The Reverend John E. McGinn, Rector
Saint John’s Episcopal Church
Sandwich, Massachusetts 02563
February 24, 2008
3 Lent
The sermon today is taken
from the Gospel according to John, chapter 4, verses 5-26 and 39-42.
In 1971, I had a roommate in
Viet Nam who was from the south. He was
a graduate of Tulane University and had received his chemical engineering
degree there. Roger was quite the
fellow, except one of the things that he didn’t understand, nor did he want to
know, was anything about religion. From
time to time when I would come back from the chapel on base, I would talk to
him about some of the things that the chaplain had said. And finally, he would say to me, “John, I
really do not like that religion stuff.
Please don’t talk to me.” You
know how things are in this world...a lot of times it’s hard to talk religion
and politics with other people. My
roommate really wanted nothing to do with that, as he called it, “Jesus
stuff.”
My roommate’s job was an
interesting one. He traveled throughout
South Viet Nam. His job was to go to
different bases and to look at the ordnances and at the arms that had been
found by American troops. His testing of
those new arms and those new rounds were important to the war efforts. On one of his trips his helicopter was hit by
a shell, and it caused his engine to give out and the helicopter crashed. A good thing is that the pilot was a good one
and he got the helicopter almost to the ground before it fell, and my friend,
Roger, was okay.
I remember when Roger came
back to the room. He said to me as he
sat there…and he was still trembling after all this experience…he said to me,
“Now, John, I want to hear more about God.”
There are stories in the
Bible of people who met Jesus and then changed their ways. And such is the story of the woman this
morning at the well. I think we need to
know, first of all, that this story is set in a place called Samaria. You are probably familiar with the prejudices
that Jews have against Samaritans. The
Samaritans were a group of Jews from Province of Samaria who had intermarried
with foreigners. The Jews considered
Samaritans as social outcasts, untouchables, racially inferior practicing a
false religion. Both claimed to be true
descendants of the Nation of Israel.
Samaritans descended from the
northern kingdom of Israel while the Jews descended from the southern kingdom
of Judea. The Jews believed Jerusalem
was the only true place of worship, while the Samaritans located the true place
of worship as Mt. Gerizim in 128 B.C.
The Jews destroyed the Samaritan temple at Mt. Gerizim.
Any close physical contact
with a Samaritan - drinking water from a common bucket, eating a meal together
- would make a Jew ceremonially unclean.
This meant they were unable to participate in temple worship for a
period of time, and the hostility between the two groups was so great that
Jewish travelers usually chose not to travel to the area where the Samaritans
lived. They would not even talk to each
other. The relationship between the Jews
and Samaritans was very similar to the relationship between Jews and
Palestinians today.
The Pharisee in a prayer
would say, “I thank God that I am not the woman, gentile or Samaritan, and
would pray that the Samaritans not be included in the resurrection. Now, this is the background of this morning’s
gospel story.
Jesus and his disciples had
been traveling for some distance, and he is tired and thirsty. His disciples had gone into town to buy food,
and Jesus sits down by a well known as Jacob’s well. A Samaritan woman comes to the well to draw
water. Jesus says to her, “Would you
give me a drink?”
Here we go again. There were not only strict rules about Jews
and Samaritans talking to one another.
There were also rules about men and women conversing. The Samaritan women is surprised and somewhat
rude. She said to Jesus, “You are a Jew
and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you
ask me for a drink?”
Can’t we all get along? If there were some way to remove blind hatred
from relationships, we could solve most of the world’s problems. Jews and Arabs, militant Islamists and the
people of the west. Even in our own
country - blacks and whites, Anglos and Latinos, straight and gay. The list goes on and on and on. We may not agree with one another. We may not approve of one another, but must
we hate? In the providence of God it is
probably not accidental that our story for this morning is set in Samaria.
The greatest problem, I
think, in our world today is not global warming or poverty. The greatest problem in our world is the
animosity between different groups of people.
Jesus reached out to the
Samaritan woman, and that’s the second thing I want us to really see this
morning. When she somewhat curtly turns
aside his request for water, Jesus turns a seemingly chance encounter into an
evangelistic opportunity. And Jesus says
to her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asked you for a drink,
you would have asked him and you would have given him living water.”
And this is a significant
statement. Jesus is offering the gift of
grace to the Samaritan woman. It is
clear that Jesus targets his ministry at Jews, and Jews alone. In Matthew 15, verse 24, Jesus says
specifically, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” Yet here Jesus was offering the gift of
living water to a Samaritan woman. Jesus
explains to her that if you drink this living water, you will never be thirsty
again.
Then the situation gets even
more remarkable. She responds to his
offer, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep
coming here to draw water.” And Jesus
says to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” Oh, do we have a problem? “I have no husband,” she replies. And Jesus says to her, “You are right when
you say you have no husband. The fact is that you have had five husbands, and
the man you have now is not your husband; and what you have just said is quite
true.” And “Sir,” the woman says, “I can
see you are a prophet.”
Jesus was a prophet alright,
but he was different from any other prophet she would ever encounter. He was breaking all the cultural taboos. Jesus was reaching out to a woman, a
Samaritan woman, a Samaritan woman who had been married five times, and who was
now living with a man who was not her husband.
And he offers her grace.
This is startling even to
this day. Not what it says about Jesus,
but what it says about us. How did we as
a faith community seem to miss the gospel so completely? How did we become so judgmental towards others? And how did we allow ourselves to shut out
those of whom we disapproved when time and time again Jesus did exactly the
opposite? What is wrong with us that we
cannot love those for whom Jesus died?
Now I know someone, a good
friend of mine, who adopted a child through an organization called ASK. A-S-K:
Adopt Special Kids. Part of the
adoption process included filling out a questionnaire and checking yes or no to one’s willingness to adopt babies that
had been born addicted, terminally ill, with physical defects or mental
disabilities.
My friend and her husband had
checked down the list. You know too,
it’s like an adoptive parent - you know that God is like an adoptive parent who
says, ‘Sure, I’ll take the kids who are addicted or terminal. I’ll pick all the retarded kids; and of
course the sadists, the selfish ones, the liars. I choose them. I choose the disobedient ones, the terrified
ones, the self-indulged ones and the trouble-makers; the damaged ones and the
unlovable ones. In love, I choose them
all. I will be a parent to them all. I
will end their separation and bring them home.
That’s what I think the
gospel is about. That’s what the good
news is. God’s grace is available to
everyone. To the immoral and the amoral,
to the Arab and the Jew, to the native and to the illegal immigrant, to gay and
straight, to black and brown and yellow and white. It is the good news of the gospel.
In Southington, Connecticut,
I went with a parishioner to the New Britain superior court. I stood there in court beside a member of my
congregation - an individual who had been out with the boys one night and had
too much to drink. As he was driving
home on the rain-soaked streets through the dense fog, he turned a corner a
heard a sickening clash of metal and breaking glass. Two young people lay dead. They had been thrown from their
motorcycle. My parishioner was charged
with manslaughter and driving under the influence.
He sat in court trembling
after days of testimony. The judge was
about to speak. It could mean years of
prison, loss of job, poverty for his family.
The judge faltered. The test for
drunkenness had not been properly done.
The motorcycle had no proper lights. The jury was ordered to render a
not-guilty verdict. And all that was ominous
and foreboding was now going. He was a
free man. The court declared him not
guilty. His family kissed him - they
could go on with their life - all because the court, the judge, had declared
him innocent.
Now maybe this story and the
way it ended angers you because you hurt over those young people who were
killed. But know this: you and I are that man; his story is our
story. We are the sinner who finds
himself in the presence of God, the eternal judge. You see, not only are we blinded by our
prejudices toward people, like the Samaritan woman with her unseemly lifestyle;
we are also blinded to the fact that we are the Samaritan woman. We too have fallen short at the grace of God,
but the hand of grace is reached out to us as well.
And, you know, this story in
the gospel is really a story of a changed life.
You may remember how the story ends.
Jesus’ disciples return and are surprised to find Jesus talking with a woman. But no one asks what do you want - or - why
are you talking with him? Then leaving
her water jar, the woman goes back to the town and says to the people, “Come,
see a man who told me everything I ever did.
Could this be the Messiah?” And
the gospel of John tells us that the people came out of the town and made their
way toward Jesus.
And John concludes this story
of the Samaritan woman like this: Many
of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s
testimony. “He told me everything I ever
did.” So when the Samaritans came to
Jesus, he urged them to stay with him, and he stayed two days. And because of Jesus’ words, many more became
believers. They said to the woman, “We
no longer believe just because of what you said. Now we have heard for ourselves, and we know
that this man really is the Savior of the world.”
What a witness…a Samaritan woman with a questionable
lifestyle becomes a recipient of God’s grace.
And now she is a vehicle of grace to guide others to Jesus. After her encounter with Jesus, the Samaritan
woman passed the test for being an effective Christian witness. I think the question for this morning is: In light of
God’s great love for all people, can you and I be witnesses?
Amen