Down By the Well

John 4:5-42

Lent 3A

Growing up, I spent the vast majority of my time tooling around my neighborhood on my bicycle. And this love of peddling around on wheels started pretty early on in my life. I remember at my church there being a room with a bunch of those plastic tricycles with the big wheel up front and two smaller wheels in the back. That was soon followed by a little red metal tricycle which seemed to be standard issue for kids of a certain generation that I would ride up and down my driveway. Then a larger bike with training wheels, then a blue BMX bike that I thought made me into some kind of a daredevil, the kind that you would see on the X-games or kids cereal advertisements, as I would peddle as fast as I could to hit the place on my driveway where a large pine tree had grown so big that the concrete had buckled up just to the left of it and formed a perfect ramp to send me flying at least a foot into the air—which seemed like all the lift that anyone could ever want to get. Then it happened. Somewhere around my 12th Christmas, Santa Claus, having decided that I had graduated from the world of kids bikes with nubby, fat tires and the brakes where to stop you peddled backwards cinching the back wheel and bringing you to a terminal point, and into the world of the 10-speed. And I can still remember that feeling of walking into the living room that Christmas morning and seeing the crudely wrapped package, and it was plainly in the shape of a full-size bicycle with the tag reading: To: Jamie From: S. Claus. Now, even though it was clear from the quality of the wrapping job that this had been one of the last, if not the last, gift to have been wrapped by Santa, somewhere in the early hours of the morning, I still could not wait to get my turn to unwrap it. But, as it turns out, in my house, growing up, in determining who would be called on and when a gift would finally be unwrapped were both determined both the age of the recipient and the size of the gift and of course it went in ascending order. And so, being the oldest and this obviously being the largest of the presents that adorned our living room, I had to watch my two younger brothers both unwrap present after present as I looked on with a level of salivation that would have made Pavlov’s dog proud as one-by-one presents were cleared from under the tree until, one of the last gifts still remaining was the large bicycle shaped gift sitting in the corner of the room. Then, finally, I was called on to rip into the wrapping paper and uncover the 10-speed of my dreams. It was red with the curvy kind of handlebars so as to allow for the rider to hunch down over the bar like some cyclist in the Tour de France chasing down the peloton with aerodynamic speed and velocity. It had gear shifts on both handlebars, as well as the kind of brakes that you squeezed. It was, in a word, perfect and I couldn’t wait to get out and ride it. And normally this would not have been an issue. I grew up in rural eastern North Carolina where I could count the number of times we had snow or ice during my childhood on one hand. But on this Christmas, we had had a freak ice storm a couple of days before hand and though it was starting to quickly melt away as frozen precipitation so often does in the South, there was still a fair amount of slush all over the road in front of my house and try as I might, I could not convince my father to let me take it on out for a spin down the road and around the neighborhood. But, after much, “cajoling” on my part, he relented and let me get on the bicycle in my driveway and pedal down to the other side of the road. Stop and come back. So I quickly put my winter clothes on and I went outside carrying my prized possession with me. Here’s the thing, though. When you graduate to an adult bike, you can’t be hesitant in your riding. My bike, unlike my blue BMX bike was tall enough that I had to put one foot in the pedal and throw my other leg over the bike and at that point you are on your way. In a similar fashion, upon starting to go, you can’t really go slow. It’s not like a bike with wide tires. These were razor thin and so, part of the trick to balancing on the bike was to get moving. All of this I didn’t really realize until I had gotten to the bottom of my driveway, wind blowing through my hair and feeling free as a bird when I noted the oncoming curb just across the street and muscle memory kicked in and I pedaled backwards as hard as I could not slowing down one ounce until I hit the curb on the other side and went flying over the handlebars that were curved for better speed and velocity and that had the gear shifts and, as it turns out, handbrakes and landed with a thud in the slushy ice and grass in the yard across the street. It was like I had wanted an Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle and I had shot the glasses right off my face and had a little bump to show for it. Only, it was my whole body that ached with the ache of bruise and cold. But that’s the thing about riding a bike like that. You have to be willing to let go off all fear, all trepidation. You have to be willing to let go of whatever you have been holding onto for balance, to pedal as hard as you can to stay up, simply be alive and free and without the shackles that too often hold us down in the rest of the world. You have to simply let it all go. And it is only then that you can experience life and life in abundance. And this is what Jesus asks of the woman at the well and what Jesus asks of us today—to tear down all the safety nets that we have built up around us and simply live into the light.

In our scripture for this morning, we are told that it was near the hottest part of the day, with the sun at the apex of its journey from east to west, when Jesus decided to take a well-deserved moment of rest at a well near the town of Sychar. He had previously sent his disciples into town to gather more supplies for their constant journey criss-crossing the region and was now just enjoying some rare alone time when a lady from the village made her way to the well. And one is left to wonder if this was how Jesus interacted with everyone he met or if this woman elicited some special reaction from him but almost immediately he begins to tear down the walls of division that first century Palestine has placed in between these two people. “Give me a drink,” he said to her. And just like that all the assumptions and presumptions, all the cultural baggage and societal norms that dictated every aspect of the relationship between these two people all of it is shattered as he reaches out to her, and her to him, and they touch what it true and real in each of their souls. And really on any other day, this interaction would have looked starkly different. Surely this woman was used to doing what of the men in her life said and going to the well would have been something that she would have done multiple times a day. And I’m not sure if the presence of this man sitting at the well would have elicited any sort of reaction from her. And so his words could have meant, you lady, give me a man a drink, so that I don’t have to trouble myself with it. Of course, we know that there was a regional issue as well. Give me a drink would have certainly sounded like a request that one didn't have the right to refuse in an interaction between one from Israel and one from Samaria. We well know that Samaritans were stuck near the very bottom of the society. The were rebels in the eyes of the Jewish hierarchy, heretics of the faith, shiftless, lazy, dumb, a drain on the society in which they found themselves. In this light, “give me a drink,” may well have sounded like a directive from one who held more communal sway than the woman who had walked up the the well. But what we see, what we encounter in this story for this morning is that all of that matters little to the one making the requests. All that matters little to the one who has come to bring living water, all that means little to the one who comes to set all of us free from the bondage of sin and welcomes us into life eternal starting right now. Indeed, the woman at the well would depart from that place and, her life forever would be altered, forever changed. All that she thought she had known about the world, about her place in it, about the truth fell away and she could not contain her excitement to reach out to the people in her village to try and convince them to come and see him, too. Never again would the world and her place within it look the same. In that moment, that moment in which the brokenness of society, the brokenness of the woman, the brokenness of the world encounters the savior of it all, this woman who no one would have otherwise cared about, is offered redemption, is offered grace, is offered the chance to drink of the living water that is found in Jesus but that is also found deep in the well of each one of us. Their interaction, marked by the knowledge of the societal norms of the day as well as the manner in which she had lived her life, a manner in which she had had five previous husbands and was living out of wedlock with a sixth man, their interaction allowed the light of the new life to shine in her, to be birthed in her, to give her a new license on the gift of time that she has and before you know it, she has become the biggest missionary of the village, calling all the people that she encounters to come see Jesus and to have their lives altered as well. And as the disciples return and struggle to understand the practical aspects of what is going on, all the towns people have gathered and are hearing and in hearing are developing faith. Like water in a parched desert, Jesus’s message sprinkles down on all the people and they cannot help but be moved to be different than they were before. And from there, once Jesus has broken down the societal boundaries that would have before dictated everything that happened between them, he then turns to breaking down everything they thought they knew about the spirt of God in their midst. About the way in which we are called to worship. About the spaces in which we are called to worship. About the way in which we are to see and hear the realm of God erupting all around and shaking to its core all the foundations of the world and demanding that we rebuild everything see each one, not through a societal, or gendered, or classist, or even religious lens, but as simply a sister, a brother in God, each of the same spiritual lineage, each with the same holy destination, each the beloved of God.

I don’ think I need to tell you that this congregation is something of an anomaly in the church world of today. Earlier this week, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who, too, was in the pastorate and he was lamenting the challenges to pastoring his church, how so much had changed over the last few years, how the church he thought he knew even 2 years ago seemed almost unrecognizable to him today, and how he was tired. Unfortunately for him, when I talk about this church, I cannot help but be excited about the place that we find ourselves, the way we are journeying together—lifting up those who struggle to walk and skipping with those whose joy is impossible to contain—the way we reach into our community and seek to bring in those who have felt either as if they were exiles to their own faith or lacking a community where they might honesty and authentically pastor it, how we reach beyond all the labels that our society, culture, and world might want to place on each of us as individuals and genuinely find the Christ that is located in all of us. I told him about our presby-curious class and how large numbers of folks squish together in a room to hear what I have to say about being a Presbyterian in the world, about chili lunches and fellowship meals and beautiful music and children’s time, and relatively passable sermons. We are and do church differently from any other congregation of which I am aware and I know pastors all over this country and honestly, the next step in our movement to be better tomorrow than we were today is just the continued practice, each day, each hour, each service to strive to let go of whatever sorts of safety rails we keep in our lives, in our faith, in our practice, and to pedal as hard as we can feeling the wind in our hair, feeling the freedom that comes with a life lived into the immediacy of eternity, feeling the slight trepidation that one feels when they get going a little too fast on their bicycles and realize that the only way to stay up is to keep going, living into the life of abundance that Jesus desires for all of us to have. And let that being our contribution, our offering, our one spiritual grain of sand lain on the scales of humanity and the cosmos. That is our lenten journey, that is our practice, that is our faith. Now and always, amen.