March 27 sermon

Text: John 4:5-42
Preached March 27 at Trinity


Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

Friday night, I was writing this sermon. For part of that time, I was also cleaning for my guests, chatting online with a friend, and talking to another friend on the phone. It’s a pretty typical scenario for me, and it’s even worse for many people younger than me. They often engage in several different conversations at once—online, by phone or text message, and in person.

And many of us have in-person interactions that aren’t much more substantive than these frenzied electronic communications. We hardly look up to acknowledge the cashier at the store, we have drive-by conversations in the hallway at work or school, and we rarely go much deeper than “How are you?” and “I’m fine.” We’re in touch with a lot of people, but our encounters aren’t always very meaningful.

The encounter we hear about today is completely different from these. The Samaritan woman who met Jesus at the well probably had no idea she was in for such a transformative experience.

But meeting Jesus is always transformative. He won’t settle for pleasantries like “How are you?” and “I’m fine.” No, Jesus is intent on immersing us in the living water of God’s love. When we encounter Jesus, he wants to be sure we walk away with a better understanding of who God is and who we are.

The Samaritan woman John tells us about gradually came to know Jesus better during the course of their conversation. The first thing she notices is that Jesus is a Jew, and she wonders why he would ask her for a drink. It was very unusual for a Jew to talk to a Samaritan, or for a man to talk to a woman he didn’t know.

But Jesus did talk to her, and he keeps on talking to her. When she wonders aloud why he might speak to her, Jesus answers, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.’” Now she must really be wondering about this guy!

She responds, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?” As we see so often with those who hear Jesus’ teaching, she misunderstands him initially, thinking he’s talking about actual water from the well.

She goes on, “Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well?” I’m not sure whether she’s being a little sarcastic here, as in, “Who does this guy think he is?” Or whether she’s really starting to wonder if there might be something special and powerful about the man with whom she’s speaking. Perhaps it’s some confused combination of both.

The next thing she knows, Jesus is telling her about her past and her present—her history with several husbands—and now she knows for sure that this Jesus is remarkable. “Sir, I see that you are a prophet,” she says.

As the conversation continues, her thoughts turn to the long-awaited Messiah, the one God promised to send as a Savior for the people. She expresses faith in the promise as she says, “I know that Messiah is coming.” And she sees that promise fulfilled when Jesus responds, “I am he.”

Now she really knows who this Jesus is. He is a Jew, even greater than Jacob. He is a prophet. He is the Messiah. Through her encounter with Jesus, she learns firsthand that God keeps his promises. The Messiah had come.

And, through this encounter, she also learns more about who she herself is. Her first words to Jesus proclaim her basic status as a woman of Samaria. So, already, she has two strikes against her in terms of social acceptance by the chosen people. Women had little social standing in general, and the Jews had contempt for the Samaritans that went back hundreds of years before Jesus’ time.

This woman was also a social outcast among her own people. Jesus tells her she had had five husbands and was now living with a man who wasn’t her husband. Who knows why she had such a tumultuous past? She was likely widowed or abandoned.

But one way or the other, she was ostracized. No one would have come to the well to draw water and haul it home in the hottest part of the day unless she were trying to avoid the other women of the village. They would have come in the morning and in the evening, when it was cooler.

This woman was an outsider, rejected and shamed by her community. She probably organized her whole life around avoiding these people who judge her so harshly.

And in her encounter with Jesus, she realizes she is weary and thirsting for relief. When Jesus offers living water, she is initially skeptical. But Jesus sweetens the offer when he says, “those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”

Suddenly, the woman is convinced! Or maybe she’s still confused, and even a little skeptical. But she’s desperate enough to give it a shot. “Sir, give me this water,” she says, “so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” This woman yearns for relief from the piercing sting of shame and rejection, the stares and glares of her community.

But she is not totally without hope. She also knows that Samaritans, like Jews, were descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. These are the very people with whom God made a covenant: “I will be your God, and you shall be my people.” These are the very people who received God’s promise of a Messiah, a descendant of David who would rule in righteousness forever. This woman believed that God’s promises were for her people as well.

And, in her encounter with Jesus, she experienced kindness and acceptance where previously she had known only condemnation and exclusion. And she was receiving this love from the Messiah himself! The Chosen One of God! The promised deliverer of God’s people! Someone who had demonstrated that he knew who she really was, and loved her anyway.

This is what it’s like to encounter Jesus. This is what it’s like to be washed and nourished by the living water. In meeting Jesus, we learn who God is, and we learn who we are, and we experience this love that transforms us.

So where do we meet Jesus?

We meet Jesus in the living water of baptism. Today Crimson Chance will be washed in this living water, freed from the power of sin and raised up to new life. She will be claimed by the God who reveals himself through Jesus, the God who knows her fully and loves her completely. The same God who washed each of us in this living water, who freed us and raised us up to new life as well.

As Crimson encounters Jesus in baptism, she will learn what we all learn in baptism. She will learn who God is—the one who claims us and loves us and creates us anew. And she will learn who she is—a beloved child of God and a new creation in Christ, along with each one of us.

We meet Jesus in worship. As we encounter Jesus in the word and in the meal, he shows us over and over who God is and who we are. We learn that God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. We learn that we are created in God’s image, and that God takes delight in us. We learn that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves, but God forgives us and upholds us and guides us through the darkest valleys of our broken world.

And we meet Jesus precisely in those dark valleys. We heard in our first reading that the Israelites whom God delivered from Egypt found themselves wandering in the desert without water. So God gave them water, gushing forth from a rock. In their difficulty, they encountered God in the living water which he provided.

We have seen searing images recently of the destructive power of water, and we have seen the suffering of our brothers and sisters in Japan. We know, too, about plenty of other suffering—in Libya, in Syria, even in Minnesota, in our own lives. We have all found ourselves wandering in the desert without water, lost in the wilderness of illness, grief, addiction, or other despair.

And, like the Samaritan woman, sometimes we don’t even realize we’re trudging through the wilderness until Jesus shows up unexpectedly, offering us living water that shows us just how thirsty we are. In such encounters with Jesus, we learn that God is present even in the midst of struggles, that he can handle our questions and fears and anger, and that he will continue to love us even when he sees our doubts.

We also meet Jesus in the everyday routines of our lives. This woman was making her usual daily trip to the well, just like we make our usual daily trips to work, to school, to visit friends and family, to pursue our hobbies, to volunteer in our communities. And Jesus meets us in all of that.

When we encounter him here, we learn that our service to others—in whatever form it takes—is God’s work, and God is present in all of it. And we learn that we are God’s hands and feet in the world, carrying out that service in a variety of ways.

No matter how we encounter Jesus, we walk away transformed. The Samaritan woman “left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, ‘Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?’”

This woman marched right into the midst of the very people who had rejected and condemned her and bravely told them what she had heard and seen. This woman who had toiled in the midday sun just to avoid the people of her community now left her work to go and invite those same people to come and meet Jesus.

Encounters with Jesus are empowering. Jesus knows us, and he claims us in the living water of our baptism, forging a relationship that goes much deeper than the electronic interactions and distracted conversations of our everyday existence.

Crimson will meet Jesus in those living waters today. She and each of us will continue to meet Jesus throughout our lives. And in those encounters, God equips us to speak and act with the same authority as the Samaritan woman, serving in his name and inviting others to come and see this God who knows and loves us each so profoundly. Thanks be to God! Amen.