Sunday Sermon - February 24, 2008

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS WTH CHRIST
#3, “A Wounded Woman Is Won”
February 24, 2008 John 4:5-30, 39-42
Dr. Michael Dent Trinity UMC Denver, CO

Have you ever been really thirsty? You have eaten a dinner of spicy Mexican or Italian food and an hour or two later your body is telling you, “Water, water, water!” Or maybe you’ve been working out or shoveling snow and the only thing you can think of is how good a tall glass of cool, clear water would taste!

But what if there is no water fountain, sink, refrigerator or other water source available? The first two things I was told when we moved to Colorado were, “Dress in layers and always carry a bottle of water with you.” Have you ever been thirsty and had no means to quench that thirst? That is what happened to Jesus that day! It is the first, but not the last time in John’s gospel that Jesus will be thirsty. In chapter 19, as he hangs on the cross, just before breathing his last, our Lord cries out, “I am thirsty.”

Now on this day it was hot - 12 o’clock noon - the sun is beating down - close to 100 degrees. The disciples have gone to the city to get some lunch. Jesus sits down by an old well. His legs are cramping - his stomach is growling - his throat is dry - his lips are parched. His humanity hungered for cool, refreshing water. Though he was beside the well, he has no bucket, no rope, no means to draw any water.

Then help comes. Someone shows up - someone who can help Jesus get water. There is a problem though - this someone is a woman - not only a woman, but a Samaritan woman - not only a Samaritan woman, but an outcast. Coming to the well at noon indicates she has been rejected by the other women of the community.

Jesus breaks the ice by asking her, “May I have a drink of water?” He initiates what becomes the longest conversation between Jesus and an individual anywhere in the Bible - a conversation that becomes a close encounter between this unnamed individual and the Son of God.

In this close encounter filled with irony, metaphor, and a conversation that is spiced with literal and spiritual understandings - much like the one with Nick at night we considered last week - we discover several important dimensions of the saving work of Jesus. As we share this extended encounter of this individual with Jesus, we discover that her story is our story. We are all soul mates with the wounded woman at the well who was won that day because of the way Jesus encountered her.

FIRST, we discover that Jesus crossed barriers to encounter her. When Jesus asked her for a drink, look at her response in verse 8, “How is that you a Jew asked me - a woman, and on top of that a Samaritan, for heaven’s sake?” Jews and Samaritans didn’t care for each other - like Sunnis and Shiites - their beliefs and traditions were vastly different.

Look back at verse 4 in John 4. Paul did not read this verse, but it sets the context of this close encounter. John says there about Jesus’ itinerary, “But he had to go through Samaria.” Friends, that was not a geographical necessity - it was a theological one - because God’s grace was for more than the Jews. Jesus is willing to overcome cultural barriers of racism and sexism, centuries of religious resentment and even hatred between Jews and Samaritans, to meet this woman where she was.

We can see how later in the story - verse 27 - when the disciples return and find Jesus talking to this woman, they are “astonished,” John says Perhaps they are getting used to such unconventional encounters, because none of them has the gumption to say to Jesus, “Don’t you know this is bad PR for your campaign? The 6:00 news is going to have a field day with this one!”

How many times have we drawn back from conversing with someone or avoided eye contact with them because they weren’t like us? Their clothes, color, odor, body piercings, tattoos, orientation or language was not what we are comfortable with.

The good news today is that Jesus crosses all such barriers. He flaunts conventional practice by going through Samaria. He breaches social taboos by speaking to a woman in public. He does what it takes to break down barriers and enable a life-changing encounter with a woman who had been deeply wounded across her life. That leads us to the second dimension of Jesus’ encounter with her: He accepted her where she was. Do you remember how in the middle of their conversation about water, Jesus shifts the conversation to her personal life? He says to her, “Go and bring me your current college transcript.”

“But I have no current transcript,” she protests. Jesus then says to her, “Woman, you are telling the truth in saying you have no active transcript. The fact is though, you have enrolled in 5 different colleges and have dropped out of every one of them, and the college you are now attending is one in which you are only auditing the courses without being officially enrolled!”

Now, it was not colleges that Jesus was alluding to, was it? It was husbands The woman had had five husbands and was now living with a man to whom she was not married. For centuries the church has condemned this woman as an unworthy partner in the conversation with Jesus. Some interpreters of this passage have consistently called her “wild,” “wanton,” and “wicked.” But that is a misunderstanding of what was likely going on in her life. She was not wild, wicked or wanton, but she was wounded. Rather than having been divorced five times, she probably had been abused and abandoned by some of those husbands or they may have died. A woman in that day had no power or legal rights. She certainly had not initiated the dissolution of her marriages.

She was a victim who was experiencing excruciating grief and agonizing shame at having been abused and abandoned multiple times. No wonder she chose to travel for water in the heat of noon day to avoid the stares and snap judgments of others. She was isolated, rejected, and wounded as she came to the well to get water. And what happened to this wounded woman at the well that day? That is the third dimension of this close encounter: She met someone who could meet her need - who could quench the thirst of her weary and wounded soul. She brought an empty jar to the well, symbolic of the emptiness in her heart. It is almost amusing the dialogue between the woman and Jesus. They are on two very different levels as they converse about water, buckets, wells, and thirsts - just as Jesus and Nicodemus were last week!

Jesus offers her what she needs - not water from Jacob‘s well - but living water - the spring of eternal life - the very living presence of God - the truth of God - the light and love of God. So overwhelmed is she that she has met the Messiah of God who knows and speaks the truth, this fragile female flees the scene so fast that she fails to take her water jar with her!

Why does she hotfoot it away? Is she afraid of Jesus? Is she embarrassed because this foreigner knows of her woundedness in her broken marriages?

No! She speeds to Sychar to share the story of what has happened to her! This wounded woman has been so wooed and won by the love of God - her thirst quenched by the living water of Christ - that she can’t keep quiet! She exaggerates somewhat in verse 29 where she shouts, “Come and see someone who told me all I had ever done! This must be the Messiah!”

Her witness is an effective one. John reports in verse 39, “Many Samaritans from that city believed in Jesus because of the woman’s testimony.” In fact, they beg Jesus to extend the Samaritan portion of his campaign for another 48 hours. Many more of them taste the living water and come to believe in Jesus as the Savior of the world because they, too, have a close encounter with him. Friends, as we said earlier, this close encounter with Christ is not just a story of a wounded woman long ago who is won, but it is also our story. It is the story of all who are thirsty - who have a spiritual dryness in our souls. It is a story about our need to bring our woundedness and to encounter the Christ in a close way.

None of is exempt from the temptation to satisfy that deep thirst in less than healthy ways. We all thirst for intimacy at some level. It may be through a series of faulty relationships, of multiple partners who cannot fulfill the emotional need of intimacy through a committed, lifelong partner. A pastor in Colorado Springs, a coach at a Christian school in Denver, the most powerful person on the planet - all trying to satisfy a thirst in a dead-end and self-destructive way. It was decade ago that the press prominently paraded the peccadillo of the President and his intern - the sad, sad drama of two thirsty persons - thirsty for gratification, for power, for intimacy, at some level. Both were left wounded to pick up the pieces of their broken lives, never to be quite the same again.

Frederick Buechner has written of our propensity to damage ourselves in seeking to fulfill our needs for intimacy, “Lust is the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst.”

It is not just casual sex we may use to quench our deep-down thirst, but, even more common and as destructive, we use stuff. We seek to satisfy our spiritual needs, to fill that void in our lives, with things.

Many years ago a very wealthy man was asked what would in take in terms of money to satisfy him. He answered, “Just a little bit more.” Studies indicate that most people - no matter how much money they make - feel they could be happy if they just made about 20% more than they do now.

Almost fifty years ago, a Methodist minister in Florida - in fact he was once the pastor of Trinity Methodist Church in Miami - wrote a song based on this story today. It took Dick Blanchard less than 30 minutes, sitting at a piano in a Sunday School classroom in Coral Gables, Florida to write these words, some of which we sang earlier:

Like the woman at the well I was seeking
For things that did not satisfy
Then I heard my Savior speaking
Draw from my well that shall never run dry.
Fill my cup, Lord, I lift it up, Lord.
Come and quench this thirsting of my soul
Bread of heaven, feed me til I want no more.
Fill my cup, fill it up, and make me whole.

Jesus says to us what he did to the wounded woman at the well, “Those who drink of the water I will give them will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give them will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:13-14).

Are you thirsty today, friend? Have you tried to quench that soul dehydration with things that cannot satisfy? Jesus did not shake his finger at the woman who had multiple husbands. No, he crossed barriers to meet where she was:

Not with accusation, but acceptance;
Not with guilt, but grace;
Not with a put down, but a pick up;
Not with indignation over her past, but with inspiration for her future!

Jesus’ offer of living water to her was in the spirit of the prophet Isaiah, “Everyone who thirsts come to the waters.” (55:1)

It was in anticipation of the that heavenly vision of Revelation 21:6, where the resurrected and exalted Christ proclaims, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.”

When that wounded woman closely encountered Christ and tasted the living water, she was a changed person! She became a winsome witness to the transforming work of God - resulting in others coming to recognize and rejoice in Jesus as the redeemer of the world.

Lord Jesus, Living Water, wash afresh over our dry souls. Fill our cups. Transform us with your life giving water to satisfy, save, and send forth. In this Lenten season, may we encounter Christ closely and drink daily of his living water through repentance, prayer, Bible study, and service. In your name we pray. Amen.