On wells and brands
Scripture Text:
John 4:5-42
Sermon:
Please pray with me:
Lord, please take our minds and think through them,
take our hands and work through them,
take our hearts and let them gush from your living water. Amen.
So … I don’t know if you could tell based on hearing it from multiple voices, but there is a lot to this story. There are a lot of layers to this story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well. And it’s more than you’d expect from a seemingly innocent encounter. He’s a single guy, in his 30s, walking on a road that was one of the many interstates in the Roman empire. It wasn’t the most traveled road, but it wasn’t the desert either. It was in Samaria – a region between Jerusalem and his home area of Galilee.
Jesus is walking this road but he doesn’t really have anything to worry about. Sure, it’s kind of a foreign land – he’s certainly not among fellow Jews. But he doesn’t have much to worry about, since he’s walking with his posse, the disciples.
And at some point, when they reach a city, he sends them off to get food. That’s when the story becomes interesting.
He’s alone. (Which is a detail that might cue your sixth senses — warning bells are appropriate here).
Away from home? Yep.
Now he’s alone? Yep.
Single guy, early 30’s? Yep.
The story says he’s at a well – the local watering hole. And, then the story gives a little hint – a little reminder sticky note of what to look for. The story points out that this well has a long history. It was a special well, that Joseph – the amazing, technicolor dreamer in the book of Genesis — had inherited from his father Jacob. (That’s the clue.) This well was ancient.
And just as ancient was the role that wells had ancient Hebrew culture. The wells were places of matchmaking.
Abraham sent his servant to find a bride for his son Isaac. The servant goes to the well, prays to God, decides to test Isaac’s future wife — she’ll be one who, when he asks for a drink, will oblige and give him one. And Rebekah, one of the local girls did exactly that. She came to the well and when he asked, she gave him and his camels water. She returned with the servant and she and Isaac were married.
And their son Jacob, when he was fleeing from his brother Esau, he went to a well where some shepherds were watering their sheep. After asking if these shepherds knew his uncle, the shepherds said yes, and said, “here comes his daughter, Rachel.” After that, the rest is history. They met, Jacob helped Rachel water the sheep, they kissed. And after a long time, and a couple of more wives, Jacob and Rachel had a son, Joseph.
And then there’s the story of Moses. Moses, after being raised a prince of Egypt, killed an Egyptian slave master and fled across the desert to Midian. When he got there, he went to a well, and the local priest’s daughters were there. They were trying to water their sheep, but some men were denying them access. Moses came to the rescue and, the local priest, in a sign of gratitude, offered Moses his oldest daughter Zipporah to marry.
Wells in ancient Hebrew culture, were places of courtship — a single guy and a girl meet at a well, and storytellers could almost prescribe what would happen next.
The future groom or someone in his place goes to a foreign land. (Jesus is in Samaria — a foreign land)
He encounters a girl or group of girls at a well.
(In Jesus’ case, it’s a woman)
Someone, either the man or girl draws water from the well.
(Jesus and the woman have this almost flirty discussion about drawing water. They test each other and change the subject so often it’s hard to follow.)
The girl rushes home to tell others of the stranger’s arrival.
(The woman leaves, just as the disciples arrive)
A wedding occurs between the stranger and the girl, usually after the’ve been invited to a meal.
(Did you hear the Disciples get nervous when Jesus says he doesn’t need to eat with them? And then at the end of the story, he’s asked to stay with the people of the city!) (1)
This story, to those who have the ears to hear it, can almost be scandalous.
The difference between the gospel story and the well stories of the ancients - at least as far as we can tell - is the outcome.
The Gospel of John sets the scene, and the audience is left to figure out … “who is the bride?”
The story doesn’t leave many options, since it’s just Jesus and this woman.
So would it be appropriate for the Samaritan woman to be the bride? I mean, she’s had five ex-husbands, [as Heidi said, “Insert Elizabeth Taylor joke here”], she’s not Jewish, and she’s from a race of people whom the Jews were openly hostile and violent towards.
And yet, if you were to ask, “Who is the bride of Christ?” She could fit the role. In Christian tradition, the church is the bride of Christ. Augustine, a bishop in the 4th century, identified the Samaritan woman as the church. Augustine pointed out that “this woman, who bore the type of the church, comes from strangers, for the church was to come from the Gentiles.“ Gentiles are non-Jewish people. We, all of us, are Gentiles. In this story, think of this woman as us.
The conversation goes like this: Jesus says,
“Give me a drink”
“How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”
“If you knew the gift of God, 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.”
- a side note: living water, at its most basic level, means non-stagnant water. Think of it as flowing water, or bubbling water.
“he would have given you living water.”
“Sire, 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 who drank from it?”
“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I 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.”
“Give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
From there, the conversation turns to her past marriages.
And later it gets even more personal.
“Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you say that place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.”
(Another side note: he didn’t say that! She just assumed it because he was a Jew).
“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.
(Notice here: Jesus isn’t confirming or denying her accusation)
“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.”
This exchange is recapping an ancient rivalry between the Jews and the Samaritans. To put it in local terms, imagine the Jews as the Chicago Cubs, and the Samaritans as the Chicago White Sox. The Cubs have Wrigley Field. The White Sox have Comiskey Park, aka US Cellular Field. These two most venerated baseball fields are like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and like Mount Gerazim near Shechem in Samaria. On which of the mountains could true worship happen? On which could animals be sacrificed? And on which was God truly present and wanting to be worshipped? (Those were the questions at stake. And they can be answered about as impartially as the question “In which baseball park is the best baseball played?”)
The Jews, the Samaritans – they’re different brands of a common tradition. And all brands, at their best, are symbols of an experience that undergirds an identity. In the case of the Jews and Samaritans – their experience is a vast tradition — a tradition that was split with struggle. Both the Jews and the Samaritans can trace their histories to the Kingdom of Israel before the country was conquered by the Babylonians. But when they came back to re-establish themselves in the land — they claimed that their religion was the true one. “True worshipers will worship …” they claimed, on this particular holy mountain. They just didn’t agree on which mountain that was.
The rivalry between Jews and Samaritans — in some ways, we still live among these rivalries. Cubs or White Sox? I’m a Mac; I’m a PC. Do you lean conservative or liberal? Do you like Gino’s East, Giordano’s or Lou Malnati’s better? Pepsi or Coke? Do you get your groceries at Meijer or Jewel? Are you a member of Costco or Sam’s Club? Oh — I love this one. Portillo’s, Five Guys or Fat Ricky’s?
(I dare someone to go up to Bill Scheets after the service and ask him about Portillo’s hot dogs!)
Brands are symbols of an underlying experience. They’re easily identifiable with their logos … their slogans … their consistency.
If brands aren’t consistent, they lose their meaning … and their loyal followers. Marriott means little if you don’t sleep well. An Apple computer isn’t helpful unless you find it easy to use. You only keep your newspaper subscription if you consider its news and reporting valuable. Consistently not having customers’ expectations met … that’s the beginning of the end for a brand.
There’s a little secret that the church doesn’t often like to admit:
Our denominations in the church — they’re brands.
Their loyal followers keep coming to them because of a consistent experience — a consistent culture. Whether that culture comes from the historical tradition, from the consistent worship, even from the consistent people — church denominations are brands, with expectations that they try to meet.
And the beginning of the end for a brand is to consistently fail to meet expectations.
But today’s Gospel story challenges our brands. Expectations are unmet throughout every single layer of this story. Neither Jesus nor the woman meet each others expectations. They test each other, trying to see how closely they live up to their brands. Neither of them get even close. (And this story was setup for a marriage, but that expectation wasn’t met either!)
I don’t know if many of you know this, since I don’t talk about it that often. My job – my ministry is to both help our churches learn to communicate better, but, strangely enough, it is also to help brands fail. I come from a denomination that started out with the goal to “just be Christian” by living like and ultimately restoring the New Testament church. We were going to be called “disciples of Christ” – only … no labels, just disciples of Christ. We were a group of churches that broke away from the Scottish Presbyterians because we didn’t think people should be denied communion. We didn’t want creeds or confessions to bar people from coming to the Lord’s table. Our goal was to unite the entire church. We would help end denominations. Instead, we sadly became yet another one. We were called “disciples of Christ” and then we started to capitalize it so that we were called Disciples of Christ.
Denominational churches, and usually non-denominational churches for that matter, we resemble the disciples in today’s gospel story much more than we take after the Samaritan woman. The disciples are conflict-avoidant. Our gospel story tells us “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?” They were thinking it, but they weren’t willing to stick their necks out and risk a confrontation. So then they decided to urge Jesus to eat something. But he confuses them and turns their command to eat into a big metaphor about harvesting. “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 the sower and reaper may rejoice together. …. I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”
That part of the story is so completely random of a response that it’s almost a non-sequitur. It just doesn’t compute. The disciples are saying “hey man, you should have some lunch” and Jesus is saying, “start harvesting other people’s fields and reap the benefits of the work they’ve done!”
(If the disciples are conflict avoidant, Jesus is just plain passive-aggressive. Or maybe he’s aggressive-aggressive. You can’t really tell what’s he’s talking about … at least from the disciples’ standpoint). For sure he’s confusing. He’s speaking in a metaphor that tells them to get to work, but not how to do the work. He tells them he expects results, but not how he expects them to succeed.
But they’ve been gone through the whole Samaritan woman’s story.
The Samaritan woman the well — she didn’t need a step-by-step guide or a strategic vision. She was herself. She was a natural. And her impact was enormous. She goes back to her friends, her family, her neighbors — the people she sees every day — and she does some good old fashioned word-of-mouth marketing.
“Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?”
She takes this truth of her life and shares it … and it starts growing and spreading.
The church would be better if we took after the Samaritan woman more than we took after the disciples. Today’s marketing industry relies on analytics. (This is also part of my job, so I feel like I deal with these every day). Marketers can tell who follows whom, what’s hot, what trends are fashionable. Marketers even have a measurement called the conversion rate that measures the goal of how many people express interest … by clicking a link online. One click and they’re counted as converted.
In today’s economies, good marketing means you can clearly state what a person will get from your product or service. Good marketing shows how a person’s life will become better or easier. It’s built on brand loyalty and making a consistent culture – a consistent experience that meets expectations.
The church, however, it’s different.
The Samaritan woman’s story shows us that we are called to a different kind of marketing. We don’t promise how people’s lives will be better. We don’t tell them what they’ll get. Our call is not to set up lofty expectations or conversion rates that we’ll fail to meet. Instead, if we’re like the Samaritan woman than the disciples, we go back and tell not of the future but of the past. We tell a history. We tell our history – of our encounters with Jesus. We tell of what he’s done to us.
We don’t need the latest technology or tools to share with people the underlying experience of meeting Jesus. We already have them. Jesus offered living water when he assured us that “the water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The good news for us, is that offer never expires. And to some extent it’s beyond our control too. The water “gushes up” with such force that it can transport us beyond our own brands and beyond our own comfort zones. It can even push us beyond our own brands – our consistent experiences. And if our brands start to fail because they’re not consistent — well, that might not be such a bad thing. Our brands are not eternal. Being Episcopalian, being Lutheran, being Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Evangelical or being a Disciple of Christ means little unless we’re Christians first and foremost. Coming to the Church of St. Benedict means little if it’s not impacting your life with Christ. And like the Samaritan woman, we as a church, we can continue to proclaim in both awe and wonder:
“Come and see … He cannot be the Messiah, can he?”
(1) This paradigm breakdown is loosely based on a pairing of Robert Alter’s “type-scene” framework with the OT and John stories. Read more in J. Eugene Botha’s Jesus and the Samaritan Woman: a Speech Act Reading of John 4:1-42, 1991 (p111)
