|
Precious water…water from the well. Many of you know that John and I live in Angelus Oaks where our drinking water arrives in our glasses directly from the wells in our community. We have learned first-hand the harmful effects on our water of pesticides or chemicals or other infestations to the land. Simply stated, we have become more aware of what we do to the land around our home because it all affects the ground water we and our neighbors enjoy.
Precious water… Environmental scientists tell us that, perhaps within our lifetimes, water will become the new oil. Wars will be fought over rights to drinking water. Wealth determined by how much water a family can access. Novels have appeared in the past 10-15 years with this drastic scenario as the backdrop. Works of non-fiction paint a similar picture of desperate thirsty people living in the not-too-distant future, seeking in vain to drink a glass of fresh water. Yet in today’s readings, the precious value of water has nothing to do with quantity and everything to do with quality.
The story from the Exodus wanderings of the Hebrews is set in the deserted wilderness, and reads like an episode of the television series “Lost.” The group is in a situation where there seems to be no solution: there is no food and they are hungry, no water and their throats are parched with thirst, they have no idea of their destination or of the length of their journey. For these people, there is only bareness, dryness, death, as far as the eye can see. Not surprisingly, the people grumble and complain, accusing Moses of bad leadership. In return, Moses names the place Test and Quarrel.
But the panorama for these desert wanderers is much larger than suggested by the immediate dispute between leader and followers…the panorama of this story is as large as the very heart of God. And when God hears the suffering voices, and feels the thirst and hunger of the beloved wanderers, then God responds to their desperate situation by providing more than water. In this act that some would call miracle, this act of Moses tapping the rock with his wooden staff to produce water, God reminds the wanderers yet again of the main point they will repeatedly hear in that apparently God-forsaken desert. No place is forsaken by God, who gives abundantly all the resources needed for life, and who does so through the humans around us.
Take that thought into our look at the gospel story of the Samaritan well. UCC Minister Rick Marshall, places the dialogue—the longest between Jesus and anyone else in all the gospels—in the familiar format of Broadway stage.
We don’t see Jesus giving her this water. We don’t watch her drinking it. Yet the dialogue about water continues. It turns out Jesus sees into her life. “Call your husband.” “I have no husband.” “I know; you’ve had five and the one you’re living with would make six.” Then the dialogue turns theological, logical, abstract, and seems to run into a ditch. We lose interest. Their discussion ends with “I am he.” The disciples enter stage left. “Why are you talking with her?” Our interest returns. We smell conflict. Jesus doesn’t answer them. Their question hangs in the air; the fog machine fills the stage with opaque light. We seem to see, but cannot penetrate. The stage goes dark. Curtain down. Curtain back up: the woman is gossiping in the village. Curtain down and up again: Jesus with the disciples having dialogue about food: “Rabbi, eat.” “I have food to eat of which you do not know.” “What?” Curtain down. House lights up. The end. This is confusing. We want our money back. It was a nice story. I had sympathy for the woman, but the main character—just weird. Couldn’t relate. The critics turn to their keyboards. A strange deadline looms. Our minds want a point to it, a conclusion… but there is none. That’s a wrap.
These dramatic stories we’ve heard today start and end with water…ground water, if you will. The stuff of life we need to live. Yet, in neither of these biblical stories this morning is there evidence of actual water either flowing or finding its way into a bucket or down anyone’s throat. The proof of these stories is not, as some would desire, in the pudding, at least if we understand that proverbial pudding to be an actual drink of water. For in neither story does the hoped-for water ever appear. What does appear, however, in both of these stories, is transformation—the same story of transformation that God keeps telling us from the opening words of Genesis to the benediction of Revelation. This transformation is God’s primary business with us humans; lovingly, compassionately, creatively, God moves us from hunger to fullness, from thirst to satisfied, from blindness to sight, from leprosy to cleanness, from poverty to well-being, and in the end, from death to life.
For the Samaritan woman, the transformation occurs for her from her initial interest in a cool drink of water into needs that are deeper than Jacob’s ancient well. They are the needs of a person who, in her society, is a triple outsider. Preacher and theologian, Barbara Brown Taylor, suggests in her exegetical article in this week’s Christian Century magazine that in the first place, the woman at the well is a Samaritan, which made her a half-breed and full pagan as far as the Jewish purists were concerned.
The bad blood between Jews and Samaritans dated back 750 years before Jesus was born to a time when the Jewish people in Samaria began inter-marrying and thus defying Jewish purity laws. The hatred between the Jews and the Samaritans intensified about 200 years before the birth of Jesus, when the Samaritans decided to build their own temple in Samaria rather than travel the great distance to worship and sacrifice at the Jerusalem temple. It was a bold move, considered rash and offensive by Jewish scholars, and ever since the building of that northern temple, the theological question dividing these cousins from one another focused on the correct location of the worship center. Parenthetically, this centuries-old heated discussion between Jews and Samaritans reminds me of another heated discussion of many years ago. It was at a church board meeting in another congregation a long distance from Redlands. The item being discussed was the purchase of a new video cart, and for 45 full minutes, I sat stunned as the group debated whether that cart ought to be a grey one or a black one. Sometimes I wonder about us religious types and our priorities…and even more I marvel at how much entertainment we provide to the Creator of the universe…!
Back to the well of Samaria…the person to whom Jesus dares to speak is Samaritan, a sworn enemy, and her second outsider characteristic is that she is a woman. Again, Barbara Brown Taylor comments,
“In Jesus’ time, women were not what you would call liberated. They were not even allowed to worship with men, whose morning devotions included the prayer, ‘Thank God I am not a woman.’ Women had no place in public life. They were not to be seen or heard, especially not by holy men, who did not speak to their own wives in public. One group of pious men was known as ‘the bruised and bleeding Pharisees’ because they closed their eyes when they saw a woman coming down the street, even if it meant walking into a wall and breaking their noses.”
So Jesus dares, first to talk with an enemy Samaritan, second with a despised and socially-invisible woman, and third with a person who was not respectable. The fact that this woman had probably followed the old levirate marriage laws and retained her legal protection by marrying brothers of each of her dead husbands, and was now living with yet another one of the brothers without the benefit of marriage, meant nothing to Jesus and everything to others in her town. We know this by following the dialogue (in which Jesus shows not a shred of judgment or moral concern) and by asking why it was that she went to the well at high noon, instead of in the cool of the morning with the other women. We can only surmise that, due to her unusual home life, she would not have been welcomed into the women’s water klatch.
Barbara Taylor continues,
“Imagine [the woman’s] surprise when she comes in the heat of the day with her water bucket balanced on her head and sees a strange man sitting beside the well. He could be anyone, but when he lifts his head and asks her for a drink, she sees the olive skin, the dark eyes, the strong nose. He is no half-breed. The man is a Jew, but what in the world is he doing there? Has he lost his way? Has he lost his faith, to be talking to her like that? The Jews have endless rules about what they may and may not eat and drink. She knows that much at least, and she know that this man will be breaking the law if she lets him sip from her bucket…So they talk about it, and while it is never clear whether they are on the same wavelength, the woman understands that she wants what Jesus is offering her…”
As we know from hearing the conversation again this morning, the topics these two unlikely partners discuss ebb and flow from water, to the woman’s personal life, to her truthful declaration about herself and her situation, to the great theological divide between Jews and Samaritans, and finally to Jesus’ own disclosure about who he is. Every time—and there are 13 exchanges between them—every time the woman tries to back up, Jesus steps forward. Barbara Brown Taylor notes,
“When she steps back, he steps toward her. When she steps out of the light, he steps into it. He will not let her retreat. If she is determined to show him less of herself, then he will show her more of himself. ‘I know that Messiah is coming,’ she says, and he says, ‘I am he…’ It is the first time [Jesus] has said that to another living soul. It is a moment of full disclosure, in which the triple outsider and the Messiah of God stand face to face with no pretense about who they are. Both stand fully lit at high noon for one bright moment in time, while all the rules, taboos and history that separate them fall forgotten to the ground.”
What brings them to this moment? I believe it is the same reality that brought refreshment to the wandering Hebrews in the desert wilderness, the same reality that brings hope to our despair and breathes life back into our tombs of death…the woman at the well of Samaria was struck in a very personal way with the good news that God is in the business of making a way where there seems to be no way.
And this same God waits patiently for us to be struck—as was the rock by the wooden stick—to be struck with the good news of a way where there seems to be no way. We’ve heard again this morning: God made a way through the desert, with a water-filled rock and a wooden stick. God made a way for a triple-outsider to become an agent of transformation for an entire city. God made a way for two enemies to talk over a deep well about matters of depth and meaning to each of them. For this woman and this man who happened to meet at an ancient well, God made a way for honesty and disclosure and courage and love to penetrate the souls of each. And God makes a way for us as well.
Contrary to what self-avowed agnostic Bart Ehrman said while on his book tour this past week, that the presence of evil and suffering in the world is proof enough for him that a loving God does not exist…I believe that the Spirit is nudging us through these two water stories this morning to declare just the opposite. A loving God repeatedly makes a way where there seemed to be no way, and God does precisely that with the assistance of humans around us. I would argue with Professor Ehrman that suffering in the world is no evidence of God’s absence, but rather of our inability as humans to work creatively with God in solving the problems that lead to suffering. The problem is not God’s but ours to share. This we learn from the water dialogues this morning. Moses and God shared the pain of the people’s thirst and hunger, and together shared the way through that pain to satisfaction. Jesus and the Samaritan woman honestly shared their needs, their insights, and their souls with one another, and together, they shared in the city’s transformation from outcast to family again.
This ground water satisfying our thirst and transforming our lives still bubbles up for us as it did for all those whose stories we heard again: for in the presence of this One, we know who we really are—the good and bad of it, the all of it, the hope in it. In that presence, we find ourselves by finding that Other—who crosses all boundaries, breaks all rules, drops all disguises, speaking to us like someone we have known all our lives, bubbling up like ground water, like a well that needs no bucket, so that we go back to face people we thought we could never face again, speaking to them as boldly as that One speaks to us… “Come, drink, for there is water, living water, with life for all…”
|
