Feb 24 , 2008
3 Lent, John 4:5-42
I have to begin the sermon today with a disclaimer. In fact, the whole sermon may be a kind of disclaimer for what you can expect from the church. If you have come here today to learn something about God, well, you may have come to the wrong place. Oh we’ll talk about God here today, and we’ll tell stories. We’ll tell other people’s stories, and that’s just it. They will be their stories. Much of what we say here has to do with what other people, people we respect, people whose stories have given us direction....much of what we say here is about what other people came to know about God.
What we know about God, we come to know through our own life and experience.
For example, we hear in church about loving our neighbor, yes, but we come to know about loving our neighbor through the events of our lives, through caring, and being moved to action. The church can point us in the direction of love, can plant a seed that challenges us when we are torn between loving and turning away; but a profound, deep knowledge of what love is and what love looks like and feels like can only come from experience.
The same is true for all religious concepts. I can preach about sin until I am blue in the face, but in the end, we don’t understand sin until we feel the pain of having failed not only God or our neighbor, but ourselves. Only when our actions cause us pain does sin become a reality that moves us to seek a new way of living.
The church’s stories and teachings give us a background, a set of symbols and signs to watch for in our lives as our stories unfold. The story of the good samaritan, say, is a fine story, but it is just a good story until we are lying in some kind of a ditch bleeding, or until we cross a road to get involved in someone else’s trouble. The story of the rich young ruler who can’t bring himself to part with his riches in order to follow Jesus is a fine story. It haunts us and nudges us to ask questions about our own priorities. But it doesn’t become real until we are called on to give up something we think we can’t live without in order to serve the needs of another.
You can come here Sunday after Sunday and hear the story of the risen Christ, but it may be something as simple as a well placed, “I love you” that rescues you from the pit one day and makes a believer out of you.
I am convinced that what we learn about God and loving and discipleship we learn not in our worship, but in our lives. Our worship provides a context and a language for what we are learning “out there.” Our worship provides a way for us to offer our lives to God and to ask God’s blessings on our lives, but our most memorable encounters with God will mostly be out there, not in here.
If you are looking for evidence of God, close-up, first- hand encounters with the Holy One, chances are you will find the kind of solid ground of belief in the events of your own story.
I say these things to counter the notion, rampant among church folks that somehow, our lives are something to be gotten past in order to arrive at God; that somehow, we are supposed to be or become something called, “religious” and that that involves shifting our focus from ourselves to God. The story for which we were born, the story that will lead us to God is our own story.
In a way, that’s what happened for the Samaritan woman who met Jesus. We have this great tale in which Jesus has the longest conversation he has with anyone in all the gospels. Jesus is talking in what we recognize as religious symbol language......living water. We theologically astute church goers know something’s up there. He’s talking about more than water. And Jacob’s well. Here is Jesus seeking water from a well that is fabled to have delivered water to Jacob by simply bubbling its contents to the top when he was thirsty. No need for a bucket, and here is Jesus without a bucket. That has to mean something. And here is Jesus speaking to a woman; unheard of. And she’s a Samaritan. That must have something to do with the spread of the gospel. Here we have Jesus, preaching, proclaiming, filling the shoes of his ancestor, standing on a holy site, and what in all of this convinces the woman that he is someone special? “He told me everything I ever did,” says the woman. “This man knows my story.”
John’s gospel is full of stories like this one. Stories rich in layer upon layer of theological meaning and tradition. It is easy to begin to shift our gaze toward lofty heights as we try to take in what is being offered. It is worth remembering though, how John’s gospel began. Remember. In the beginning was the Word and the word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.....and the Word became flesh and lived among us. The thing to remember when we are tempted to separate the religious from the mundane, the Godly from the human, is that Godly and human are, and have always been inseparable. That is the beginning point.
Jesus not only knows the Samaritan woman’s story, he accepts her as she is. Her story doesn’t need any cleaning up. Her story is messy, it is human, it speaks of a life journey that has been over some bumps. Jesus knows her completely and he doesn’t turn away. It is interesting that when Jesus tells her all she has to do is ask and he will give her living water, she asks and the next thing that happens is that he tells her her story. How life giving it is to be really known and accepted. It wasn’t religion that changed her life that day. It was a stranger telling her he knew her deepest secrets and then treating her with respect. She went running off to tell her friends and their lives were changed too, but not by her story we are told, rather by Jesus becoming a part of their stories.
I have been reading Krista Tippett's' book Speaking of Faith: Why Religion Matters and How to Talk About it. I would listen to her radio show, but it is aired on Sunday mornings and I’m usually busy. She has been interviewing people for many years, talking with them about their lives and their beliefs. When she started interviewing people about their faith, she says, “I did not invite people of faith to Pronounce. I asked then to trace the intersection of religious ideas with time and space and the color and complexity of real lives.” She says, “I was surprised by how listenable these conversations were, in dramatic contrast to the strident religious language of our public life. There is,” she says, ”a profound difference between hearing someone say this is the truth, and hearing someone say this is my truth. You can disagree with another person’s opinions; you can disagree with his doctrines; you can’t disagree with his experience.”
The season of Lent, more than any of our seasons, tries to lead us into our stories. The season assumes that some of what we find there, we wouldn’t want everyone know. And so we are given this story about the God who comes to live among us and help us get comfortable being honest about who we are. Not who we think we ought to be, or who we want to be, but with who we are right now. The God who was created into us in the beginning, and who is always there with us when the complexity of our lives intersects with the religious ideas that call us into this place.
Maybe the story whose telling will do us the most good this lenten season is our own. Maybe the story for us to ponder and meditate upon is the one we are living, the one where our complexities intersect with the religious ideas we share. Maybe the most important story for us is the one we think, or even hope no one else really knows, an idea we find out happily today to just not be the case.
Amen
JB
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