Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Rev. David Williams; 03.23.14
Scripture Lesson: John 4: 5-42
When my kids were little, they went through this phase. You’d be scurrying around, trying to juggle the day, the work and the laundry and the endless scatter of tiny people. It was time for dinner, and there they’d be, plopped down at the table, little faces peering up over the edge, little hands cleaned.
It’d be a simple meal, elemental and basic in the way that meals are when you’re scrabbling desperately just to keep ahead of the day, feeling for all the world like you’re the lead character in some disaster movie, just one step away from catastrophe at every moment.
And so you cast aside your Julia Child fantasies, and even your deep-fried Paula Deen daydreams, and go with what works in ten minutes or less, which more often than not is breaded chicken strips and instant mashed potatoes. And because you want the meal to be healthy, there’d be those frozen peas you can bombard with microwave radiation and steam in the bag, just the way grandma used to do. It is, technically, a home-made meal, or so you tell yourself. Technically. It’s nothing at all like just skipping out to Mickey D’s, because you warmed up the factory-made food yourself.
You settle in at the table, and after some encouragement someone bumbles their way through a blessing, and then it’s time to ingest the manufactured nutrients. Mmmm, manufactured nutrients.
Only one of them or the other of them just sort of sits there, looking disconsolate and poking sadly at their plate. They’re not about to eat. They can’t possibly eat. The world is coming to an end. This is not food, this is a nightmare. Why? Why, you ask?
Because the food is touching. The peas keep rolling into the mashed potatoes. They are leaving their designated official pea area, and are being drawn relentlessly into the area set aside for mashed potatoes, as if the potatoes have their own peculiar gravitic field. But that’s not the worst of it. Bits and pieces of the breading on the manufactured instachicken have detached themselves, and have wantonly intermingled with the peas and the mashed potatoes.
It’s a violation of all that is good and holy, total chaos, the end of the world, cats and dogs, living together. A total loss. You may as well have covered the food in live earthworms and small chunks of uranium 238.
We don’t like it when our expectations are shattered, when those carefully constructed categories that help us understand the world get busted open. When something punches a great big hole in our understanding about the way the world should work, it bothers us. It’s not just the world that has been unsettled. It’s our sense of ourselves. We think we know where we fit in, how things work, and we’ve created the neat little silos and categories that help us navigate our existence.
Things that mess with those categories are, well, problematic.
As, frankly, were the words of Jesus in this week’s passage from the Gospel of John. It’s a funny thing, this Gospel. It’s got some of the most complex and soaring passages of Jesus talk you’ll find anywhere, complex and mystic and difficult in the way that only very simple things can be difficult.
And yet it can also be remarkably earthy, setting you into a place and a moment. It’s noon, and the sun is high in the sky. To the west, a low mountain, Mount Gerizim, atop which is a Samaritan temple. We hear that Jesus is all tuckered out, and chilling by a well. A woman arrives, to draw water from the well, and a conversation ensues.
It’s a strange conversation, for a couple of reasons. First, Jesus is talking with a woman. He just up and starts talking to her, even though he does not know her. In the ancient near east, this wasn’t something that you just did. It violated some fairly basic expectations of decent human behavior. You just didn’t do that, unless you had certain rabbi-inappropriate intentions. “Hey, haven’t seen you at this well before. Can you buy me a drink? How you doin’?”
But second, and even more significantly, he was talking with a Samaritan woman.
Throughout the Gospels, the tension between Jews and Samaritans is a constant theme. There was some big hatey hate there, the kind of multi-century loathing that seems to be a specialty of Middle Eastern cultures, as much a part of the flavor of that region as hummus and tabouleh. There were reasons for this, ones that we often don’t grasp.
Once upon a time, Samaritans were Jews. When King David ruled over Israel, they were the Jews who lived in the northern part of the kingdom. But when David’s grandson decided to inflict heavy taxes on the North, and to force their people into bondslavery, the north rebelled. They broke away from the southern portion of the kingdom, and formed their own kingdom. The name of the Northern kingdom: Israel.
Folks in the south hated them, I think mostly because they’d forgotten to trademark the name Israel. Judah? Why do we have to be Judah? That split happened eight hundred years before Jesus, which just goes to show you how long folks can bear a grudge.
But there were other things that happened over those 800 years. Worship in the temple in Samaria was very different from the worship in the temple in Jerusalem. Where the Jerusalem temple ferociously defended itself against the incursion of any outside influences, the Samaritans didn’t seem to care quite so much. They worshipped the God of Israel, sure. But they also folded in celebrations of Ba’al, the Caananite God. Why not? When the region was overrun by Alexander the Great, the Judeans fought a ferocious war to drive out those who’d violate their temple with images of the Greek Gods. The Samaritans? They just sort of chilled with it. Oh, sure. You want to put up a statue of Zeus Xenios, right up there on our sacred mountain? No problem. We can totally do that.
This would make the Samaritans the Unitarians of the ancient world, I guess.
And it meant that the Judeans viewed them as not really Jews at all. They were a mongrel faith, a mismosh of things, no more welcome in Judah than a stray from the streets of Mombasa would be welcome at the Westminster Dog Show. In the same strange way that family hatreds can be the deepest hatreds of all, the Judeans utterly despised their Samaritan cousins.
Which is why this woman is confused when Jesus speaks. She knows how things are, how deep the hatred runs. She knows, or thinks she knows, what this Judean must think of her.
So when he raises his voice, and speaks to her, she has some trouble processing it. Really? You’re going to talk to me? We don’t mix, you and I. And as confusing as those first words are, the conversation gets even more confusing.
Having asked for water, Jesus offers her living water. Wait, what? What and the what? Why would you ask me for water if you have living water? And how did you get it? Where’s the bucket?
What she hears, when he says “living water,” is “spring water.” “Flowing water,” like you’d find in the spring-fed well where they were sitting. But Jesus is taking her understanding of that, and saying that the reality God is calling her to is radically different. He’s telling a completely new story, offering her a Spirit-driven way of life that has nothing to do with the old hatred between the Northern temples and the temple in Jerusalem.
The whole way you understand our relationship is going to change, he is saying. The way you think things are--broken, hateful, negative--will have to shift, if you are to be open to the deep and transforming reality of God’s presence. We, all of us, need to be shaken out of our strange, self-absorbed natures. We all have this desire to shape the world, to control it, to take our limited grasp of what is truly real and force the world to comply. We do not want peas and mashed potatoes touching. We want everything divided up, exactly the way we understand it.
Jesus takes that way of knowing, and shatters it. The way of life he lived out, and that he offers all of us? It’s completely different. It presents us with a reality that demands that we love all, stand freely in relationship with a God who is Love, and Spirit, and Light. That relationship, if we let it really touch us, shakes us out of our patterns of complacency and moping.
It’s why everyone who talks with him seems a little confused, a little shaken, as they struggle to grasp what he’s talking about.
But it’s a struggle worth having.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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