What can we say March 12? Lent 3

    Exodus 17:1-7. What a roomy text for Lent! A test in the wilderness, the hard-to-beat question, “Is the Lord among us or not?” Wryly I may take note that it’s the wilderness of Sin, not sin – observing though the sin in Sin. Notice the verbs: they camped, quarreled, thirsted, complained. God’s reply? Not judgment, but mercy. Is the Lord among the quarrellers and complainers? Yes, of course. So the presence is a matter of realization, or embodying, or not deflecting, shoving away?

   This business of demanding proof should draw many people in. Anselm, Aquinas and a host of brilliant people have devised proofs for God’s existence. Logic can’t bend the will, or the heart though. As we’ll see in Philippians 2, Jesus ‘proved’ God by utterly ungodlike actions:  humbling, debased, being abused and killed. There. That’s the only proof you get. 

   As in our Gospel reading’s woman at the well, the people are thirsty – and then they also are thirsty. This story figured prominently in the rest of the Bible. Psalms 81 and 95 remember and issue dire warnings based on it. “O that you would listen to me, Israel!  Do not be stubborn as you were at Meribah.” As C.H. Spurgeon put it, “Let the example of that unhappy generation serve as a beacon to you; do not repeat the offenses which have already more than enough provoked the Lord.”

   Romans 5:1-11 is a rich text, but I’ll veer from preaching on it, given the two dramatic narratives in this week’s readings. I would note that Paul, taking a deep breath after chapters 1 thru 4, exclaims “Therefore we have peace.” Our people will breathe relief – until we read on to be informed that this peculiar peace leads to suffering (verse 3). 

 I think of Mother Maria of Paris, St. Maria now, the Latvian woman killed by the Nazis for her labors in the French resistance, who said “It would be a great lie to tell those who are searching: ‘Go to church, because there you will find peace.’ The opposite is true. The Church tells those who are at peace and asleep: ‘Go to church, because there you will feel real anguish for your sin and the world’s sin. There you will feel an insatiable hunger for Christ’s truth. There, instead of becoming lukewarm, you’ll be set on fire; instead of being pacified, you’ll become alarmed; instead of learning the wisdom of this world, you will become fools for Christ.”

   And I shy away from Paul’s confident “Hope does not disappoint.” Sure it does. And I admire Kate Bowler’s interesting musing: “Hope for the future feels like a kind of arsenic that needs to be carefully administered or it can poison the sacred work of living in the present.” Ponder, ponder, ponder this…

   John 4:5-42. Such a vivid scene, so much drama. The little details dig us deeply into an interpersonal encounter. It’s noon. High sun; it’s hot, the shadows are sharp. She’s tired – midday? Did she go on noon so as to avoid the other women who typically went early morning or late afternoon? The well – 135 feet deep, visitable today, and you can drink from it! – was tantalizingly “near the plot of ground Jacob gave Joseph.” Not on, but near… Here’s a sermon I preached shortly after visiting – and drinking from that well!

   The setup verse (4:4) says Jesus “had to pass through Samaria.” Hardly: this is the hilly, rocky, more dangerous route – even today, situated as it is on the West Bank. This Greek word, deî, is pregnant with a sense of divine necessity. He had to, as it his missional focus required him to go there.

   Samaritans were actually Jewish, but attached to Mt. Gerizim instead of Mt. Zion, and to the Torah but not the Prophets (and not liking the prophets makes them like lots of people we preach to!!!). So close to Judaism – and yet so far. What is it in human nature that makes us most hostile toward the people who are just barely different from us? There’s the hilarious (and crass) scene in The Life of Brian (not for the sermon, just for the preacher’s fun) where the People’s Front of Judea explain “the only people we hate more than the Romans are the Judea People’s Front”…

   She’s despised by Mt. Zionish Jewish guys like Jesus. But this woman is despised even within her own despised group! She is pitiably alone, as in lonely, ostracized. Jesus encounters her – and he too is alone. He becomes what she is. He’s alone, and thirsty, like she is.

   I love David Ford's ruminations (in his great new commentary on John): "Does the woman approach the well provocatively or nonchalantly? Does she project shame, modesty, or sexual availability? What tone of voice does she first use to Jesus - polite, ironic, flirtatious? Does she understand Jesus's request for water as a sexual advance? Is her response to Jeus's offer one of genuine astonishment and openness, ironic dismissal, or wistful longing?" He's so on point on her marital history: "There could have been a mixture of divorces and bereavements. Yet, whatever the truth, a life shot through with disappointment, pain, and grief is suggested."

   He doesn’t judge, or teach a lesson, or even give her water. He asks her to do something for him. Jean Vanier explains, “Jesus is showing us how to approach people who are broken and wounded: not as someone superior, from ‘above,’ but humbly, from ‘below,’ like a beggar. Such people who are already ashamed of themselves do not need someone who will make them even more ashamed, but someone who will give them hope and reveal to them that they have value.”

   Once there was a boy born with an acute case of cerebral palsy who was treated terribly as a young child.  He was sent to another home where his mother noticed how he watched Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.  She believed Mister Rogers was keeping her son alive.  Some big foundation worked it out for Mister Rogers to visit this boy, and when he did, Mister Rogers asked, “Would you pray for me?”  The boy was thunderstruck because nobody had ever asked him for anything.  He was the object of prayer, not the one to pray for Mr. Rogers.  But now he prays for Mister Rogers and he doesn’t want to die anymore.  Tom Junod witnessed this and privately he congratulated Mister Rogers for being so smart.  But Mister Rogers didn’t know what he meant.  He really wanted the boy’s prayers, saying, “I think that anyone who’s gone through challenges like that must be very close to God.”

    This Samaritan woman does not seem or feel close to God though. Can we hear this woman’s pain? “I have no husband.” She’s not lying, or covering up; it’s a lament, one we all sense in the gut. How many negative images has she been bombarded with, and how much self-recrimination does she tote around in her head? The Bible doesn’t tell us her name – par for the course. She didn’t matter much to anybody else back then – except Jesus, who surely did learn her name, even if John forgot to tell us.

   I’ll guarantee you Jesus asked for and remembered her name. He knew her entire life story, one she’d prefer to cloak. And yet he’s not repulsed. Don’t we all long for such a friend, who can bear our entire, true story, and not shrink back? This is faith, I think, exploring the truth about our story, and experiencing the presence, the mercy. As Vanier puts it, “Jesus invites her, and each one of us, to revisit our past in truth: not just to analyze it or remain trapped in it, but to be liberated from its hold.”

   Jesus knows all about us, but never with a Gotcha! I am moved by Gerhard Lohfink’s vision of final judgment: “When we encounter God in death, we will for the first time recognize with full clarity who we really are. God will have no need to sit in judgment on us, to harangue us. In our encounter with the holy God our eyes will be opened to behold our own selves. We ourselves will judge and condemn the evil in ourselves…” He adds that those we’ve hurt or not helped may also stand before us and stare – becoming our judges! My knees buckle at such the prospect of such an “encounter with the truth about God, about others, about the world, and about ourselves.” But Lohfink says we should rejoice, because as Jesus said “You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Only then will we grasp the depth of God’s mercy – and only then can the healing that will be eternity begin.

  She is exposed, she is loved – and then she is filled, refreshed, washed with this incredible living water that Jesus is. Double entendres everywhere: the well is “deep,” as in the depths of her soul, and where Jesus is taking her. Wink, wink as you preach.  

    In my book, Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week, I explore some medieval notions of being hungry and thirsty for the Eucharist – and then Jesus’ own hunger and thirst.  Julian of Norwich wrote that “Jesus will be thirsty until the last soul is saved and joins him in his bliss; his thirst is to have us drawn into him.”  And Bernard of Clairvaux: “My penitence, my salvation, are His food. I myself am His food. I am chewed as I am reproved by Him; I am swallowed as I am taught; I am digested as I am changed; I am assimilated as I am transformed; I am made one as I am conformed to him.”