"What Are You Thirsty For?"

A Sermon by the Rev. Amelie M. Sell

Preached at Pleasantville UCC, March 27, 2011

   Last week, Lucia had her first ear infection.  Lucia spent several days with a fever, a runny nose, and an achy ear.  She would have moments in which she was happy and blissfully unaware of her illness, and then in what seemed like an instant, she would start to whine and cradle her right ear in her little hands.  In addition to my heart breaking because my little girl hurt and couldn’t tell me what she felt, one of my greatest frustrations with the ear infection was Lucia’s refusal to drink fluids.  Her throat hurt and she did not know why Momma kept cramming sippy cups in her mouth.  Lucia rejected many of my attempts to hydrate her so the infection would heal more quickly. As we all know, water is one of the most essential and important of our resources, it gives life through hydration and its cleansing powers, and it also ends life as the result of natural disasters like tsunamis and floods.  All living beings need water.  God’s people also need the living waters offered to us through Jesus—those waters sustain our relationship with God and Jesus. 

   Today’s text is one of many of the Bible’s conversion stories in which people who met Jesus struggled to accept Jesus’ life giving waters.  Like Lucia refusing the sippy cups, the woman at the well threw out several objections before she was willing to take in the waters that would never allow her to be thirsty again.  The woman’s cultural assumptions about gender and Jews were stumbling blocks for her—why was this strange man, an enemy of her people, talking to her and what did he mean by the odd statements he was making?  Could he be the messiah??

   Jesus’ conversation with the woman at the well is the first example in the Gospel of John of Jesus sharing his message with someone who was not Jewish.  This peasant woman, a Samaritan, was the first outsider to become a believer in Christ…she was the first of many Christians who came to our faith from another faith.  The Samaritan people and religion believed in the Pentateuch—the first five books of the Old Testament--but their religious path diverged from Judaism in the 7^th century BCE at the time of the Assyrian exile.  In the first century, things became very ugly between Jews and Samaritans—the ancient scholar Josephus reported numerous violent confrontations between Jews and Samaritans throughout the first half of the first century.  When Jesus brought the good news to this woman of Samaria, Jesus shared his message with a non-Jew who was part of a group who were regularly having violent conflicts with Jews.  If Jesus lived in today’s Israel, this situation would similar to a Jewish messiah approaching an unaccompanied Palestinian woman and asking her for a drink.

   In addition to the woman being a Samaritan, it is significant that Jesus shared his message with a woman.  I used to think she was somehow a “fallen woman”—if you look at other pastor’s sermons on this text, they often portray this as a story of a ‘sinful’ woman who is redeemed by Jesus.  Throughout the centuries, many Christians have assumed this woman was sexually deviant for her day and age—a promiscuous woman who had intentionally married five different men and was living with another.  Their interpretations may have been more influenced by our lifestyles and realities than by what the Bible says about this woman.  Instead of being a ‘fallen woman,’ I found a different possibility for the woman’s past.  Gail O’ Day, in the New Interpreter’s Bible, pointed out that this woman may have been part of a levirate marriage.  A Levirate marriage is an ancient marital custom in which a man is required to marry his brother’s wife when the brother dies.  The woman at the well may have been forced to marry a whole family of brothers until the youngest brother refused to follow the tradition or there were no brothers left to marry.  The woman may have been like many women in the developing world and was a child bride to a much older man, which resulted in the woman outliving both the first husband and his brothers.  We have heard about this recently happening to young women in Afghanistan during the Taliban’s rule.  In John’s retelling of the story of the woman at the well, Jesus does not seem surprised by the woman having had five husbands and the woman does not seem defensive about her marriages.  Instead, Jesus uses his knowledge of the woman’s past as a way for Jesus to convey to the woman his knowledge of her history….Jesus knows more than a stranger “should” know, and he therefore must be a prophet or perhaps the messiah.

   The woman at the well received a drink from Jesus that was much more beneficial to her life than regular H2O.  Through the life-giving waters of Christ she was given a new faith, a new understanding that God loves all of us, and a new purpose in life: to share the Good News of Christ with her people.   When the woman shared her conversion experience, a whole town of Samaritan people converted to the new faith of Christianity.  The woman’s transformative experience at the well led her to become one of the first Christian Evangelist….she literally brought others to Christ.  And, significantly, she was a woman Evangelist during a time-period women did not have power and influence.

   Just as Jesus blessed the Samaritan woman with living waters, Jesus sustains our lives by the living waters he brings to each of us through the Holy Spirit.  The story of the woman at the well reminds us that God comes into our lives in unexpected ways and at times when we are not searching for God.  The woman at the well probably woke up on the morning of her visit with Jesus expecting her day to be a typical day.  She followed her routine and did her chores and went to gather water for her family.  At the well, she encountered an audacious Jewish man who broke all of the rules and asked her for a drink.  Jesus’ request led to a life-changing event for the woman….in the midst of our mundane lives, God appears.   

   We cannot anticipate when God will interfere with our lives….we don’t know when we will be asked to make radical departure from “life-as-we-have-always-known-it.”  But, I can assure you, God is going to ask us make difficult decisions.  We may be asked to do wholly unexpected things and go to wholly unexpected places.  Like the woman at the well, we will be invited to share the story of our experiences with others.  I pray we will be just as successful as she was at telling others the Good News.  The life-giving waters offered by Christ will more than sustain us and we will never be thirsty again.  May it be so!  Amen.