Homily by the Rev. Amy Bradley
Lent 3, Year A
John 4:5-42
Beloved siblings in Christ, when I first began preparing my Sunday sermon at the beginning of last week, this was not the way I pictured myself delivering it. Things have changed rapidly over the course of the past week. All week long, statistics, charts, and graphs have swirled around, and our best-laid plans have changed and then changed again. But through it all, I’ve found myself comforted and inspired by the story of the Samaritan woman we meet in the Gospel lesson you just heard.
I believe this nameless woman has a thing or two to teach all of us as we face the changes and chances of the coming days and weeks. You see, she knows a thing or two about “self-isolating” and “social distancing.”
It’s no accident that she was going to that well in the middle of the day, all by herself. The other women in her village would have gathered together there in the cool of the morning or the evening to draw their water, to chat, to laugh, and to enjoy being together in community. We don’t know whether the woman in John’s gospel was going alone at high noon because she chose to self-isolate, or whether her community required her to practice social distancing, but we do know she was perceived as a carrier, infected with sin. Perhaps she and her neighbors were worried that if she came too close, she would contaminate them as well.
I can only imagine how surprised she was to find a man-- a Jewish man at that-- sitting at the well as she approached. More surprised still when he asked her to get him a drink of water. I have to admire her for not shrinking back, for challenging him. “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to be asking me for a drink? You’re a Jewish man. I’m a Samaritan woman. We don’t share. The risk of cross-contamination is too high.”
And yet, Jesus didn’t run away. He stayed. He wasn’t afraid of her past or of the weight of sin she carried. He knew it all. He met her exactly where she was-- in her isolation and anxiety, and he told her about the water he had to offer-- living water-- a spring gushing up to eternal life-- a spring that could reach into the deepest, darkest parts of her life, the parts that made her neighbors walk the other way when they saw her coming, the parts she most wanted to hide. This spring would renew her and restore her to life.
The woman hears this news and immediately runs back to her city, no longer worried about herself or her sin, concerned only with sharing the news that she has met the Messiah. There’s a tiny detail that John includes, which might be easily overlooked. But I think it’s important. When this woman leaves the well, she leaves her water jar behind. She doesn’t need that jar to carry her water, because she has become the vessel, carrying the good news of the living water that Jesus offers back to her community.
As we enter into the next few weeks of uncertainty, my prayer is that all find the time to follow in the Samaritan woman’s footsteps and to make our own solitary journeys to the well to meet with Jesus and to take big gulps of the living water he offers. And I hope that we’ll all find new ways to be vessels carrying that living water to our neighbors.
It has been encouraging to see the many ways we’re already doing just that. We’ve offered living water to our most vulnerable neighbors by choosing to operate differently, to sacrifice gathering in person for worship or other large events, for the sake of their health and for the good of the medical teams who will be working tirelessly to care for those who are sick. We’re offering living water across faiths and denominations through online gatherings like this for worship and prayer. Every p
hone call to a person who is alone, anxious, or sick is a stream of living water. Every bag of groceries left at the doorstep of someone who can’t leave their home is living water.
We don’t have to be physically present with one another to find ways to be vessels of living water within our communities. So go to the well, drink deeply, and let that living water flow.
Amen.
