Lent 3A – Bill Harkins
Good morning, and welcome to Holy Family on this third Sunday of Lent, a day on which we hear again the story of the Samaritan woman at the well. It is a risky encounter for both Jesus and the woman, as both willingly subject themselves to “exposure” of various kinds. This is a fascinating word, exposure, with subtle meanings, the etymology and synonyms of which are relevant to today’s Gospel text. We define exposure, for example, as the fact or condition of being presented to view or made known, or the condition of being unprotected, especially from severe weather. It isn’t necessarily pejorative, of course, as in being subjected to some beneficial influence. When our boys were growing up we sought to expose them to culture in the forms of art, and music, for example. As a professor I have endeavored to expose students—and myself—to new ideas and ways of thinking. But, we know all too well from the past several years that exposure to a virus or illness is not good, nor is the condition of being at risk of financial loss. Hikers, trail runners, anyone who spends time in the outdoors is vulnerable to exposure to weather, geography, and all that exposes us—both physically and psychologically—in those spaces. We seek to limit our exposure to market fluctuations, for example, and as a licensed clinician I take care to avoid exposure to ethical or legal liability. We may speak of an instance of exposing, as a verb, as we saw in the Gospel text for today, a disclosure of something secret or which has been revealed. Synonyms include liability, openness, and vulnerability. It is the last synonym, in particular, I want to highlight in the text for today.
Recently I was talking with a colleague about our shared grief over a series of professional losses, and my mind took me to the Waffle House on Charlotte Avenue in Nashville, where I had a final meal with a beloved professor from Vanderbilt who was dying of cancer. I had tried to convince him to pick a fancier lunch spot, but he loved the Waffle House because the food was compatible with his chemo regimen, and the waitresses looked after him and called him “hon” and one, in particular, knew to keep his water glass full in response to the dehydration caused by his treatment. It was a calm sea in the storm of the medical protocol, and in the midst of his dying. We would sit there, eating waffles, and drinking water, and talking and giggling, until it was time for me to take him home and back to the mysterious task of his saying goodbye to this beautiful world, and for me to head back to Atlanta, grieving the loss of this dear man without whom I would not be here this morning. The last time we went to Waffle House, shortly before he died, I noted how his favorite waitress watchfully kept his water glass filled, but it wasn’t just Cumberland River tap water. It was, well, living water from a deeper well. Maybe she was an angel, right there on Charlotte Avenue, so carefully disguised as a Waffle House waitress. I know she was one of his angels. I made note of her compassion, and I said to Liston, “A very wise man once told me that sometimes the most we can do is to show up, give someone a cold cup of water on a hot day…and sit, and listen, that would be enough pastoral care.” A tear formed in his eyes, and he said “Now William, you know that wasn’t original to me. Sometimes we claim to know all the right notes of the Bible, but can’t hum the tune of it. That’s what the Gospel is all about…humming the tune of compassion….keeping the living water flowing…drinking water from a deeper well.” Liston had taught me long ago, in the classrooms of my beloved Vanderbilt Divinity School, that one can be broken and yet whole, and we can be terminally ill, and healed. And he was still teaching me in that moment on Charlotte Avenue, just as Jesus was still teaching the disciples on this day with the Samaritan woman at the well.
The day with my mentor and professor had indeed been one of exposure to grief, and joy, and for me, a new way of understanding both. We had experienced a shared vulnerability, to be sure, and this is available to us all in wilderness journeys, whether the wilderness is “out there,” or “in here”—including our soul-informed Lenten interior journeys. As the social science researcher Brene’ Brown has noted, courage and transformation paradoxically come from our own places of vulnerability. She writes “When I ask people what is vulnerability, the answers were things like sitting with my wife who has Stage III breast cancer and trying to make plans for our children, or my first date after my divorce, saying I love you first, asking for a raise, sending my child to school being enthusiastic and supportive of him and knowing how excited he is about orchestra tryouts and how much he wants to make first chair and encouraging him and supporting him and knowing that’s not going to happen. To me, vulnerability is courage. It’s about the willingness to show up and be seen in our lives. And in those moments when we show up, I think those are the most powerful meaning-making moments of our lives even if they don’t go well. I think they define who we are.” In the account of Jesus’ conversation with the woman at the well, Jesus and the woman experienced vulnerability and exposure harrowing in both senses of the term—to vex, and to prepare the soil for harvest. This text is challenging to read because most of us have been subjected to highly imaginative and biblically unwarranted portraits of the woman at the well. These distort our understanding of the text and the truth it reveals. As homiletics professor Fred Craddock reminded us, evangelists aplenty have assumed that the brighter her nails, the darker her mascara and the shorter her skirt, the greater the testimony to the power of the Samaritan woman’s converting word in this passage. How quick we can be to generalize, and to make assumptions in relation to those who may be different, and whose socio-cultural contexts may invite our imaginations to relegate them to the status of the “other.” Conjure any immediate images about Waffle House waitresses, for example—or come to that, even folks like me who choose to eat there—and a random sample is not likely to be entirely positive. The Samaritan woman, whose name we never know, is open and honest, a truth-seeker hindered only by a hypocritical town that forces her to come alone—exposed to the heat of the day—to the well at noon rather than the customary evening hour. Moralizers, however, have painted her as dangerous: beware her seductive ways, her mincing walk, and her eyes waiting in ambush. These spurious speculations miss the point. All we know is that Jesus, as is his custom in John’s Gospel, reveals special knowledge of the individuals he encounters, and alerts them that in meeting him they may encounter the transcendent, and this may reveal truths hidden, well, in the clear light of day at the village well. Jesus does not urge the woman to repent or change her behavior. For those quick to judge her, this can only complicate our ability to understand the text, and to see her authentically. But let us try.
Jesus’ longest-recorded conversation with anyone is the one he has with the Samaritan woman. On many counts it seems extraordinary that it took place at all: a man and a woman in public; a Jew and a Samaritan; a transient and a citizen, one offering “living water” and another caught in the ceaseless rounds of drawing water at the well. But the Holy Spirit in Her mischief was at work. The conversation begins with Jesus’ request for a drink of water. However, through the ensuing exchanges the transient Jew offers more than did Jacob, the patriarch with whose name the well was associated. In fact, Jesus’ knowledge of the woman convinces her that he is a prophet from Jerusalem and prompts her to defend her own tradition of worship on Mt. Gerizim. To her surprise, Jesus does not debate her, he declares that true worship of God is not geographically defined but is defined by God’s own nature, which is spirit and truth. In other words, dear ones, God’s love is love that transcends sex, race, tradition, place and liturgy. If this traveler from Jerusalem is greater than Jacob, is a prophet and yet more than a prophet, the woman has but one category left: in her mind, a God whose nature it is to embrace and respect the dignity of all people in all places is a Messiah. The woman runs to town, not with the answer but only the question, to the city and gives the call to faith, “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” If we wish to be fascinated by this woman, let us be so now. She is a witness, and her witness is invitational—come and see—it is curious, not judgmental; it is within the range permitted by her experience; it is honest with its own uncertainty and openness to mystery; it is for everyone who will hear. How refreshing. Her witness avoids triumphalism, parroting someone else’s conclusions, packaged answers to unasked questions, thinly veiled ultimatums and threats of hell, and assumptions of certainty on theological matters. She does convey, however, her willingness to let her hearers arrive at their own affirmations about Jesus, and they do: “This is indeed the Savior of the world.” John gives to her witness a name which is the very term with which he began his lyrical Gospel: the Samaritan woman, the Greek text reads, spoke “the Word.” Exposure can be dangerous, my friends, and it can also be revelatory. On my Waffle House sojourns with my professor, I learned things about myself that I found scary, and in relation to which I felt vulnerable. For one, I have never since seen a Waffle House waitress the same way again, now having been delivered from my too quick assumptions about the circumstances of that form of employment. In the woman at the well we see exposure—and the vulnerability that it can create—as a means to a deeper encounter with the Word made Flesh. An “other-wise” reading of this text invites us to be mindful of our assumptions. The author bell hooks suggests that we should pay attention to those who speak from the margins—attention, that is, to both the power of those voices, and our all too human tendency to claim to know too much about them, based on our assumptions. May our Lenten journey, with its own forms of exposure and vulnerability, do the same for each of us. Amen.