God is With Us
Year A
Exodus 17:1-7
Psalm 95
Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-42
May the words of my mouth… O God… speak your truth…
In today’s reading from Exodus… the people thirsted for water… they thirsted for that which would sustain life… and demanded of Moses… Give us water to drink… and they quarreled with him… and tested God… they asked… Is God with us or not… that’s a question some people may still be asking these days… and God gave them what they needed…
Psalm 95 implies a question that piggybacks off of the question just asked in Exodus… not if God is with us or not… but why do we want God among us… is it only to get what we need and want… or is it also so that we can be molded like clay to do God’s will in all times and in all places…
The first seven verses tell of the Israelites praising God… and I believe that the Rock of our Salvation… is the rock at Horeb which Moses struck… and water came out… and saved the people who may have lost hope… but at verse eight… the speaker changes… it is now God who asks them not to harden their hearts… as their forebears did in the wilderness… when they quarreled and tested God… even though they had seen God’s works…
Is God with us… or not… and how do we determine that… especially when we make up reasons why we think we deserve God’s hand to touch us… and we don’t think God has… or when we make up reasons why we think others don’t deserve God’s hand to touch them… and we think God has… ] and even when we think we deserve God’s hand to touch us… there may still be times when we feel passed over… and that can be wildly disconcerting…
Today’s Gospel passage begins with verse five… but I want to add in verses :1-4… they say… now when Jesus learned… that the Pharisees had heard… “Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John”… although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized… he left Judea and started back to Galilee… but he had to go through Samaria…
On Sermon Brainwave this week… the Rev. Dr. Joy J. Moore shared that as a child… who in day-to-day life was driven around Chicago… she began to notice that there were two exits that her parents never used… that you just didn’t use to get off the highway… because as black folk… you just wouldn’t be safe in those neighborhoods…
Now the Samaritans were a small group of Israelites who remained in the land of Israel after the deportation of Israel by the Assyrians in 722 BCE… they intermarried with foreign unbelievers… and established their own religion at Mount Gerizim… and built their own temple… at which they worshipped for 400 years… they were despised and rejected by the Jews… they were considered unclean… and in the latter part of the 2nd century… the Hasmoneans… who ruled from 165 – 63 BCE… destroyed the Samaritan’s temple on that mountain… that’s why the woman says… Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain…
And because of the tension between the Jews and the Samaritans… it’s the last route a Jewish man would take… Jesus didn’t have to go through Samaria… no he didn’t… the bee line from Judea to Galilee does not go through Samaria… no siree… not at all… so why did he… he went to make a theological point… to demonstrate that God came as one of us… for all of us… for everyone… in all times and in all places…
And remarkably… today’s Gospel contains the longest conversation that Jesus had with anyone… and a theological one at that… and it’s extraordinary that this conversation occurs with a woman… a tired Samaritan woman… drawing water at the well in the heat of the day… a woman who knew the well’s history… that God gave the well to her ancestor Jacob… but this well was also where Abraham sent a servant to find a wife for Isaac… it’s the well where Jacob met Rebekah… and we might say that the setting of the well… is a love story… because the well gives life in other ways too… and the first hearers of John’s Gospel would know this… and today… the well functions as the backdrop for another love story… between God and someone who had so many perceived strikes against her… a Samaritan… a woman… multiple husbands… that she might easily win the title of “Most Marginalized… “
And in spite of the questions we might ask… like why did she come alone in the heat of the day… why did she have five husbands but none now… whose fault was it… there’s nothing to indicate adultery… so maybe she could not bear children and was divorced… or she could have been widowed five times… and a widow would need to be sheltered in a man’s household… . and the one who is not her husband now could be one of her former husband’s brothers… or her brother… or a cousin…
But like a worthy contender… she pushes the envelope in much the same way that Nicodemus did… her deepest thirst would be… to be seen for who she is… and she was… He told me everything I have ever done… and in their conversation… in the exchanges between them… she first sees Jesus for who he is… a prophet… a truth teller… and like with Nicodemus… Jesus leads her into a gradual recognition of who he is… and when she affirms that… when Messiah comes… he will proclaim all things to us… in response… Jesus says… I am he… but in the actual Greek… all Jesus says… is… I AM… it’s the same I AM that God says to Moses at the burning bush… and it’s the first of the seven I AM sayings in John’s Gospel… that Jesus makes about himself…
In the Collect for Purity… which we pray almost every Sunday… we affirm our belief that to God… all hearts are open… all desires known… and from God no secrets are hid… and that’s because God is with us… ] and while we need H2O from our kitchen faucet… or well… to survive bodily… while we need to worship God in Spirit and in Truth… no matter where we are… we also need the water which Jesus gives and which becomes in us a spring of Living Water that gives eternal life… but that’s something we already possess… something we already own… and for that and so much more… we say thanks be to God…
