Springs create their own space in the Middle East, they make
their own atmosphere, lush with humidity and haze. Water is the stuff of life,
miraculous in the stone-dry Palestine heat—it speaks of life in its burble, in
its still deepness and cool darkness alive with teeming, bulging life . . .
springs are magnets in rocky places, drawing the wanderers, the travelers, the
herders-of-sheep, they all know where the springs are, they’re mapped with radar-like
precision in their brain-pans because their lives depend on them, depend on the
bubble of cool air made by the spring . . . and within that bubble, life stews
and brews and breeds, its earth funk assaults nostrils more used to sterile
desert smells . . . life breeds frantically, automatically before the water
goes, before it boils off into bone-dry air . . . reproduction is always in the
air at a spring.
Wells are springs made tame, springs cosseted and corseted and
constrained, bricked up and cobbled together, straight-round sides and ropes
and buckets, but they’re still places of power, places where life is just a
little wild . . . drovers bring their sheep to them and lift the water,
sloshing up from the dark, slapping and lapping at bucket sides . . . and women
come to wells, clay jars on shoulders, or strapped to cross-beamed arms. They
come for household water, or for the family sheep, out from their sheltered
tents, and things . . . develop, things in keeping with the fever-pitched
goings-on in the envelope, in the spring-space that surrounds even tame old,
bricked-up wells . . . women come and things . . . happen. Like when Jacob
stopped at the well near Haran, and his relatives were there, and so was
Rachel, come to water the sheep . . . and he was smitten in that fervent place.
Or when Moses was running from the Pharaoh and collapsed exhausted by a well,
and seven – count ‘em seven! – Midianite daughters came along, and Moses
married one of them, and it changed his life. Spring space is magical space,
where love soaks the charged atmosphere and husbands appear and wives are
obtained.
And so like his ancestors, Jesus sits beside a well in the
full-bore Palestine sun, and a woman comes, and he asks about her husband –
husbands and wives meet in spring space – and he says “Go, call your
husband, and come back . . .” and at this point she doesn't know who he is,
exactly. . . just some guy asking her for a drink . . . although she was
amazed that a Jew would even talk to her, much less ask her for help . .
. and she said as much, she said “How is it that a Jew asks a drink of me,
a Samaritan?” And his answer was elliptical and vague, he didn't answer the question,
but presented a puzzle instead – “If you knew the gift of God, and who asked
you for drink, you would've asked him, and he would've given you living
water.” And this living water thing really stumped her. How could he get
this living water? He didn't have a bucket or a jar, how was he going to get it
out? And just where do you get this living water, anyway?
But although he sounded like a lunatic, babbling about
living water and all, something about how he said it, maybe it was his quiet
authority, gave her pause, and she asked, perhaps not altogether innocently
“Are you greater than Jacob our ancestor, who gave us this well?” And
again, he didn't answer her directly . . . “If you drink of this water,”
and he gestured down at the well “you’ll get thirsty again, but if you drink of
the water I will give, you’ll never be thirsty again . . .” and in the
charged atmosphere at the well, in that spring-space where courtship was always
in the air, she marveled at what he spoke, for it was unlike anything
she’d ever heard before and what he said next blew her mind: “The water I give will become in them a spring of water
gushing up to eternal life!” And immediately an image came upon her of a
leaping, dancing spring of life, continuously pouring from her innermost being.
Surrounded by spring space wherever she went, a nurturing spirit-system, humid
with life, welling up from within. She wanted it! “Sir – give me this water so that I may never
be thirsty or come here to draw water again.”
And that’s when he asks her about her husband, and she’s taken
aback – what's he trying to do? Here he is talking to her, and she's a
Samaritan, and a woman to boot, and so she assumed he was willing to
deal with her, that he’d give this living water to her, but
abruptly he asks her to get her husband . . . “Go, call your husband,
and come back.” Does he want to give it to a husband? It was a man’s world after all . . .
or maybe he was trying to see if she was married . . . after all, people
went to wells for more than just water, and was that what this was all
about? Was it some elliptical courtship
dance? Was he asking if she had a
husband? But she answers truthfully – “I
have no husband.” And immediately he says “You’re right . . . what you have
said is true – you’ve had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your
husband!” And it dawns on her that this man has the gift, the sight, the way of
seeing what others cannot see. “I see
that you’re are a prophet,” she says, and she asks a question you might ask of
a prophet, about where it is right to worship God, just to test him a little .
. .
And Jesus answers in the mode of a prophet – he talks
about the Kingdom of God, which is coming and at the same time already here,
and how at that time – which is already here – people will worship in spirit
and truth, and they won’t worship at any given place . . . “God is spirit,” he
says, “and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
But though he answers in prophetic style, what he says
is like no prophet she knows of, and it begins to dawn on her just who
she is dealing with, so she says “I know that when the Messiah comes, he will
proclaim things to us” – just as Jesus
was doing – and in his next breath he confirms it by saying “I am he, the one
who is speaking to you.” And just then, the disciples return, and she drops her
water jar and goes back to the city. And as she goes, she says to all the
people she meets – “Come and see a man who’s told me everything I’ve ever done!
Could this be the Messiah?” When it clicks in, when she figures it out, when
she finally comes up with his identity, she can’t help her self. She instantly
becomes an evangelist, and many Samaritans came to believe because of her. They
even invited Jesus to stay with them so they could see for themselves, and this
was unheard of, for a Jew to stay with Samaritans.
Look at how it goes for the Samaritan woman – she comes to the
well, without the protection of a husband, handed down from man to man, through
five men who owned her like a sheep, to whom she was but a possession . . . and
now she’s in a less than perfect relationship, and therefore less than optimal
for her well-being, and she might have come to the well with marriage on her
mind, or at least in the back of it . . . and there’s this man sitting there
who asks her for a drink even though he’s a Jew and she’s a Samaritan,
even though she’s a woman alone, and that alerted her to his different-ness.
But her awareness of just how different he really was grows
in stages, as their conversation progresses. At first, she suspects he’s a
patriarch, maybe like Jacob – who, after all, met his wife at a well just like
this one . . . and when he does a sign, divining just what her position was,
right down to the number of husbands, she knows him as a prophet, one chosen to
speak God’s word . . . but it’s not until he calls God “Father,” not until he
speaks of Spirit and truth, and says the word “salvation” straight out, that
she comes to the full realization of the truth
that Jesus is the Son of God, the Messiah, the one who has been
promised.
And note her reaction to this revelation, to this
realization there in the spring space around Jacob's well . . . her response to
the spirit and to the truth and to the living, rushing water is to enable others
to drink. The woman at the well goes
from outsider to evangelist in the blink of an eye, or perhaps in the babble of
a brook . . . when her faith is fully present within, when the living water is
raging and sighing and welling-up inside, she runs immediately to spread the
Word, to proclaim the Gospel to her people. She can't seem to help herself, she
just has to do it. “Come see the man who knows everything about me . .
.” And so her faith is reproduced, along with the algae and microbes and
water-striders, there in the spring-space, where the air is full of water,
teeming with life and hope and love . . .
Our faith comes in stages too, doesn’t it? Our faith journeys
are not unlike that of the woman at the well, only they happen over a longer
time than just a single afternoon . . . often, ours aren’t as smooth as hers .
. . sometimes, they seem to go in fits and starts, two-steps forward and one
back – or even one step forward and
fifty back – and often our urge to
evangelize as well. I know my own faith
journey’s often like that . . . I just seem to get to some plane of
spirituality or another, just seem to arrive somewhere, when I fall off
the cliff and onto a ledge below. But God always seems to be there to catch me,
God never lets me fall . . . And maybe one of the reasons we go through this
stop-and-start progress, this stutter-step of faith is we try to walk the
journey on our own, we try to put one step in front of another ourselves,
instead of leaving it up to God in the first place.
The woman at the well was totally passive in her
movement toward belief . . . things just seemed to dawn on her, elicited
by what Jesus said, not her . . . she asked questions, but they didn’t
seem to be the right ones, and Jesus didn’t really answer them, anyway. It was
what he said that grew her faith, not anything she did. There at the
well, the water was given to her by the Word, both spoken and incarnate,
in spite of anything she did. There in the spring space, where anything can
happen, something did: belief dawned, a woman was converted, and a whole town
was evangelized . . .
It’s been almost five years since Pam and I came to Greenhills. We’ve celebrated four Advents, four Epiphanies,
five Pentecosts . . . and now we’re into our fifth
Lent, and as we’ve gotten to know Cincinnati, as we’ve visited other churches
and gone to Presbytery meetings, we’ve run into scores of folks who have been
touched by this church.. . . over the years, many people have been nourished
within these walls, within the bubble of rarified atmosphere here at Cromwell and Winton . . .
Because sisters and brothers, you don’t have to go to the
desert for living water, you don’t have to go out into the woods or by a stream
or up into the mountains . . . you don’t have to retreat, because here, in this
place, we are a wellspring . . . we are a spring space, a space where
faith can grow and progress. Sure, sometimes our individual and collective
faiths do a little shuffle, a little two step forward and then back, but here
in this spring space God has always steadied us, always caught us when we fall.
And I am convinced that God will
continue . . . let us make Greenhills a space where flowers of Christ can bloom
in the secular desert in which we are embedded, a place where the atmosphere
is saturated with the love of God. From
generation to generation, for almost 80 years, folks have come here to drink of
the living water, and God has made them full. By the grace of God, we will continue to be a
bubble of refreshing air, a spring space for 80 years more. Amen.
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