Conversations at the Well

Sunday, February 27, 2005
Lent 3A
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
John 4:5-42

5So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. 7A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink.’ 8(His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 9The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 10Jesus answered her, ‘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.’ 11The woman said to him, ‘Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?’ 13Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14but 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.’ 15The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.’ 16Jesus said to her, ‘Go, call your husband, and come back.’ 17The woman answered him, ‘I have no husband.’ Jesus said to her, ‘You are right in saying, “I have no husband”; 18for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!’ 19The woman said to him, ‘Sir, I see that you are a prophet. 20Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.’ 21Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. 24God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.’ 25The woman said to him, ‘I know that Messiah is coming’ (who is called Christ). ‘When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.’ 26Jesus said to her, ‘I am he, the one who is speaking to you.’
27 Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, ‘What do you want?’ or, ‘Why are you speaking with her?’ 28Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, 29‘Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?’ 30They left the city and were on their way to him. 31Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, ‘Rabbi, eat something.’ 32But he said to them, ‘I have food to eat that you do not know about.’ 33So the disciples said to one another, ‘Surely no one has brought him something to eat?’ 34Jesus said to them, ‘My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. 35Do you not say, “Four months more, then comes the harvest”? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. 36The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. 37For here the saying holds true, “One sows and another reaps.” 38I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.’ 39Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, ‘He told me everything I have ever done.’ 40So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. 41And many more believed because of his word. 42They said to the woman, ‘It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.’

What moves, motivates, enthralls, engages, and generally affects us more than anything? What convinces, persuades, perplexes, challenges, and frustrates us most? Words.

Granted, there are, among us, those who are mostly unaffected by words, but more so by actions. And we all strive to strike a balance between the two.

There is an inherent danger in swinging too far in one or the other direction. When we are too caught up in words, we lose the sense of what it means to put actions behind the words, and when we are too involved in DOING things – be they all noble and worthwhile, we can lose the perspective gained by examination and reflection provided by words.

I remember sitting in classes in college, and I remember sometimes lively discussions, engaging professors, and challenging classmates. But the most significant events – the most powerfully moving moments I remember about those four years were in the midst of the conversations I had with my roommates, usually too late at night, and too far off the subject we were supposed to be studying, but that’s another story. The conversations would sometimes go on for days or weeks, stopping and then picking back up several times over that time. As we thought of new issues related to the subject, or questions arose that we’d not thought of before, the thread of the conversation continued. To some degree, they are still going on today. When we got together in Louisville Christmas before last, there were a couple of times when all it took was a single comment, and the conversation that we began back in 1983 picked right back up.

The same goes for seminary. I remember being even more enthralled in the classes than I had been in college – we were studying the stuff of LIFE. We were learning about and reflecting on exactly what it meant for faith and life to intersect … more often than not, we ended up finding that it’s not so much an intersection as a shared lane, depending on how you approach it.

While the subject matter in class was different from those in college, the most significant moments in seminary again came in the form of conversations, and not necessarily conversations in a classroom, but in an apartment, or in the library, or the cafeteria, or the post office. There used to be a couple of bulletin boards, that were a kind of no-mans’ land. They were primarily used to post notes about stuff you wanted to sell, or buy, or apartments for rent, or looking for a roommate signs, that sort of thing.

But they were also an open forum. They were the precursor to the internet chat rooms we have today. People would post letters, or messages, intentionally leaving room for people to post replies – or even if they didn’t leave room, people would find a space to jot down some sort of response.

It used to be one of my favorite pastimes: going to check my mail, and stopping to read the latest post. There were some pretty significant events noted on those boards. A lifelong friend of mine, also a student at the seminary, announced that he was homosexual, and that he was leaving seminary. People would post accusations and counter-accusations, others would throw in a comment to try to make light of a situation, and others would then jump on THAT person for not taking things seriously enough.

Southern at the time was a relatively healthy mix of views and ideas, of thoughtful opinions and interpretations of the usual hot-button issues, along with a growing number of stridently closed individuals who would in the end strengthen their grip on the institution to the point where the interchange of ideas is mostly in one direction: from the administration to the student. That is probably an unfair statement. But comparing the then and now is to compare two institutions with radically different approaches … and to some degree, objectives.

There are moments we savor for what has happened in them. Moments where we are caught up in what is being done – in the action of the moment -- that leaves a lasting impact. Building a house for someone, if you’ve ever been involved in a habitat for humanity project, that can be a life-imprinting event. If you’ve ever been involved in disaster relief, that can be as well. If you’ve ever been involved in saving someone’s life, or in averting an accident, things like that don’t happen and then fade quickly into memory. YOUR life is changed, not only the life of the other person.

We have a little of both in the passage today.

The words spoken at the well, the conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman hold some of those first moments, where the sparking of ideas and the point-counterpoint of the questions and answers engage the Samaritan woman’s mind as well as our own.

What’s the difference between the Samaritans and the Jews? Why does one claim Jerusalem’s temple as ‘the’ place to worship, while the other claims Mount Gerizim, next to where they were carrying on the conversation, as ‘the’ place? Those were questions SHE raised then.

Christ’s response to her then and to us now is the same. The time is coming when it won’t matter so much WHERE you worship, as much as it will matter that you worship in Spirit and in Truth. We can become so wrapped up in the formalities of worship, can’t we? Jesus was saying it’s not about the formalities; it’s about where your hearts are. it’s not about how you sing, or if you follow a set pattern, it’s not about how it looks to others, it is about US – YOU and ME being in communion with each other. THAT is what it’s about. If you’re not in communion with me inside your heart, what difference does it make which four walls you stand inside of on any given Sunday?

The conversation continues, and what results is action. That happens today even as it did nearly two thousand years ago in Samaria. Jesus never engaged someone in conversation to have them walk away unchanged, somehow unaffected, or ignorant of the significance of what just took place.

In this case, after Jesus tells the Samaritan woman who she really is – confronts her, as it were, with her true self, she is compelled to run into town and tell her neighbors and the rest of the townspeople who she’s been talking to at the well.

THEIR response, in turn, is to be … drawn out to HIM. There’s always the possibility that it happened to be a slow day in town – nothing showing on TV, all of it reruns … but it’s also true that the story the woman at the well was sharing was pretty … compelling … we are so easily intrigued by people who can tell us things about ourselves that sometimes even WE are afraid to admit… I wonder how many of the people who ran out to meet Jesus were approaching him thinking “there’s no WAY he’ll be able to guess so-and-so about me.”

And yet, Paul tells us there will come a day when all our secret thoughts will be shouted from the mountaintops… for all to hear.

A little unsettling isn’t it?

I wonder how many of the other townspeople continued their conversations with Jesus around that same well over the next two days.

How many looked him in the eyes and realized they were looking into the face of an infinitely compassionate God, who SO wanted to be a part of their lives that he came to earth to live among them … how many hearts sang back when they heard the melody of God’s voice singing to them by name across the way?

How many of us have let the thread of our conversation with the Savior … drop for far too long? How long has it been since we engaged in the conversation that is our working out our salvation with fear and trembling? How long has it been since we raised that question that has been on our mind with our fellow pilgrims?

There’s room at the well for all of us.

Let’s pray.