Sermon preached by The Rev'd Nicholas Lang

St. Paul’s on the Green, Norwalk, Connecticut

The Third Sunday of Lent – February 24, 2008

A woman and a man were involved in a car accident on a snowy, cold night. Both of their cars were nearly totaled, but neither of them was injured. After they crawled out of their cars, the man began yelling about women drivers, how they shouldn’t be able to get a license. The woman, seeing what she was up against, says, "Wow, just look at our cars! There's nothing left, but we're unhurt. This must be a sign from God that we should meet this way and be friends and live together in peace for the rest of our days."

Taken back by her spin on this, the man replies, "Oh yes, I agree with you completely; this must be a sign from God! But you're still at fault...women shouldn't be allowed to drive." The woman continues, "And look at this, here's another miracle. My car is completely demolished but this bottle of wine didn't break. Surely God wants us to drink this wine and celebrate our good fortune." Then she hands the bottle to the man who nods his head in agreement, opens it, takes several good swigs out of the bottle, and hands it back to the woman. She immediately puts the cap back on, and hands it back to the man. He asks, "Aren't you having any?"

“No,” she said, "I think I'll just wait for the police...."

A shrewd woman. She obviously had run into other situations like this where she experienced bias based on her gender. She was prepared this time. Smart lady. But even at a time when Senator Hillary Clinton is a contender for her party’s nomination for president of the United States, women are still targets of discrimination, marginalization, exclusion, and abuse. This funny story is rather benign but the fact is that women, among other groups of people, are a vulnerable community. It is, perhaps, more subtle in America but not so in other parts of the world.

One of the early morning news shows this week featured a story about as many as 5,000 women who inhabit so-called "witches' villages" in four districts in the Northern Region of Ghana. When crops fail or children die of mysterious illnesses, the villagers usually suspect that a witch is to blame. Fearing for their lives, hundreds of elderly women in northern Ghana have banded together for protection in sanctuaries known as "witch camps".

They live in clusters of sun-baked huts, where lizards scuttle under the eaves and pumpkin vines grow over the thatched roofs. Women accused of witchcraft are subjected to abuse and other cruel treatment, and their fate is usually determined through trial by "ordeal." Banished women and their children are denied basic rights, such as access to safe drinking water, food, shelter, health care and education. Dating back to the 17th century, the tradition of witchcraft blames every death or misfortune on someone, usually a woman. These women are outcasts. They have been ostracized.

The woman we meet in today’s Gospel would have great empathy for them. She knew well what it meant to be a pariah. In the first place, she was a Samaritan, a half-breed and a pagan, as far as the privileged were concerned. And she was, of course, a woman. In her day, women were not even permitted to worship with men. They had no place in public life. They were to be seen and not heard and men did not speak to their own wives in public.

The third strike against her was that she was a fallen woman. Respectable women made their trips to the well to draw water in the morning—and in groups. She, however, shows up at noon—evidence that she was not welcome among the ladies who gathered earlier, probably to gossip about her. Jacob’s well lay at a crossroads and would not be unlike a service station on the thruway today. No, camels don’t run on gasoline but they do require water. And they transport men—lonely, maybe decadent men. An unaccompanied woman coming to the well when the camel brigade and its passengers are sure to be there suggests that she may have been looking for more than a jug of water—perhaps, as the song goes, “Lookin’ for love in all the wrong places.”

Jesus, of course, sized all this up. Her diminished status as a woman and the contempt that the Hebrews would have for her as a Samaritan were obvious givens. I am sure he quickly assessed why she might be at the well at noon and not earlier and in the company of other women. But she was no fool either. She sized him up just as quickly. Why is this male stranger, groomed and well-spoken talking to her. “Why is it that, you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a Samaritan woman?”

It’s difficult for us to get the full impact of what this story meant for the first Christians who heard it. If we could get inside the head of a thirty-something, successful, religious Jewish male who is hearing it for the first time I am sure we would be surprised at his reaction to what happened in this chapter of the Gospel of John. Jesus talks longer to the Samaritan woman at the well than he does to anyone else in all the Gospels—longer than he talks to his disciples, longer than he talks to anyone he had healed, longer than he talks to the Pharisees.

Imagine if Jesus showed up here today at coffee hour and passed by almost everyone one of us in the room—clergy, vestry, choir, acolytes, all those who minister in so many ways and look so presentable—and went off into the corner to strike up a conversation with someone who just appeared from nowhere and who, by his dress, her demeanor, his reputation, her upbringing, his lifestyle was clearly someone who society would never place on the “A” list. The most charitable among us would probably wonder why he just smiled and walked by us. Some might take real offense. After all, we’re the ones keeping this church he started going, right? We’re his insiders.

If you were here last week, you heard another story of a meeting with Jesus—this time with an insider name Nicodemus, a teacher and leader of the Jews. But today we get the story of Jesus meeting an outsider and, truth be told, the Gospels are heavily slanted towards the outsiders. In fact, Jesus usually has better luck with the outsiders. The insiders go looking for Jesus, asking questions, trying to figure him out, but Jesus is the one doing the seeking out when it comes to outsiders. He comes to them before they have the chance to go to him. And they usually end up following him or spreading the Gospel.

This is, of course, a story about God’s boundary-less, indiscriminate, unconditional love. For this woman at the well, Jesus is the icon of that love just as he is for us. Some years ago, the Episcopal Church adopted a slogan from its former Presiding Bishop Edmond Browning: “In this Church there are no outcasts.” That is the truth Jesus reveals to us again today. In his church—his church—there are no outcasts and, if there are, it is not the church. It may resemble it, have nice music and worship, serve the best coffee, but it is counterfeit. Samaritans, saints, schlemiels, shlemazels, klutzes, putzes, and shmoes—they’re all included in the church Jesus founded. God’s love is as underserved as the sunrise, but it is freely offered for everyone—without exception.

There is another interesting twist to this story that I find rather sweet. In Hebrew stories, wells are places where romance blooms. It is at a well where Jacob meets Rachel. Moses meets the daughters of Jethro at a well and one of them becomes his wife. The much-romanced woman in the Gospel comes to the well and finds this curious man, olive skin, dark eyes—no half-breed like her. And he talks to her—for a long time. He asks her for a drink. That’s against his law. There is something very different about this man. Here is a woman who has been coming up thirsty every time she starts a relationship. What is this living water he offers her?

Perhaps this encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman can provoke two questions for our reflection in the next few weeks of Lent. What are the things in life—jobs, obligations, routines, gimmicks and gadgets or even some people or organizations—with which you have relationships that keep you coming up thirsty, longing for the living water Jesus promised to the woman at the well? Is it time to replace the merry-go-round of any of these relationships or associations with something lasting, something you can really count on to quench that thirst?

Dean Alan Jones in his classic work, Soul Making says that everything that happens to Jesus happens to us. We might not walk on water or change water into wine, or command a herd of swine to jump off a cliff but we will most certainly be asked to give “water” to the “Samaritans”—the vulnerable ones, the marginalized, the disenfranchised, the outsiders in our lives. In doing so, we may even be asked to break sacred boundaries as he did. How can we be with Jesus as he reaches out to the world and not hunker down as the insiders in our cozy little enclave here? To whom can you bring “living water”—God’s Good News that there are no outcasts in this church this week? Today? Tomorrow?

“I know the Messiah is coming,” she said to him and Jesus replied, “I am he.” It is the first time he says this to another living soul—a woman, no less, a Samaritan, a multi-romanced woman. The outcast and the Messiah stand face to face in his presence and she knows—we know who we really are, the good and the bad of it. That’s what it’s like when God meets us at the well in our life. All boundaries are crossed, rules broken, disguises dropped. It’s just God and us. No more need for pretense.

There is life after the well. The woman, the outsider, goes and tells the world about her encounter. She is the first evangelist.

Author Linda M. Bridges writing in her work Interpretation says that Evangelism is allowing one’s life to be the conduit of God’s grace for another. Our name or family pedigree does not matter. Our past history is of no particular concern. All that God requires is willing vessels who will leave behind the past and walk boldly into the future, carrying the living water of God’s forgiveness and mercy in their lives. A nameless woman from long ago Samaria walks before us. She keeps coming round every few Lents telling us what she knows. May we follow her steps and keep spreading the word.