‘A’   //   Lent 3   //   2-24-08   //   Celebration of Worship, Northside Presbyterian Church

 

Scriptures      Exodus 17:1-7     John 4:5-42

 

It is the Watering Hole. The social gathering spot for the village where she lives. The place where everybody knows your name.

 

It is a special spot. A historic spot. One long established in the community – planted there by their hard-driving, hard-living, heel-grabbing forebear: Jacob Isaacson.

 

Plenty of joie de vivre still lingers there, on the edges of each day.¹ At dawn – and at dusk – the sisters can be seen with their huge water jars, dropping them down and dipping them deep, filling them to overflowing, sharing from the ever-rolling streams of their lives as they draw the latest from this communal well of life. Carrying away, as each always does, libation for their family’s daily bread – with a cupful of hope, perhaps.

 

These sisters, they come – on the edges of each day. When the heat of isolation has yet to arise, or has long faded away. The crucifying heat: that noonday sun.

 

Isolating. Crucifying. As one of the sisters knows, all too well.

 

She stands at that hole – and peers within. The waters seem murky, and they certainly seem shallow. She can barely make out her reflection anymore. No one around to hold a mirror to her life: her thoughts … her dreams … her hopes … her fears. No one around, because no one wants to be around. Not her.

 

She is already a Samaritan: a half-breed. She is already a woman: just a piece of property. And now … Strike three, she’s out! Because you know what they say. She is fallen. As if she had much further to drop.

 

But she did. And she had. No sisters come near. And neither must she.

 

So now she must come on her own – to, in the words of the Psalmist, “the destruction that wasteth at noonday.” It’s isolating. It’s crucifying. It’s … her time.

 

A Samaritan. A woman. A Samaritan woman … fallen.

 

For a Jewish man like Jesus: a true triple-threat. 

 

 

But, he doesn’t run. And, she doesn’t run.

 

In fact, he lingers long enough to talk with her. Longer than with anyone in any of the gospels.²

 

All while standing where her community should have been.

 

 

Remember the gospel narrative last Sunday? That leader Nicodemus, it seemed, had known his name. He was celebrated by his community. Celebrated so well, in fact, that he sought Jesus out … by the cover of night.

 

Remember what Nicodemus said? “Be born again? Of water and the Spirit? How can these things be?”

 

That Samaritan woman at the well – surname: Fallen – knows her name, too. So well, in fact, that she stumbles across Jesus … in the heat of her day.

 

Do you hear, by further contrast, what the Samaritan woman says? “The water you will give me to drink that will never leave me thirsty again? A spring within me, gushing up to eternal life? Sir: Give me this water!”

 

His name was pride – Nicodemus, after all, means “victory of the people”.

 

Her name is shame. She comes to us unnamed – and even, unclaimed.

 

 

For this is someone who not only promises living water. This is someone who sees into the watery depths of her soul. He sees into her depths, only because he sees that there are depths – of which she is blithely unaware. And why shouldn’t she be?

 

Now, it’s tempting for many – and I am one of those many – to dismiss the Jesus figure in this narrative as a sort of drop-in God with telepathic powers.

 

Lest you or I label him with our modern conceit of divine mind-reader, let us allow the Son of Man his humanity here. Let us allow him his profoundly humane – not superhuman, but profoundly humane – ability to hear the song in this person’s heart, and sing it back to her when memory fades. Or – more accurately – to sing it back to her even before she knows it is there.

 

Hear again Jesus to the woman: “The water that I will give will become in (those who drink it) a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”

 

If we are to believe, as Jesus the Jew must have believed, in the original blessing of the creation story – “God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good” – perhaps what Jesus is “giving” this woman is simply the ability to tap into an unsuspected inner reservoir she had already received, at her birth.

 

For Jesus names the woman for who she really is. And – in the process – he identifies himself for who he really is.³ “I know (the) Messiah is coming,” she asserts. To which he responds: “I am he.”

 

 

 

They all come running to Jesus, still at the watering hole – the well of their community he had restored to them all.

 

Or … had he? For they all come running to Jesus only because they had stopped, and they had listened, and they had responded to the one they had once cast out from their midst. They had stopped, and they had listened, and they had responded to the good news the woman dared to return to share with them. It was these Samaritan villagers, it seems, who had restored her to their midst.

 

But more than just that. By restoring this living reminder of their own vulnerability, they had restored their community to themselves. And now, as they craned forth to meet Jesus at the well, here, they discovered, was that watering hole they had been thirsting for, all along!

 

 

 

It was 22 years ago this late winter that – with trembling hands – I picked up and dialed the phone in my parents’ home.

 

Since I had graduated from college the summer before, I had taken the world by storm. And some storm it was!

 

A desert storm, to be exact. Not much could be watered where I flitted. Not much, when you land in two psychiatric wards to "find yourself", and two intentional communities in distant states where you better had found yourself before you went there. 

 

But of course, I hadn’t. I hadn’t, because I couldn’t. The drugs wouldn’t let me.

 

And so – with trembling hands – I picked up and dialed that phone that day.

 

No, not the number of a treatment center. As with most alcoholics and addicts I know, that had already been done for me. But the number of my former college pastor, 250 miles away. To tell him where I was going.

 

I trembled, because I knew – I really, really thought I knew – what that dignified old man was going to respond.

 

“What took you so long?” “Well, you’ve thrown away so much already.” Or, at the very least: “It’s about time!”

 

Need I tell you my college pastor responded in none of these ways? What he did say was this: “Chuck: That sounds like Easter, to me!”

 

That day, my college pastor – Bob Martin by name – heard the song in my heart, and sang it back to me when my memory faded.

 

He sang it back, and led me back, to the watering hole of my faith. Where the hot, yet frigid, noon of Lent would eventually relent to the Easter dewfall, and my bucket would come up empty, no more.

 

And here – truly – is what we are thirsting for, today: this Communion table. This watering hole, which Jesus has prepared. One of the few places in this world where each of us can still be vulnerable, and not be banished from the well of life.

 

Come. Come. Let us be filled, once more.

 

 

¹See Raymond E. Brown, S.S., The Gospel According to John (i-xii) (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1966), p. 169. Writes Brown: “The woman’s choice of time for coming to the well (in this narrative) is unusual; such a chore was done in the morning and evening.”

 

²I am grateful to Barbara Brown Taylor for this insight. See Taylor, “Living by the Word”, in “The Christian Century”, February 12, 2008, p. 19.

 

³Taylor, op. cit.