Some Plus More Equals Infinity Rev. Dr. John W. Stewart John 4:1-30; The Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time June 5, 2016 Scripture Introduction

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1 Rev. Dr. John W. Stewart John 4:1-30; The Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time June 5, 2016 Scripture Introduction Let me first say a word of appreciation to this congregation s elders, pastors, and staff for their kind (and risky) invitation to participate in today s service. I am keenly aware of an old Pennsylvania proverb: Home is a place that when you go there they have to take you in. Now before I read the scripture lesson of the day, I hope you will allow the historian in me a little play in order to refresh our memories of those social and cultural realities that swirl beneath and within this New Testament text, located in the fourth chapter of the Gospel according to John. Appreciating those realities is pivotal if we are to appreciate this astonishing encounter between Jesus and an unnamed woman at a well in Samaria. In Jesus'ʹs day, in a land that we now call Palestine, there were three distinct territories: in the north was Galilee; in the south was Judah, centered around Jerusalem; and in the middle was Samaria. Decade after decade, century after century, Jewish Samaria was occupied by foreign forces like those from Babylonia (which is present day Iraq). While Jewish leaders, artisans, and child- bearing women were carried off, many ordinary folks remained in place. Thus, over the years, many native Samaritans intermarried with their captors, creating a racial cleavage and animosity. Over time, Samaritans generated their own style and practices of the Jewish faith tradition. They built their own temple on a mountain top, called Gerizim, where, they claimed, the Abraham nearly sacrificed Isaac. They insisted that only the first five books of the Hebrew Bible counted as divine scripture. Psalms and the prophets were second- rate. Thus, over the years, Samaritan religious orthodoxies and practices became deeply offensive and heretical to devout and orthodox Jewish folk. And some wild- eyed parable about a good Samaritan is off the charts of respectability. So by the time of Jesus, Samaritans were deeply despised and a person was thought to be contaminated if one were ever in their presence. So, Jewish travelers who went north or south went around this territory of Samaria. Perhaps when Joseph and Mary left Nazareth to go to Bethlehem in the south, they traveled around Samaria. So when our text of this morning begins by saying that Jesus had to go through Samaria we need to know upfront that this is an unusual if not radical decision. Jesus is going to a place where he did not belong. And note well: this is the longest conversation between Jesus and another person ever recorded in the pages of the New Testament. And it is all the more remarkable for males were never to speak to women on public streets; rabbis were not even supposed speak to their wives out in public places. Scripture Because sermons are prepared with an emphasis on verbal presentation, the written accounts may occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.

2 1 Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized he left Judea and started back to Galilee. 4 But he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, Give me a drink. (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria? (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, Give me a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water. 11 The woman said to him, Sir, [Rabbi] you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it? 13 Jesus said to her, Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life. The woman said to him, Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water. 16 Jesus said to her, Go, call your husband, and come back. 17 The woman answered him, I have no husband. Jesus said to her, You are right in saying, I have no husband ; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true! 19 The woman said to him, Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem. 21Jesus said to her, Woman, believe me, 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 hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers 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. 25 The woman said to him, I know that Messiah is coming (who is called Christ). When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us. 26 Jesus said to her, I am he, the one who is speaking to you. 27 Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, What do you want? or, Why are you speaking with her? 28 Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he? They left the city and were on their way to him. 39 Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman s testimony, He told me everything I have ever done. So when the Samaritans came to him [Jesus] they asked him to stay with them; and he [Jesus] stayed there for two days. And many more believed because of his Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 2 of 6 June 5, 2016

3 word. They said to the woman, It is no longer because of you that we believe for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that he is the Savior of the world. * * * I. We are in the presence here, in this passage in John'ʹs Gospel, of a sublime work of art. And like all great art, there are multiple ways of interpreting and savoring it. And in great literary art, every word counts here. And don'ʹt discount Jesus encounter with this radically different person by disclosing that he is both tired and thirty. No credential- waving here if a relationship is to emerge. But, did you notice, track, the progression in this narrative? You might say there is a mysterious multiplication underway. First the Samaritan woman sees Jesus simply as Jewish male and as potential adversary. We cannot miss the contempt in her snippy remark, How is that you, a Jew, ask of me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink of water? She is not to be trifled with, even when Jesus raises the delicate issue of her multiple marriages and current housing arrangements. But remember: Samaritan women were little more than negotiable property. But she addresses him as Sir a term, for Rabbi or teacher. Next, a bit later, she wonders if he is a prophet and proceeds to engage him in a hefty theological discourse about competitive claims about temples and centers of worship, the one in Jerusalem and the Samaritan temple on Mt. Gerizim. Then note the progression is going on when she says, I know Messiah is coming, and in one of the most closely guarded topics in the New Testament, Jesus says to her, a woman of Samaria, I am he, the one who is speaking to you. Finally, to top off this entire passage, she and her friends affirm that Jesus is the Savior of the World. There is a strange kind of mathematics, calculus, at play here. The more she inquires, the more Jesus becomes. The more she learns, the greater her capacity to absorb more. She started with meager knowledge about Jesus that he was male, Jewish, tired, thirsty and little by little something more is factored in. She began with little and ends up with everything. Jonathan Edwards may not exactly be a house name these days, but for those who care and write about such things, most agree that he is, arguably, this nation s premier Christian thinker. (He died just before the America Revolution got underway in 1776.) Well, there is a small edition of Edwards autobiographical writings (called Personal Narratives) in which a very young and sensitive adolescent is trying to explain to his father his journey into the Christian faith and his encounter with this Jesus, not at a well but in a field. His words have this same mathematical magic for me. I gave today an account to my father of some of the things that have passed through my mind.... I was walking alone in a solitary place in my father'ʹs pasture,... looking up in the sky and clouds and there came to my mind so sweet a sense of the majesty and grace of Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 3 of 6 June 5, 2016

4 [Christ], that I do not know how to express. [More and more] I seem to see them [majesty and grace] in sweet conjunction; majesty and meekness joined together; it was sweet and gentle; a holy majesty; a majestic meekness; an awful sweetness; [His was] a high and great and holy gentleness... and there was the appearance of divine glory in almost everything. We are pretty close here whether it is a woman at a well or Edwards in a pasture field we are pretty close to the deepest realities of the Christian faith: the more we encounter Jesus, the more he becomes. Is this not what we would want to testify to: that from earliest days in Sunday School, to youthful experiences in camp and literature classes, to the deeper reading of Scripture we share with other adult friends, we replicate the mathematics of this Samaritan woman s faith journey? Or as a late, dear colleague used to say over and over to seminary students, The more you know the better it gets. II. But there is more here. She saw more in Jesus than others did and the more she inquired the more he became. But another calculus is happening simultaneously here. It is true that she saw more in Jesus than others did, but Jesus saw more in her than she ever did. When we first meet her she is a simple, obscure person whose chores in life were reduced to drawing water, satisfying others, dabbling in religion; she was trapped on a treadmill of boredom, consigned to caste and custom. Her God- given potential as a human being, made in the image of God, was shriveling. The sum of who she was by creation was daily becoming less and less. Each day, a little more of her personhood was being subtracted, if not divided. Tomorrow she would be diminished from who she was today. And then this Jesus comes her way. And who can do the math here? Who can fathom all this: in three days, she is translated from the ranks of the wounded into a company of healers; from one whose voice is silenced, to a proclaimer of good news to an entire village; from an outcast in some parochial, Samaritan village to an ambassador of the Kingdom of God. We are in very deep mystery here. The well is deep and we have little with which to draw. Did you notice this extraordinary verse: She left her water jar and went back into the city and said to the people, Come and see a man who told me everything....? (New Testament scholars say that it is fair to read this verse like this: Come and see a man who told me who I am. ) The well is deep here and we have little with which to draw, but is it not the testimony of most Christians that, within the strange providence of the Spirit, that as we begin to discover who Jesus is, we simultaneously begin to discover who we ourselves are? Is it not our testimony, that in our encounter of God, there is a mysterious correlation of discovering what we are and what we are made for? Many of us in the academic world are privileged to be given the leisure to frequent libraries and research the religious experiences of ordinary humans in ordinary faith- communities. (Some us Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 4 of 6 June 5, 2016

5 of even got paid for it.) Well, for me, a contemporary German theologian, Jürgen Moltmann, has occupied my attention for the last decade or so. As a young lad of 17, Moltmann was conscripted by the Nazis to man a anti- aircraft gun near his home town. He and his family had had nothing to do with a church or catechisms or Christian models. But one night, during an Allied attack near Hamburg, a bomb dropped near the turret. It instantly killed his good friend and companion in the turret, but he was not so much as scratched. Moltmann has testified many times that on that horrible night, his journey into the Christian faith began. He eventually stayed in Scotland as a prisoner of war, and the through the kindness of parishioners of nearby Christian churches and a Methodist tutor he began, he testifies, to read in this strange book, the Bible, and a mysterious but vital faith began to take shape. Some forty years later, now a deeply insightful Christian (who is still lecturing in Christian communities here in the United States and around the world), he has offered to us all something of an autobiographical account of his encounter with God and, at the same time, his discovery of his deepest self. Here is how he put it. I am not sure whether it a testimony or a prayer: For a long time I look for you [God] within myself, and I crept into the shell of my soul, protecting myself with an armor of unapproachability. But you [God] were outside outside myself and enticed me out of the narrowness of my heart [and] into the broad place of love for life. So I came out of myself and found my soul in [through] my senses, and my own self, in others. The experience of God deepens the experiences of life. It [God] does not reduce them, for it [God] awakens an unconditional Yes to life. The more I love God the more gladly I exist. The more immediately and wholly I exist, the more I sense the living God, the inexhaustible well of life, and life'ʹs eternity. (Spirit of Life, p. 98) So we are back to our morning s text. We know, or at least I sense, we are in deep mystery here. Who can digest all this: that a Samaritan woman, with extraordinary gifts of hospitality and who can only get employment drawing and carrying of water to others, emerges as an ambassador of the kingdom of God? III. Will you hang out with me for just a moment longer? I want to circle back and retrieve what I think is the climax of this morning s text. For there is another verse here verse 42 that stands like the dominant peak in a mountain range of unforgettable theological affirmations. This one verse looms above the horizon. After Jesus had, apparently, enjoyed the hospitality of Samaritan folks for two days, they, the strangers those aliens, heretics, half- breeds of Samaria said to this woman who had been with Jesus, It is no longer because of you that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the World. Isn t this an unprecedented and extraordinary complement, an awesome breed of mathematics? Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 5 of 6 June 5, 2016

6 But isn t it also a Word from God for us, now? Isn t it the longing of every parent that our children will hear for themselves and come to know this Savior of the world? And isn t it the joy of every teacher who helps children or anyone to begin read and write that someday they will read for themselves and know that this Jesus is the Savior of the World? And isn t it the agenda mission does matter of a congregation like this one that every stranger longing for a community, every seeker longing for a faith, every prodigal of us longing for forgiveness, will come to know for themselves that this Jesus is the Savior of the world? Just think: Those who drink of the water that Jesus will give them will never be thirsty again. For the water I give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life. I wish we knew this woman'ʹs name. Why don'ʹt we know her name? She deserves to be ranked alongside those early apostles, Peter, James, and John. She may well be the first woman preacher, madam ambassador, of the Christian faith. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen. Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 6 of 6 June 5, 2016