Community Church of Wilmette

Feb 24, 2008

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Sermon: Third Sunday of Lent, Year A
The Community Church of Wilmette
February 24, 2008
John 4:5-42

Digging Out

There is a really deep well inside me.
And in it dwells God.
Sometimes I am there, too.
But often stones and grit block the well,
and God is buried beneath.
Then God must be dug out again. – Etty Hillesum

There is something about a well. It’s a rich symbol, practical and yet mysterious, frightening and yet life-giving. We dig them. We cover them. We send Jack and Jill up a hill to fetch a pail of water from a well. We fall into them.

There is a well on my father’s property. Actually, there are two now. The first one dried up and Daddy had to have another one, a deeper one, dug in the back yard. Out in the country where he lives there are no water mains, no civil infrastructure to provide water for everyone. People live too far apart. So, every family has their own well.

Like I said, the first one dried up. It was a hot and dry summer and the well was at the top of a hill. One day it just ran dry. That’s all. There wasn’t enough rain and the water table dropped. So, there was no water for the house. And it made no sense to wait for the rain to come…though that might have made a great sermon illustration if he had.

My father decided that such a dry spell would be a relatively frequent occurrence, so he had someone come out and dig another well. This one would be dug deep into the ground, much deeper than the old well. We wouldn’t want it to dry out. It was such a good idea. Truly. But something interesting happened. The water from that deep in the ground is rich in minerals, too rich. It has to be filtered to make it drinkable. It leaves a coppery residue on anything that is not cleaned regularly. The well water corrodes and stains.

Digging a well is a complicated business. It’s not as simple as walking around with a dousing rod in your yard and then digging a hole in the ground. Sometimes you dig and find nothing. Wells run dry. Wells tap into undrinkable water. Their capstones crumble and become hidden hazards in the woods, deep and dark holes into which people fall. What is meant to bring life for a community (Picture a bucolic village with a lovely well in the village square. People gather at the well. They gossip and charm one another. They do business there. They quench their thirst there.) may also become a place of fear.

In the movie Batman Begins, the boy Bruce Wayne falls into a deep well. It had been covered and hidden in the family garden, but somehow he fell in. The well led to a cave and in the cave were bats. The young Bruce Wayne would develop a phobia of bats because of his experience in this deep well. Batman begins.

Today we encounter Jacob’s well…and at the well is a woman. She is an outcast, forced by virtue of her being a Samaritan and her marital status to the fringe of the community. So, she gathers her water in the heat of the day.

So often this passage is interpreted to be about right marital practice...or less vaguely, sex. This story, however, may not actually be about sex. Someone recently reminded me that sex is the subject we love to talk about not talking about. And this is one of the favorite stories about how we don’t talk about sex. So we won’t.

What if this story is not about sexual morality? What if there is something else at work?

Jesus approaches the woman as comfortably as he would approach his own mother. She is completely taken aback. And she says as much.

“The Samaritan woman said to him, "How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?" (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)

The first impulse she has is to challenge the religious identity that separates them. Samaritans, if you recall, were the remnant of those who stayed in Israel during the Babylonian Exile. They intermarried with non-Jews. They worshiped in a different Temple and the scriptures they deemed legitimate were different as well. This should sound like familiar territory to many of us.

The woman’s instinctive push back against Jesus is religious. “We don’t belong together.” She seems to be saying. “Aren’t I supposed to be unclean or something?” You can almost hear the venom in her tone. "How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?" This is a religious debate that they are having and not a discussion on sexual morality.

But Jesus is unrelenting. He tells her who he is. He is the person that has been promised to all God’s Creation. And he tells her who she is (this is the sex part we’re talking about not talking about) and that God loves her. And in this exchange, the religious divide between them is gone. His love for her, his intimacy and comfort with her, and his acceptance of who she is and where she is overcomes the religious divide. Healing in her life is made possible.

This is the most important piece of this story. Like the blind and the lame, this woman is healed of what has burdened her. The segregation with which she has lived for so long is lifted. Following this exchange with Jesus she no longer hides on the fringes of society. She becomes an evangelist…one who proclaims good news: “Have Hope! God is here!” And those who hear her believe and they too are transformed.

Religious divides are often the most profound. And people who have been shunned because of religious differences are often deeply wounded. We know that here at Community Church. We know how someone can suffer under the burden of religious difference. Some of us call ourselves “recovering Catholics” or “recovering fundamentalists.” Perhaps we are “church damaged.” We say we are spiritual but not religious. Maybe you are a woman who has never felt welcome in Christianity. Maybe you are gay, queer, or lesbian. There are countless divisions. There are many stories.

The gift of today’s story is this: Such division does not belong to God. Such division is our own creation.

Such division is like throwing stones in a well, or covering it with boards and dirt. We bury God and ourselves in the process of trying to shut one another out. This is always the fruit of acting in fear.

Christ knows that the wells we drink from are often Tainted.
We Survive, but we don’t Thrive.
Somehow we are still thirsty no matter how often we drink.
But Jesus offers us living water. Jesus offers us the gift of the Love of God…Love, Faith, Hope and a Family of believers to call Home.

People, even the disciples have difficulty accepting this. What seems so obvious is incredibly challenging. There are spiritual and religious differences between us. Sometimes those differences serve simply as distinctions…like having a favorite color. Sometimes, however, they divide us deeply. How we each come to God, understand God, or encounter God is precious and to be cherished. The stories and experiences of faith are dear to us - intimate and life giving. How we navigate that part of our life together is essential to who we are as a congregation. It is essential to who we are as a people.

Can there be a more important message in our time?
When armies gather and cities are razed to the ground in the Name of God,
we
must
proclaim
something
else.
We must join the Samaritan woman and proclaim the presence of God in our midst. We must step across the lines that divide us and shout: “Have Hope! God is here!”

The divisions are real. And they are dangerous. Dangerous people gather the poor and fearful around them promising them water that will not satisfy their thirst. Governments respond in fear. In their acts of violence they do nothing more than cover the wells that would sustain us. And in these wells they bury their own sons and daughters. In these wells they bury God. Thus we are all impoverished. We are all made fearful.

We are called to dig out.

We are called as God’s own Children to help the world dig out…to clean out the wells, to uncover God, to uncover the Love that exists for one another. We must join the Samaritan woman, our sister, and shout: “God is here! Have hope!”

We must come to understand this is part of our vocation at Community Church. Navigating difference, healing the wounds that religion can cause, is part of who we are and perhaps always have been.

The Annual Program Meeting is tonight. This is the time of the year where we return to the well with one another. We look to the past and envision the future. This is when we are challenged to ask the question: What has filled our well? Is our well filled with stones and debris, or is our well overflowing with, living water, the messianic promise, the coming of God and of Christ’s Love? Is our well filled with Hope? We gather tonight to re-encounter who we are.

We are called to minister to the “church damaged.”
We are called to be a witness to Christ’s kindness to those who may find themselves on the outside of communities for any reason, be it gender or sexual orientation, age or politics, economics or race.

We are called together to help one another dig out.
We are called to minister to Wilmette, to help it dig out its own well.
We are called to minister to the world.

We are called to dig out.

There is a really deep well inside me.
And in it dwells God.
Sometimes I am there, too.
But often stones and grit block the well,
and God is buried beneath.
Then God must be dug out again. – Etty Hillesum

Amen.