SUNDAY Lent 3 DATE 19 March 2017 (Year A) The Ven Mandy Herriman

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1 SUNDAY Lent 3 DATE 19 March 2017 (Year A) PREACHER The Ven Mandy Herriman Romans Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. John 4: 5 42 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. The woman said to him, Sir, 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? 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. Jesus said to her, Go, call your husband, and come back. 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! The woman said to him, Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem. Jesus 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 worshippers 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. 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. Jesus said to her, I am he, the one who is speaking to you. 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? 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. Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, Rabbi, eat something. But he said to them, I have food to eat that you do not know about. So the disciples said to one another, Surely no one has brought him something to eat? Jesus said to them, My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. Do you

2 not say, Four months more, then comes the harvest? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, One sows and another reaps. I sent you to reap that for which you did not labour. Others have laboured, and you have entered into their labour. 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, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there for two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Saviour of the world. As the deer pants for the water, so our souls thirst after you Lord. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my Redeemer. I grew up in Guildford in the only family home I knew. We had a half acre block and in the back of the garden was an old well, an old bricked well which was a remnant of the market gardens that had existed there before. The opening of the well was flush with the ground and was covered with a slatted wooden cover which was easily slid off. As a child, I was fascinated with the well and although we weren t supposed to, one of my brothers and I would regularly take the cover off and peer down into its depths. We couldn t see the water at the bottom very clearly, but would drop stones down and listen for the plop when it finally hit the water. There was a partial ladder, rusted and worn that extended part way down the roughly bricked walls of the well. I sometimes felt a desire to descend the depths of the well and experience the space down there I imagined it damp, claustrophobic, dark and oppressive and yet the sense of there being water down there was appealing. A dark, still, pool of water with no concept of where the bottom might be. My fear, however, of the imagined never-ending bottom, prevented my brother and I attempting any heroic descent using ropes, etc. In my later years, dad installed a bore pump and the well was used to irrigate the back garden. The mystique and intrigue of the well was lost. But I carried with me a sense that we had for a time something that was special, something that other people didn t have. Today s gospel text is centred around a well. A well with many stories to tell and the story it tells today is the greatest story of them all. There is so much in this story, so many theological positions to explore, so many things to say about each nuance of the story. This is a gospel text with a history that spans more than 400 years which informs this encounter between Jesus and a woman from Samaria. I could take you on a theologically historical journey but I want you to focus on this profound encounter between the woman and Jesus and what their exchange can tell us about our own faith journey this Lent a Lent of sacred encounters. In this tableau there is a woman and there is Jesus. We know some things about this woman and can surmise many other things. We know that: She is a Samaritan there is a 400year antipathy between the Samaritans and the Jews.

3 She is a woman and Jesus was not culturally permitted to speak to her. She is mystified at first and doesn t comprehend what Jesus is talking about. They converse at cross purposes for a time. Much like Nicodemus in last week s gospel. She is a woman of loose morals borne out by her many husbands and the current man to whom she is not married. Some of the things we can perhaps surmise about her: She is ostracized by the community. She is a nobody. Hence she comes to the well in the heat of the day to draw water instead of dawn or dusk as would be the usual custom. Was she barren and that was why her previous husbands had abandoned her or was she a very unlucky widow? Whatever her back story, she is unnamed in the text and the inference is that she sees herself as someone who sits outside the religious culture she is not accepted by the Jews and she is not accepted by her own people. She dwells on the fringe. This is what we know about Jesus in this story from his ministry years. Jesus is traveling to Jerusalem and has not bothered to skirt Samaria as others would, but rather, to journey straight through saving travel time. He is hot, tired and spent. He is also thirsty and is willing to ask anyone for a drink to slake his physical thirst. Jesus is willing to step through the cultural barrier to ask a stranger for what he needs. Jesus sees into the heart of the woman and knows her story. She is not a stranger to him even though she is as removed as she can be from his own cultural experience. This Samaritan, outcast woman is also fixing for a theological argument with Jesus but all her ripostes are as chaff in the wind in the startling revelation that Jesus presents her with and which she finally comprehends. Jesus loves her as she is one who is ostracized, one who is broken, one who is barren loves her with amazing love that offers her new life, and, in abundance. He shares with her a glimpse of the possibility of what is to come the living water of eternal life, the living water that satisfies our thirst for love and acceptance. All the things that she has searched for in her world and through her life love, companionship, acceptance, peace and happiness and that have eluded her, have been met in this brief encounter with Jesus, who breaks down every barrier. Her water jug is left, her task forgotten, her joy and happiness welling up in a fountain that cannot be contained and she runs to share what she has experienced. And in her sharing, she confesses her life as it has been and tells what it has become. Come and see she cries, a man who told me everything I ever did a man who knows the very heart of me, the sins I have committed, the pain and isolation I have lived with, the worthlessness I feel as a woman ostracized by her community a man who dares to love me as I am and to offer me life in abundance.

4 I leave my water jug, I leave my daily routine, I leave my self and I come to tell you that he is the one. I am made as new and I am filled with the life-giving water that wells up and will not be contained. For my life has been made anew. Come and see! And they came, and they saw and they encountered Jesus for themselves. This nobody, this Samaritan woman has been transformed and her barren life made new. This life changing, life affirming, abundant life encounter happened by a well. A well beside which, part of the covenantal story of God and his people played out across the years. A well then, is a sacred place a place where the saving grace of God has been manifest over and over and over through the long history of our story. Margaret Silf refers to wells in her book Sacred Spaces as pools of possibility. Wells for the Celtic tradition are places of sacredness and referred to as thin places where heaven meets earth in a profound and sanctified way. Silf speaks of a well as that which expresses in a physical sense the deep paradox of the human experience that joy and sorrow are two sides of the same coin, that our greatest creativity can arise from the potential ruins of destructive experiences and that to live life in all its fullness is to accept the risk of descending into the depths and embrace the challenge to venture beyond our comfort zone. She says of a well: It is sacred because it is the source of water, the cradle and assurance of life itself. Yet that source of life is only reached by descending into the depths of a deep, dark shaft. There are three aspects of drawing water from a well the descent to where the water that brings life is present, the turning the point when the descent ends and the ascent begins the return to the light of the world, filled and sated with the living water we have collected from the depths. It is the story of baptism, the descent into death through the waters, the turning from the old ways of being towards Christ and the rebirth through the life-giving waters into resurrection promise of new life. When we come to the well, we may be tempted to board it up because we are fearful of what lies beneath at the bottom and are afraid of the darkness below, just as my brother and I were wary of what may or may not lie at the bottom of the well, but then we deny ourselves the opportunity to drink from the life-giving water. Sometimes in our lives it is easier to board up the dark places of our souls because we dare not venture there. Or we can choose to be open hearted enough to face the plunge into the depths that life calls us into, to face our fears and pains and open ourselves to the possibilities of abundant life and redemptive grace that lie beneath. Sometimes we don t have a choice about what life delivers, but we always have a choice with how we face those difficulties in our life.

5 It was through a very dark despairing time of my life that I encountered Christ in a real and redemptive way I had descended into a deep well of profound sadness and fear and where my capacity to cope was severely compromised. I was in a place where I could not discern the presence of God. I understood myself in a frighteningly vulnerable way and I was confronted with intense feelings of worthlessness. Eventually through the faithful prayer of others, as I found I could not pray in any real sense, I became aware that I was being borne out of that place of darkness into a softer and less fearful place. There was no sudden turning but rather a gradual ascent back into a world of light and happiness, back into a world where the overwhelming, indescribable, unnameable fear ebbed, became an undercurrent and then finally dissipated. I became aware that beside me walked my God, not absent, never absent, but rather sitting with me in the dark and silently holding my terror and despair. But I didn t know that or recognize that until I was on the way back up. The spaces of darkness and despair, were replaced with a renewed and restored faith and a deeper, more profound understanding of who I was and the possibility of who I could become. And for the first time in my life, I understood, really understood, that God loved me profoundly even at my ugliest, my unworthies, and most unlovely. That whoever I am and whatever I am and wherever I am, my God loves me beyond my understanding. It was a long journey and one that spans some years of my life. It was a journey of self-discovery, and paradoxically, one that I am grateful for, for all the blessings and grace that have flowed out of that experience. In a sense, I think that is why I am intuitively drawn to this gospel story of a woman who comes to the well in the middle of the day, encounters a stranger, is confronted by the extravagances of her sins and is unexpectedly given a gift of life and love. Come and see the one who told me everything and loves me just as I am. I leave you with a prayer by Jim Cotter. It is an ancient unknown, silent and dark But to enter the darkness in trust is to emerge more whole. To go further into the inner caverns with steadiness and courage Is to emerge into a broad place A place of greater honesty and clarity in encounters with others. A place of greater ability and enjoyment in loving and being loved by friends A place of greater strength and compassion. Give me a candle of the Spirit, O God, as I go down into the deeps of my being. Show me the hidden things, the creatures of my dreams, the storehouse of forgotten memories and hurts. Take me down to the spring of my life, and tell me my nature and my name. Give me freedom to grow, so that I may become that self, the seed of which you planted in me at my making. Out of the deeps I cry to you, O God. The Lord be with you.