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The Rev. Michael Richardson |
Lent 3 -- A |
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The Chapel of Our Saviour |
Exodus 17:1-7 |
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Colorado Springs, Colorado |
Romans 5:1-11 |
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March 3, 2002 |
John 4:5-26, 39-42 Psalm 95 |
Jesus asked a Samaritan woman for a drink of water. She knew right away that something was up because the she had two strikes against her. She was a Samaritan. And she was a woman. Let me explain, briefly.
Hundreds of years before, at the time of the Babylonian exile, the people of Samaria were not taken into exile, but left behind by the conquerors and even intermarried with them. Long before that, for hundreds of years, the people of Samaria had worshiped on the mountain nearby while most of the Jewish people worshiped in Jerusalem at the Temple.
When the Jews came back from the exile, they found that the Samaritans had intermarried with other people and were still worshiping at the mountain. As the Jews rebuilt the Temple they became more and more estranged with those people who had been left behind, who were not part of the exile, and rejected their participation in the life of the country. The Samaritans were considered ancient traitors and corrupters of the true religion of the Jews. Jews were to have nothing to do with them and did not associate with them.
The better way to understand this is to call her by her modern name. The people called Samaritans are called Palestinians today. That is, they had the same kind of relationship with the Jewish people that Palestinians have today. This was like a Jew walking through the West Bank and asking a Palestinian for a drink.
The second strike is an ancient custom, that men should not talk to women with whom they were not related. This is not something created by the Taliban or even the Islam, but was a common custom in the Middle East among all people.
Here we have someone whom custom dictated that Jesus not speak to. History dictated that each would hold the other in enmity. But this is Jesus and he is not bound by either custom or history if they go against his mission; the mission to show God’s people that they are truly God’s people and loved by God in a radical way.
Find Jesus wherever we are and we find a relationship with God. That is what the Samaritan woman found, a relationship with God that was new and loving. And then she led the town to find that relationship with God. It doesn’t say so in our story, but the people in that town who were so concerned about where to worship God and which laws to follow were undoubtedly told that the point was to love God with all their heart and to love their neighbor as they loved themselves. And they probably asked just who their neighbor was.
Jesus probably went on to tell them a story about a Jew, a Pharisaic Jew perhaps, who came upon a Samaritan traveler who had been robbed and beaten and left for dead. And the Jew took the Samaritan in, nursed him back to health, and sent him on his way after he recovered with enough money to get home and get back to business.
Like the story of the Good Samaritan he told to Jews, he might have told the story of the Good Pharisee to the Samaritan town folk.
The people of the town probably didn’t want to believe the story at first. A Jew, help a Samaritan! Then they saw this Jew in their midst, loving them and not rejecting them and they were moved to know that this was truly evidence of real love. This was how God must love. Now the people of the town believed that they had experienced God’s love for themselves and could believe new things about God and about love.
Here is a story about love. It is from William R. White’s Stories for Telling.
One day a little puppy took a walk around his master’s farm. When he came to the pen where the horse was fed he heard the great animal call to him. "You must be new here," the horse cried. "You will soon find out that the master loves me more than all the other animals because I carry large loads for him. I suspect that an animal of your size is of no value to him at all."
The little dog hung his head and was about to walk away when he heard the cow in an adjoining stall. "I have the most honored position on the farm because the lady makes butter and cheese from my milk. You, of course, provide nothing of value to the family."
"Cow, your position is no greater than mine," called the sheep. "I lend the master wool to make his clothes. I provide warmth to the entire family. You are correct, however, about the dog," the sheep concluded. He gives the master nothing.
One by one the animals joined in the conversation, telling about their honored positions on the farm. The chicken told how she produced eggs, and the cat, famous for her quickness, how she rid the house of mice. All the animals did agree on one thing: the little dog provided no service of value to the farm family.
Stung by the criticism of the other animals, the puppy found a secluded place away from the animals and began to cry. An old dog heard the sobs and paused to listen to the little one tell his story. "They are right," the little one sobbed. "I provide no service to anyone."
"It is true," the old dog began, "that you are too small to pull the wagon. And you will never produce eggs, milk, or wool. But it is foolish to cry about what you cannot do. You must use the ability the Creator gave you to bring laughter and cheer."
That night, when the master came home exhausted from long hours in the hot sun, the little puppy ran to him, licked his feet and jumped into his arms. Falling to the ground, the master and the puppy romped in the grass. Finally, holding him close to his chest and patting his head, the master said, "No matter how tired I am when I get home, I feel better when you greet me. I wouldn’t trade you for all the animals on the farm."
We can only be ourselves and see that God still wants to love us because God made us to love us. In the story, all of the animals knew that the master loved them, but they believed it had to do with their success at giving something.
The key is not how good we are or how well we meet God’s desires. The key is God. God chooses to love us right where we are. The woman did nothing to make Jesus care for her, it was his choice. So it is with God’s choices about loving us.
Does that mean that we never need to grow or change? Of course not. Our own lives will be richer if we choose to grow.
My life will be richer if I choose to love others in the way that God loves me. By loving, I can recognize the love God has for me. That is not the point today. Today the point is that God loves you no matter where you are and who you are.
We tend to think that we know God loves us if things are going well. If the house is clean and the children are well dressed and well behaved, if the stock market is up and our career is on track, if we are getting good grades in school and everyone likes us, if our team wins the hockey championship and our nation wins enough gold medals, if the car hasn’t broken down and everyone in the family is healthy, then, perhaps then, God loves us.
But what about those times when someone in the family is sick? What if we actually make a bad grade in school? What if we’ve studied hard and still missed too many questions on the test? Or what if we just didn’t study because we don’t care, and are sure that no one else cares either? What if our career looks like it has gone south along with the stock market? What if the children aren’t well behaved and the house isn’t clean? What if our parents aren’t well behaved? Then what? Does God love us still?
And if God does love us? Why? Why would God or anyone want to love us when we are not at our best? When we are not perfect? Why would God bother to love me unless I deserve it? That’s what we worry about as long as we are convinced that love is tied to value. We aren’t sure which way it works, but we’re pretty sure that
either God loves us because we have all of our problems straightened out and we are in good health, or
we are in good health and have all of our problems straightened because God loves us.
That is what the story of Job is all about. Job is faithful to God and someone in heaven says that Job is only faithful because his life is working so well. So Job loses everything. Everything. His job, cars, house, wife, kids and eventually friends. Our friends tell us that they love us and Jobs friends told him they loved him, but if he was that bad a person that all those calamities struck, then surely he must not be worthy of their love any longer and his friends abandoned him. Perhaps they would love him again when he got his act together and bad things quit happening. "Get with it Job and fix all these things. When you look more like us again, then we’ll love you."
That is how we commonly understand love. That it must be deserved. Oh sure, we know that other people don’t have to deserve to be loved. It’s OK for us to love them when they don’t deserve it, but that just makes us magnanimous, it doesn’t change love for us. But that is not what Jesus calls love. It’s not what the Father calls love. God calls love caring for people when they don’t know how to care for themselves.
Jesus died for us while we were still sinners, not after we had the right job, the right car and house and had cleaned up our lives to the point where we deserved to be made part of the family. God gave us an inheritance, put us in the "will", so to speak, without even any assurance from us that we would try to clean up our act.
Because that is who God is. You and I may believe that we are free to do anything we want and are able to do in this life, but there are some things we cannot do. We cannot make God love us more and we cannot make God love us less. That is God’s free will, to choose to love, to choose to be vulnerable to us even before we agree not to hurt Him.
A friend of mine is doing an interesting Lenten Series. Every Wednesday evening the congregation gathers for a trial. They are putting Judas on trial to decide whether God can or will forgive him. People have been assigned roles to play, Judas, a prosecuting attorney, defense attorney, judge and various witnesses. They have testimony, examination and cross examination every Wednesday and will have arguments by the lawyers. The whole congregation is the jury. On the last Wednesday of Lent they will vote whether or not Judas can be forgiven. On Palm Sunday they will open the vote and learn something about themselves and their view of God.
How will the congregation vote? How would you vote? Does Judas have to get his life cleaned up and turned around before God loves him, or does God love him that he might see a way to turn around and face himself, knowing that he is still loved after hurting God?
What about everyone else? Do they have to get their lives cleaned up before God loves them? Do the Jews? Do the Palestinians? Do we? Will God stop loving us if we continue to hurt Him and each other? He hasn’t yet and I don’t believe He will. God is God. And God is Love. And love doesn’t ask whether you are Palestinian or Samaritan or Jew or Christian or even pagan. Love doesn’t ask whether your life is a mess or not. Love doesn’t ask if you have the right job or the right car or the right grades. Love just asks for love. Love just asks to share a drink of water.