Fearless Witness: Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent A

This has been a challenging last few weeks for many of us, and this week has brought changes and challenges seemingly each and every hour. I don’t know about you all, but my head is spinning. While we had hoped to be able to bring you more information and formally launch our capital campaign, to strengthen the ability of this parish in its witness to the world. Instead, the changing situation regarding best practices in attempting to prevent the spread of COVID-19 have led us to curtail our gathering in person together. But we are blessed to be able to have this worship time together this week, regardless, whether in person or online.

And the readings we have today speak forcefully to the concerns of our time, and our sermon series on “Fearlessness” during our shared Lenten journey takes on new urgency.

Today, we start with hearing two stories about thirst. 

In our first reading from Exodus 17:1-7, the Israelites are stricken with thirst in the wilderness and complain violently to Moses, blaming God (and Moses, as God’s spokesman) for their plight. God responds by providing water from a rock that Moses strikes with his staff. 

In the gospel, from John 4:5-42, we hear a story that starts with Jesus admitting his thirst, and asking for a drink from a Samaritan woman he encounters at Jacob’s Well. This request initiates a conversation that leads to a multitude from an entire Samaritan town to believe in Jesus as Messiah. In doing so, these Samaritans thereby have their thirst quenched with living water, even as Jesus’s own people have trouble recognizing him as the fulfillment of prophecy.

The reading from Exodus this week is one of an Old Testament genre called “murmuring stories.” These are stories in which the people “murmur”—in our text, it is rendered as “quarreled,” but it seems that misses the flavor. “Murmuring against” someone is so much more suggestive of that tendency we all have to mutter just audibly enough to be heard, that passive-aggressive tactic that allows one to later deny that one has said anything at all. 

Murmuring of this type is filled with negativity, ingratitude, a simmering resentment and discontent, and is deadly as any plague. Here are the Israelites, freed from slavery in Egypt, moaning about how their every need isn’t being taken care of while they are traveling back to their homeland. And rather than take steps to care for each other, the people dare to blame God for their predicament, rather than remember that God is alongside them and all of us in our own trials in the wilderness. Their murmuring was a product of their fear, their feeling of being abandoned, their very real fear that they we vulnerable to suffering and possibly even death as they could not find any water to slake their thirst.

This story is a providential reminder of the power, the negative power, that fear and hopelessness can play in our lives, not just as individuals, but as a community. As we face a rapidly changing situation in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are called to remember that fear physiologically turns our attention inward, and narrows our field of vision in ways that are often harmful to us. Fear paralyzes us, making us feel adrift and alone in the wilderness, even when we are in the midst of a community who, if energized, can share the burdens and care for each other. The people’s reaction toward fear and anxiety is one way a people can respond to a crisis—but it’s not a very productive one. Let all with ears to hear, listen.

Our gospel tells a completely different story, however. We start off with a story about thirst that ends up being a pretext for Jesus’s life-changing encounter with the Samaritan woman. This story starts with reminding us of how human Jesus is: we hear that he is tired, and that he is thirsty. Jesus is tired from a long journey because he had decided to go back to Galilee, uninterested at furthering an alleged rivalry the Pharisees are dreaming up between Jesus and John for who is performing the most baptisms in a blatant attempt to sow division between their perceived rivals. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Divide and conquer. But Jesus refuses to play, so he decides to return home.

And along the way, he enters what was then considered enemy territory. The Samaritans and the Jews were themselves in opposition to each other. Although both descendants of Abraham, the Samaritans had intermarried with foreigners and developed a different system of worship—and Jews never let Samaritans forget that they considered the Samaritans as impure and less-than. So once again, just as our reading from Exodus appears in an “in-between place,” a place of vulnerability, so too does our gospel. Given our current situation right now, that reminder about vulnerability is a comfort to hold in our hearts as we consider this gospel message.

What a contrast with last week’s story about Nicodemus, though. Nicodemus was the ultimate insider, while this woman is the antithesis of him in almost every way. In a way, she is even bolder than Nicodemus, because she gives as good as she gets, and is as bold as he is hesitant. 

Jesus issues no condemnation for the narrative of her life that he has provided—which is a sign that there was nothing there to condemn. Contrary to what two thousand years of commentators have held, she is NOT a fallen woman. Women in that time and place—and indeed up until very recently—did not have the right to initiate divorce. That power belonged solely to men. An unmarried woman was in a vulnerable, life-or-death situation without male protection. So if she has had five husbands, it is because those five husbands either died, or more likely have used her and abandoned her. 

Indeed, even though she is a woman and a Samaritan, Jesus accepts her as an equal, as worthy of his time and attention as Nicodemus was. Once again we are reminded that the gospel of Christ is embedded with true equality and dignity for all people, no matter how much society may categorize and denigrate them. We are reminded that, in fact, this gospel is a gospel of liberation from all kinds of oppression—and the worst kind of oppression in anyone’s life is often the internal oppression of hopelessness, cynicism, and despair.

In her conversation with Jesus, we can specifically trace the arc the Samaritan woman’s understanding follows: from wariness (v. 9) to skepticism (v. 12) to acknowledgment (v. 19) to conversion and testimony (v. 29). She then becomes the model disciple and witness of John’s gospel thus far, and many in her town come to believe in Jesus due to her testimony—and later join the community for which John’s gospel is written. The fact that she is so readily accepted and believed provides further proof that she was not seen as a “fallen woman” by her acquaintances, contrary to what commentators throughout the ages have implied about her. Her quick jump from suspicion to disbelief and evangelism is also in stark contrast to the caution Nicodemus displayed last week.

Last week we heard the magnificent, sweeping promise of John 3:16-17— 
“For God so loved the world 
that God gave God’s only Son, 
so that everyone who believes in him
may not perish but may have eternal life. 
Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world 
 to condemn the world, 
 but in order that the world
might be saved through him.”

This woman represents that universal promise and imperative of the gospel of Christ, and of our own role in spreading that gospel to the ends of the earth regardless of any barriers that we might manufacture in our minds. In going from talking to the powerful and respected Nicodemus in the dead of the night to talking to an outcast, unnamed woman, cast aside by at least five husbands, Jesus proves that he is sent to bring his good news to the entire world, indeed, without respect to barriers of race, ethnicity, privilege, gender, or status.

Jesus sees this woman as she is—and in return, she sees him as he really is, and is the first person in this gospel to proclaim the possibility that Jesus is the Messiah. All Nicodemus, with all his learning and righteousness could manage was that Jesus was from God. The recognition of Jesus as the Messiah comes from the limits and margins of society, and from a woman who has demonstrated great ability in holding her own in debate with Jesus even while she has been discounted in the eyes and assumptions of the disciples.

The disciples are still judging by rigid social categories and appearances—and Jesus is demonstrating to them by example that social barriers and expectations mean nothing before the power of the gospel to transform lives. It is only those who have need of Jesus—and in her case, are probably reminded of this constantly—that are willing to suspend disbelief and hope instead that there can be salvation and reception into a new society—the kingdom of heaven.

And as fears of the COVID-19 pandemic spread in our own time, we hear stories right now of people hoarding supplies and in some infamous cases, refusing to self-quarantine. We see churches determined to remain beacons of faith while taking pro-active steps to keep parishioners safe. Should we cancel worship services? Should we discontinue the use of the common cup at the Eucharist?

The conversation Jesus has with this woman at the well leads her to a true epiphany—and in her excitement to share the news with her townspeople so that they, too, can experience an encounter with Jesus, she runs off, leaving her water jar behind in her haste. Her everyday chores—even the necessary chore of fetching water—is forgotten in her zeal to make sure that everyone else she knows has the chance to get to encounter Jesus.

It is at this point that the living water now becomes the focus. Jesus has tapped into the well of her soul—and living water is indeed pouring out, and the Samaritan woman is overflowing with the joy of expectancy and hope. Where previously she had been mired in her past, and her struggles and disappointments, her being devalued by those closest to her and powerless to change that without truly scandalizing the social structures of her time, now she is set free by the transformative power of Jesus.

Jesus meets each of us and asks us to cast down our buckets into the well of our souls that we might also be refreshed, restored, and transformed by the water of purpose and hope he offers. Right now—both as individuals, as a parish, and, in this time of fear and anxiety magnified by pandemic, as a people who are being challenged to display compassion and care for each other in the coming days and weeks. As true disciples of Jesus, like this woman, we are called to witness to the gospel of Christ by taking the good news to those who are also right now, filled with very real fear and anxiety. That is exactly who we are called to be as Christians in deed as well as word.

Our readings are calling us to re-examine the power of faith in each other, and the power of community to open our hearts to receive testimony to the truth, to the hope that is fed and watered by caring for one another, rather than the panic spread by rumors. What a different story would it have been in Exodus if the people had remembered how far they had come, and seen the strength that came from being molded as a people even during times of trial and searching? What a different story it would have been in John’s gospel if the woman would have shunned Jesus’s request rather than be awed and amazed by Jesus’s openness to bringing the gospel to her, and his admission that he needed something from her? Now THERE are two precious reminders for us right her, right now.

This is a time for us to live into being the Beloved Community of witnesses that Jesus calls us to. that his gospel of action. Just like that woman, we too are called to expand the horizon of our action from just our household to include our community—our fellow parishioners and our neighbors.

We are blessed to have each other—to have this strong, vibrant community of faith that refreshes us and restored us not just each weekend. The love and sense of belonging we receive here flows from that living water Jesus offers each of us from a well that will never run dry. The encounter with Jesus that is always at the center of our activities within this parish calls us to witness to our neighbors and community just s that Samaritan woman did.

Especially in a time such as this. Too much of the world is reacting to the pandemic we are in the midst of by turning inward in a way that magnifies the fear that looms all to close during such a time of uncertainty. 

Even as we are encouraged to physically distance ourselves from each other, we have to remember that the reasons for that distancing is not just about protecting ourselves, but about protecting each other. We can—and MUST-- testify to the power of God active in our world by our charity, faithfulness and love for each other. 

Even as we are encouraged to limit group activities, we must always demonstrate boldness in our care and concern for the truly vulnerable among us. To check on our neighbors—especially those who live alone, the isolated, those who fall within high risk groups. To share from our abundance. To strengthen this community of faith so that we can engage in our real work with the world around us in the name of the compassionate and reconciling heart of Jesus. 

Here is the message for today from God’s word: This is also a time for us to come together—to check on our neighbors, to show consideration for those who are vulnerable, to make sure people who become ill or who are at risk are supported rather than viewed with fear or suspicion. For too long, our hearts and the hearts of those around us have been waiting to be satisfied with the water of compassion, generosity, and true community. Our fearless witness to the love of Christ begins here. 

AMEN.

Preached at the 9:00 am single service at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:
Exodus 17:1-7
Psalm 95
Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-42