The Pause that Refreshes

It is important that we perceive reality correctly. The story is told of a police detective who was training three recruits. He held up a picture of a suspect and asked the first recruit how he would recognize the man if he saw him on the street. “That’s easy,” the first recruit said. “I’d look for a man with only one eye.”

The training detective got very agitated. “No, no, no. This is a profile shot. Obviously this man has another eye.” So he turns to the second recruit and says, “You’re bound to do better. How would you recognize this man on the street?”

“That’s easy,” the second recruit said. “A guy with only one ear should be easy to spot.”

“No, no. It’s a profile shot. Don’t you understand what that means?” The police detective turned to the last recruit. “Are you as dense as the others? How would you recognize this suspect?”

“Well,” the third recruit said. “I’d look for a guy wearing contact lenses.”

The police detective thought this was pretty strange. He went back to the file on the suspect and, sure enough, he did wear contact lenses. He went to the recruit and said, “You’re right. How did you know that?”

“Well,” the recruit said. “A guy with only one eye and one ear couldn’t wear regular glasses.”

It is important that we perceive reality correctly. But what I want to say to you today is that it is very easy to be deceived about who we are. It is very easy to push the truth away. And it is a gift beyond measure when someone can speak the truth about who we are to us. That is the gift that Jesus offers us. Jesus can speak the truth to us about who we are and when you can see the truth, you can really live.

My preaching professor in seminary was named Zan Holmes and he used to tell the story about his dog. Brownie. Now he lived in a house with a very small backyard and they used to keep Brownie on a chain tied to a pole in the middle of the yard. And every afternoon when Zan came home from work he’d go to his backdoor and yell out to the dog. And when Brownie saw Zan she had a little routine. The dog would run out to the length of that chain and when it pulled her tight she’d start running around the yard in a circle at the length of the chain. That’s how she showed her excitement when anybody in the family came out to see her. And she had done this so much that she wore a path in a circle at the length of that chain.

Well, one day, Zan says, he came home and somebody had forgotten to chain Brownie to the pole. And when he came to the door he stood there and yelled out to the dog and she came running towards him…until she got to the point where the chain usually stopped her. And then, even without the chain, she started to run in a circle on that same tired path she had worn. Brownie was free, but she didn’t know it. So she kept on running in a circle. If Brownie had been able to see the truth about herself and her situation, she could really begin to live.

Anybody want to raise your hand if you’ve got some tired circles you’re running in? I’ve got them. There are lots of old habits and bad tapes running in our heads. There are lots of ways we tell ourselves lies about what’s really going on. Lies about who we are and about what the world is like. Let me tell you, the world is full of lies.

Jesus knew something about this. Jesus knew that we human beings are capable of telling all kinds of lies about ourselves and of living with all kinds of walls we didn’t need to construct. We don’t know the truth; we can’t see the truth, and so we don’t know how to really live.

Did you hear this story from the gospels today? It’s a wild story. Jesus is traveling through Samaria with his disciples. Now that doesn’t sound strange to us and it wasn’t strange for Jews to pass through Samaria on their way between Jerusalem and Galilee, but we don’t hear it in the same way unless we make ourselves listen differently.

Jesus and his disciples were Jews and Jews and Samaritans did not get along. The Jews thought of the Samaritans as a corrupted people because they had intermarried with foreigners. They wouldn’t share the same drinking or eating vessels. Samaritan women were considered ritually unclean and so Jewish men made an extra effort not to touch or be touched by them. Jews and Samaritans claimed the same God but each thought the others were heretics who worshipped in the wrong place and the wrong way. Jews and Samaritans were related but there was very bad blood between them, which makes this story pretty unusual.

So anyway, Jesus sends the disciples on into a village to get some food and he stops by a well, which just happens to be the well used by his ancestor Jacob. Jacob was an ancestor for the Jews and the Samaritans and the well was named for him, even though Jacob probably never drew water from the well. That would have been a job for Rachel or Leah, his wives. Back in the day, that’s who drew the water…the women. It’s not a great job, either. The well is not convenient. It’s outside of town. You have to carry a large earthenware jar and probably put it on your head to carry it back. It’s a hot job and it has to be done every day whether you feel like it or not because you just can’t live without water. And so the women got the job. No, it wasn’t fair. But those were the times.

So Jesus is sitting there by the well alone when a Samaritan woman comes to draw water. She comes in the middle of the day, which is not when the rest of the women come. This woman is isolated from the rest of the women. She comes when she knows she won’t have to be with them.
Now as a Jew and as a man this is where Jesus should have moved away or where the woman should have moved away, but neither one of them plays the game that was expected of them. They’re going to play another game.

Jesus says to this woman, “Give me something to drink.”

She recognizes that he’s breaking the rules by asking her to do this, so she calls him on it. She says, “You’re a Jew! You’re asking me, a Samaritan woman, to give you something to drink?” That sounds like a “No, get your own water” to me.

But Jesus wants to get her into a conversation so he says, “If you knew the gift of God and if you knew who was asking you for water, you’d ask him and he would give you living water.” Well, this is the invitation to a game. The woman begins to suspect that this conversation might not be about the well anymore. What Jesus is saying is, “Let’s have a conversation and this is how the game will work. I ask you for water and you respond by asking me for living water.”

This woman decides that she will play the game and she starts by teasing Jesus. “You know, that well’s pretty deep,” she says. “You don’t have a bucket,” she says. “It’s going to be awfully hard for you to give me living water. Are you a better man than Jacob who dug this well?”

Jesus probably smiled then, but then he said, “Everybody who drinks this water is going to get thirsty again. This water I’m talking about becomes a fountain in the person who receives it and they will never be thirsty again.”

Well, you know this sounds pretty good to the woman. No more thirst. No more trips to the well. She probably forgot for a minute that Jesus was talking about something besides the water in the well because she says, “O.K., give me this water.”

Now Jesus turns the tables on her. He says, “Go away, tell your husband, and come back.” It’s almost like he’s saying he doesn’t want to play this little game anymore. If he was really concerned about the appropriate way to talk to her, he would have called her husband in the first place. If Jesus was going to have any contact with this woman, it should have been through her husband. But he’s not trying to end this conversation. He’s not trying to change the rules. He wants to start talking about the truth. He’s not going to talk about the well anymore. He wants to talk about her.

She’s ready. She admits right up front, “I don’t have a husband.” That the truth. She seems to be living with a man and seems to have had relationships in the past with men who were not husbands but she’s not going to hide this from Jesus. In fact, Jesus seems to know all about her. He praises her for telling the truth.

When it’s clear who she is, she wants to get clear about who Jesus is, so she starts asking the questions. She asks him if he is a prophet and asks him about religious questions and asks him if he is the Messiah and then Jesus tells her what he has not told anybody else to this point. When the woman asks, “Are you the Messiah, the Christ, the one we’ve been waiting for?” He says, “I am. The one speaking to you. I am.”

When Jesus says this the disciples walk up and maybe they heard what he said, but they couldn’t listen to it right then because they were so disturbed by what they were seeing. Jesus was talking with a woman, a Samaritan woman? There may have been truth in the air, but they couldn’t hear it. But the woman knew. And she left her water jug behind and ran into the city. Now that she had seen the truth, she was ready to really live.

That’s a strange story. It really is. The conversation that Jesus and the woman have is really strange but, in the course of the conversation, truth is told. The woman finds a person who can tell her and help her admit who she truly is. And the woman sees Jesus for who he truly is. The truth is told. The woman is a person looking for living water and Jesus has come to tell the good news that the living water is here.

Do you know what it’s like to live with a lot of lies? Do you know what it’s like to be told over and over who you are? Some people live with some very hurtful things that others tell them or that they tell themselves. Have you ever been called worthless, hopeless, irredeemable, incapable, incorrigible, incompetent or incurable? Have you ever thought of yourself as valueless, insignificant, useless, or used up?

I’m here to tell you tonight, in the name of the Jesus who sat by that well with the Samaritan woman, that all of those words are lies. The truth about us, about any of us, is that we do fall and we do fail. We do mess up and we do sin. But it is not true, for all that, that we are condemned. It is not true that we are beyond God’s reach, beyond God’s touch, beyond God’s love. It is not true that Jesus will pass you by.

It IS true that Jesus will come and sit by the well with you. It IS true that Jesus will stand by you. It IS true that Jesus will transform you. And whatever lies the world may throw at you then…whatever sick thoughts continue to plague you then...whatever lingering wounds continue to fester, you can then say, “Lies, you have no power over me anymore. I was lost but now I’m found. I was sick but now I’m healed. I was dead but now I’m alive because I know the truth about the world and about me. I know that God did not come to condemn the world and to condemn me, but God came to save the world and save me. God is not standing over me waiting for me to fall. God is standing WITH me helping me to get back on my feet.”

We United Methodists talk a lot about grace, you know. Grace is God’s love freely given to all God’s children and there is no way to put yourself outside of God’s grace. When you wake up in the morning, God’s grace is there. When you hurt your neighbor, God’s grace is there. When you sink into despair, God’s grace is there. What you need to realize is that God is not waiting for something to happen so that God can accept you. God is expecting something to happen because God has already accepted you. When you see the truth, then you can really live.

One more story. You know the story of Harriet Tubman? Harriet Tubman was born a slave on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the early 1800s. She escaped slavery and went to live in the north, but she kept coming back. She kept coming back to the South because she knew there were people there who needed to be free.

On dark nights she would bring them across into freedom. And when she did it she would carry a big rifle along with her. She never fired it, but she used it to remind the slaves that there was no going back. Once they realized they could be free, there was no going back to what they had been before. Once they knew the truth about who they could be--free people, she was not going to let them go back to being slaves.

Harriet Tubman said, "I freed a thousand slaves; I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves." I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.
The first step in getting free is to realize that you are a slave, that you need something beyond yourself to get free. To get free you have to admit the truth, and the truth is that God is waiting with living water to baptize you into a new life. Jesus is waiting by the well. It’s time to tell some truth. Whatever you have been, you don’t have to be any longer. Because the truth is that you are a child of God. Thanks be to God.

John 4:7-14
A Samaritan woman came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me something to drink.” For his disciples had entered the city in order to buy food.

Then the Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, being a Jew, ask from me, a Samaritan woman, something to drink?” For the Jews did not have dealings with the Samaritans.Jesus answered, saying to her, “If you knew the gift of God and who is the one saying to you, ‘Give me something to drink,’ you would ask him and he would give you living water.”

The woman said to him, “Sir, you do not have a bucket and the well is deep. Where, then, do you have the living water? You aren’t more prominent than our ancestor Jacob, are you, who gave us this well and who himself drank from it along with his children and animals?”

Jesus answered, saying to her, “Everyone who drink from this water will get thirsty again. But whoever drinks from the water which I shall give to them will not be thirsty ever again. Rather the water which I will give them will become in them a fountain of water spring up into eternal life.”

Then the woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water in order that may not thirst nor come here to draw.”
He said to her, “Go away, call your husband, and come back here.”

The woman answered, saying to him, “I do not have a husband.”

Jesus said to her, “It is well that you say, ‘I do not have a husband,’ for the five men you have had and the one you now have are not your husband. This you have said is true.”

The woman said to him, “Lord, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, and you say that Jerusalem is the place where it is necessary to worship.”

Jesus said to her, “Believe me, woman, that the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know. We worship what we know; for salvation is from the Jews; but the hours is coming and now is when the true worshippers 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 comes, the one called Christ. When he comes, he will disclose all things.”

Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one speaking to you.”