The Wesley Foundation at UVA

Dinner @ 6pm, followed by forum @ 7pm. Check the “Thursday Nights” tab for specific weekly topics.

“Leave Your Jars Behind”

John 4: 5-42

I really have only one thing to tell you tonight so I’m going to say it now: When you believe that God is the One giving you what you need to survive, you can leave behind your inadequate attempts to save yourself.

Do you know what I mean?

And do you know what it’s like to walk miles in the desert at noon, by yourself, carrying a water jug to fill up and quench your thirst with? Do you know what it’s like when you realize after all that walking and sweating that there is not a well on earth deep enough for your thirst? Do you know what it’s like to be met in such a lonely place by Jesus, offering to fill you up so you are never thirsty again?

This unnamed Samaritan woman does. Early morning was normal time for drawing water from the well. Women went together in the cool of the dawn to get water for their families, socializing and talking along the way. No one went to the well at noon. It was way too hot.

So long before Jesus starts asking her questions, we understand that she is something of an outcast, forced to make that daily journey on her own in the hottest part of the day. A daily reminder that she is not welcome in the social circles of her town. Do you know what that’s like?

And out of nowhere there is this man. A Jewish man and a rabbi at that! And he’s talking to her! This simply wasn’t done – men and women talking alone or Jews and Samaritans socializing. On top of that, no one ever talks to her – that’s why she’s there at noon in the first place. And on top of all that he is brazen enough to ask her for a drink.

What do you mean by this, you a Jew asking me a Samaritan woman for a drink?

And Jesus says, “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” (v. 10).

Maybe you already know this, but there is a big difference between finding water to live and receiving living water. ( ) You can go to the well every day — early morning, noon, or night — to draw enough water for the next day. You can walk all that way and back, careful not to slosh it all out onto the dry ground. You can love the cool, fresh taste of it and you can long for it when you don’t have it. But that’s just water to live.

Then there’s living water.

The woman is confused and curious when Jesus mentions it. Where do you get this living water? You don’t even have a bucket and this well’s really deep. How do you plan to get it?

He doesn’t answer the question directly. This water here will leave you thirsty again eventually. But if you drink the living water I give you’ll never be thirsty again. The water I give you will gush up like a spring to eternal life.

I find this part amazing, because if I had been at that well with Jesus I don’t know if I would have been that brave. There in the crazy heat of the day, talking with someone she isn’t supposed to be talking with, the woman receives what must have been the strangest invitation of her whole life.

She’s used to fending for herself. If she doesn’t walk out here in the middle of the day there will be no water. She doesn’t have friends to bring some back for her and she can’t make the load lighter by going with the other women at dawn. She came here to draw her own water and now this complete stranger with no bucket is offering her some water she’s never heard of.

And what does she do? Does she tell him to go take a flying leap? Does she think he’s being cruel and taunting like the rest of the people she meets? Does she even think he may have spent too long in the mid-day heat himself?

Without hesitation she says, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water” (v. 15). Whatever it is, I know I need it. Please give me this water! Is that what you would say to Jesus? Are you that brave?

Then it gets scarier because Jesus knows more than he has let on. He says back to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back” (v. 16).

She tells him she doesn’t have a husband and he says You’re right. You’ve had five husbands and the man you have now is not your husband. What you’ve said is true.

That is all he says about that.

We don’t know why she’s had so many husbands. We don’t know if they’ve died or run off or what. We don’t know anything except how Jesus responds to her. When she confesses the truth of her life all he says is “you’re right.” He recognizes the truth.

A lot of folks like to focus on this part of the story. They want to talk about her five husbands a whole lot more than Jesus did. They want to decide things about her and her life based on this one fact. They want to condemn her and her past.

This is not what Jesus does. I’m here to tell you that there is a big difference between condemnation and the hard healing truth. Do you know what I mean? The truth about who we are can be hard to see, hard to say, and hard to deal with. But at least it’s the truth. Saying it and seeing it is at least honest. It is a starting place. It is the only place to start.

The woman must know this somewhere deep inside because after she has been brave enough to ask for some of that living water, she’s honest enough to tell Jesus the whole story about her life.

None of this changes anything about Jesus’ invitation to the living water. He asks her for the truth and he listens to it all. He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t change his mind about the offer. He doesn’t decide to get up and walk on to another well. He doesn’t tell her to stop talking to him. He still wants her to have living water gushing up inside her to eternal life.

The story tells us they talk a little while longer and then the disciples come up. And when they get there they are so shocked to see Jesus talking alone with a Samaritan woman that they are speechless. They just stand there gawking and wondering what is going on.

And in that silence “the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people [there], ‘Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!’” (vv. 28-29).

I told you that I had only one thing to tell you tonight and it depends on this: the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. It is such a small-seeming thing that it would be easy to overlook. Of course when she gets to the city she tells everyone she runs into about this amazing man she’s met. She’s a great evangelist even though we never find out her name.

But the big news – the biggest statement she makes — is when she leaves that water jar. That water jar was her one friend on her daily trips to the well. It represented life to her because she had to have the water it held for her every day. This was how she took care of herself, how she kept herself alive.

And she left it behind!

Do you think maybe that water jar represents even more? What else was she ready to leave behind? Where else in her life was she protecting herself and trying to save herself? Where else in her life did she think it was all up to her?

Maybe it was that long line of husbands, there to give her a name or a home, or some kind of security. Maybe it was being able to take care of herself. But she gets up and runs back to town to tell all those people who wouldn’t even allow her at the well with them. She leaves behind all those ways she thought she was taking care of business. She leaves what she thought she had to have in order to make it through the day – she leaves that water jar, sitting there empty by the well.

When Jesus offers her living water she says Whatever it is I know I need it. What do you say?

I’ll say it again: When you believe that God is the One giving you what you need to survive, you can leave behind your inadequate attempts to save yourself.

If you have a water jar with you tonight, know that God makes the same offer to you. There is living water for you. There is eternal life for you. There is living water that is so abundant it overflows all our water jars and it quenches the deepest thirsts of our lives. If you have a water jar with you, know that you can leave it behind.

You may have come here to draw your own water. But God’s got a better offer.

What do you say?

Thanks be to God!

24 February 2008

Fluvanna Women’s Correctional Center

© Deborah E. Lewis

Tonight’s worship will be with the inmates at Fluvanna Women’s Prison. We will meet at the Wesley Foundation at 5pm to make the drive. We will return by 9:30pm at the latest. If you’d like to take part in this special service and outreach to the women of Fluvanna, please contact Deborah to make sure you are on the list.

Sunday Night Worship at the Wesley Foundation will resume *in 2 weeks* on March 9th at 6pm (after Spring Break).

Dinner @ 6pm, followed by forum @ 7pm. Check the “Thursday Nights” tab for specific weekly topics.

“At the Well”
John 4: 5-42

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat:  Jesus could have taken another route.  He didn’t have to travel through Samaria.  The first few verses of this chapter (which we didn’t read) set this story up with a description of Jesus traveling from Judea back to Galilee and claim that “he had to go through Samaria” (John 4: 4).  I don’t buy it.

I mean, this is the gospel that begins with that great echo from Genesis, declaring Jesus to be the very Word of God, with God from the beginning of all that is.  This is the gospel where Jesus’ first miracle – at Cana – is turning water into wine.  This is the gospel in which Mary of Bethany not only anoints Jesus’ feet with expensive perfume, but then wipes them with her hair.  This is a gospel with some inherent tensions:  Jesus is Word (capital W) and yet he is sensually human, someone who enjoys Mary’s elaborate foot treatment and someone who sits down by the well because he was “tired out by his journey” (v.6).  So, when Jesus takes a notion to go through Samaria, when a thirsty Jesus decides to sit by a well in the desert at noon and wait until a Samaritan woman approaches before he does anything about getting some water – we should pay attention.  There wasn’t any other road for him to travel, was there?  Well.

This is a gospel where Jesus’ seemingly random conversation with an unnamed woman of an enemy people gets 38 verses – one of the longest conversations he has with anyone.  It’s tempting to contrast this story with the one we read about Nicodemus visiting Jesus in the night.  It is interesting to consider the curious contrasts:  a named male Jewish leader seeks out Jesus in the night; an unnamed female Samaritan is minding her own business when Jesus seeks her out.  Most biblical commentaries contrast the woman at the well with Nicodemus, using her as an example of someone who accepts Jesus’ message and casting Nicodemus in less favorable light as one who couldn’t get past his silly questions to grasp what Jesus was trying to tell him.  There may be something to these comparisons but that’s not where we are going today.

She may not have earned a name in the biblical account, but this Samaritan woman is the first person in John’s gospel to hear Jesus reveal himself as the Christ.  And this after a strange ramble of a conversation, touched off when Jesus presents his simple request for a drink (v.7).  He’s a foreigner in her land, thirsty from the travel, and in need of her hospitality.  The woman’s initial reaction is to question him right back, wondering at his flouting of Jewish purity laws.  By this point it would seem Jesus should be very thirsty and intently focused on getting a drink to his lips, but he answers her back:  “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” (v.10).

What begins as a relationship of hospitality continues as one, but it becomes less clear as the conversation continues who is giving and who is receiving.  Jesus seems to be both asking for a drink and offering to quench the woman’s thirst.  The woman moves from considering his request to imploring him to give her the strange water he calls living water.  Who is asking whom for what?

This scene reminds me of a letter one of our past Wesley Foundation student presidents sent out to area churches one summer, inviting them to help provide meals for our Thursday night dinners.  A week or so after the letters went out I ran into a pastor who mentioned the letter, chuckling a little and saying, “David invited us to partake in the opportunity to cook for the Foundation students.”   To which I said, “Well, isn’t it an opportunity, to serve?”

Hospitality is a wily endeavor.  There have to be two sides, two roles, to the relationship.  But without some fluidity of roles, you end up with handouts or mooching or self-aggrandizement or any number of other distortions.  If you enter into a situation of hospitality convinced that you know all the rules, chances are you don’t.  If you like to have a script in advance and follow it without wavering, then hospitality isn’t the thing for you.

Jesus and the woman know a little something about hospitality.  Each has something to offer and to receive and it seems that only in this dance of an encounter at the well, where the roles of giver and receiver flow like water, are they each affected by the other person.  By the times she pleads with Jesus for some of this crazy living water “[the woman] has moved from seeing Jesus as a thirsty Jew who knowingly violates social convention to seeing him as someone whose gifts she needs” (NIB, p. 567).

How does this happen?  How does the skeptical woman end up trusting the strange man with her life?

I think the trust begins with him.

I told you Jesus could have traveled by another route.  Sure, he could have stayed safely out of Samaritan territory, clean away from that estranged part of the Jewish family tree.  He could have set up just at the edge of Samaria and called to them across the border, offering living water from a safe distance, in a more respectable manner.  He could have.

But what does he do instead?  He walks right into enemy territory and plops himself down at the well.  And when the least likely candidate for divine revelation shows up….he asks her for something she can give.  Then he asks her about her life, her family situation.  He recognizes the truth when she speaks it.  He lets her know he hears it, sees her, and wants to get familiar with the details of her life.

Some folks want to focus on the woman’s marital status and history.  Jesus doesn’t do this.  It’s of little importance.  The focal point of this whole story isn’t a list of husbands.  It’s the jar.

That water jar she left behind, her one response to Jesus’ self-revelation.  Like other disciples who leave behind boats and tax offices to follow Jesus, she leaves behind her water jar and runs back to town to give everyone she meets her testimony:  “He told me everything I have ever done” (Storyteller’s New Testament Women, p. 128;  v.39)

Just think how little Jesus had to say in order for her to feel that he had a grasp on her whole life.  When’s the last time someone listened to you like that?  When’s the last time you went out of your way to pay attention to the details of someone else’s life?

On several occasions I have heard my seminary professor Don Saliers mention somewhat wistfully that his singer-songwriter daughter Emily, of the Indigo Girls, can get 9000 people to sing along with every word of her songs, while he can’t get a congregation of 30 Methodists to sing a hymn.  ( )  Our culture is thirsty for the living water that can quench our deepest thirsts, but too often too many people experience the church as just another parched patch of desert.  Don’t get me wrong.  I am one of the 9000 singing along at the Indigo Girls concerts and I am thankful for the ways God speaks to me inside and outside of these walls.  What disturbs me is that too often we choose which side of the wall to live on.

I was flipping through The Christian Century magazine a while back and saw a seminary advertisement featuring a young man wearing a bandana on his head, an earring in his ear, and a wary scowl on his face.  The copy was:  “The last thing he wants is a sermon.  How will you communicate God’s love to him?”

Indeed.  You know, Jesus spends an extra two days in Samaria because of this woman.  When she runs back to town she just keeps telling everyone she sees about this man who has spoken her whole life to her.  “Come and see [the one] who told me everything I have ever done!” (v.29).  And they come.  Based on her testimony of this life-giving encounter, the people come in droves.  Because she believed, they came to believe.

When’s the last time we ran from church on a Sunday afternoon, eager to proclaim all the good God has worked in our lives?  When’s the last time we turned to each other in the pews to testify to our experience of the living God?  When the last thing much of the world outside these walls wants is a sermon, how will we communicate God’s love, if not with the proof of our lives?

This is a week when the outside has come inside here on the Wesley block.  Last night began our 2 weeks of hosting the PACEM homeless shelter here in our buildings.  It’s a simple and life-giving idea:  a moving shelter for homeless men in the coldest months of the year.  Each church takes a week or two to offer beds, showers, hot meals, and companionship in the evenings.

We could take another route.  It’s easier for us not to learn each other’s names, to stick to the rules, to go straight through on our journeys without stopping at foreign wells.  We are hosting a group of unnamed men these 2 weeks.  People who our society likes to blame for their circumstances.  People who might need someone who can tell them everything they have ever done.  Or who may be able to see you clearly enough to tell you about the things you’ve done.

It’s easier to let them remain unnamed.  But we have the opportunity to tarry.  We can stop by the well this week and next.  Take a load off.  We can offer hospitality – and receive it – with thirsty, nameless, strangers passing through.

Maybe we think we are the ones who can offer a cold draw of water from the well.  Maybe we can.  But sometimes the rules and the roles of hospitality get confused and the one who comes asking is the one who bestows the gifts.

What if the living water Christ promises is to be found among the community in the church basement every night?  What if we miss out on it because we think we’re not thirsty or because it’s been so long since we relied on someone else for a cup of cold water?

Leave your jars, your boats, your tax offices….your tax returns, your load of laundry, that pile of reading and study problems…Try it this week…Come by the well and drink deeply.  Leave your jars behind and receive the water, like a stream that catches your whole life up in its course.

Thanks be to God!

© 2008 Deborah E. Lewis

Join us for a field trip to the Newcomb Hall Theater to see the film “For the Bible Tells Me So.”

This screening is sponsored by the LGBT Resrouce Center and includes a discussion with Writer/Producer/Director Daniel Karslake following the film.  For more on the film visit:  http://www.forthebibletellsmeso.org

Meet us at Wesley at 6:40pm to walk over together or just meet us at Newcomb before 7pm.

Worship tonight @ 6pm.

Join us for worship each Sunday night in the dining room at the Wesley Foundation. Dress is casual and friends are welcome.

This is a student-led service, with musical worship team and weekly Communion. Come listen for God’s Word and your call.

Come as you are…leave a bit more.

The Student Coordinating Council meets today at 4pm in the living room.  All students are welcome to sit in on the meeting.

Dinner @ 6pm, followed by forum @ 7pm. Check the “Thursday Nights” tab for specific weekly topics.

“By Every Word”

Matthew 4: 1-11

Ash Wednesday is a weird and wonderful way to begin Lent.  The way it shows up in the middle of the week, on a different date each year, almost hidden between Sundays.  Today may be the first Sunday in Lent, but Ash Wednesday always kicks the whole season off.

It’s a strange ritual, to gather in order to have ashes smudged on our foreheads – and then to walk around for the rest of the day like that.  Weirder, perhaps, to be told when we gather like that:  “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

You started as nothing but the dust of the earth and one day you will die and be returned back to the dust.  Remember that.

I’ve been reading Eric Weiner’s book The Geography of Bliss.  He’s a reporter and a self-described grump who decides to set off around the world to find the happiest countries.  He finds several unexpected trends, things like Denmark and Iceland turning up happier than warm island paradises.  But one of the most interesting trends is how often the topic of death comes up with happy people and in happy cultures.

Places like the Himalayan nation of Bhutan.  One of the local men Weiner meets is actually named Karma and it’s Karma who offers this as a prescription for a healthy and happy life:  “You need to think about death for five minutes every day.  It will cure you, sanitize you.”  The typical middle-class American, Weiner responds by saying how depressing that sounds.  Karma says, “Rich people in the west, they have not touched dead bodies, fresh wounds, rotten things.  This is a problem.  This is the human condition.  We have to be ready for the moment we cease to exist” (The Geography of Bliss, p. 65).

Sounds happy, doesn’t it?

Advertisers and marketers and sometimes our own well-meaning family and friends can go to great lengths to “keep us happy” by avoiding all such topics, by keeping life sanitized and easy and comfortable, by encouraging us to forget or at least ignore for a while the cold hard facts of being human beings on the planet.

I remember being with my grandfather when he was dying.  Along with my mom and my aunt and my step-grandmother, I was there for 2 days at his bedside.  And it wasn’t like it is in the movies.  Granddaddy, who had been suffering with Alzheimer’s for several years, had to struggle to die.  His raspy breathing turned rattling and his lips dried out until they cracked and bled.  His skin turned yellowish as his liver failed.  He would seem restful for small bits of time and then vigorously struggle to get the covers off, to sit up, to do anything except the task at hand – dying.

At the time, it struck me how like birth the whole thing was.  Like a woman in labor going through waves of pain and pushing, Granddaddy needed to work his way through that threshold into the next life.  He was laboring and getting closer with each wave.  It wasn’t like it is in the movies.  He didn’t just shut his eyes and leave.  And, though he seemed to be letting go, it was not a peaceful, quiet, interior process.

In the weeks after my grandfather’s death, I wrote letters to my mom and my aunt and my step-grandmother, telling them what a privilege it was to be with them in those holy moments.  Don’t get me wrong, it was uncomfortable and sad and scary and gritty-real, but it was also so obviously the kind of thing we are put here for that I felt grateful for the experience.  I felt thankful that I was able to be part of that labor and that we did not leave it all up to hired professionals.

There is an awful lot in our culture that would say it is better to remember “the good times” and to remember my grandfather in the days before he was diseased.  There is an awful lot that would want to sanitize my experience.  Even in the church, we sometimes move too quickly from the deathbed to the service of death and resurrection.  Karma would tell us to linger a little and get a feel for death while we are yet living.

There is something of this in the conversation we begin on Ash Wednesday.  Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.  In part we are reminding ourselves of how simple it is.  No matter the bystanders, we each enter and leave the world on our own, crossing the thresholds alone.  Are we living now so that we are ready for the next one when it comes?  What are all these suitcases and storage boxes and where do I fit the plasma screen TV?  Who is this friend and where is this relationship going?  Why do I never find the time to tend it?  Why do I never seem to have time for the most important things and people?

Jesus goes out alone into the wilderness for 40 days.  Into the arid, lifeless, unforgiving desert, carrying nothing and accompanied by no one.  And then the devil shows up.

And he’s like a traveling snake oil salesman, with a coat full of dangling watches and a trunk with extra compartments and something hidden under his hat.  He’s determined to make his sale.

Step right up, young man.  You look like you could use something to eat, perhaps a nice sourdough.  Would you believe it if I told you any of these stones could be turned into bread?  Go ahead and try it.

But the young man from Nazareth leaves the stones in the dust on the ground.  No thanks, I live by every word that comes from God.

OK, a tough sell.  That’s alright.  The devil’s seen worse in the dust bowl days in Oklahoma.  No one wanted to buy anything back then.  He pulls out a dusty photograph of St. Peter’s.  See this here dome?  446 feet high she is!  Want to know how to jump off without a scratch?

It doesn’t interest me, Jesus says.

He removes his straw hat and wipes the sweat from his brow.  You must be interested in knowing what I know about the mountain yonder? he says, pointing in the distance.  You can see all the world from there and, I tell you, whatever you seen you can have, if you’ll come with me.

Jesus glances into the distance and back again at the pitiful sweating man in the plaid polyester suit.  I won’t come with you.  And I’m not interested in anything you’re selling.  Can’t you see I came out here with nothing?  It’s God I’m after.  Now leave me!

That’s a rough translation.

It’s the rough, treacherous, deadly places that can reorient us towards life.  Jesus doesn’t bring a picture of his mom or an iPod to pass the long hours.  He faces the desert wilderness with nothing but a desire to seek God – even there.  He goes hungry with only a taste for God’s Word.

Some of us feel like we are facing death when we give up chocolate or internet access or any of the myriad ways we distract ourselves from real life.  It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with most of them, but occasionally it seems we become a bit overloaded and need to clear out the excess, head into the wilderness and see how we do on our own again, with just God.  With only the hunger for every word God sends our way.  Word-itarians, you might say.

I quoted Jan Richardson in this morning’s sermon and here’s another one from her Painted Prayerbook blog.  Jan’s a United Methodist elder, writer, and artist, and wrote this on her Lenten blog this week (www.paintedprayerbook.com):  “The season of Lent beckons us to see what we are clinging to. The imagery of this season, therefore, is frequently stark. These days draw us into a wilderness in which we can more readily see what we have shaped our daily lives around: habits, practices, possessions, commitments, conflicts, relationships—all the stuff that we give ourselves to in a way that sometimes becomes more instinctual than intentional. Much as Jesus went into the desert to pray and fast for forty days, Lent offers us a landscape that calls us to look at our lives from a different perspective, to perceive what is essential and what is extraneous.”

Am I shaping my life around chocolate and television and Facebook?  What is the shape of my life?  Does it look sanitized and store-bought or does it look homemade and include messy things like relationship and death?  When I return to the dust, will I be upset at all the crap I have to leave behind at last?  Or will I recognize the threshold where I’ve visited, the place I’ve practiced for?

Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.

Most yoga classes end with a restorative pose called savasana, “corpse pose.”  It’s pretty much like it sounds:  you lie on the floor on your back, palms up, eyes closed, and try to stay still for several minutes.  Most teachers talk about it as restful and balancing after a hard and vigorous practice, and it is.  But I had a teacher once who said something different.  She said that the pose is what it sounds like:  we are practicing for our own deaths.

The thing about any yoga pose is that all of your regular personality traits come to the surface as you practice.  If you are impatient, you will want to come out of poses before the rest of the class.  If you are uncomfortable with stretching yourself, you will pull back when it would help you more to lean into the stretch.  If you are serious about your practice, you make note of these responses.  They, too, are part of the practice.

That’s what the Lenten wilderness is like.  That’s what Lenten disciplines can be to us.  Places where we practice in order to live more intentional lives.  Places where we rid ourselves of the extraneous and develop our Word-itarian tendencies.  Maybe even a place we allow ourselves to remember that we are dust and that we shall return to dust one day.

Thanks be to God!

© Deborah Lewis 2008