John 4:5-42 "We All Thirst For Something"

You are welcome to use parts of this sermon, but if you do, please attribute it properly!

         The parents of a young boy, who was maybe five or six years old, had just put him to bed one evening.  All the nighttime rituals had been dutifully done.  Prayers had been said.  The closet had been double checked for possible monsters hiding amongst the dirty laundry, and final drinks of water had been offered and received. Mom and Dad had just settled down for a quiet evening. 

         However, five minutes later, the following conversation began from the bedroom;

         "Da-ad...."

         "What?"

         "I’m thirsty. Can you bring me a drink of water?"

         "No. You had your drink of water. Now it’s lights out."

         Five minutes later: "Da-aaaad....."

         "WHAT?"

         "I’m THIRSTY. Can I pleeeease have a drink of water??"

         This exchange went on for quite some time until the father spouted:

         "I told you NO! Now, if you ask again, I’ll have to spank you!!"

         The little boy was persistent.  Five minutes later......"Daaaa-aaaad....."

         "WHAT!"

         "When you come in to spank me, can you bring me a drink of water?"

         We all thirst for something.  And it was no different for Jesus and the Samaritan woman he met at the well in Sychar in Samaria. 

         Now, it is important to understand that, if at all possible, Jews bypassed the country of Samaria, feeling it was better – purer – to travel around the outcast nation and its marginalized population rather than pass through it – even if it meant extra days on the road.

         You see, a longstanding – about 800 years actually – and deep rift existed between Jews and Samaritans.  Its basis was pretty simple.  The Jews believed that God has chosen them and, therefore, had summarily rejected the people of Samaria.  Samaritans, however, did not think it was quite that cut-and-dry.

         The source of the disagreement was two-fold.  First, the two ethnic groups disagreed on exactly where the One True God they both worshipped actually lived – on the Temple Mount as the Jews believed or on Mount Gezerim as was the Samaritan tradition.          Second, Jews considered Samaritans to be traitors because the latter had assimilated themselves into Assyrian culture during a period of exile through intermarriage with their conquerors.  It was a question of purity.  In short, from the Jewish perspective, hanging out with Samaritans was a social and religious taboo, and that is the historical context for our story today.

         Maybe it was because the Pharisees were stirring up the pot too much for comfort as they made their case against Jesus, or maybe it was because Jesus did not take religious and social taboos all that seriously.  We do not know for sure, but we do know that Jesus decided to leave Judea and return to Galilee, and he did not need a GPS to know that the most direct route was right through Samaria.

         So here we find Jesus, sitting by the deep well where his forbears, Jacob’s family, had once drawn water an eon before. A bright noonday sun was beating down on our rabbi.  It was hot, and he was thirsty. 

         Not only that; his feet were sore from walking.  His sweat formed little rivulets through the dust on his neck and his arms. At the moment, he was alone because his disciples had gone to the market to buy provisions – goat cheese, peasant bread, and a jug of wine – for a good old-fashioned and well-deserved picnic lunch. 

         The well where he sat was deep, and Jesus had a problem.  He had no water pot, no cup, no way of reaching the cool clear refreshing stream that ran beneath the earth and bubbled up here in this ancient well.  Jesus needed someone to help him – which, in most villages, would have been pretty unlikely because no one would have been caught out in the noontime sun.  Women filled their jugs and water pots in the cool of the morning or evening.  Noon was the time to seek shelter in the shade.

         However, in this village, someone did come to the well at noon, an unnamed woman marginalized by her own community.  She was unwelcome at the well in the cooler hours of the day, and yet it was this woman who ended up having the longest recorded conversation with Jesus in all of the Gospels. 

         It was this woman who, in this particular Gospel of John, was the first one to proclaim – albeit as a question - that Jesus was the Messiah. In short, she was the first evangelist, the first bearer of the Good News that the Anointed One was here – at Jacob’s well – in the little backwater town of Sychar – in Samaria, no less.

         Maybe Jesus’ thirst was really getting to him – or maybe, again, he just did not take religious and social taboos all that seriously, but he asked the woman for a drink of water and, in doing so, broke all the rules of polite convention: First, Jews did not speak to Samaritans.  Second, men did not speak to women in public without their husbands present.  And third, an upstanding young rabbi building a reputation did not speak to a woman of such questionable background. 

         In a nutshell, the unnamed woman at the well hailed from the wrong place; she was the wrong gender, and, at first glance, at least, she had lived the wrong life. One would think that in three strikes she would be out, but instead….

         “Give me a drink of water,” Jesus asked, thereby initiating a conversation.

         Her response was flip.  “You are a Jew, and I am a Samaritan. Don’t play with me.  How can you ask me for a drink?”

         “Oh, if you only knew – knew about God,” he replied, “knew about the message that I preach, knew about the life-giving water that offers hope to dry souls and love to arid, burned out hearts.”

         Taking it all in, she chose to continue to banter with him.  “You don’t have a bucket.  How could you possibly get that special water?”

         “The water in this well will run dry some day, you know,” he reminded her.  “But the water of God will be like a clear, refreshing shower as it will wash over you always.”

         Perhaps it was the image of a dry soul or an arid burned out heart or even the thought of a clear refreshing shower. Who knows?  But the woman at the well got it (in a way, by the by, that Nicodemus, whom we heard about last week, never seemed to). “Oh!  Sir!” she cried.  “Give me that water, so I will never be thirsty again.”

         You know, the story might have ended there.  After all, a point has been made, and a good one at that – all about Jesus and that living water.  However, the Gospel writer chooses to continue the narrative.

         And so a delightful dialogue follows about an array of husbands and a confession that the woman’s relationship with her current partner is more the common law type than anything legally binding.  And I must say that traditionally we have made some pretty heady presumptions about the woman at the well here.  Five husbands?  Living with a sixth?  Obviously a case of loose morals!

         But, have you ever thought that maybe she had a different history?  Maybe she was just old and had outlived her five husbands. Or – “maybe her five husbands had found her lacking, unsuitable, unlovely, unfit for their desires, and they simply rid themselves of responsibility and relationship.”  After all, the divorce laws certainly favored men, as one would expect in a patriarchal culture. (Linda McKinnish Bridges)  It is interesting to be aware of the assumptions we make and the boundaries we create because of those assumptions.

         At any rate, what follows is, first, a conversation about the origins of the rift between Jews and Samaritans and then more theology - and then even more theology when the disciples return with the picnic food to find – horror of horrors – what does he think he is doing:  to find their rabbi in the midst of spirited and spirit-filled conversation with a female outcast.         

         And in the midst of the disciples’ disapproval and Jesus’ theological explanation for his astounding behavior, the unnamed but now transformed woman at the well runs off, declaring what no one else in this Gospel at least has had the wherewithal, the courage, or the gumption to declare – albeit she does it in the form of a question:  “This man couldn’t be the Messiah, could he?” And we – thanks to twenty/twenty hindsight – can say confidently and affirmatively:  “Of course he is.”

         What a wonderful story!  And it all happened because Jesus asked a woman who was forced to be out and about in the noonday heat, in a foreign country where he was unwelcome, for a drink of water. 

         We all thirst for something.  And so the quite obvious question for us today is this:  What that YOU are thirsting for on this your Lenten journey?

         Do you thirst for the dismantling of the boundaries that separate us one from another, for the tearing down of walls between us?  Do you thirst for courage enough to put aside social and perhaps religious taboos as Jesus and the unnamed woman did? 

Like the Samaritan woman at the well who found that Jews were not as bad as she had thought they were, do you thirst for the clarity of conscience to finally see beyond rich and poor, gay and straight, man and woman even - and envision instead a wonderfully diverse humanity, all of us made in God’s image, all of us beloved sons and daughters of the Holy One?  Is that what you thirst for?

         Or do you thirst for the assurance that you are accepted in spite of who you are and what your past might have been?  Like the Samaritan woman at the well, do you thirst to experience what it feels like not to be an outcast, not to be marginalized, not to be thought of first off as stupid or fat or bald or old, but rather to be understood as someone with unique gifts to share with a family or a church community?  Is that what you thirst for?

         Or do you thirst for some sort of redemption, for a hidden strength to turn aside from the old wells in your life that have long since gone dry, leaving you cracked and broken and desolate?  Wells of addiction…Wells of failed marriages…Wells of busyness and not having enough time…Wells of living in the past or the future but never in the present moment? 

Like the Samaritan woman at the well, do you thirst to taste the Living Water of which Jesus spoke, and, perhaps more importantly, do you thirst for the humility to ask for it, pray for it?  Is that what you thirst for?

         Or do you thirst to recognize in a way you never really have before that Jesus is the Messiah, the long awaited one to put you right with God? Like the Samaritan woman at the well, do you thirst for the wherewithal, the courage, and the gumption to proclaim – even if it is in the form of a question as she did - that Jesus is the one who embodies all that God wants humans like you and me to be?  Is that what you thirst for?

         We all thirst for something.  What is it that YOU thirst for on this your Lenten journey?

         When I returned from the Southwest last fall, I read a book entitled House of Rain.  It was about the constantly migrating Native American tribes in that part of the country. The amazing thing about these clans and families was that not only, for seemingly no reason, would they pick up and move, leaving everything behind in their cliff dwellings, but two or three hundred years later, a civilization would be built again on the same site. 

         The author, Craig Childs, speculated that the tribes moved to find water.  And the way they knew that they needed to migrate was because their healers and shamans would go deep, deep, deep into the recesses of the cliff dwellings where they resided to a place where only the most holy among them could go, and there in the dark they would monitor the drip, drip, drip of the groundwater.  When the dripping slowed to a certain point, though the surface water may have looked no different, they knew it was time to leave their home.

         We are in the middle of our Lenten journey now.  We are deep, deep, deep into our own wildernesses.  We are in the dark, and we are in search of the source of that Living Water of which Jesus spoke, water that has the potential to transform our lives even as it changes our perspectives.

         Perhaps like the woman at the well, we will meet Jesus in the noonday heat, and we will have a spirit-filled conversation, and we will thirst no more.  But don’t count on that scenario. 

         More likely, we will need to go deep to find water – like the healers and shamans in the Southwest. We will need to go deep into the dark, into ourselves, into our hearts (that most holy of all places in our body), there to discover – by the grace of God – the drip, drip, drip of Living Water. 

by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church, United Church of Christ