March 15, 2020: Presence Revealed
March 15, 2020 Rev. Rhonda Blevins, DMIN
Presence Revealed
John 4:5-42
Here’s something I posted to Facebook on Wednesday:
Today I was driving when an ambulance came speeding up from behind, siren blaring and lights flashing. I pulled my car over and stopped as did the other drivers in order to allow the ambulance to pass unhindered. I didn’t stop or inconvenience myself for my own health—I stopped for the health of the one being tended by the EMTs.
That’s what healthy folks are being asked to do during this pandemic. On a large scale we “pull over.” We stop our progress. We do this for the benefit of the vulnerable among us, and for the healthcare workers who care for them.
Those of us who aren’t considered senior adults and who aren’t dealing with medical issues that place us at greater risk of complications from COVID-19 must be ready to stop our normal lives for a while. We do this out of compassion. We are or will soon be asked to make changes. We will do so for the greater good.
Stay safe, friends. Be well. Take care of each other. And if you have to pull over for a little while, get the well-deserved rest you need. 💕🙏🏻😎
That little analogy earned me over 1,000 “likes” and over 2,000 “shares.” That’s a lot for my little Facebook feed! I suppose the analogy resonated with people—perhaps it helped them make sense of why healthy people are stopping their normal lives when they’re not sick and maybe no one they know is sick with COVID-19.
Today, as you know, we canceled our in-person worship service. This was no easy decision, and it hurts this pastor’s heart to do this. For some of our members, this is their primary social outlet—I worry about their isolation. For others, church attendance is a main source of solace—I worry about feeding the anxiety many of us are feeling as this virus has shaken our lives, changing how we interact with the world and with one another. But I couldn’t handle the thought of the alternative: contributing to community spread, or even worse, someone getting terminally ill or worse because we were afraid of overreacting. I didn’t sleep much this week. The disruption, the stress . . . you may be feeling it too.
This “social distancing” is no fun. Just ask the woman at the well, from the Gospel of John, chapter 4.
She is at the well all alone in the heat of midday. We don’t know why. It’s unusual. While other women gathered at the well earlier in the morning, drawing water while catching up on the latest gossip, connecting with one another as they performed their daily work—this woman is there all alone. Does she have the coronavirus? Has she been shunned by the other women? There’s surely a story behind why she’s had five husbands and the one she’s with now isn’t her husband. Is that story why she’s alone? Did her husbands die? Did they divorce her, which sometimes happened if she was infertile? As a woman, she was considered “property” in that day—she didn’t have agency to divorce. And the man she lives with now—is it a Levirate marriage in which a man is required to marry his deceased brother’s widow—a social safety net that prevents widows from becoming homeless and destitute?
So much we know don’t about this woman in the midst of her “social distancing.” But because of her social distancing, precisely because she is alone, this unnamed “woman at the well” has one of the most amazing encounters with Jesus of anyone in the New Testament. Let’s read her story together:
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.”
What a truly amazing encounter with the Lord! Jesus isn’t “supposed to” interact with a Samaritan. He breaks that rule. Jesus isn’t “supposed to” interact with a woman. He breaks that rule too. Not only does Jesus break the rules, he breaks down the barriers to this woman’s heart. He names the source of her deepest shame. She doesn’t deny the fact that she’s had five husbands, and the man she is with now isn’t her husband. She owns it, but it seems she doesn’t like this conversation very much, so she quickly changes the subject to the hot topic—to the big point of debate between Jews like Jesus and her Samaritan people: “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.”
We do this too, you know. Deflect. Change the subject when it gets too real. We often don’t like it when our souls are exposed, when we feel vulnerable, when someone looks straight through our defenses. Heck, we don’t look inside too often, why would we let someone else see in there? So we turn our attention away, to entertainment or like this woman, the big political debates of our day. For this woman, the debate/distraction was all about whether the proper place of worship was the mountain or the temple. Jesus, per usual, dismisses the binary and offers another way. A higher way. “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
And then the conversation takes a surprising twist. The woman had been vulnerable with Jesus, and now Jesus becomes vulnerable with her. This foreign woman was the first person in the Gospel of John to whom Jesus reveals his true identity, outing himself as “Messiah,” presenting the first of many “I am” statements in the book of John. She was amazed. She left her jar, went back into town and told everyone she saw about Jesus. “Come and see!” she urged them, and they did. And many believed because of her. God so loved the world that even this this woman could have everlasting life. Even those Samaritans could have everlasting life. And though the Bible never tells us her name, some Eastern Christian traditions have sainted her and given her the name “Photina” meaning “the luminous one.” This woman is known as the first evangelist.
Back to my premise. Because of social distancing, this woman is positioned to have a deep, meaningful encounter with the Lord. If she comes to the well with all the other women, she is lost to history. There is no opportunity to engage with the Lord. Maybe, just maybe, that’s the gift inherent in this pandemic.
We don’t like this social distancing. We don’t like that spring training has been canceled. We don’t like that the Masters and March Madness are called off. We don’t like that Disneyworld is shuttered or that college kids are sent packing with little notice. And my kids are out of school for two weeks? TWO! WEEKS?!? (Hyperventilating into a paper bag.) Two weeks my kids are home and YOU PEOPLE took all the toilet paper!
But here’s my hope: that by “pulling over,” by distancing ourselves from casual encounters, by going alone to the well—we might just discover (or rediscover) the living water through our solitary encounter with the One who meets us at the well.
Being alone does not mean that we have to be lonely. In fact, being along can open up the opportunity for us to find solitude—a pathway to experiencing the deep, abiding presence of God. Like an underground stream that supplies an unending source of living water, God’s presence lives underneath the busyness and the compulsions many of us are being forced to relinquish. We go to the well—alone—and there God’s Presence is Revealed.
So my dear friends, claim this unprecedented time as the Sabbath you’ve ignored, perhaps, for too long. Go to the well and connect with the One who can offer living water. Drink, and discover God’s presence revealed in your life too. I close with a poem shared with me by Kay Shurden, written by Lynn Unger just this week—the title of the poem is “Pandemic.”
What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath—
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.
And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.
(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)
Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.
Promise this world your love–
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.