Exodus 17:1-7, Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42
Here we are in the third week of Lent
and week 3 of this sermon series on “What keeps you up at night?” The first week, the topic was money. Last week, it was aging. This morning, it’s another one of the
questions that plague us: “Am I more
than my work?”
Well, I’m a priest; so my work is an
ordained vocation and all that. But I’ve
often wondered what it would be like to be a bartender. The romantic image of it appeals to me, the
image from movies or old reruns of Cheers. On difficult days here, I could really see
myself doing it: John at the bar, who
welcomes people as they come in, listens to their stories, offers a wise word
here and there, and serves drinks to ease their pain. Actually, maybe my current vocation isn’t so
different after all. Turn the bar into a
communion rail …. well, perhaps it’s not a 1:1 match.
But I do have days when I wonder, “Am I
more than my work?” You don’t have to be
a priest to experience it. You get up in
the morning and start thinking about what’s on your schedule. You get to work and dive into the day –
moments of energizing creativity alongside mind-numbing details. Amid one meeting after another, you try to
get the most important things done and keep the urgencies of the moment from
pushing the priorities aside. You
struggle to keep up with the e-mail. You
worry whether there will be enough – customers or profits, Sunday attendance or
pledging units. You take real joy in
those times when you know, deep in
your heart, that you’ve actually made a difference. You go to the day’s last meeting, and then
you go home to find it’s nearly bedtime.
And you go to sleep thinking about what’s on the schedule for tomorrow….
You don’t have to be a mental-health
professional to know we need a more holistic sense of who we are and what we
do. God has equipped us for work, but
God has not created us to be workers.
God has created us to be … human beings, earth-creatures miraculously
filled with the divine Spirit so that we can bridge this world and the kingdom of heaven we can’t quite
see. We know this, deep down. We know we’re more than carbon-based life
forms, random collections of chemicals that somehow evolved
self-awareness. We know God sees us as
more than that. But we also find
ourselves right there with the people of Israel sometimes, wandering in the
wilderness. In the dust and the heat of our
own barren landscapes, we sometimes look around and see no water. Intellectually, we may know God’s leading us
on a journey; we may understand we don’t get to see the Promised Land until
we’re there. But in the moment, it’s
easy to wonder whether we’re doing anything more than wandering. Are we just walking in circles in a barren wilderness? “Is the Lord among us, or not?” (Exodus
17:7).
Let’s change the scene to today’s Gospel
reading. We’re not in the desert
wilderness, but the setting is just as hot and dry – and potentially, just as
spiritually desolate. Jesus is walking
through Samaria, a place that used to be part of Israel. David and Solomon ruled this land; the people
there and the people of Judea once were one.
But over the centuries – after divisions, and invasions, and
deportations, and return from exile, and rule by different foreign empires –
the people of Samaria and “the Jews” are just similar enough to despise each
other.
So at noon, traveling in the heat of the
day, Jesus stops at a well to rest.
There he meets a Samaritan woman – an odd meeting for several
reasons. First, most of the local women
wouldn’t have chosen the heat of the day as the time to lug gallons of water
back home, so you have to wonder if she wasn’t welcome among the others who
would have been there that morning. Second,
Jesus engages this woman – he asks her for a drink, and he carries on quite a
conversation with her. That would have
been a breach of social norms because a man and a woman wouldn’t have engaged
each other like that in public. And
finally, he was a Jew, and she was a Samaritan.
And you don’t have deep, meaningful conversations with people you’re
supposed to hate….
The woman names the awkwardness, but
Jesus takes the conversation in a new direction – away from the need for a
drink of water and into the need for hope.
He tells her he can offer not just well water but “living water” (John
4:10) – flowing water, not stagnant; and water that leaves you satisfied
forever after only one drink. The woman
is intrigued – she’d love to stop making her daily journey to carry water from
the well – but she’s no fool. Who’s ever
heard of water that quenches your thirst forever? Jesus needs to take the conversation deeper so
she can see him as something more than a snake-oil salesman. So he leads her to look at herself through
his eyes.
Now, here we’ve got to be careful to
step outside the assumptions people often bring to the character of this
Samaritan woman. It is a fearful thing
to fall into the hands of R-rated biblical interpreters, but that’s what often
happens with this story. Jesus points
out the woman has had five husbands and that the man she’s living with is not
her husband. That doesn’t make her either a skank or a hooker with a heart of
gold. In this social context, a woman
had no legal right to divorce her husband.
So the likelihood is that she’s lived through the hell of being dumped
or widowed five times. And now, the only
relationship she can find is outside what little protection marriage offered
women. She’s had an incredibly hard
life. She’s on the margins of
everything. Jesus wants her to know that
he gets it.
And he wants her to know that she is
more than what her hard life would lead her to believe. In the eyes of her culture, this woman’s
identity would have been a negation: “not someone’s wife.” In the eyes of a Jew walking into her
Samaritan culture, the woman’s identity would have been a judgmental negation: “a heretic
who’s not someone’s wife.” At best,
she’s a nothing. And yet, here’s a
prophet engaging this nothing in a theological conversation. Here’s a prophet saying that where people
worship God doesn’t make a nickel’s worth of difference; what matters is
knowing the Father and worshipping authentically, “in spirit and in truth”
(John 4:24). Here’s a prophet revealing
to her that actually he’s the Messiah, and he wants to have a conversation with
her.
This woman’s identity is as far away from “nothing” as you can get. It’s not about her marital status, or her ethnic
group, or her religious practice. Her
identity comes from the living water welling up within her, the water Jesus
gives her by focusing not on what she is but who she is. And who is
that? This woman is the greatest thing
there is: a child of God, worthy of a conversation with God’s own Son, worthy
of receiving living water, worthy of being taken completely seriously.
And once she begins to see herself
through Jesus’ eyes, she begins to see Jesus through God’s eyes. She says, testing the waters, “I know that
[the] Messiah is coming…” (4:25). And
Jesus smiles and lets her know she got it right: “I am he,” he says – or, more precisely, as
the Greek text gives it, “I am” (John 4:26) – just like God on
Mt. Sinai. This has truly been a divine
encounter. And it heals the woman so
deeply that she can live into the opposite
of her society’s expectations. This
outsider, who couldn’t even go to the well with the other women, now runs to
the crowd and says, “Come and see a man who told me everything I’ve ever done!”
(4:29) Come and see the first man who ever
truly saw me.
When Jesus looks at you, who does he
see? Does he see a banker, or a
homemaker, or a student, or a parent, or a physician, or a retiree, or a
businessperson, or a priest? Does he gauge
who you are based on your accomplishments in your role? No. No. No.
No. What Jesus sees is you – the
real you, deep down, at the core of your being.
Our identity, our value, comes not from
what we make but from how we’re made. We
can earn millions of dollars, or labor countless hours, or insist on perfection
in all that we do – but none of that gives us our value. Our value comes from the Spirit’s presence
welling up within us. Our value comes
from the fact that you – not humanity in general but you, the beautiful face looking back at you in the mirror – you are made in the image and likeness
of God. You bear the spark of divinity
within you. In God’s eyes, you are worth
dying for – not because you are
“good”; in fact, despite much that you regret. (Romans 5:6-8) Your failures aren’t the point. In God’s eyes, you are worth dying for simply
because you are a precious child.
Precisely because God knows
you so well, because Jesus can tell
you everything you’ve ever done, because
you cannot earn love no matter how hard you try – because God knows you need it, the love of your heavenly
parent flows into your heart. It’s the
river that watered the Garden of Eden in the beginning and the river that flows
through the city of God, the heavenly city waiting to welcome each of us home. It is the water of life. And it’s yours.
The question isn’t, “Am I more than my
work?” God knows you’re more than your work.
The question about work is this: “Does
my work reflect who I am?” Does what I
do spring from the living water that springs up in me? Does my work honor the God who loves me
unconditionally for who I am? Does my
work honor the inherent value of every person my work touches? Through my work, do I love God and love the
person in front of me?
So what is
your true work? To serve drinks. When you come right down to it, we are all
holy bartenders. You are called to take
the love of God that flows into your heart and pour that love back out
again. In your office, in your home, at
a party with your friends, in a meeting room filled with tension – in every waking
moment – your work is to love. Nothing
less will do for us, for the children of the God who is love. Your work is to draw
living water from the well of your own beloved heart and pour it out freely,
not fearing the loss. Your work, my work
– our work – is simply to offer a
drink to every thirsty child of God the world sends our way
