Ashes to Sunlight: The Phoenix Affirmations.” This series is based on a book written by a United Church of Christ pastor, Rev. Eric Elnes, who has pastored a very successful church in Scottsdale, Arizona, where they have made amazing use of a diverse array of tools and talents available to them in doing ministry. Eric then wrote this short book called The Phoenix Affirmations, after the town in which it was composed, but also because the image of the phoenix, being reborn out of the ashes, is a hope he has for the vital congregations of mainline American Christianity. Last week, we talked about the richness of spiritual, scriptural, artistic worship, and the week before we talked about hearing God’s word in scripture. Today’s theme, then, turns from the church’s life on Sunday morning to the church’s life of the everyday—as Jesus did, engaging people authentically and treating everyone as being made in God’s image, as Genesis 1:26 tells us.
And for my money, no Bible story tells this theme better than John’s story of the Samaritan woman at the well, precisely because of that annoying word—vulnerability. This story takes place in a moment of incredible vulnerability for both Jesus and the woman. Jesus is vulnerable because he is a traveler who is currently alone—John writes that the disciples had left to obtain food, and in those days, if you traveled alone you were liable to be robbed. We know this because of the more famous Gospel story involving a Samaritan character—Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke, which begins with the solitary traveler being robbed. So Jesus must know that he is vulnerable simply because he is alone. But he is also tired and thirsty, so if he was robbed, he probably wouldn’t have the strength to defend Himself (whether the Prince of Peace would have defended himself to begin with is another question).
The Samaritan woman, in turn, is vulnerable for one of the same reasons—she, too, is alone, in public, in a time and place when women were not expected at all to converse with men without their father or brother or husband present—at our Tuesday morning Bible study a couple of weeks ago, Florence said that the Bible simply didn’t mention women, and its true—it’s because they were expected to be invisible, and to certainly never challenge a rabbi like Jesus.
And it matters that this woman is a Samaritan, because this story takes place at Jacob’s Well, a scene that invokes the story in Genesis where Jacob meets his wife Rachel for the first time—as the Genesis account writes, “As Jacob looked, he saw a well in the field, out of that well the flocks were watered,” and Rachel comes to that well to feed her father Laban’s sheep, and Jacob, being the gentleman that he is, kisses her right off the bat. But Jacob’s well would come to be a sacred place for the Samaritans because the Jews, Jesus’ people, kept the Jerusalem temple as their holiest site, which didn’t leave a lot for the Samaritans, and so they kept Jacob’s well as a holy site—and Jesus, a Jewish rabbi, is visiting it against the prevailing religious custom of the day. If you’re this Samaritan woman, a Jewish rabbi is visiting your holiest site—it would be like, say, one of us happening to swing by the Ka’aba in Makkah, Saudi Arabia—the holiest site in Islam, a site so holy that non-Muslims aren’t allowed in by custom. And what’s more, the Samaritan woman was probably raised to despise what Jesus’s teachings would be, simply because Jesus was a Jewish rabbi, not a Samaritan rabbi.
But that’s no problem for her! Her response—“How is it that you, a Jew, can ask a drink of me?” is so understated, so calm, that the narrator actually has to tell us afterwards that Jews and Samaritans didn’t play nice with one another! And her response is so, so powerful in its simplicity—a Jewish rabbi has come to her holiest site, a place that she cares about and relies on for her own water, her own life, where she would be physically, spiritually, and emotionally vulnerable because it has so much meaning, and she does not try to kick Jesus out, she does not rage, she does not condemn, she asks him a question and then actually has a dialogue with him!
It truly saddens me that this Samaritan woman is not as colloquially well known as the Good Samaritan, because the Good Samaritan was a character in Jesus’s imagination—Jesus made him up in order to make a point to a lawyer who was interrogating Him. This woman was real, and more importantly, her hospitality to Christ was real. What if we were that other Samaritan woman? People enter our church, and we may not agree with them. If you’re like me and don’t listen to Joel Osteen, someone who preaches prosperity theology enters our sanctuary. If you believe in traditional marriage, a lesbian and her life partner enter through those doors. What do you do? We can tolerate people, sure. And tolerance is better than intolerance. But it also falls far short of the radical hospitality that an otherwise unremarkable woman is showing to the Son of God. Because as far as both Samaritans are concerned—the Good Samaritan and this Samaritan woman—they are interceding in a person’s moment of vulnerability, they are being proactive, they are meeting the other person’s needs, and in doing so, they make themselves vulnerable as well. Tolerance is passive, it says, you do your thing, let me do mine, and we’ll do brunch or go bowling sometime. That’s great. That’s not being like either Samaritan, though.
Biblically-oriented inclusiveness and hospitality is not the same thing as tolerance. The Samaritan woman did not merely tolerate Jesus’s presence, the story says she eventually joyfully proclaimed his message to any other Samaritans who would hear it. And when you walk through these doors any Sunday, every Sunday, may you too be greeted by God’s presence as reflected in us, joyfully proclaiming your presence here to share in our worship and in our life. For us as Christians far from the Holy Lands of Israel and Palestine, some of the holiest, most meaningful ground we have, ground where we are at our must vulnerable, is here, before the altar of God where we eat and pray together. The table of communion is our Jacob’s well. And when a stranger comes to us, asking for a piece of bread and a drink, asking for a fleeting glimpse of the divine presence of God, what on earth are we to do? May we actively bring that stranger into our flock, treating that child of God as one of us. It will be a great, great day when all churches do this. But until they do, may our hospitality show them the way. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
October 16, 2011
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