"Every Woman, Every Man"
A Sermon Preached by The
Rev. Thomas C. Leinbach
February 24, 2008 - Harwich, Massachusetts

Preaching Text: "Jesus said to her, 'Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.'" (John 4:13-15)

The story starts out simply enough, innocuously enough. Only as it unfolds are we drawn into the underlying drama.

The story begins with Jesus taking a break midway through his long journey from Jerusalem to his home in the north, Galilee. While the disciples are off buying food, he stops by a well to refresh himself. There he encounters a lone woman drawing some water. Nothing unusual so far.

But then the complexities of the story emerge. For one thing, we learn that Jesus is traveling through Samaria, rather than taking the longer though customary route around it (customary because, as any observant Jew knew, the Samaritans were infidels because of their intermarriage with pagans and their unorthodox religious beliefs and practices). To come in contact with such infidels automatically made one ritually unclean.

Not only that, but Jesus is interacting with this woman in broad daylight, outside customary guidelines regulating contact between the sexes. There were, in fact, certain Pharisees at the time who actually would close their eyes rather than encounter a woman under such circumstances, earning them the title of "bloody nosed" Pharisees, because in their desire to remain ritually pure, they sometimes would bump their noses into walls!

To make matters worse, this particular Samaritan woman had come to the well at noon, which, on the face of it, seems normal enough. Yet this little detail proves to be significant. The reason, simply, is that she is not allowed go there at any other time. Why? Because she is an outcast in her community.

The other women in town would draw water from the well in the early morning and late afternoon, avoiding the hot midday sun. Except for this woman. She instead would come when no one else was around. For you see, she was the kind of person the other women would talk about dismissively as they gathered daily around the well. She would not have been welcomed.

Later we find out why. As Jesus is talking to her, he asks her about her husband. When she tells him she has no husband, Jesus, to her amazement, reveals not only that he knows she has no husband but that she has had five. And also that the man she currently is living with is not her husband.

This exchange eventually results in the woman accepting Jesus as the Messiah, and accepting also his offer of living water. She then runs off excitedly to tell everyone she meets, in almost half belief, only to become, with no small amount of irony, one of the world's first evangelists for Christ!

Thus, what began as a rather unremarkable encounter turns suddenly into a powerful parable about the nature of Christ, revealing the very purpose of his mission to the world: to bring the message of God's love and forgiveness to everyone, even to this particular outcast among outcasts, this woman with the checkered past, this sinner whose loose living and moral failures have rendered her life a living hell.

How easy it is, however, for us to miss this story's deeper meaning. After all, both the woman and the situation she finds herself in are pretty hard for most of us to relate to. In fact, the story reads more like a morality tale taken straight from the tabloids. A notorious sinner is confronted by her sin and finds redemption. We're warmed by the story, but quite frankly, it doesn't seem all that relevant to our lives.

Her sins, unlike ours, are major league in nature, particularly when measured by the norms of her day. Having five husbands, outside of Hollywood at least, is not something most of us can relate to even today. Not to mention the fact that few of us have ever had the experience of truly being ostracized by others, much less for our moral failures and misdeeds.

It's like opening up the paper or turning on the television and seeing murderers, thieves, drug dealers, even out-of-control celebrities paraded in front of our eyes. We note the morality tale and content ourselves that, thank God, our story is nothing like theirs.

But what's interesting, at least to me, is that the gospel writer chooses not to divulge the Samaritan woman's name, though it probably would have been easy enough to. Yet perhaps that's the point: that she is not supposed to be some kind of tabloid caricature or abstraction, but more like an average, everyday person. What if her story, in other words, is the story of every woman and every man?

What I mean is that though her sins admittedly are extreme, particularly by the standards of her day, she is no less a sinner than we are! And like us, she, too, never really ever expects genuine salvation or real forgiveness. She carries in her heart many failures, heartbreaks and losses, as do we. And she can't fathom, and neither can we, just how much God actually cares for her, how powerful God's love is for her.

And though our sins very well may be far less egregious or extreme, we have all known significant failure and loss. Not only that, but we know all too well just how hard it is for us to forgive ourselves, much less others.

When Jesus approaches this notorious woman with the checkered past, and she responds by acknowledging her heartfelt need, humbly and gratefully accepting his offer of living water, the message to us becomes clear: that no one, not even the worst of sinners, is beyond God's power to forgive. If the woman at the well can receive new life from God's hand, so can we. That's the good news.

One of the most common experiences for those who've lost a loved one is the persistence of lingering guilt feelings. Often even the smallest offense, after a loved one has died, leaves the survivor wracked with guilt.

In the grief recovery video series we used this past fall, one of the men on the video speaks of his unrelenting guilt over what most of us would consider the smallest of slights. After assuring everyone in the group that he and his wife had had a good and happy marriage, he admits to continuing feelings of guilt. He keeps running over and over in his mind, for example, his failure on occasion to tell his wife how nice she looked, even though he had thought it at the time. And even though he acknowledges this as a relatively small thing, he can't seem to shake it. He longs for the chance, he says, to see her just one more time, so that this time he might correct his omission.

What this reveals, it seems, is the simple though often hidden fact that each of us carries around a lot of guilt. Oh, we may cover it up pretty well. We may walk around with a smile on our face, hoping everyone will mistake our mask for the real "us." But deep down we know we carry around a lot of unresolved guilt, a lot of pain, a lot of disappointment and failure. We know it. Even though we rarely admit it!

My father, who has a pretty good sense of humor, once said of his father-in-law (my grandfather), that he was the kind of guy who when you asked him how he was doing, he'd actually tell you!!! Then again, most of us rarely make that "mistake." Instead, we cover things up, and act like everything is fine.

Yet the feelings of pain and heartbreak don't go away. They stay there, robbing us of vitality and zest for living at the very same time we are denying them.

Yet why must this be so? What is it about us human beings that we prefer to cover things up rather than address things openly?

The answer, I think, has a lot to do with forgiveness. For one thing, we're not particularly good at it. In fact, we find it almost impossible to forgive. We just can't seem to let go of our hurts and our resentments. And it's not just others we are unable to forgive. For, if anything, we're harder on ourselves than anyone!

One of my favorite passages in the Bible is found several times in the Old Testament. They are words spoken by God to the nation of Israel. And the occasion for these words is Israel's rebellion and subsequent pleas for forgiveness.

God's response to these earnest pleas is powerful, and surprising: "God remembered their sins no more." God, we are told, could not remember. God's forgiveness is so complete and far-reaching, in other words, that God actually can remember nothing about their sin!

The trouble we have is that we don't quite believe this. We assume, unconsciously, I suppose, that God is like we are. If we can't forgive, how is it that God can? This, I suspect, is why we are uncomfortable with confession and with the whole idea of repentance.

Because we don't believe God will forgive us - and we don't - why dredge up painful thoughts and memories we can do nothing about, if all we're left with are residual bad feelings? Isn't it better, in that case, to continue to squash such feelings? At least that way we can move on and get through the day.

The problem, of course, is that we were not made to squash and repress our feelings. For though we may be perfectly capable in many instances of repressing our bad feelings, the unintended consequence is that we end up squashing our good ones as well. Such denial may get through the day, to be sure, but chances are it's a day marked by diminished joy, diminished peace and diminished well-being - and not at all what God wishes for us.

More to the point is how unnecessary this all is. The promise God has made to us is that if we earnestly acknowledge our failures and our mistakes, God will forgive them. Completely and totally. Period. God's promises, in other words, are not like ours, which often are broken. God's promises, instead, are real and true, promises we can stake our lives on.

In earnestly repenting of our sins, as does the woman at the well, God forgives us - completely - and offers us the living water of life. Freed from having to carry around the heavy burdens of guilt, and the pain and suffering it produces, we are set free to begin anew.

The good news of today's gospel story is that no matter what you've done, no matter how much pain and loss and grief and hurt you've known, no matter how much you think God couldn't possibly forgive you, God knows you and loves you, just as Jesus knew and loved the notorious Samaritan woman at the well.

And she leaves the well with joy in her heart, freed from the burdens and brokenness of her life, shouting out to anyone who will listen what Jesus has done for her - and becomes one of the most powerful and persuasive witnesses for Christ.

Often we worry that our lives are so ordinary and so bound by countless missteps, doubts and needs that we forget God's love for us and God's wish for us to know genuine peace and joy, to experience the living waters that alone can nourish our thirsting souls, waters that can never run dry.

We miss as well the opportunity to witness to the glorious miracle of God, of sharing our story with others, that they, too, might know the unmerited grace of Christ's love, who has shown the willingness to touch even us in spirit and truth, even the most timid, unsure, and seemingly lost among us.

Amen.