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Drawing water
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| 2/24/2008 |
The scripture lessons for this sermon are found here.
Nearly 30 years ago, I edited my college newspaper. A beautiful, smart woman served as managing editor. At first, I was somewhat smitten, but we remained “just friends.” She came from a prominent family, drove a fast car, and liked to brag that her hamper always held $1,000 worth of Halston clothes. Before long, I saw she was so driven, so thin, such a chain smoker, such a nail biter, and such a compulsive churchgoer and confession-maker, that I could only guess how her life might come undone one day when she confronted whatever demons and tragic events locked away inside her soul. When I went off to seminary, I lost contact with her. In truth, her pain, and consequent complications, were too much for me to carry forth a friendship.
Her story is a sad one, and I feel conflicted as whether to even tell it. But she has been in my heart this week. The Samaritan woman who encounters Jesus at the well in today’s Gospel reading has reminded me of my college friend. I am not sure why, but I trust in God’s providence that these memories, which in truth I have tried to discard, have come back to me, for a reason.
Like my friend, this Samaritan woman plays sad to me. I get that from the subtle detail that she drags her buckets a mile to the well at “the sixth hour,” or noon. No one should have to do this hard, sweaty work in the worst heat of the day. The other women of the village come in the cool of the morning or the quiet of the evening. She comes alone. She wants to avoid others, even though coming with others would protect her from attack by roaming men. Maybe, if we can imagine where the story gives no detail, she thinks this man sitting at the well is such a marauder when she spots him form a distance.
She doesn’t want to explain herself. The others gossip about her enough as it is, whispering about her five husbands; each has abandoned or discarded her, and now she has to drag her buckets back to a man who uses her and won’t protect her. Not her husband, he can put her out anytime. So, now she ends up in a difficult spot. Jesus is standing at the well. She keeps her eyes down. She has glimpsed just enough to know that he isn’t of her ethnic group (we would say racial and religious group). There is no one else around. She feels fear, her body at risk.
My friend from college was sad for different reasons than the Samaritan woman, but she felt as alone. She called me late in the night; I was in my early thirties. I couldn’t quite place her, but then I remembered. She wanted to talk about forgiveness, not a topic I engage late at night. She suffered, she believed, because she believed that God could not forgive her.
She said, “I want to confess to you. I can’t forgive myself. Will you forgive me?”
“For what?” I asked .
Then, her speech became slurred; she said that she had taken pills and drunk a bottle of “$40 scotch.” I heard the phone fall out of her hand and hit the floor. I didn’t know what happened. I didn’t know where she was, and then the line went dead before I could get a message to someone who could help. Finally, I found someone who knew her, who called a sister, who called the police, who broke in, and she survived.
Why such a sad story? Because it is a real story. I tell a real story from a long way back because the person is anonymous to you all, but this is a real story not far removed the reality of our life. We know the aloneness the pain of feeling unforgivable. We either know it in our own lives, or see it in the lives of others. Or, sadly, we perpetuate it in the lives of others. This pain, this myth of being unforgivable, moves through the lives of the affluent and the destitute. This pain is found in the streets of tony 19106 and 19147, and under the bridges of I 95 and the 676. Some are broken by it, others driven by it.
When the Samaritan woman at the well heard Jesus’ voice, she must have jumped. It was uncomfortable enough to be alone with this man. She didn’t know why his group hated her group, but the enmity had so much history that no one believed things would change. But now he was talking to her. Would anyone see? This could mean real trouble. Jesus says, “Give me a drink.”
Why doesn’t he say, “Please.” I wonder. He doesn’t ask like a guest asks, but as a family member at the dinner table asks, “Pass the salt and pepper.” Is this the clue? Is Jesus trying to tear down the walls of formality (he has done that by even being in her presence)?
I’ve read that this conversation is Jesus’s longest with another person in all of scripture. Longer than with any disciple, longer than with Pilate. And the conversation is so personal. He is telling the woman that she is forgivable. She is loved. God’s love applies to her, and that is like drinking water that will slake a thirst forever.
I hear Jesus as giving the Samaritan woman permission to see herself differently. He is inviting her to see her future, not to be tethered to her broken past. By commanding her, “Give me a drink,” he is telling her to rise up, to stand tall, to walk, to unbind herself.
In a profound way, he is telling her to forgive herself, because God’s love has forgiven her. Listen to what she tells people about Jesus after this encounter.
She says, “He has told me everything I have ever done.”
She is excited. She has lost her shame. God’s forgiveness is God’s love and God’s judgment. Nothing falls from the memory of God. God knows everything we’ve ever done. If God can forgive whatever is on that list, why can’t we?
After that eventful night with my friend, I tried to reconnect. I tried to see if she would come to church; she would not. She opened a cappuccino place, and I’d stop by, but when Starbucks moved in, she closed it. I didn’t try so hard. She had so much pain, and I couldn’t deal with it. That’s okay. I have forgiven myself here, and trust in God’s forgiveness.
One afternoon, I came back to my office from lunch and found a woman waiting for me. She was my friend’s mother, and I knew in a terrifying instant why she was there, to plan her daughter’s funeral. She gave me an envelope, addressed to me from my friend, with instructions for her funeral. She asked for just two things: One, to forbid her father from coming, and, two, to ask God to forgive her. Her last words on the page were, “I am sorry.”
When she approached the well, the Samaritan woman believed that she was unforgivable before God because of how she was born, and for the terrible things that had been done to her. She reminds us that the pains inflicted and injustices done on us are the hardest to forgive in ourselves if we’ve been taught that we are unworthy of God’s love and forgiveness. Simply, I think Jesus is trying to destroy that heresy in the way he speaks to the woman at the well. The hardest things to forgive ourselves for are the injustices done to us, the pain inflicted by others. Jesus freed her. I believe the grace of God wanted to free my friend from her pain and despair. My only explanation is that she went to the well on days Jesus wasn’t there. Why that is so, I do not know. Very few people choose to escape their pain as she did, but such pain and abuse is very common. We look away, and we deny it in ourselves.
Jesus reaches into the life of the Samaritan woman and in a few words forgives her. From there, she releases herself. She drinks of the living water of God.
And may we, in this life, as I pray and hope my friend has in her life now, fully known by God.
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