The Third Sunday in Lent
March 24, 2008
~The Rev. Steve Smith

Half-way between Jerusalem and the Sea of Galilee, there is the bustling Palestinean city of Nablus. Nablus is in the news regularly, because it has been at the heart of the Palestinean intifadah. Over the years, you have seen it on t.v., with Israeli tanks leveling homes, children throwing stones at soldiers, bloody protests, seething unrest.

Such was my experience of Nablus when I first visited it in the fall of 1999. The day before we arrived, Hezzbolah had fired rockets from Lebanon into northern Israel, and in retaliation, Israel had bombed a suspected guerilla stronghold, killing militants and civilians.

Nablus was in an uproar. Angry young people surrounded our bus, and a couple of projectiles broke some of the rear windows. Clearly, we were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Eventually, we stopped at an unfinished Orthodox church, and were escorted into its bowels. There, far from the din above us, we recounted the story of an earlier pilgrim who you might say was also in the wrong place at the wrong time.

For Nablus was once known as Sychar, the capital of the Samaritans, and it was here that Jesus stopped and rested by the very well of Jacob you can visit to this day.

As we huddled around the candlelit well, we stared down into the dark abyss of the well, and the old wizened priest began to tell the familiar tale.

The fact of the matter is, that day, Jesus had no rhyme or reason to be there at all. The vast majority of self-respecting Jews would have taken an extra day’s journey to circumvent Samaria. For centuries, you see, Jews and Samaritans had no dealings with each other. Each thought they had a special corner on the truth. Each considered the other infidels, blasphemers. Samaritans considered their Mt. Gerezim to be the place of God’s revelation. For the Jews, it was Mt. Sinai.

Jesus, in our Gospel today, is in the wrong place at the wrong time. And to compound this, while he is resting by the well, a Samaritan woman comes to draw water. It is hard for us to imagine the taboo that existed between men and women of that time. There is an old rabbinical admonition that says it well: “A man should hold no conversation with a woman in the street, not even with his own wife, still less with any other woman, lest men should gossip.”

The Samaritan woman is fully aware of this prohibition. But it is Jesus who breaks the taboo. He is thirsty and has nothing with which to draw water from the well. And so he asks her for a drink.

Incredulously, the woman responds: “Why are you speaking to me?” Is this a come-on? Is this a trap? Is this just one more way for her to suffer humiliation at the hands of some man?

Jesus, however, tells her, he has living water to offer her, water that forever quenches one’s thirst, water that itself becomes an eternal spring within the soul.

Hearing this, the woman desires to have this water, so that she never has to come in the heat of the day to draw from this well.

For you see, like Jesus, the woman is also at the wrong place at the wrong time. She draws water during the day because she is shunned by her people. Five of her marriages have gone bad, and God only knows who this sixth man is she is living with. She is alone, living in shame, and now this stranger tells her it can all be different, it can all change.

Furthermore he tells her a time is now coming when true worshippers will no longer go this place or that, this mountain or that, this church or that, the time is near when all worshippers will worship God in spirit and in truth, for this is the very God seeks to be worshipped.

And this is the way our Gospel ends. The Samaritan woman believes, and not only her, but her very kinsfolk who had put her to shame. In this most unlikely place and time, salvation takes root in the hearts of a most unlikely people.

So, friends, what are we to glean in this story, this chance encounter? Jesus shows us the way to God, Jesus gives us living water, I believe, because he is completely living in the moment. Because of this, all the social conventions and attachments that are bound to the past, all the things that divide us as human being drop away. And all that is left is truth and spirit. All that is left is the spirit of our lives and the truth of our lives, which in essence is the living water that springs up within our souls.

We encounter God in spirit and in truth, not by practicing this religion or that, not by swearing allegiance to this flag or that, not in being bound to the past or in dreading the future. We encounter God, instead, by living completely in the moment. Living in the moment is a state of grace to which each of us are called who choose to follow Jesus.

In recent days, we have been reminded the way Martin Luther King talked about this: Dr. King called it “the fierce urgency of now”. It was in this fierce urgency of now that Jesus made his earthly sojourn. In the fierce urgency of now, there are no wrong times and wrong places. In the fierce urgency of now, all wrong places, all wrong times can be redeemed. In the fierce urgency of now, the very worst in us can be different and change. The past no longer has dominion over us. The future appears as an open horizon, in the fierce urgency of now. In the fierce urgency of now, the truth of our lives is revealed, the spirit of our lives is released, and living water courses through our souls so that never again need we be thirsty.

Jesus met the woman by the well. And in every time and place, no matter how matter how wrong they may seem to us, no matter how unworthy we may feel, he also meets us. In the fierce urgency of now, he invites us to live right here, right now, completely in this moment. Jesus invites us to encounter God in this very moment, so that in that words of the Psalmist we can fully embrace the sum and substance of these words: “This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” So that we may truly “come into God’s presence with thanksgiving and make a joyful noise to God with songs of praise,” in the fierce urgency of now.