Scripture/Sermon of the Day

7 A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8 (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 9 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.) 10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” 11 The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” 13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” 15 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.”

16 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” 17 The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband,’ 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” 19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” 21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 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. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 25 The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” 26 Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

27 Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” 28 Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, 29 “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” 30 They left the city and were on their way to him.

31 Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” 32 But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” 33 So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” 34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. 35 Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. 36 The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. 37 For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ 38 I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”

39 Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. 41 And many more believed because of his word. 42 They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”

I. This is the longest conversation Jesus has with anyone in any of the Gospels. Not only that, but Jesus is also breaking rules in this story. Good Jews were discouraged from traveling in Samaria — a region in Israel between Jerusalem to the south and Galilee to the north. Also, a “proper” man was not supposed to talk to a strange woman — and a “good” woman was not to speak to a strange man. Finally, for a Jew to speak to a Samaritan would have made him unclean.

II. Do you see that the Gospels go out of their way to show us that the God we worship goes out to everybody — loves everybody. Jesus breaks the religious and cultural “fences” that his society has used for thousands of years. Have we learned from this?

Now people yell “Ice, Ice, Baby…” for the cruel, inhumane immigration policy that is happening right now — people are being arrested and thrown into 21st-Century-American versions of concentration camps — with names like Alligator Alcatraz in Florida. It’s a time of irony because people across the nation are worshipping a God — Jesus — who goes out an meets and stays with and loves the same people that we are arresting and forcing into pens and cages like human-stockyards. We worship God, and violate God at the same time.

III. If we look at Jesus — he’s always trying to bring different groups of people together. Though Samaria was made off-limits by the Jewish religious establishment (a religio-cultural wall was built around that region), Jesus broke the barrier and entered a number of times.

Notice what the writer of this Gospel of John is doing. In Chapter 2, Jesus goes to a wedding in Cana of Galilee, a region in northern Israel. Archeologists have discovered there ancient inscriptions that are written in various languages including Aramaic, Greek, Arabic and Latin. These show connections to wider trade networks and interactions with neighboring regions, revealing a community that was both Jewish and Gentile. In John’s Gospel — we are all invited to this wedding. The groom, and the bride, is God — and we are the ones being married. The rest of the Gospel is about Jesus inviting everyone to the wedding -- their wedding -- and he travels throughout Israel and the surrounding regions, personally inviting all to this new (born again) marriage covenant with God.

In chapter 3 he travels south to Jerusalem, where he meets a religious leader, Nicodemus. In chapter 4, he goes north to the “unclean” region of Samaria. A leader of our country once, on a live-mike, called countries with dark-skinned people "sh_t-hole nations." That’s what Samaria was to the ancient Jews. But Jesus broke down that cultural barrier and invited the Samaritans to his wedding — he proposed marriage to the Samaritans.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus breaks down walls, he breaks open the gates of detention centers and concentration camps— especially the gates and walls that we build around our hearts. Jesus embraces everybody, from the opposites of Nicodemus to the Samaritan woman and everyone in between.

III. When the horrors American Concentration Camps are finally exposed and written about 20 or thirty years from now in history books, if any of us are still alive then, people will say, “I’m shocked to hear that — if I’d have known, I’m sure I would have done something about it.” Like the people of Germany said when the extent and the brutality of the concentration camps was discovered.

IV. There’s more to say about this story — Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. But for me now, John writes this whole gospel around the first miracle at this wedding at Cana. This is the wedding-Gospel where God proposes to us at Cana — and in the night — and at the well. The well was where Moses met his wife, and Jacob met his. And it’s where Jesus, spiritually, meets us. And if we say yes to God, then the wedding vow — ours — is to love God, and our neighbor as ourselves.

It’s a verse that begs the question— how does Jesus save us — or what does he save us from? How about — indifference. Jesus saves us from not caring about the lives of other people. Jesus saves us by reconnecting us in spiritual-matrimony — marriage — to our human family — everyone, with just one vow: to love God and neighbor.