Originally preached on March 12, 2023 at St Luke’s Lutheran Church, Devon, PA
Texts: Exodus 17:1-7; John 4:5-42
Grace and Peace be with you all from our God who lives among us. Amen.
Good morning. I am so grateful to be among you, proclaim the gospel at Pastor Matt’s invitation. As you heard earlier, my name is Mycah and I am currently on a final year pastoral internship in Reading, PA at a mission developed site called Common Ground Recovery Community. We work with folks in addiction recovery, and people who live with food and housing insecurity, and mental health struggles. Our ministry is focused on the intersection of twelve step spirituality and inclusive Christian faith, recognizing the brokenness of all people and sharing God’s loving Grace. My wife and I move to Downingtown, PA when I started seminary at United Lutheran in Philadelphia and have enjoyed living here for nearly four years now.
Before I came to seminary, I worked in a church in Virginia as a Communication and Ministry Specialist. I had a lot of varied responsibilities during my time there, but part of my role was to support our new member class.
Every new member class included a short Bible study on the story of the Woman by the Well from the Gospel of John (4:7-26). One of our longtime members was a woman a Biblical Storyteller, and she would preform this passage for us before we broke out into small groups to talk about what the passage might mean. The first time I went through this process as a new member myself, I was bracing myself for some tiresome anti-woman rhetoric. I’d heard it before, and maybe so have you.
I have heard this woman preached on time and again, and those interpretations had left me feeling a little jaded toward studying this passage with church folk. The woman at the well was immoral because her ethnicity made her less than Jesus and the disciples (implied racism), her marital status was in question (sexism), and not to mention the scandal of a woman being alone and approached by a single man (patriarchal scandal). I was in for a surprise when the pastor leading our class introduced new perspective and context to this scripture passage. We talked about the meaning of hospitality, and the importance of Jesus’ ministry to the Samaritan woman. The history of text reception of the woman at the well is steeped in unforgiving assumption, but by divesting Jesus and the woman’s interactions at the well of those assumptions, we can pull out important message: Jesus’ call to go out of his way to show care for all.
This is a long gospel reading, right? And at first glance, Jesus leaves us with a few more questions than he does leave us with answers. We open with this conversation with a Samaritan woman, alone, at a well. This is the making of an old testament meet cute – just like Moses and his wife Zipporah, or Jacob and Rachel. What could it mean that Jesus pauses to speak to this woman, alone, in the middle of the day, who happens to be a Samaritan?
This is a pretty scandalous scene, but not for the reasons that I grew up hearing, and maybe you did too. We might have questions about what it means that this woman was at the well in the middle of the day – could it mean that she was an outsider in her own community, not drawing water early in the day with the rest of the women, or that she was in great need of more water for some reason that day? We really don’t know. What we also don’t quite know is the significance of her five husbands – it’s not that she is promiscuous or immoral, but maybe that she is in a dire situation.
But this is not what made this interaction stick out to early Jesus followers.
She was Samaritan! Jesus is in Samaria! From the perspective of Jew’s at the time, Samaritans had all the history, but told the stories wrong. They worship the wrong mountain, one near them called Gerizim instead of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, and the temple there instead of in the Holy City. The book of Ezra details their ethnic background, being brought into this land during the Assyrian occupation while Israel was in exile. And somewhere along the way one of the Scribes changed the wording of the Samaritans from “we do sacrifice to God” to “we do not sacrifice to God.” The Jews’ refusal of the Samaritan’s help became the basis for excluding others from temple worship for centuries to follow.
There’s a lot of ethnic and cultural drama between the Samaritan woman, and Jesus who is a Jew.
In fact, this is likely the most scandalous part of this interaction. It is not that she is a woman, but that she is a Samaritan, and Jesus asks for her help drawing water. He is inviting her to play host, inviting himself into a hospitality relationship that is still so sacred to this day. A Samaritan, hosting a Jew and drawing him water. Even with all the animosity, hatred, distrust, scandal between them, Jesus puts his trust in her.
But, in a very classic move by Jesus, just after asking her to give him water, he takes the role as host to offer her living water. Her confusion here is genuine because the Greek word for Living could also be translated as spring water, but how would Jesus know about a nearby spring that her people who have lived here for generations did not know about? We know the water Jesus is offering her is more than something that will quench her physical thirst, but nourish her spirit as well.
And as we get to know this woman, Jesus is not condemning her for any perceived promiscuity or forgiving her of her sin – that is something that we read into the text ages later – it is that Jesus is turning to her with compassion and inclusion. Despite her painful personal history, Our painful personal histories, despite their people’s history of hating one another, and the conflicts that stretch into the 21st century now, Jesus shares the Good News about God with us.
The woman even asks – Where should I worship God? On this mountain near here, or the one in the Holy City? She wants to settle this old debate, as if revisiting this specific history will settle generations of hurt. Jesus responds with inclusion. We will not need a holy mountain to praise God on, because the Spirit will be with us always.
The geography matters here, right? And we still have conflicts over access to clean, drinkable water and other resources. 2000 years later and we are still asking Jesus the same question about where we should worship God. Where can we get a draw on that living water?
But how does Jesus respond?
Scholar Karoline Lewis wrote, Jesus has to go to Samaria, not geographically, but theologically, because God so loved the world (John 3:16) and Samaritans are a part of that world that God loves. Jesus had to make that clear. The Spirit of God will be with them. The last place that the disciples and early Jesus followers would expect Jesus to go, there he went.
You see, Samaria was out of his way, and his disciples questioned why they would pass through this region when a safer, more direct, more welcoming route was available.
But Jesus has to go to Samaria. Jesus has a message to share and that is that God so loves this world, that God shows up even in Samaria. Even in Devon, even in Reading, even in Kensington. Sharing the good news that God has come to be with the people.
Jesus has to go out of his way to make it clear that the last people we might expect to be objects of God’s love are right at the top of the list for Jesus to go see. To minister amongst. To raise up new disciples like the Woman at the Well and encourage her to share with her neighbors.
That is who we are called to be. Jesus invites us, in this story, into the scandal of his inclusion. We are called to go out of our way to welcome people on the margins, who are at the well in the middle of the day for whatever reason, and also be the one to share out of our neediness.
It is something we do at Common Ground, and something y’all have done with the Welcome Church in Philadelphia or participating in an upcoming blood drive. It’s something we can do every day. We, like the Samaritan woman have the opportunity to share the living water that is Jesus going out of his way to be with us. Something that satisfies our bodies and also our Spirit. That shows us a new way into the future where old historic divisions can be set aside to honor God amongst us by caring for each other.
So may we be an extension of Christ’s welcoming and loving inclusion for all. Amen.
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