We Don't get to Choose!

The Lord's table is long, and wide, and there is room for all. Never doubt this, and never forget it.

Exodus 17:1-7

From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the LORD commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. The people quarreled with Moses, and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the LORD?” But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” So Moses cried out to the LORD, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” The LORD said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the LORD, saying, “Is the LORD among us or not?”

Philippians 2:1-13

If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross.Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; 13or it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

Matthew 21:23-32

When he entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to him as he was teaching, and said, “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?”

Jesus said to them, “I will also ask you one question; if you tell me the answer, then I will also tell you by what authority I do these things. Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?” And they argued with one another, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say to us, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ we are afraid of the crowd; for all regard John as a prophet.” So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And he said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.

“What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ He answered, ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir’; but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, “The first.” Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him; and even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

In May of 1998, Stephen Alan Thompson became the seventeenth person executed in the state of Alabama since 1983. There wasn’t any doubt about his crime, there was no outpouring of protest against his going to the electric chair – three people showed up in Linn Park in Birmingham to protest on the night of his execution. Not exactly an international wave of support for the condemned.

He spoke to the family of his victim, saying he hoped that they would at last find some peace. And just before they threw the switch, he raised his hand against the leather restraint and made the International Sign Language symbol for “I love you” – a sign he learned in a prison ministry called “Kairos.”

You see, on Alabama’s Death Row, Steve Thompson had become a Christian.

In our Gospel reading today, Jesus enters the Temple and is confronted by the leaders of the Jewish faith. These are, for all intents and purposes, the guardians of righteousness, the ones who decide what is right and what is wrong for those who wish to worship the one true and living God. They examined the offerings to make sure they were fit for the sacrificial altar, interpreted the Books of the Law of Moses, and were generally the mediators between Yahweh and humankind.

Think of it – here, in the epicenter of the Jewish faith, the Temple, the men who held absolute sway over the spiritual lives of millions of believers were focused on one road-worn, nondescript, homeless rabbi. Amazing, isn’t it?

But people were listening to this rabbi. People were finding healing, hope, and new life in this rabbi, and (I’ve said this before) the one thing a totalitarian ruler can never allow, the one thing that will destroy his kingdom from within, is hope. And the chief priests served at the pleasure of Caesar. A bad day for Caesar meant a very bad day for them.

But it could be that I am being too hard on them, too cynical. After all, if these chief priests and elders took their responsibility seriously, someone like Jesus would have had them worried. He healed on the Sabbath. He ate with prostitutes and tax collectors. He even went into Samarian and Gentile lands to minister to the people there. Every time they turned around, this Jesus fellow was doing something else to stir the people up, and yes, the things he did were good, but he was doing them wrong!

But what does it mean to believe? In whatever context we put it, a pre-Resurrection belief in the one true God, or a post-resurrection faith in Jesus Christ, how do we define “believing?” What constitutes “faith?”

For both the Pharisees and the Sadducees, belief and faith were defined by religious rites, by personal piety, and by adherence not only to the Law of Moses but to specific interpretations of that law. For one to be a true believer, for one to have a valid faith, coming in contact with a Samaritan, a Gentile, or any person who was less pious was dangerous. Merely passing though Samaritan territory made a person unclean.

Yet this appearance of piety was a thin bedsheet which covered evil hearts. In the twenty-third chapter of Matthew, Jesus has nothing at all good to say about the piety of the scribes and the Pharisees: “The scribes and the Pharisees… say things and do not do them. They tie up heavy burdens and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are unwilling to move them with so much as a finger. But they do all their deeds to be noticed by men; for they broaden their phylacteries and lengthen the tassels of their garments. They love the place of honor at banquets and the chief seats in the synagogues, and respectful greetings in the market places, and being called Rabbi by men.

“…Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you devour widows’ houses, and for a pretense you make long prayers; therefore you will receive greater condemnation… Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness; but these are the things you should have done without neglecting the others. You blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!”

All that work, all that dogged dedication to every area of the Law… and they missed the whole point!

Meanwhile, Jesus is doing amazing things in areas the Pharisees and Sadducees would never dare to go. He had touched lepers, he had gone to the territories of the Samaritans and Gentiles – going so far as to heal, so far as to feed a multitude in the same way he had fed five thousand in Judea, so far as to share the Good News of the Kingdom of God with men and women who would never have been welcome in the Temple!

Small wonder, then, that Jesus would have been the focus of so much of the chief priests’ and temple rulers’ attention. No wonder Nicodemus had come in the night to find out more about him. Jesus did things wrong, and upset the status quo. When they heard he was coming to the Temple, a direct confrontation was inevitable. The chief priests and the elders were the religious authority in the land, and Jesus needed to admit that he had no authority, he needed to be stopped!

But when prostitutes and tax collectors will get into the Kingdom of God ahead of you, your authority doesn’t much matter, does it?

You see, each in their own way, the Sadducees and the Pharisees thought they had the ability to decide who was worthy of acceptance into the faith, and who – because of birth or gender or any number of other factors – would never be worthy. They thought they could decide who would be allowed to believe, to have faith.

But no. They couldn’t make someone believe, and they most certainly could not decide who was not permitted to have faith.

And in reading the Gospels we see, time and again, that it is faith which so often is the key to the miracles of Jesus Christ. In the ninth chapter of the book of Matthew alone, Jesus performs four healings and an exorcism, and in each of the healings, faith – belief – are vital components. Those who brought a paralyzed person to Jesus displayed great faith. The synagogue official believed that Jesus could heal his daughter. The woman with the issue of blood believed that if she touched only so much as the hem of his garment, she would be well, and the two blind men received their sight because they believed! Over in the fifteenth chapter, the Canaanite woman we spoke of awhile back – not likely even a follower of Judaism – saw her daughter healed because of her faith in Christ, and everyone in her region who came to Jesus in need of healing got that healing!

By contrast, we read in Matthew’s thirteenth chapter that Jesus didn’t do many miracles in his home town “because of their unbelief.”

So people who were allowed to have faith did not, and people prohibited from having faith… well, they had faith anyway!

The Pharisees, the Sadducees, the elders and the scribes and the rulers didn’t get to pick who had faith.

And we don’t get to pick who has faith, either. 

When the Apostle Paul says, in our Epistle reading, in humility, to regard others as better than ourselves, to put the interests of others ahead of our own interest, to be of the same mind as Christ, it was with the knowledge that he was speaking to men and women and children for whom Jesus Christ had died. That same Jesus gave his life for each of us here today. This is a fact: we are beloved children of God, chosen and called by God into the citizenship of the Kingdom of Heaven, welcomed into loving relationship with the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Though we are uniquely loved, especially valued, this treasure is not meant to be hoarded, but shared! Shared with everyone, without reservation.

In the New Testament, we meet lepers and prostitutes and tax collectors and pagans and slaves and centurions and eunuchs and people who are crippled and a criminal on a cross who all believe in Jesus Christ, who all enter the Kingdom of God long before the religious elite, the people with the flawless theology and the perfectly crafted doctrine, even notice that a Kingdom of God exists.

And today? Today there are people just like Steve Thompson, who I met at Christmas in 1997 on Death Row at Donaldson Correctional facility, and who I shook hands with one last time in May of 1998, after listening to him preach from the Book of Psalms to his fellow inmates through the food-tray hole in his cell door. Steve was a murderer. But Steve had faith, he believed, he followed Christ.

We don’t get to choose who has faith.

Today there are people like Jay Bakker and Hugh Hollowell and Phil and Stephanie Shepherd and Neil Christopher who share the Gospel in bars and in homeless shelters and with outcasts and misfits, and who see many of these turn to Christ.

We don’t get to choose who has faith.

It is a fact that there is no person you or I have ever met – no person you or I will ever meet – for whom Jesus Christ did not die.

And that Jesus who died, rose again. And that Jesus who rose again will come again. And we don’t get to choose for whom Jesus will come. But we do get to share that joyous good news.

Thanks be to God!

Living Water...

A word of thanks to Rev. Kathleen Lambert, who posted her sermon on her blog, and helped me consolidate my thoughts about this passage.

Honestly, there is so much to unpack and explore with this passage. I didn't even touch on the disciples' reactions, and the whole part about Jesus having food they didn't know about.

All I'm saying is that this is not the last time you'll hear from me about this passage...

Exodus 17:1-7
From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the LORD commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. The people quarreled with Moses, and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the LORD?” But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” So Moses cried out to the LORD, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” The LORD said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the LORD, saying, “Is the LORD among us or not?”

Romans 5:1-11
Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person — though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

John 4:5-42
So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.
A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “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.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” 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.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.”
Jesus said to her, “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. What you have said is true!” The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman said 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.”
Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” They left the city and were on their way to him.
Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.”
So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”
Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”

This is the Word of the Lord.



We met Nicodemus last week, sneaking through the dark of night to meet with Jesus. Since then, Jesus has spent some time in the Judean countryside, spending time with his disciples while they baptized people.

But now they’re headed back to Galilee, along the most direct route available. Even so, the long, dusty walk in the relentless heat has taken its toll. They near a village, just another huddle of tiny homes and shops poking up out of the dirt and sand like broken molars. There’s a well, though, encircled with rocks worn nearly smooth by the centuries, and built just high enough to create a shady spot. It is there, at last, Jesus rests. The disciples all go on onto the town to try and find some food. Jesus doesn’t pay attention to the grumbles about how hard it’ll be to find something permissible, something even edible amongst all these Samaritans.

There are people who will tell you that Jesus chose this time and this place for the specific purpose of meeting who he was going to meet and for teaching the disciples what he was going to teach them.

I have no problem at all with that kind of view.

But it seems to me that there is a simpler, more wonderful explanation. One of the hardest things for people to remember about Jesus is that, though he is and was fully God, he was fully human, with all the pain and weakness that so often marks the human condition. He lived in a place and time where nearly everyone lived on a subsistence diet, one meal a day, mostly beans, perhaps a few vegetables, bread, and some kind of meat once a week or less. Water was as scarce as food. Most people were too poor to afford the luxury of a riding animal, so they walked everywhere.

So with all of this in mind, it isn’t hard to imagine Jesus, bone-weary from walking, caked in sand and dirt, sitting into the shade and leaning up against the well’s cool stones with a sigh of relief. Slowly his back stops throbbing, his legs stop cramping, and he might have drifted off to sleep, but as the pain subsided he realized… he was thirsty!

Wells being what they are, of course, he couldn’t just turn a tap. Luckily, someone showed up just when he was thinking about going to look for something to dip water with, a woman shows up with a water vase.

He says, “Give me a drink.” It’s a simple enough sentence, and I’m betting it sounds a lot less demanding in Aramaic, but with that one sentence, Jesus takes centuries of prejudice, hatred, distrust, and naked fear and grinds them into the dust.

You see, to say the Samaritans and the Jews hated one another is a breathtaking understatement. The Samaritans were the descendants of Jewish people deemed too insignificant to deport to Babylon and of Gentile people whom the Assyrians had settled in Palestine. Over time, these Samaritans had developed different worship habits and different beliefs than the Jews. The central place of worship for the Samaritans was Mount Gerizim, and as if that alone weren’t enough to drive home the wedge between the two people, the Samaritans recognized only the first five books of the Bible, the Penteteuch, as authoritative.

So the Jews considered these Samaritans to be less than pure, less than honorable, less than human, when you get right down to it. In fact, the really good Jews who had to travel from Jerusalem to Galilee would usually add days to their journey by actually going around Samaria, because to touch the soil of that land was to be made unclean!

So for a Jewish man to be simply sitting in the shade of a Samaritan well was a shock. That this Jewish man would speak to a strange woman was another shock. That this Jewish man would speak to a strange Samaritan woman… well, I imagine the woman about dropped her jar in shock. She may have even looked around to see who Jesus was really talking to.

She asks, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” and Jesus answers her, not with the same words, but in the same fashion that he answered Nicodemus in our Gospel reading from last week.

You’ll remember that Nicodemus had started off on a rather pompous declaration of how all his colleagues had decided that Jesus was worthy of respect as a man of God, and Jesus interrupted him with a bold statement: “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”

To this Samaritan woman, Jesus answers, “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.”

Now, just like with Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman at first doesn’t understand exactly what Jesus is saying. Living water, you see, is a phrase which was commonly used to describe water which was moving, constantly refreshed, like in a stream or a river, as opposed to water which accumulated and grew brackish, like in a cistern. So in the same way that Nicodemus completely missed what Jesus was saying about being born anew, born from above, the Samaritan woman thought Jesus was either joking with her, or crazy.

Unlike Nicodemus, though, it didn’t take her long to go from doubt to understanding.

Isn’t that interesting? Throughout the long, nighttime conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus, we are never sure the Pharisee understood what Jesus was saying to him. He very likely left that night more full of questions, doubts, and frustrations than when he snuck out the back door to go and see Jesus in the first place. Despite his education, his standing, his riches and his authority, the spiritual truth that Jesus offered him hung in the air, unclaimed. Desptie everything in his favor, he simply did not get it.

For all the things Nicodemus had in his favor, this Samaritan woman had enough strikes against her to end a ball game. Aside from being, well, a Samaritan, she was a woman in an oppressively patriarchal society. We don’t know whether she had lost husbands through death or through divorce, but she’d been through a lot of them. She had to, though; a woman in that era and that region had no standing and no legal rights apart from a man. Couple this with the fact that she came to the well alone, and in the middle of the day, rather than in the late afternoon, when it was cooler, and when the women of the village gathered together to share the news of the day as they filled their water jugs, and we have the picture of a person who was considered an outcast even by her own.

Sure, the Woman at the Well had issues. She was uneducated, she was a Samaritan, she was an outcast. Yet in spite of all of these things working against her, this Samaritan woman got it. And because she got it, many more people in that Samaritan town were able to meet Jesus, to hear the Good News of the Gospel, and believe for themselves.



You know, it all began, though, with Jesus asking a question. A simple question. But with that question, this Jewish man, this Jesus of Nazareth, broke the rules. He broke the rules by speaking to her, but he did something more. He asked her for water, which gave her value. He spoke of her life in specific terms, but, and I want to be clear on this, without condemnation. In fact, at no point in the conversation, be it her current living arrangements or how the Samaritans rejected the Temple in Jerusalem as the proper place to worship God, did Jesus use words which rebuked or condemned her. To the contrary, Jesus removed the stigma, erased the shame, destroyed the walls of separation…

In our Epistle reading today, Paul says something earth-shattering. I know, big surprise, it’s Paul, duh, he does that stuff all the time, right? But listen to what he says in Romans, the fifth chapter and the eighth verse: “But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”

Not, “But God proves his love for us in that once we got baptized, Christ died for us.” Not, “But God proves his love for us in that once we went through confirmation and joined the church, Christ died for us.” Not, “But God proves his love for us in that once we prayed a prayer and publicly confirmed that we gave mental assent to all the right things, Christ died for us.”
No, while we were still sinners. While we were as far from God and as averse to relationship with God as it is possible to be, while we were at our darkest and most venal, that was where and when and how God loved us. Loved us to the point of death – loved us to the point of resurrection.

Do you see the power in that? It means that whoever we are, whatever labels society has pasted on us, whatever we’ve done in the past or the present to reject God, wherever we are – regardless of disparities in geography or philosophy or theology or politics or culture or ethnicity or gender, we, like that Samaritan woman, are of utmost value in the eyes and in the heart of God.

This is the Good News! This is the living water which flows in us and through us and which must be shared – shared with those we love… and shared with the Samaritans in our life.

I promise you that I could go on with this passage for the remainder of the afternoon. If I ever decide to take that fateful leap into becoming someone who does sermon series, the first one will be on this passage, because there is so much to say. But I’ll close with this:

Who are the Samaritans in your life? The people you don’t really know that well, because they are different? Perhaps they live in a way that you find repugnant. Perhaps they believe things that rub you the wrong way. Perhaps they’re just people from a worldview or culture you just haven’t had any experience with. Beginning today, why not be Jesus to them, in the way that Jesus was to the woman at the well? Speak life to them, rather than standing in silent judgment. Reach out in the love of Christ, with the same heart with which God loves you, rather than pulling away, as so many do. Proclaim the grace of God that loved you when you were and are at your worst, rather than pontificating condemnation and wagging your allegorical finger at them.

How dare we hold back living water from people – from a world – dying of thirst?