SERMON 39 - SUNDAY 23 MARCH 2014

Sermon at St. Lawrence’s Church, Stratford-sub-Castle – Sunday 23 March 2014

Exodus 17 (1-7); John 4 (5-42)

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be always acceptable to you, O God.  Amen

It is lovely to be with you all this morning and thank you Tessa for letting me have the opportunity to come and preach here in this lovely church.  I had a chance to meet with some of your last week at Joyce and Peter’s re-dedication of their marriage vows (what a wonderful service that was) and again on Wednesday at the Portway, coffee morning.  I hope we’ll have another opportunity for a chat after the service today.

After all the rain and flooding which we have been having during these first weeks of the year, I really hoped that I wouldn’t have to preach on water – something like Noah’s flood would have just been too much! - but it seems that God has chosen the next best thing today – two readings – one from the Old Testament and one from the New about living water.  As we have seen, over the past couple of  months, although water can give life it can also be very destructive too.  However in both of our readings we hear about the way in which water, both actual and allegorical, can save us – body and soul.

Before we look more deeply into the readings, I have to tell you that I can never hear this morning’s Gospel passage without a smile crossing my face as I recall a very humorous incident which I am told is true – I’ll let you be the judge as to whether or not that is so.  The story goes that a young Christian couple, who were organising their own wedding asked a friend, a non-Christian cake decorator, for an inscription to be iced on their cake.  After much searching in the bible they decided upon 1 John 4:18 which reads “There is no fear in Love”.  Somehow, the instructions to the decorator got mis-written down as not 1 John 4:18 but John 4:18 (what we have in fact had read to us today) and the icer, although slightly bemused and assuming there must be some completely incomprehensible (to her) theological reason for so wanting this piece of scripture inscribed “You have had five husbands and the man you now have is not your husband” – the cake’s inscription could not have been more wrong!

In fact, today’s reading in John could not be more wrong either.  As Tom Wright describes in his commentary on John, this very long conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman appears to be  all wrong.

First, as a Jew, Jesus should not have been engaging with a Samaritan in the first place – the animosity between the two was worse than that which exists between Portsmouth and Southampton football fans.  In fact, it was well known in those days that Samaritans would ambush pilgrims on their way from Galilee to Jerusalem (as Jesus and his disciples were doing now) and so many Jews (as Jesus did on his final journey before Holy Week) would travel down the Jordan Valley and then up to Jerusalem via Jericho.   For some reason, on this occasion of his encounter with the Samaritan woman, he chose to go right through “bandit country”. 

Secondly, it would be an unacceptable practice for any Jew to approach and talk to a strange woman on her own, particularly a Samaritan woman and

Thirdly, it would appear that because the woman had had five marriages which had all broken up – we assume through divorce – and she was now co-habiting with a sixth man to whom she was not married – she was being shunned by her own kind as nobody would have gone to the well at the middle of the day when the sun was at its peak – except a woman who didn’t want to meet anyone through shame and, of course Jesus. Perhaps I should add mad dogs and Englishmen too!

So, we can assume that in speaking to this woman, Jesus was breaking so many conventions and doing so deliberately.  What he was doing was just plain wrong!

The conversation which ensued reminds me a bit of the sketch with the two Ronnies when the character played by Ronnie Corbett enters the hardware shop of Ronnie Barker asking for four candles/fork handles?  Here we have living water/running water?

Jesus first of all asks the woman to give him some water. She simply cannot understand why on earth he is asking her for this.  He is a Jew, she is a Samaritan – a Jew would never accept anything from a Samaritan – in fact the disciples have gone off to another, presumably non-Samaritan, village to purchase food as they could never accept any from a Samaritan – yet here is Jesus asking this woman for a drink.

Then Jesus turns the conversation around saying that if she knew who he was then she would have asked him for living water!  By this point Jesus is now talking about something entirely different but she still thinks he is talking about the water at the well and she has noticed that he doesn’t have any pots or pans or bucket to collect the water – nor is the water at the well living (or running) water – it is a stagnant pool.  This discourse goes on and on leading to Jesus saying that the water he has to offer is one which will not only quench the thirst of the one who receives it but they will also never go thirsty again.

Clearly the woman still thinks in terms of H2O – the stuff we actually drink.  Jesus then reveals himself to her as a prophet by bringing the woman’s husband into the conversation – knowing that she isn’t married to the man in her life at that moment – so that he can tell her that he knows about her previous marriages.

It is at this point that they get into a more theological discussion – one which resembles the one about which is the better football stadium – Portsmouth’s Fratton Park or Southampton’s Saint Mary’s  – a debate concerning which is the holier mountain – that of Mount Girizim in Samaria or the Temple Mount (Mount Moriah/Zion) in Jerusalem. It was this disagreement between the Jews and the Samarians that had brought about such animosity between the two in the first place.

The next revelation of Jesus’s is the one which is of great importance to us today – “The time is coming when you will worship on neither mountain but will worship in truth and spirit and the spirit is God”.  In other words, Jesus is telling this woman, a Samaritan, and branded as being of bad character, that it will no longer matter where you worship or what denomination you are so long as you worship the one true and living God.

It appears that this Samaritan woman had been educated, for she at last seemed to understand what was being said even if she still didn’t quite get the context - for she responds – “When the Messiah comes he will explain all this to us”.  Jesus, in his first ever clear revelation of who he is says, not to the Jews, the Pharisees or even to the disciples at this stage, but to the woman - “I am he”.

Recently we have looked at readings of Jesus as the good shepherd but I think that the analogy of Jesus being a spring of water in a dry place – just like the water that gushed out for the Jews in the Exodus reading – is a really good one.  Only on Friday I was asked to try and explain the Trinity to one of the clients at the Alabare Drop-In Centre for the homeless where I am chaplain and I remembered once being told that we can think of God the Trinity as water which can take on three distinct physical forms – although the chemical composition of each is the same H2O it can appear as – ice, solid hard and very strong – after all it did sink Titanic,  - liquid – which keeps us alive, quenches our thirst and supports fish which can eat - and steam which we cannot see but which has powered some of the mightiest and varied machines ever invented.  God the Father is represented by Ice, Jesus the son by Water and the Holy Spirit by Steam.

The world has many great rivers which support life and we can think of the identity of many of them quite easily – the Ganges, the Amazon, the Nile, the Thames, and so on.  Our life can be like those rivers – starting as a small fresh clean bubbling spring we grow and grow and grow as we head towards our destination – the mighty eternal ocean.  The river’s banks get crowded with wharfs and buildings and shipping so that we forget that it once started as a pure stream of clear water. So our lives get crowded and polluted by the cares of our everyday life until it gets so choked that we no longer recognise where we came from. So it is good to go back and remember that just like those mighty rivers our lives started with the clean living water that is Jesus Christ – the source of all that is good in life before so many things choked us.

As with the Samaritan woman, an unlikely person for Jesus to have this wonderful discussion with, so we too can sometimes think that we are not the right person or are not in the right place for a renewal with the source of our life. Just like the cake, how wrong we are.  Jesus will come to us and engage with us whenever and wherever we are if we are prepared to listen to him. He knows the right time and place for each and every one of us.  He will step into the bandit country of our busy lives, just as he stepped into Samaria, and cleanse us and quench us with his clean living water of eternal life. That is the root, the source of our Faith.

Let us pray:

Dear Lord,

The source of that special living water
Come today and quench our thirst.
As you promised the Samaritan woman at the well
Give us that eternal living water
So that we may never again thirst
And so go on to enjoy eternal life

Amen