Sharing the Water
John 4:1-29

The scripture reading today comes from the Gospel of John.  It is about Jesus and the woman from Samaria.  Now when Jesus had learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John, although it was not Jesus himself but the disciples who baptized, Jesus left Judea and started back to Galilee. But he had to go through Samaria. He came to a Samaritan city called Sicar near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.  Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “give me a drink.”  His disciples had gone to the city to buy food. 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. Jesus answered her, “if you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, give him a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”  The woman said to him, “ Sir, you have no bucket and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob who gave us the well? And with his sons and his flocks drink from it?”  Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give will never be thirsty. The water that I give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”  Jesus said to her, “Go call your husband and come back.”  The woman answered him, “I have no husband.”  Jesus said to her, “You’re right in saying that you have no husband, for you have had five husbands.  And the one that you have now is not even your husband.  What you have said is true.”  The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet; our ancestors worshiped on this mountain but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.”  Jesus said to her, “Woman believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You will worship what you do not know. We worship what we know. For salvation is for the Jews, but the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the father in spirit and truth. For the father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”  The woman said to him, “I know that the Messiah is coming who is called Jesus.  When he comes he will proclaim all things to us.”   Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you. Just then the disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with the woman. But no one said, “What do you want or why are you speaking with her?”  Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city.  She said to the people—come and see a man who has told me everything I have ever done. He cannot be the Messiah, can he?

The word of God for the people of God.

I want to start out with a story, and then we are going to go back to the biblical text and I’m going to tie that story back in with that text.  When I first came out of seminary, I had three wonderful churches in southern West Virginia. And one of them had a lady who I’m going to tell you is named Elizabeth, because I don’t want you to worry that I’m going to be out talking about your house to some other church after I leave here. Elizabeth was a wonderful lady, and she had some exquisite furniture in her living room that she covered with very thick plastic because she wanted to preserve it so that it would always look nice.  And she had this huge collection of silver vases and trays, and she had taken tin foil and covered them really well, because she wanted them always to look pretty.  She had beautiful china on her table, but she always kept sheets over that because she didn’t want it to get dusty and didn’t want it to get dirty.  So when I would go and visit with Elizabeth, I would be sitting and wondering how long it would take for my thighs to get stuck to that plastic, and if I was going to be able to stand up without making huge ripping sounds as I did.  And as much as I loved Elizabeth and the many good qualities she had, I realized that in her attempts at preserving the good things that she had, that she never really got to enjoy them as much as she should.

I want you to hold onto that story, because I’m going back to the text that Todd read to you earlier.  Here is just a little bit of background.  The Samaritans were with the Israelites when the children of Israel went off into exile.  Most of the children of Israel stayed in the area of Samaria.  They intermixed with other people who happened along, and although the Samaritans had something of a Hebrew faith, the Jewish despised them because they saw them as half-breeds who were worse than pagans even though they worshiped kind of the same God.  Doesn’t this kind of remind you of the Muslim/Christian/Jewish conflict even in our present day?  Remember my sermon from last week about Jacob and Bethel?  This lady gets into a theological discussion with Jesus, and she said, “You know, we worship God on the mountain, and you worship God in Jerusalem.”  And Jesus said something that is so important.  That is that we should never, he implies, think that we worship God in any given place. Indeed, there are no sacred shrines that we go to, to know God.  But Jesus says we worship God in spirit and in truth.

What I want to say to you all is that it could be very easy for us to start worshiping this incredible building that we have before us.  It could become for us that thing which we need to cover with tinfoil and plastic and preserve because we don’t want to mess it up. And that would be the wrong thing.  Let’s look at the message that is so central to the Gospel that we read today.  Jesus accepted this woman who had been rejected by everyone else, and he gave to her the very thing that she needed to keep her life going.  This thing is God’s eternal love. There is one purpose for the Church to exist and one purpose only: that we may experience that eternal love in our lives and that we may do the very same thing that the woman at the well did—rush out into a world that sometimes may have rejected us, and share with this world the overflowing water of God’s love and mercy.  I want to tell you something. This building has one goal and one purpose.  It enables us to share God’s love and mercy better than we could without this facility.  The lay leadership committee has been meeting.  We’ve run into a few problems.  Addison Hawley reminded me that there are 79 different outreach ministries with which the outreach committee is dealing.  It has become so cumbersome, so what should we do?   So we have to divide outreach into all these sub committees and task forces so that we can make sure that all those outreach ministries happen and that they occur.  We see these wonderful children!  In December we are moving to a rotation model Sunday school.  This is an innovative way of doing Christian education, and the new program is for all our children.  And what I mean by our children is more than the kids you see here.  I mean our children out there, who have yet to know the love of God.  Our children include those beyond these walls.

Now, it’s interesting that on Wednesday nights in this center section, all these chairs are coming out.  There are tables going in because this is our fellowship hall as well as the place where we worship.  And I want to tell you something: I cannot wait for the first cup of coffee to be spilled and to stain this carpet.  And I mean that!  I think once that happens, we will get out of the Elizabeth mode of thinking—that we’ve got to preserve this shrine.  It is best that we are reminded that as long as we are serving God, and God’s people in this facility, that the work of God will take place. I want every door in this place unlocked.  I want it opened up to this community, and I want to know that every one of us, like the woman at the well, has been so touched by God’s grace that we can’t contain it.  But we have got to go out and share God’s grace.  And, my friends, that is what the dedication of this sacred building is for us today.  Let us bow our heads now for a word of prayer.