Lent 3A 2014
Father Adam Trambley
March 23, 2014 St.John’s Sharon
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| Hand-painted icon of the Woman at the Well by the priest currently serving the church at Jacob's well. |
The Samaritan woman at the well’s testimony is: “He told me
everything I have ever done.”
Saint Paul says that “while we were still weak, at the right
time Christ died for the ungodly…while we were still sinners Christ died for
us.”
God knows everything we have ever done and he loves us.
He knows everything good we have done.
He knows everything bad we have done.
He knows everything good we have done to look good and
promote ourselves.
He knows everything bad we have done because our own fears
and pain kept us from doing any better.
He knows everything we have done that we have kept
successfully hidden from those closest to us.
He knows everything we have done that we even hide from
ourselves.
He sees you when you’re sleeping.
He knows when you’re awake.
He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so
…no, actually that part is Santa
Claus.
And the point of God knowing everything about us
is not to manipulate us into
behaving better
so we get nice Christmas
gifts.
The point of God knowing everything about us
is that while we were still doing
much that was bad,
God sent us the greatest Christmas
present ever.
Jesus his
son.
Immanuel.
God-with-us
to reconcile us back to God
while we still acted
as enemies of God.
As Paul says: “God proves his love for us
in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”
God know us completely.
And he still loves us so much
that he sent his Son to come to us
to bring us into a saving
relationship with him.
He sent his son so that instead of walking in darkness,
we could see the light of the
world.
He sent his son so that instead dying of thirst in the
deserts of our own sin and brokenness,
we could receive springs of water
gushing up to eternal life.
He sent his son so that instead of coming to a final death
in our fragile, mortal bodies,
we might be crucified with Christ
and share in his resurrection.
Jesus says to the Samaritan woman at the well.
“Go, call your husband.”
“I have no husband.”
“You are right in saying ‘I have no husband’;
for you have had five husbands,
and the one you have now is not
your husband.
What you have said is true!”
Now we can be pretty sure that
in the small town of Sychar,
none of this was a secret.
The woman knows her situation,
probably the husband she now has that isn’t her husband
knows the situation,
and every gossip in town certainly knows the situation.
Probably some particularly sheltered nine-year old isn’t
quite aware of it,
but we can guess that this isn’t the first time someone has
mentioned her five husbands, plus whatever her current situation is.
Jesus is an exception, however,
in that he is from out of town
and that he says it honestly to her face
without judgment or and without scorn.
He doesn’t scold her to repent
or to kick out the no-good-whoever
she’s living with
or say that if she likes it she
should put a ring on it,
and he doesn’t put her down.
All he tells her is that he really knows her,
and that he has something
life-giving for her.
Then the woman challenges him.
He seems to be a prophet.
Yet he’s a Jew and she’s a Samaritan.
She isn’t interested in just being some project to get the
foreign girl to pray the right way.
She knows something about God and theology,
and she knows the barriers religious people and their
practices have put up.
Again, Jesus refuses to judge.
He says that the time is coming when people will worship God
in spirit and truth.
What Jesus says about religious and cultural practices
is that the time is coming when God
will bring people together
and religion won’t push them
apart.
That’s enough for the Samaritan woman.
When Jesus says he is the Messiah, she’s sold.
She drops her water jar,
runs into town,
begins telling everyone to come and
see man
who has told her
everything she has ever done
and is probably
the Messiah.
They all come to Jesus,
keep him there for a couple days,
and come to
believe in him.
As the Samaritan woman at the well experienced Jesus,
we are invited to experience
Jesus.
Just like Jesus knows everything about the Samaritan woman
and didn’t hold it against her,
he also knows everything about us
and doesn’t hold it against us,
either.
Churches can make people feel like they aren’t the right
people.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said
that Sunday morning
is the most segregated hour of
Christian America.
At various times people had to be the right color,
the right ethnic background,
the right social class,
have the right education,
speak the right language,
or even already know everything
important about a church
to come and be
part of it.
But none of those things come from Jesus.
He was a good Jew
who didn’t care that this woman was
a Samaritan,
and he made it clear that
Samaritans and Jews,
and anyone else,
would be able to worship
together.
So where we have come from is not a barrier
to entering into a loving, saving
relationship with God.
The good shepherd has sheep of many folds
that he is bringing together.
Jesus invites us to come to him whoever we are.
Jesus also invites us to come to him
no matter what we have done.
This piece is often harder for us.
We have all made mistakes.
We have all acted on emotions we wish we didn’t have.
We have all hurt people we didn’t really want to hurt.
We have all done things we’d rather no one found out
about.
We all carry guilt and shame and regret
and, in some places,
an inability to forgive
ourselves.
We don’t always want to accept our past failings,
we don’t want someone else knowing
about it,
and we certainly don’t want them
telling us
everything we have
ever done.
Yet, we desperately need someone
to know us at our deepest level
and to love us anyway.
We could go through six partners
looking for that level of love and
acceptance,
but we aren’t likely to find it,
except in
Jesus.
Only Jesus
brings both an unconditional love and the bright light of
truth to us.
All we have to do is accept it from him.
Jesus came and died for us
while we were still in the midst of all
our guilt and shame and hardness of
heart.
He came to reconcile us to God
by giving us an honest assessment
of what we’ve done and
letting us know that we can come to
him anyway.
Too often we only want to present
our Sunday best selves to him,
but Jesus knows our depressed Monday morning selves,
and our frustrated Wednesday hump-day selves,
and our careless Friday afternoon selves
and our not-entirely-presentable late Saturday night selves
when, like the woman at the well,
we were not entirely forthcoming
about our
relationship status
with the cute guy at the local
watering hole.
Jesus knows everything we’ve ever done,
and he’ll put it all out there
and he’ll love us anyway.
When we hear him tell us what we’ve done
without the undertones of judgment
we use with ourselves,
and when we receive his love
beyond any other love we have felt
before,
then we are reconciled to God and saved.
We will reorient our lives onto paths of holiness and
happiness,
because we can’t imagine wanting to
reject
Jesus’ truth and
love any longer.
We may stumble,
but those stumbles will move us,
by God’s grace,
further into the loving arms of
Almighty God.
While we were still sinners,
Christ died for us,
and having been
reconciled,
we will be saved
by his life.
The Samaritan woman at the well’s testimony is:
“He told me everything I have ever done.”
Once we experience Jesus’ love ourselves,
we will say,
with the rest of the Samaritan
village:
“we have heard for
ourselves,
and we know that
this is truly the Savior of the world.”
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