March 23, 2014 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.

Chance Encounters

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 95
John 4:1–42

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances:
if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”

Carl Jung

Today is the third Sunday in the season we know as Lent. Because we have been here before, I am spoiling no surprise by telling you that this season culminates with Easter Sunday and the central narrative of our faith, the resurrection, in which God raises Jesus from the grave and, in so doing, reminds us that nothing, not even death, can separate us from the love of God. We need, in our life and in our faith, Easter-days, days when we see God acting in ways that call us far beyond our expectations of what constitutes human life. The season of Lent exists because to fully appreciate this message of new life on Easter morning, we must first walk the road to the cross. We walk that road with Jesus, and we see how this one who would one day rise from death once walked with us on the road of life. Today’s story takes place on that road.

A couple of weeks ago I officiated at the wedding of two of my dearest friends. A story was told several times over the course of the weekend: Jamie, the groom, is one of the most careful and analytical people you’re likely to meet. But the night he went on his first date with Joelle, he came home and called his parents to tell them that he had just been to dinner with the woman he was going to marry.

That story isn’t unique. I imagine some of you have been to weddings and heard similar stories. When two people love one another enough to get married, it is often the case that, early on, at least one of them had a sense that this relationship was special. It’s also worth noting that plenty of folks have been on a great first date with someone they thought they’d marry and have then found out over the next two or three dates they couldn’t have been more wrong—but no one really tells that story at a wedding.

Life is full of these chance encounters, meetings between two people that happen seemingly out of nowhere. Many of them are of little consequence, but some of them change your life. We often don’t know we’re having one of those experiences until much later. And it gets your curiosity level up to think about what life would be like if you could see those moments coming and always make the most of them.

For all of these reasons and plenty of others, today’s Gospel lesson preaches the sermon all on its own. This is the story of a chance encounter between a woman and Jesus. The story begins in as common a place as the 151 bus or the line at Starbucks or when you and somebody else both head for the same empty treadmill at the same time. This story, though, comes from a time before buses or treadmills, and there’s not a Starbucks for miles. So this is a water cooler conversation: these two people meet at a well. The woman has come to draw water for her home, and Jesus’ disciples have gone into town to find something to eat and have left him alone. Suddenly it’s just the two of them. The woman is a Samaritan, and Jews and Samaritans don’t share food and drink, according to the law. So it’s at least as awkward as any random stranger talking to you at Starbucks when Jesus turns to the woman and asks for a drink. “Who is this strange man,” she thinks, “and why is he talking to me?” And then it gets weirder. Jesus says, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

Have you ever known someone who just has a knack for conversation, who is not only comfortable starting a conversation with a complete stranger but who can make the stranger feel comfortable about it too? Those people are out there. People just open up to them, and not just about if this is our last snowfall or who you picked in your NCAA brackets last week, but about the real stuff. In the presence of these people, you find yourself, maybe against your better judgment, opening up right away about the thing that made you cry at work this week or the underwater mortgage that has you worried sick or that you’re really concerned about your marriage.

That’s what happens here. The woman is probably a bit surprised at herself, but Jesus sits down at the well with her and almost immediately moves from the matter of being thirsty for water to the idea that this woman is thirsty on some deeper level. There’s a hole in her water jar, so to speak, so that she keeps trying to feel filled and whole and satisfied, but she never is. She’s tried everything under the sun to make her feelings of emptiness go away, but they keep coming back. She just keeps getting thirsty. One way Jesus acknowledges her emptiness is in his comment about her relationships: “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.” Jesus pretty much tells her, “I know you’ve been through a bunch of different relationships, expecting that one of them is finally going to make life all better. But you’re still thirsty, aren’t you? And here we are back at the same old well.”

Somehow the woman goes along with the talk, even though she just met this man. At this moment, Jesus has brought the woman to a place where we all need to be from time to time. He has made her comfortable enough to feel like she can reveal something true about who she is, and then he says something challenging enough to help her think about who she wants to be. Jesus says to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water [the well you keep coming back to] 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.” The woman says to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

This is what we all want, isn’t it: the secret to finding wholeness, plugging that hole inside of ourselves, finding a way to stop being thirsty, to stop coming back to the same old well, again and again. We think, “If only I could be like that woman at the well, if only I had been there, I could ask, ‘What is it, Jesus, what’s the secret?’” And you can tell the woman knows she is about to figure it out. She says to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

We can feel the tension in this chance encounter. We feel that there’s about to be an Easter moment—and then something happens that reminds us that it’s not Easter yet; it’s still Lent. The disciples show up just at the moment when we’re about to find out the secret to life, and they ruin everything. Completely having missed the content of this great conversation, they just want to know what their rabbi is doing talking to this Samaritan woman, and they want to tell him about all of the food they bought in the village.

Meanwhile, the woman gets up and leaves. And we, the readers, we see her walking away, and we’re like, “Come back! He was just about to tell us the secret to life! Where are you going?” It seems as if this turn of events resembles another thing that happens in so many of the chance encounters in our lives. A conversation begins, and then just as it seems to be getting interesting, it’s over. Something gets in the way. Suddenly it’s your stop on the bus, or the phone rings and you have to pick it up, or just like in this story, someone’s friends show up, and the moment passes you by. It’s tempting to think that’s what happened with Jesus and the woman at the well—except for two things.

First of all: the woman. She gets up and leaves because, at least for now, she has what she needs. It’s no accident that this beautifully crafted narrative tells us she “left her water jar.” You remember the water jar, the one with the hole in it, the one she’d been using to visit that same old well: she leaves it behind. And she goes to the city and says, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!” And then she says, “He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” Did you notice that? She doesn’t say, “I just met the Messiah!” she says, “He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” It’s almost like if my friend Jamie, instead of saying, “I just met the woman I’m going to marry!” really said, “I had the time of my life tonight. I think I might marry that woman.” That’s the way chance encounters work most of the time, isn’t it? An extraordinary experience you’re not quite sure about.

There’s another thing you’ve got to notice about this chance encounter, and this is the really important one: Jesus is the one who is thirsty. The whole story gets off the ground because it’s Jesus who arrives, tired from the road, and says, “Give me a drink.” He says it to a woman who isn’t even given a name because it might as well be you or me who meets a Jesus who is thirsty, and why? Have you ever imagined that God can’t understand your struggles, that God can’t understand the hole inside of you, the one that keeps you coming back to the same old well, thirsty as ever? It turns out that Jesus, God in the flesh, is on the road too, and he knows what it is to be thirsty.

Chance encounters. Life is full of them. Theologian Anna Carter Florence asks the question, “Can a little thing like a cup of cool water, offered in love, be the beginning of a salvation journey?” The answer is “Yes!” (Feasting on the Word, Year A, Lent 3). This story is not about some big secret. It’s not about the key to understanding the chance encounters in your life. You’re never going to be able to identify them on the spot. No one can! Sometimes it’s not about a divine secret. Sometimes the Bible is about God knowing what it’s like to be human.

An author named David Johnson wrote about this idea. He’s not a theologian or a preacher; he has no seminary degree. He’s lawyer who runs a biotech company. He’s on the road like the rest of us, and he writes about his Christian faith. David Johnson gets people like the woman at the well. He writes,

I find special affirmation in those moments of the Gospel accounts when Christ just unmistakably goes on record as someone who identifies with the routine frustrations of the humanity he has come to join. . . . [These are stories about people] who, though ‘not getting’ all of it, do appreciate the simpler point that when it comes to Jesus, something is indeed happening. And something is at stake; they must ask, listen, and follow; and they must be open to change. They must, in fact, be open to the relationship of faith. (David Johnson, Learning from My Father)

That’s what it means to be on the road—to ask, listen, and follow; to be open to change and to the relationship of faith.

Sometimes Jesus’ activity calls us clearly beyond the realm of anything human to a world of the miraculous—the healing of a man born blind, the resurrection on the third day, the ascension into heaven. Sometimes we need to know that the God we praise is far above the fray and way beyond anything we can imagine—a mystery we will never know. Other times it is important to remember that the God we praise was once on the road to the cross, a real road like the ones we walk. Along the way he stops at a well and starts a conversation. He begins a relationship with someone. “Can I have some of that water?” How will you respond?

Amen.