“If You Knew the Gift”
John 4:1-15
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
9/18/16
“God did not
send the Son into the world to condemn the world,” but to save, to heal, and to
redeem the world. Because of that, the Son is constantly working his way into
and through some sort of tension or conflict. Sometimes it’s petty and momentary,
as when disciples jockey for designations of greatness. More often, though,
Jesus wades into divisions wide as oceans and wounds deep as time itself.
While in
Judea, Jesus hears gossip that he and his disciples are rapidly gaining followers.
Knowing that this will worry the Pharisees in Galilee, he turns north. He heads
homeward, into the maw of the Pharisees’ indignation. Nothing says I love you like sitting calmly,
gratefully, and generously in the midst of someone else’s anger or fear, even
when they project all that anguish onto you.
Jesus knows
that the Pharisees will feel threatened by reports of his evangelical success.
Competitive spiritualities have almost everything in common with competitive
economies – jealousy, envy, resentment, greed, entitlement, lust for power.
Remember Cain and Abel. While the wound is deep, the gift is deeper.
Along the way, Jesus stops at the
Samaritan town of Sychar. For all who claim ancient Hebrew roots – and that
means the Jews of Samaria and the Jews of Judea and Galilee – Sychar is a
storied town. It claims the well that, according to the claims of various histories,
was dug on land that tradition claims to have been Jacob’s gift to his favorite
son, Joseph. Like centuries of sand layered over the ruins of an ancient synagogue,
all those layers of conflicting claims seem to have buried the giftedness of
the well and the very idea of gift itself.
Jesus knows
that the woman he meets at the well feels threatened by a lone man speaking to
her in a public place. Remember Adam and Eve’s exit from the garden. Enmity
between the snake and the woman is nothing compared to the way that story has
been used to separate women from men. It’s been used to strip women of their
basic humanity, of their innate giftedness as creatures made in the image of
God. While that wound is still deep, the
gift is deeper.
The Samaritans
and the Jews have been at odds for generations. Even in Jesus’ day there’s no
consistent story as to why these spiritual siblings live in such animosity, but
somewhere along the line, the Samaritans left or got removed. Now both groups teach
their children to live in suspicion and fear of the other rather than sticking
to the all-claiming commandment: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God,
the Lord alone…Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your
soul, and with all your might. Keep these words…Recite them to your children
and talk about them.” (Deut. 6:4-6a, 7a)
Whenever and
however it began, the wound separating the Jews of Mt. Zion from the Jews of
Mt. Gerizim is deep. But the gift – the gift to them and the gift of
them – runs deeper still. And the well at the Samaritan town of Sychar, that
hole dug deep into the ground from which nourishing water has flowed for untold
centuries, represents both wound and gift.
Isn’t it just like Jesus – to show
up right in the middle of our and the world’s deepest wounds? And there, in one
way or another, he says to us, “If you knew the gift of God” in this place, you would find living,
healing, redeeming water.
That’s easy for a preacher to say
from a comfortable pulpit in a comfortable town in a culture that’s about as
comfortable as one can find on this planet. But when plagued by some kind of
dis-comfort – grief, fear, physical pain, emotional turmoil, vocational
upheaval, or simply the dull and dulling ache of existential drift – it is very
difficult to accept that there can even be
a gift. The presence of a gift would suggest that there is grace, meaning, and
hope wrapped up in what feels like the arbitrary torment, relentless drudgery,
and occasional pleasure of all this chaos into which we have been thrust by no
choice of our own.
The Samaritan woman certainly doubts
Jesus’ pie-in-the-sky optimism. Life has gifted her with everything but joy.
She’s on her sixth husband, for heaven’s sake. And she’s a woman of Samaria. If
she gets caught talking to a Galilean rabbi, she will be the one branded as
morally suspect. Where could there possibly be grace, meaning, and hope in her
life? What “gift of God” could there possibly be for her to know?
Last Wednesday night our book group
read the fourth chapter of Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward. As the epigraph
to that chapter, which he entitled “The Tragic Sense of Life,” Rohr quotes
writer and feral mystic Annie Dillard. “In the deeps,” says Dillard, “are the
violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these
monsters down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find
what our science cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or
ether which buoys the rest…” She calls it “the unified field: our complex and
inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together…This is given,”
she says. “It is not learned.”1
In place of “ocean or matrix or
ether,” we can read the well, the gift of our “caring for each other, and
for our life together.” Remember, the well beside which Jesus and the Samaritan
woman talk is the well gifted to
Joseph. And according to shared tradition, Joseph draws up buckets of Living Water
from his brothers’ treachery. “Even though you intended to do harm to me,” he
says, “God intended it for good.” (Gen. 50:20)
Joseph rides his monsters downward
into “the deeps [of] violence and terror,” and there he discovers Living Water,
a gift not only to receive, but to give in gratuitous measure, even and
especially to those who had plotted violence against him and who had lied to
cover it up.
Like Joseph’s brothers and the
Samaritan woman, we are struggling with irksome individuals and distressing circumstances.
What will we do? Will we follow anxious “messiahs” who separate us ever further
from our neighbors and the creation by encouraging us to judge the sinners and to
dismiss the sacredness of the earth? Hasn’t the Church has done more than enough
of that over the millennia?
I think Jesus is calling us to the
difficult but rewarding discipleship of riding today’s monsters down – like
Joseph in Egypt, like Jacob at the Jabbok, like Jesus on Good Friday. A Jesus-life
is all about riding monsters down into the depths and discovering there the Living
Water that God is using to unite the creation in “complex and inexplicable
caring for each other, and for our life together.” And when we come to know the gift of God, we know that we
are both receivers and givers of God’s re-unifying gift of grace.
I agree with Annie Dillard. This
gift is given, not learned. Still, to know the generous measure of this gift, God
does more than give it to us. God calls us to do more than claim it and enjoy
it. God calls us to be stewards of the gift, to nurture it, to practice it, to
live as fountains of Living Water, grateful and generous sharers of Agape Love.
Which is everywhere.*
1Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for
the Two Halves of Life, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2011. p. xviii.
(Quoting Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk.)
*This sermon never felt finished to me. To acknowledge
what I imagined others must have felt, I issued a charge at the end of the
service saying that I felt like a tour guide who had led them to the front
walkway of a house and said, “This is a really interesting house. Cool stuff is
going on in there. But I’m not going to take you inside.” There is, indeed,
fascinating and significant stuff going on in that house, and while it’s a
universal reality, the experience is different for all of us. It’s a story that’s
been told and lived thousands of times. It’s one version of the hero’s journey,
and we all have to identify and ride our own monsters down. Then and there will
we begin to discover the Living Water and the gifts it offers us to enjoy and
to share.
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