Exodus 17:1-7; John 4:5-42
Here we are in week 3 of this sermon
series on “Five Questions We Ask in the Dark.” Last Sunday, we considered God’s very
existence: Is God really there? In the
midst of our sleepless nights, that question rises fairly easily, I think, especially
when what we hear in response to our prayers is, literally and figuratively,
crickets in the dark. Today, we come to
another insomnia-inducing question: Is there enough? Does God give us enough?
In the prayer Jesus taught us, he tried to
guide us toward humble expectations about enough: “Give us this day our daily
bread.” That’s what we ask in the Lord’s
Prayer. The Biblical text is actually
something closer to, “Give us today our bread for tomorrow” (Matthew 6:11,
NRSV). I think offering that prayer is a
good way to form our hearts, as well as to set our expectations. When I say that line in my own prayers, I
often follow it up like this: “Give us this day our daily bread. Help me to see that all I have comes from you
and that what you give me is sufficient, and abundant, and extraordinarily
generous.”
I tack on that line about daily bread
being enough because I’m a lot like the people of Israel wandering in the
wilderness, as we heard in the reading from Exodus today. In the section just before today’s reading,
we hear about the people complaining against their leaders, Moses and Aaron,
for failing to provide food in the desert. God hears the people’s fear as well
as their hunger, and God provides manna – quite literally their “bread for
tomorrow” and nothing more. Each
morning, the people find it on the ground and collect it. And no matter how much or how little each one
gathers, they all have the same amount in their baskets, and it lasts only one
day before it breeds worms and turns foul.
So they couldn’t store it
up. They had to trust that God would
send their “bread for tomorrow” … tomorrow.
Now, no sooner had God solved the food
problem than the people found a new focus for their fear about having enough –
water, which is a reasonable worry in the desert. They find no water where Moses tells them to
camp, so the people quarrel with Moses and with God: “Why did you bring us out
of Egypt? To kill us and our children
and livestock with thirst?” (Exodus 17:3).
The irony is that, as they’re eating the bread of angels, they’re afraid
God won’t set the table with a cool drink of water, too. So God tells Moses to “strike the rock at
Horeb,” also known as Mt. Sinai – the place where God called Moses from the
burning bush and where God will give Moses the Law later in the story. “Strike the rock,” God says, “and water will
come out of it” (17:6) – what people of the day called “living water,” the best
kind of water, water flowing clear in a stream rather than sitting green and
murky in a cistern. “I will be standing
there with you,” God tells Moses. “You
can trust me not just for your daily bread but for the water of life, too.”
So here’s perhaps more of a window than
you want into the questions I ask in the dark.
I am right there with the people of Israel in the wilderness, my prayers
too often degenerating into, “Lord, what have you done for me lately?” It’s why that add-on to the Lord’s Prayer
about daily bread matters to me – because it’s so easy to become fearful about having
enough.
My fears about enough don’t usually swirl
around money or things. I have different
afflictions. My fears about enough
usually involve the Church – both St. Andrew’s and the Church with a capital
C. Will the Church be around in 30
years? For most of us here, most of the
time, we’d say, “Sure, of course it will.”
But this is a challenging time for mainline Christian
denominations. In the Episcopal Church, we’ve
seen Sunday attendance drop by 26 percent in the past 10 years, and it’s currently
decreasing by about 3.5 percent per year.1 With our tiny total Episcopal population of
1.8 million, we don’t have folks to spare.
In these tough times, St. Andrew’s membership is holding steady, but our
attendance dipped slightly last year. Now,
we are addressing the scarcity we fear: We’re searching for a new assistant
rector to lead ministry with younger adults and families, both people within
the congregation and people we want to bring into it. We’re seeking to draw more people into St.
Andrew’s orbit through traditional church programs and services and through points of connection like community
classes, neighborhood events, receptions, kids’ programs, and pastoral presence
with people around us. That’s all
good. But, to build the beloved community
Jesus wants the Church to be, we need to connect with people more effectively and
invite them into this family – which is why we now have a full-time engagement
coordinator on staff, Mike McKinne. But,
of course, one staff member can’t do that work alone. So it raises the really big question about
“enough” in the Church: Do we have enough willing hearts? Do we have enough people willing to connect
with others, willing to invite them into something and walk alongside them to help
them find a home here? Does our parish
family have enough of a culture of evangelism?
We can think up evangelistic programs; we can offer (and we have offered) different styles of
worship; but by itself, that’s not enough. A culture of invitation, a culture of
connection, a culture of evangelism – that has to be here, too.
So, into my late-night fears about
“enough” steps an unlikely character: a nameless woman at a well, the woman in
today’s Gospel. She is about as much of
a nobody as somebody can be, from a Jewish perspective in Scripture. First of all, she’s a Samaritan. The Samaritans and the Jews had been feuding
for centuries, feuding the way only siblings can. The Samaritans were the descendants of the
Northern Kingdom of Israel before the Exile, and the Jews were the descendants
of the Southern Kingdom of Judah before the Exile. They worshiped the same God but in slightly different
ways and in different places – so of course their brotherhood became deep
division. So, this woman at the well is
a Samaritan; and as the Gospel tell us, “Jews [did] not share things in common
with Samaritans” (John 4:9). The second
strike against this woman is that she is a person of literally no social
standing. That’s likely the meaning
behind the exchange about how she’s had five husbands, and how the man she’s
with is not her husband. From centuries
of interpretation biased against women, we may hear that statement as impugning
her moral character. It’s much more
likely saying that five past husbands have ditched her, leaving her powerless
and alone; and she’s doing the best she can to survive in a society where a
woman’s value was measured in terms of being a man’s property.
But this Samaritan woman at the well
engages Jesus in a way no one would have expected. Like Nicodemus in last week’s Gospel reading,
she interrogates Jesus; and he recognizes her inherent value by taking her
questions seriously. As in last week’s
reading, Jesus doesn’t give the woman easy answers. He makes her keep digging, keep plumbing the
depths of that well that leads to living water.
Finally, she gets it (unlike
the learned Nicodemus last week), and she recognizes Jesus as the Messiah, the
one “who will proclaim all things to us” (4:25).
What we’ve just heard is this woman’s call
story. Think about other stories of
Jesus calling disciples, stories that might be more familiar. Think of Peter, Andrew, James, and John out
there on the lake in Matthew’s Gospel, enduring yet another fisherman’s
workday, casting and mending their nets.
Jesus comes to them – regular guys in the midst of their regular lives –
and he says, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people” (4:19). Something similar is happening in this story,
but the Samaritan woman at the well doesn’t even need the invitation. After her interrogation of Jesus, she leaves
behind her water jar, a vital possession for a woman in that time and place;
and just as surely, she leaves behind her old life, too. This social outcast, not even anyone’s wife,
goes back to the city of Samaria, finds her voice, and says to the people she
meets, “Come and see a man who told me everything I’ve ever done!” (4:29). Come and see the one we’ve been waiting
for. And, remarkably, the people follow her to find the messiah. Of course, to Jesus, it’s no surprise: “Look around you,” he says to the disciples,
“and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting” (4:35).
In the wee, small hours, I would do well
to remember the Samaritan woman – as well as the Lord who gives us living water
when we least expect it. When I find
myself worrying about where the church will be next year, or in five years, or
in 30; when I find myself worrying that I can never do enough or be enough or
meet all the expectations people lay before me; when I worry whether we have enough
of what it takes build a culture of evangelism at St. Andrew’s and in the
Episcopal Church – in those wee, small hours, I need to remember the Samaritan
woman at the well.
Do we have enough of what it takes to be
evangelists? The answer is, “Yes” – and
I can prove it. Look at the word. What does that supposedly scary word, “evangelism,”
mean? Does it mean quoting
Scripture? Does it mean telling people that
Jesus Christ is your personal Lord and Savior?
Does it mean going door to door to invite people to St. Andrew’s. Well, yes, maybe eventually … but not
necessarily, and certainly not right off
the bat. It would be like kissing
someone you just met. That scary word,
evangelism, comes from a Greek word that simply means “good news.” If you can share good news, you are, by
definition, an evangelist. If you can
gossip about something good, you are, by definition, an evangelist.
And what is that Good News? You can say it many ways, but here’s the simplest
way I can frame it. For somebody out
there, someone you meet or know, the Good News is this: that you take this
person seriously enough to have a conversation and offer hope about what
matters in his or her life. And here’s
why that’s Good News: Because the fact that you
take the person that seriously shows that God
does, too. Especially in our world,
where authenticity is rarer than living water in the desert, I would argue that
the best news any of us can hear is that we are worth someone’s investment to
build a relationship with us, a relationship that points us toward hope.
At the end of the day, that’s what the
Church is for. The Church is God’s
community of relationship-building. Each
of the promises of the baptismal covenant is about relationship. And when it comes to the project of building
relationships, God equips us with an amazing and counter-intuitive capacity for
blessing. If you can build a
relationship that points to God’s unlimited love, then you have enough to be an
evangelist.
So, remember today’s Gospel math
lesson. You didn’t know you were coming
for a math lesson this morning, but here you go: How many Episcopalians does it take to speak
about love they don’t have to earn? How
many Episcopalians does it take to build a relationship that points toward hope? How many Episcopalians does it take to gossip
good news? The answer is, one. One
is enough. One is enough – as long as that
one is you.
1.
The
Episcopal Church. “Episcopal Church Fast
Facts Trends 2011-2015.” Available at: http://www.episcopalchurch.org/files/domestic_fast_facts_trends_2011-2015.pdf.
Accessed March 16, 2017.
