November 3, 2013 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m. | All Saints’ Sunday

The Samaritan Woman at the Well

The Third in the “Texts for Life” Series

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 106:1–5
John 4:7–42 (selected verses)

“Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink.’”
John 4:7 (NRSV)

God is the God of the humble, the miserable, the afflicted, the oppressed, the desperate, and of those who have been brought down to nothing at all.

Martin Luther
Lectures on Galatians

Well done. You all got here in time despite the clocks falling back overnight. The story is told of the pastor who on the Monday after the clocks go back calls her ministerial colleague into her office and scolds her for always seeming to be running late when the clocks change and go back. “I don’t understand,” she says. “You get an extra hour to sleep.” “But that’s not the problem,” replies the associate pastor. “I have to stay up until 2 a.m. to turn the clock back.” Terrible joke, I know. So, welcome. Welcome all of you. Well done for getting here on time with the change.

We gather this day and mark All Saints’ Sunday, a day when we, in our worship and prayers, give thanks for those who have, as the text has it, have “run with perseverance the race looking to Jesus.” I will be glad to name the names in our Prayer of Thanksgiving of those who have died in the faith since the last time we gathered for All Saints’ Sunday. But for now we reflect on the story of one of the saints whom we encounter in the Gospel.

This is the third in a short sermon series that I’m undertaking: two Sundays in October and then this Sunday and next Sunday; a series I’m calling “Texts for Life.” I am reflecting on scriptures that have, in some sense, been important, even foundational, for me in my journey of faith and in my role as a pastor here at Fourth Church these past sixteen years. When I shared with my wife, Missy, my plan to do such a series, she replied to me, “I hope one of the texts you’ll do is the Samaritan woman at the well.” And I said, “Of course I will, dear.” It is a foundational text for Missy, and the more I thought about that story, the more it seemed to me that the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman was indeed one that informed my approach to ministry, my understanding of what the arc of the gospel narrative is about. But let me begin with another story, another parable, not this time from scripture, but from literature, a story that is itself something of a foundational text for me.

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a giant insect.”

It’s one of the most famous opening lines of a story in modern literature. Some of you, I’m sure, will have recognized it as the opening line of Franz Kafka’s great short story Metamorphosis. Kafka was writing in the early years of the twentieth century in central Europe, in Prague. He wrote stories that he believed were metaphors, parables, for the human condition in those early years of the twentieth century, stories about individuals struggling with affliction, with alienation. This is a shocking and disorienting beginning to a rather bizarre story, a story that some people find, in some sense, darkly humorous, this tale of a man being transformed into a giant insect. But Metamorphosis is ultimately a tragic tale. From this starting point, Gregor Samsa, an ordinary, middle-of-the-road traveling salesman, because of this change in his life and his condition—the transformation, the metamorphosis—starts to encounter fear and lack of understanding on the part of his family. As time goes on, he experiences increasing estrangement. His sister, the reluctant primary caregiver for him, starts to be neglectful, stops putting into his room the simple food for her brother to eat. As time continues, Gregor, a prisoner in his own bedroom, suffers derision, even abuse from his father. And in the end, Gregor Samsa’s alienation is complete as he festers and dies of starvation in that bedroom that he has been unable to leave, bereft of love, as his family move on with their lives, glad to be rid of his bothersome presence. Among the complex themes of the story Metamorphosis there is certainly one about what we might call the “othering” of Gregor Samsa. Because of his metamorphosis, Gregor becomes the other to his family. “Other” in a sense of being marginalized, alienated by those whom we believe should be loving and caring for him. Some people see Metamorphosis as a parable about illness. There’s also certainly a metaphor for how society can create the concept of the other, can assign otherness to individuals or categories of people within society. Criminal. Immigrant. Poor. Gay. Lesbian. Categories that define people as somehow less fully human than those who control the dominant culture.

Let’s look at this story of the Samaritan woman at the well. You can read it in some sense of a reversal of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. It is a rich, complex narrative. It comes early in John’s Gospel, when we read stories in John of Jesus encountering a series of individuals. So in the previous chapter, in John 3, we have the story of Nicodemus coming to Jesus at night—Nicodemus, the religious leader who wants to speak with Jesus. Reflect on that story. It’s a story of a male who’s named Nicodemus whose encounter with Jesus happens in the dark, at night. And it’s private; it’s behind closed doors where they have their conversation. In this encounter everything is turned upside down. In Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan, it is with a woman. Female. Unnamed. It happens at midday, the lightest time of the day, and it happens outside at the well that is used by the people in the city. It’s a very public context.

It’s important to recognize that Jesus here is in enemy territory. The woman is a Samaritan. She lives in that region called Samaria. Samaritans, you may remember, were an unwanted, unclean sect of Judaism, reviled by the religious mainstream in Jerusalem. It seems here that Jesus and his disciples have made a deliberate decision to enter into this territory that would make them, according to the religious authorities, ritually unclean.

And what we have here in this story is a reflection of a gospel in which Jesus is intent on the breaking down of barriers. And you can list the barriers, the cultural taboos that Jesus breaks in this story. It was not acceptable for a man to speak in public with a woman who is not his wife. That’s made more so when the man is a rabbi. So in the very act of saying to the woman, “Give me something to drink,” Jesus is challenging that taboo. The woman is a Samaritan and therefore, as I said, unwanted, unclean. We learned in part of the text that we did not read that she has a complex marital history, and we can perhaps deduce from the fact that she is at the well at midday—when most of the women collecting water would go early morning or in the evening, not at the hottest time—that perhaps she is in some sense shunned by her own society. This Samaritan woman, for Jesus’ time, is a great example of the other. Jesus does not live within these bounds and cultural taboos; he does not accept her otherness but in engaging with her recognizes her basic humanity. This is a transformative encounter. It’s an encounter in which there is metamorphosis for this woman, there is change but not in the negative way that Gregor Samsa experiences metamorphosis.

John gives us a clue. He says she left her water jar—the water jar, symbol of all that she had been before. She has been transformed such that she can now even offer a statement of faith. It is somewhat halting. She says, “He can’t be the messiah, can he?” But there’s nothing halting about her actions following this transformative encounter. She heads straight back to the city, boldly, and she witnesses to her people about this transformative encounter. I said earlier that in the text the woman is unnamed and that’s true, but in the Russian Orthodox tradition this saint has been given a name: Svetlana, which means “equal to the apostles.” Marginalized woman, this representative of the other, is changed by the encounter with Jesus such that she becomes one of the first to take the message of the kingdom that Jesus is bringing and to transform other lives. Here, in opposition to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the other, the marginalized, is welcomed, embraced, made to feel fully human.

New Testament scholar Alice Mackenzie, in writing on this passage, says, “Our new life begins when we finally recognize the identity of the man at the well.” These past three days or so, Thursday until yesterday, we were glad to host a national conference here in the church and in the Gratz Center for the Covenant Network of Presbyterians, an organization, within our denomination, that was cofounded by Pastor Emeritus John Buchanan. For many years it has fought for full inclusion of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender folks in the life of the church, worked to create ordination standards that are inclusive, and celebrated the movement of the Holy Spirit in lives of lesbian and gay Christians being called to ministry. Covenant Network is continuing that work, and the conference offered the chance to reflect on the question of marriage equality for GLBT people. Marvelous scholars and theologians reflected on the biblical and theological reasons for why marriage equality is important.

Currently in our denomination the church recognizes marriage only as between a man and a woman and it prohibits clergy from officiating at services that are called same-gendered marriage. So our church is in its present state marginalizing people who are in our churches. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered Christians are being treated as other. Not being given the same fully human rights as others in our pews. Covenant Network is working to change that definition of marriage at the next General Assembly, which is in Detroit in 2014. And it is my hope, my prayer that this continued marginalization of a category of people in our midst would end.

One of the speakers at the conference is a theologian from Princeton, a Presbyterian called Stacey Johnson. And Stacey was reflecting on the fact that polls published in the last year around this question of marriage equality have discovered that, in some polls, 80 percent of young people between eighteen and twenty-five believe in marriage equality. Stacey said it is that very age group who are no longer coming to our mainline churches and part of the reason they’re not coming is that they believe that the church stands for alienating and marginalizing GLBT people. “Our children,” Stacey said, “are prophesying to us.”

It was said that President Lincoln didn’t attend church very often, but there is a story of one day he was in church and leaving after the service with a friend. The friend asked him what he thought about the sermon. “Eloquent,” Lincoln said, “well researched, well delivered, good voice.” “But,” he said, “the sermon lacked that most important ingredient.” “What ingredient is that?” his friend said. And Lincoln replied, “The preacher failed to ask us to do something great.” So I’m challenging you and me this morning, let us do something great. Look in our own lives, our own contexts, our own cultures, workplace, community. Who in those contexts is the dominant culture saying who is the other or marginalized or outcast; when you can identify a person, a group, a category, do something great. Reach out and tell them that God loves them and so do you. Amen.