When Jesus met a woman at a well in Samaria, it turned out that they both had something to offer to one another: Refreshment.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the fourth chapter of John’s Gospel (John 4:5-42): the conversation between Jesus and a woman he met at a well in Samaria.
The conversation started with Jesus’ simple request that she share some of the water she was drawing so that he could have a drink. It went from there to matters much deeper — deeper even than the well, if you like. It went to spiritual matters. It went even to the identity of the Messiah, the Deliverer, the one who was coming.
Unlike lots of other conversations, Jesus actually acknowledged to the woman that he was the Messiah.
The conversation was persuasive enough that she went back to the town and invited her neighbors to meet him. She said, “Come and meet a man who told me everything I’ve ever done. He couldn’t be the Messiah — or could he? Come and see.”
It occurs to me that this story is about refreshment. It started with Jesus asking to be refreshed with the literal water to be drawn from the well. It continued with the refreshment that Jesus offered to this woman and to her neighbors: refreshment of the spirit.
He offered and delivered not just an acceptance, but also real valuing for her and for those around her, despite the fact that she was a Samaritan, despite the fact that she was a woman, despite the fact that there were a number of things that should have kept them distant from one another.
Yet they refreshed one another.
I think refreshment is a central activity, a central calling, a central obligation, if you like, of the life of faith. We are not simply here to be ourselves. We are here to support one another, to be a community, to be a family, if you like. In that family we refresh one another. We provide refreshment such as water, food, shelter. We provide refreshment emotionally and relationally. And when and how we can, we offer refreshment for the spirit: that living water of which Jesus spoke that flows through our very souls and renews our lives.
Refreshment.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
As he sat down to write his letter to the church in Rome – or perhaps as he stood to dictate it to the scribe, Tertius, who offers greetings at the end of the letter – the Apostle Paul had an agenda. He planned a trip to Spain. He had travelled a lot in the years since the risen Jesus summoned him to proclaim this good news. He hoped to go even further, to the place Clement of Rome, writing at the end of the first century, called “the farthest west.”
Along the way, said Paul, he wanted to visit the Christian community in Rome.
Unlike his other letters in the New Testament, Paul wrote this letter to people he didn’t know. He hoped for their assistance, I’m sure: a place to stay during his visit. He said he looked forward to preaching the gospel, so I’m sure he planned to do the same things he’d done in cities and towns across modern Israel, Syria, Turkey, and Greece. He wanted to meet people he’d heard good things of, names that had reached his ears across the Mediterranean Sea.
The Letter to the Romans was Paul on his best behavior, writing to strangers, trying to make a good impression.
Paul knew, and the Romans knew, that their church had had problems. A major one was that there’d been fights in the streets. The Emperor Claudius had banished Jews from the city of Rome on because of “disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus,” which most scholars interpret as dissension between Jews and Jews leaning into the new understandings of Jesus. The chances are very good that most if not all of the members of the Roman church had been shut out of the city, though it’s unknown for how long.
That probably wasn’t the Roman church’s only problem. Romans has sixteen chapters. The last chapter is a long set of greetings. Chapters twelve through fifteen contain a typically Pauline set of advice including, “Let love be genuine,” and “Owe no one anything, except to love one another.” Except for his opening introduction, he gave the rest of the letter: his time, his consideration, and his considerable focused attention, to one question: What difference is there, if any, between God’s relationship with Christians of a Jewish background and God’s relationship with Christians of a Gentile background?
It was a knotty problem. As Dan Clendenin writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “In Romans 3:29 Paul asked a provocative question: is God the God of Jews only? Or is he not also the God of Gentiles? In contrast to every attempt to claim God as ours, and ours alone, Paul says that in Abraham God loves all people equally. In the famous words of this week’s gospel, God so loves all the world (John 3:16). Our tendency is to fear the other, to marginalize the strange, to dismiss all that is different from who and what we know.”
That’s true now, and it was true in the first century. Jews had long regarded their relationship with God as unique. God might have created the world, but had only entered into covenant with one group of people. On the other hand, Romans – especially those dwelling in the city of Rome – regarded themselves as the greatest people ever. Most people living in the Empire were not Roman citizens and lived under different laws. Roman citizens, for example, could be executed for treason but they could not be crucified.
The Roman church included both Jews and Romans. Some of the latter would have been citizens and some non-citizens, adding another layer of class distinction to an uncomfortable mix, with everyone wondering: How does God really feel about that person on the other side of the room?
That’s why Paul got so excited about a revolutionary idea: that a relationship with God could be established not by living in the right place, not by divine selection, not through ritual observance, but through faith. Anyone could make the decision to trust in God. Anyone. “For this reason the promise depends on faith, in order that it may rest on grace, so that it may be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (who is the father of all of us)…”
Not only for me. Also for them. Not only for us. Also for them. Not only for the select of Rome. Also for Spaniards. Not only for the Jews. Also for the Greeks. Not only for the men. Also for the women. Not only for today’s believers. Also for tomorrow’s believers. Not only for people of the “Christian” nations. Also for the people of the non-Christian nations. Not only for the rich. Also for the poor. Not only for the powerful. Also for the marginalized. Not only for the respectable. Also for the discounted. Not only for the Americans. Also for the Iranians. Not only for the Republicans. Also for the Democrats, and the Independents, and the Greens, and the Libertarians, and so on. Not only for the people who agree with me. Also for the ones who don’t.
Let’s face it. God gets along better, with more people, than I do.
As Lucy Lind Hogan writes at Working Preacher, “Paul had experienced God’s amazing, unbelievable, overflowing love and forgiveness. How could God, in Jesus Christ, have forgiven him for all the evil that he had done? How could God accept the one who had sought to murder the disciples of Jesus? Because that is who our God is. For Paul, justification by grace was a theological concept only after it had been a life changing, throw-you-to-the-ground, awe-filled experience. God had offered him new life, and he had believed.”
These are anxious days. Hold on to that core of trust and faith: God loves you just as much as Paul or anyone. God loves you.
God also loves us. And God loves them. No matter who “we” are. No matter who “they” are.
Not only for us. Also for everyone.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes from his prepared text while preaching, so the sermon prepared does not precisely match the sermon as delivered.
Who can receive grace? According to the Apostle Paul: anybody and everybody.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the fourth chapter of the Apostle Paul’s letter to the church in Rome (Romans 4:1-5, 13-17).
Paul faced a real challenge. It was a challenge of theology. It was a challenge of thought. It was a challenge of relationship. He firmly believed that the salvation that God had offered through Jesus was urgent and important. He firmly believed that it needed to be extended to the entire population of the world.
The relationship with God, however, have been understood for centuries as mediated by a couple of limiting factors. They believed that the relationship with God was primarily for the descendants of Abraham. Other people could be added, but it took time and effort. Further, they believed — Paul believed —that through the gift of the Law offered through Moses, God had codified that relationship. Therefore people who followed the Law were those who could expect to receive any kind of grace from God.
The apostle Paul believed that that grace needed to be offered and expanded and extended as far and wide as possible.
So he went back the God’s relationship with Abraham. He went back and he found a critical aspect of that relationship. When God said to Abraham, “I will make you an ancestor,” even though that seems incredibly unlikely at Abraham’s advanced age, Abraham believed God. Abraham trusted God. There, said Paul, was the seed. There, said Paul, was the key to open the door.
Not the keeping of the Law, because as we know about law, law defines not “keeping” so much as it defines breaking. Not even kinship, ancestors sharing from Abraham, that was not where that original relationship had begun. It had begun in trust.
Trust in God, said the Apostle Paul, and that relationship is yours. That offer of salvation can be accepted. That place next to Jesus can be yours.
Not only for Abraham, not only for the countless others who had followed Abraham, not only for them, but also for you.
As we continue our Lenten journey, it is worth remembering that it was the Apostle Paul who, for the vast majority of us, made it not only for them but also for us.
May it also be a part of our Lenten journey to see that we understand and share God’s grace as not only for us, but for everyone.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
In the first century in which the Apostle Paul lived, Christianity was very new. It wasn’t always clear how it was supposed to work. Its best-known leaders didn’t always agree.
Then there were the basic problems of living in the first century. Most people were poor, very few people were middle class, and far fewer people were rich. “Give us this day our daily bread” was a heartfelt prayer for most people. Injury and illness could be much more dangerous than they are for us. Without antibiotics any infection could overwhelm a body’s ability to survive and recover.
And then, there were the problems of becoming a Christian. It was a new faith, unfamiliar to most people. As an offshoot of Judaism, it would appeal to some Jews, but concern others who worried that their faith was being corrupted. Paul himself had been on both sides of that argument. Far more people, however, would have followed the religious traditions of Greece, Rome, or Egypt, and found Christianity unfamiliar, unsettling, and even threatening.
In Thessalonica, it seems that the Christian community had suffered a lot of pressure from those around them. That’s why Paul wrote. In First Thessalonians, Paul wrote, “For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, for you suffered the same things from your own compatriots as they did…” (1 Thess. 2:14). We don’t know what the source of the persecution was. It might have been the pressures of prejudice from those around them. They might have been overcharged or refused service in shops. They might have faced taunts in the street. They might even have suffered assault and injury.
Or there might have been official suppression of the Christian community. They might have been “moved aside,” or arrested, tried, and punished for not following the customs of Rome. And, of course, there might have been both. Taunts in the streets leading to provocations and assaults, which were followed up by arrest, appearance before the magistrates, and further punishment.
That happens to marginalized people. In a lot of places. In a lot of time periods.
Whatever was happening, it concerned Paul, who had been instrumental in founding the church in Thessalonica. He feared that the suffering would drive people away from the church, and away from the faith itself. “I was afraid that somehow the tempter had tempted you and that our labor had been in vain,” he wrote in First Thessalonians. “But Timothy has just now come to us from you and has brought us the good news of your faith and love” (1 Thess. 3:5-6).
They had held on. They had not been shaken.
Shaking is a frequent part of the life of faith. Or rather, getting shaken. It was the situation of Jesus’ friends and followers. Jesus kept shaking their expectations. It was the situation hundreds of years before when the exiles who returned from Babylon to Jerusalem found that they had more work before them to rebuild God’s Temple than they’d anticipated. They’d been shaken. Haggai reminded them that God shakes the world.
The Thessalonians had been shaken by their persecution. They had been shaken, but they had not fallen.
Paul feared, however, that they might fall to something else, something that you and I don’t fear quite so much. “…We beg you, brothers and sisters, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as though from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord is already here.”
Why would he fear that? Because the Thessalonians wanted it to be there.
I don’t blame them.
There has been more than one occasion in my life where I have thrown my hands into the air and said something like, “Come, Lord Jesus!” What I meant was: I was ready for the Second Coming. I’d seen or felt too much pain. I’d seen or felt too much oppression. I’d seen or felt too much, and it was time for it to come to an end. Let history close. Let the new sunrise dawn. I was ready for not just a change, but The Change.
So far, to be clear, that hasn’t happened.
The Thessalonians, I suspect, were drawn to predictions of the end, of Jesus’ imminent return, because they had suffered. They’d suffered more than they wanted. They’d suffered more than what was just. They’d suffered more than they thought they could bear. “Come, Lord Jesus!” was a cry to end the suffering. It was a cry to have mercy.
Mariam Kamell writes at Working Preacher, “For some churches and preachers, it becomes a fascination bordering on an obsession, but the teaching of ‘escape’ through the rapture leaves people paralyzed about how they ought to live in the world now while they wait. In a sense, life can become a mere holding cell, a waiting pattern till they can escape and go to heaven. But Paul’s focus is to remind them instead of all the things that need to happen first, so they ought to trust God and continue on doing good rather than obsessing about the end.”
My guess is that you are not likely to be obsessing about the end of time, or the end of history, or the end of the world as we know it. I would further guess, however, that something has happened in your life, perhaps recently, perhaps some time ago, where you’ve asked, “When is this going to end? I’m tired of being shaken. I’m weary of being reshaken.”
When is this going to end?
I remember feeling like that about the Puna eruption in 2018. I remember feeling like that about Hurricane Lane that same year, which settled off the southwestern coast and dumped heavy rain on us for three solid days. I remember feeling like that during uncertain times of my career as a minister, during health crises in the family, during the breakup of my marriage.
When is this going to end?
The Thessalonians wanted to know. They wanted to read things in their time as signs of the end. They wanted the suffering to be over.
Paul, however, couldn’t reassure them that way. One of the characteristics of first century apocalyptic literature – a format in which contemporary events were criticized by declaring how they’d be judged at the end of time – is that the meaningful signs are things people could have seen. And in fact, during our Bible Study on Wednesday, one of the group read, “He opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, declaring himself to be God,” and gave that person a name. I would guess you could give such a person a name. I would also guess that we wouldn’t all give that person the same name.
Right?
Paul couldn’t tell them that Jesus was about to return and that their suffering would end. What he could do was commend them for their faithfulness and urge them to hold on. “Stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by our letter.”
“Paul’s point,” writes Nijay Gupta at Working Preacher, “is not to sketch out a full timeline of eschatological events. His point is that some big things are yet to happen, and there is really nothing we can do to stop them (unlike issues of political strife and economic turmoil, matters that we certainly can and must address).”
Paul’s point was to say, I hear you. I ache for you. I am proud of you. I pray for you. My heart is with you.
“My thoughts and prayers are with them,” has, all too often, substituted for real help in our day. Properly, thoughts and prayers should be coupled with concrete action. We have our limits, however. We can’t do all we want to do, like the ‘apapane who can’t find another flower for a hungry i’iwi, or when a loved one’s illness brings pain I can’t relieve, when the world around has problems I can’t address.
This week Mary Luti quoted the late Pope Francis in a UCC Daily Devotional. He said, “The world needs to weep. The marginalized weep, the scorned weep, the sick and dying weep, but we who have what we need, we who are privileged, we don’t know how. We must learn. There are realities in this life you can see only with eyes clarified by tears. If you don’t learn to weep, you can’t be a good Christian.”
Paul wrote, my heart is with you. My prayers are with you. My tears are with you.
Let’s be with one another. Let’s be aware that God is with us.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric writes his sermons ahead of time, but he also makes changes while he preaches. The sermon you watch will not be the same as the sermon you read.
I don’t know if this will surprise anyone coming from me. It might surprise someone that it’s coming from a pastor.
There are passages in Scripture I’d just as soon ignore.
Sometimes it’s due to relevance. The four chapters of Leviticus setting out the why when and how of sacrifices doesn’t align with our practice of faith. Sometimes it’s due to one and done kind of events. As the prophet Elisha was dying, according to 2 Kings 13, he invited Israel’s King Joash to fire arrows out a window and got angry when the king didn’t shoot enough of them. I really hope that that was a one-time event. Then there’s the ones that are confusing, like Ezekiel’s vision in chapter 1 of his book.
Or… Moses and the serpent of bronze.
It’s a peculiar story. Once again during this exodus from slavery to freedom, the people complained about the route, about the water, and about the food. Generally in the Book of Exodus, Moses got upset and God calmed him down, or God got upset and Moses was the peacemaker. Here in Numbers 21, nobody wanted to take a deep breath, and God sent snakes to bite the refugees. Which seems… harsh, at best.
When the people acknowledged that their complaining had brought this on, God directed Moses to make a serpent out of bronze and invite those who had suffered snakebite to look at it. When they did, they were healed. End of story.
Which seems awfully close to… well, creating an idol? Which God expressly forbid in the second commandment?
I’d be happy to ignore this text.
It’s a pity that Jesus didn’t.
“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
Oh, Jesus. That wasn’t fair, was it?
These words in the third chapter of John completed Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus. That discussion included Jesus’ words about being born anew, or again, or from above, and it included what I think was Nicodemus’ skepticism about how willing people are to adopt new ways. Which hasn’t changed much from the first century to the twenty-first.
I don’t know what Nicodemus understood when Jesus spoke of the Son of Man being “lifted up.” For one thing, while we’ve been well taught that Jesus referred to himself as “Son of Man” in the Gospels, Nicodemus hadn’t. I also don’t know whether Nicodemus understood “lifted up” as referring to crucifixion. Again, we have the benefit of knowing the end of Jesus’ story. Nicodemus had to live it.
I can only guess he thought Jesus’ reference to the bronze serpent on a pole was peculiar. Heaven knows I think it’s peculiar.
But then, a crucified Messiah is… peculiar.
Lance Pape writes at Working Preacher, “In terms of human agency, of course, the cross is a moment of profound humiliation and defeat. But in John’s theological imagination, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension are collapsed into a single movement of divine agency: Jesus exalted by God. Just as the Israelites were paradoxically required to look upon the very thing that brought death in order to receive life, so we are asked to look upon Jesus’ ‘lifting up’ in humiliating crucifixion and receive it as part of God’s plan to glorify Jesus and save the world. The image of Jesus as the serpent ‘lifted up’ is paradoxical, not simple.”
Most of our attempts to make it simple have failed. One of the best-known verses of the New Testament is right in the middle of this passage, and it is a pretty good summary of the Christian message: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Ironically, people keep using this verse to announce who may have eternal life, and who may perish, with the emphasis on the perishing. “Believe in Jesus: Saved! Don’t believe in Jesus: Damned!” Simple!
But it isn’t, is it?
What does it mean to believe? Is it as straightforward as a declarative statement? “I believe in Jesus.” Excellent. I’m all set.
And I can do anything I want after that. Except that Jesus seems to have thought differently. “And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” This would have been something Nicodemus could agree with without trouble. Back in seminary, Theology Professor Gabriel Fackre told us that all the doctrines of the Christian faith relied upon special revelation, some information from God that came outside of normal human experience, except one. The doctrine that you can prove without reference to a prophet or a Scripture or an experience of divine inspiration is: that people do bad things.
That you can see. Pretty much any day of the week, you can see that.
Even that is peculiar, when you think about it. People embrace the shadows rather than the bright places of the world. Yes, it’s easier to hide things in the shadows – but isn’t it easier, and more satisfying, to display your gifts in the light, rather than conceal your shame in the shadows? Isn’t it easier to heal from our woundedness if we bring it to where it’s visible? Aren’t we our best selves when we are our whole selves?
Listen to these words from Mary MacLeod Bethune, an educator of black girls in early twentieth century Florida and the founder of the National Council of Negro Women. Speaking of John 3:16, she wrote, “With these words [John 3:16] the scales fell from my eyes and the light came flooding in. My sense of inferiority, my fear of handicaps, dropped away. ‘Whosoever,’ it said. No Jew nor Gentile, no Catholic nor Protestant, no black nor white; just ‘whosoever.’ It means that I, a humble Negro girl, had just as much chance as anybody in the sight and love of God. These words stored up a battery of faith and confidence and determination in my heart, which has not failed me to this day.”
Those peculiar and paradoxical words, sometimes used to contain and condemn, can inspire and liberate. If we let them.
Samuel Cruz writes at Working Preacher, “To change the world or save it requires a process that ends hate, injustice, oppression and replaces it with justice, compassion, mercy, love, equality, etc. However, verses 19-21 tell us that some choose hate over light, evil deeds over good deeds, and therefore they reject the light of the son of God. Others, however agree with Jesus’ quest to change or restore the world to its original intent from a world full of evil and injustice to a loving, just and caring world. Therefore, for John, believing in Jesus has more to do with what people believe regarding evil, hate, exploitation, and injustice rather an esoteric ‘religious’ conversion.”
How peculiar that believing in something could lead a person to change their circumstances, their society, and… themselves.
Of course, believing in something and working to change things is the only way things have ever changed.
It was peculiar that God invited Moses to the ragged edge of idolatry, asking him to cast bronze in the shape of the thing that had afflicted the people and inviting them to look at the thing they feared in order to find their healing. Peculiar, but also very much the way that healing, that repentance, that renewal, work. If you want to get better, you have to deal with the thing that ails you. If you want to find forgiveness, you have to confront the things you have done and acknowledge them. If you want to be renewed, you have to know what’s lacking and what you need to be filled.
It was peculiar that God in Christ accepted the pain and shame of crucifixion as a means toward giving people life. But then: is not death what we fear, and shame what we recoil from? Do we not need to face these just as much as we need to face our ailments, our sins, and our emptiness? How will we find life except to face death?
Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “[Jesus] unveiled the poison, he showed us the snake, he revealed what our human kingdoms, left to themselves, will always become unless God in God’s mercy delivers us. In the cross, we are forced to see what our refusal to love, our indifference to suffering, our craving for violence, our resistance to change, our hatred of difference, our addiction to judgment, and our fear of the Other must wreak.”
In confronting those things of the shadows, those deeds we would hide, we come to the light, to the truth, to the life.
Then it may be clearly seen that what we do from this day forward is done in God.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes in his sermon text while he preaches. Sometimes they’re intentional.
