Sermon - Rev. Judith Perry

What was looking nasty last Sunday is now yet another war. All the cries and prayers for peace cannot stop the leaders of the USA, Israel or Iran and their allies. 

I suppose that it will be addressed in pulpits around the world, this Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The messages will differ. 

Believe me, the president of the United States is not divinely appointed. 

I am not going there this morning. Besides I hardly ever address the sinful foibles of politics from the pulpit, as you know. 

My task is to address you all, today, as we are more than distraught with the men, mostly men, who dominate our fragile world.  

Let us look more closely into the passage, which Paul read, which speaks to each of us of encountering Christ where you might least expect, for instance, by a well, doing one’s daily chores. 

When we think about it, we come to realize that the evangelists may have needed editors and fact checkers. 

But that is not how it was.  Facts never got in the way of a good story. 

So, in this passage we have Samaritans. Their ancestors were left behind to fend for themselves when the citizens of Jerusalem were exiled. 

When the descendants of those citizens returned, they rebuilt Jerusalem and established a hierarchal system around the focus of the rebuilt temple. 

The Samaritans were shunned, and they continued to worship at altars built at significant places in the countryside as had happened in the past before the temple cult. 

They were confined to a region called Samaria and were considered to be not quite Hebrew enough to be acceptable. It was a racist policy. But they spoke the same language and worshipped the same God. 

If Jesus and his group had anything to do with the despised Samaritans, then that would have given the Jewish Temple authorities a lot of ammunition. But it is never mentioned. 

In this passage they stop by a Samaritan “city”, well really a small town. The gang goes into the settlement to buy some take-out. That would have been a major transgression, being in a Samaritan settlement 

Later we read that they all stayed there for a few days. In reality the Jews never had any truck with the Samaritans. So, there are some interesting twists to this story. 

Now about the woman who goes unescorted to the town well, and there is this Jew sitting there alone. Then comes the conversation, recorded somewhere, somehow, so we would know exactly what was said. 

Even the disciples admonish him for speaking to a woman. It just was not done. Social impropriety! 

But the story isn’t about the woman, her circumstances, or about the Samaritans. It is about you, man or woman, you are the one unexpectedly meeting, encountering the Christ, the Divine Essence. 

It’s all about you and me. We are not followers of Jesus because we have been told scripture stories. We are followers because His presence changes our living, our lives. 

We encounter this living presence, some only that precious one time, some a few. The story is about unexpectedly encountering the Divine. 

The passage starts fairly mundane. Jesus asks for water which surprises the woman who asks him how come he is asking her when he is a Jew and she is Samaritan. They normally don’t have anything to do with each other.  

She points this out. Besides she thinks that he doesn’t know her and being a strange man he shouldn’t be addressing her at all. 

Mundane, but these encounters can only happen in our ordinary lives. 

It is like Jesus is talking in riddles about the water, but we humans only have a concrete language, and God can only reach us in metaphors, word pictures. 

So, Jesus says, “You don’t realise what God is willing to give you, or who it is who is asking you for a drink. If you did, you’d be asking me to give you a drink, and I would have offered you pure living water.” 

So, then the woman replies, “Mister, this is a deep well and you don’t even have a bucket. Where do you suppose you’re going to get this living water?  

This well was given to us by our ancestor Jacob. He drank from it himself, and so did his family and his livestock.  

You’re not making yourself out to be a better man than Jacob are you?” 

Jesus says, “You can drink this water all you like, but it won’t quench your thirst for long.  

But everyone who drinks the water I give them will never be thirsty again. For them, the water I will give will become a permanent spring within, an overflowing source of life without limit.” 

“O please Mister,” said the woman, “give me some of this water so that I won’t keep getting thirsty and having to trudge out here to draw water.” 

Then Jesus addresses her marital status, or lack there of, and she realizes that this is no ordinary man, just as we realize that some ordinary event or thought suddenly becomes extraordinary, tinged with an encounter with God when we least expected it. 

It is interesting how this is often connected with water.  

Some people have told me of how they had a revelation whilst washing the dishes. Often when we wash, we concentrate on the action and the hamster wheel of our thoughts slows down, and God can get an edge in. 

It doesn’t happen when you load a dishwasher. It happens when we get our hands wet. 

A younger woman once recounted to me of how one morning earlier that week when she was in the shower, she suddenly felt the presence of God.  

She was shocked and told the entity, revelation, Christ-like encounter, to get out, because she was naked. It was that real. She was emphatic, “You can’t come in here.” 

When she recounted her experience a few days later, she realized both the ludicrous and the momentousness, and the reality beyond her limited experience. 

The Divine that we encounter is the Ground of all our being, but we can only understand it in human terms as in living water that washes our souls and slakes our thirst for the ineffable beyond our imagination. 

Each of us is that woman at the well, questioning, challenging, somewhat disreputable, with a past, and a future that will never be the same. 

So then let us be stirred up each day to encounter Christ and be caught up in the Divine plan for our living and that of our surrounding world. 

Even so, come Lord Jesus.