RVCC Pastor's Sermon

Sermon - February 24, 2008

“Nobody’s Nothin’”

By Rev. Nancy Foran
John 4:5-42

Those of you who last summer participated in our adult study on the book, The Will of God, know that the author, Leslie Weatherhead, was an air raid warden in London during the blitz in World War II. He tells the story of going out on the streets one night when the all-clear sounded after a particularly heavy bombing.

All Weatherhead could see around him were the smoldering ruins of buildings destroyed. As he walked, however, he suddenly heard the sound of a child crying and hurried to find an eight-year-old boy sitting and sobbing on what had been a building. Somehow the child had gotten lost getting to the air raid shelter and yet had managed to survive.

Weatherhead approached the boy and asked, "Where do you live, son? Where is home?" The child pointed to a street where there was nothing left but rubble. The air raid warden gently questioned him further. "Where are your parents, your mother and father?" The little boy said, "My father is in the navy overseas. My mother was killed two nights ago."

"Where is the rest of your family - uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters?" Whitehead queried. The child shook his head and answered, "They are all gone. They have all been killed." At that point, Weatherhead stooped down to eye level and asked a final question, "Tell me, son, tell me, who are you?"

The little boy began to cry even more and said through his tears, "Mister, I ain't nobody's nothin'. I ain't nobody's nothin'."

Surely that is how the woman that Jesus met at the well felt: She too was “nobody’s nothin’.” From Samaria, she was of a people despised by the Jews whose land surrounded her homeland.

In addition, she had been shunned by her own community, relegated to drawing her water alone in the heat of the noon day sun rather than at dawn with the other women of her village. You see, when they gathered with their infants, laughed at the antics of their toddlers, and exchanged the latest news and gossip, well, more often than not, she was a topic of their rollicking and hurtful conversations.

The synagogue leaders had ostracized her a decade or so ago for her unbridled sexual appetites. The men who over the years had given her the time of day (and the warmth of their beds at night) had, each one, for his own reasons tossed her aside like an old used tire – maybe when the soufflé fell, or she had a headache, or her hair began to turn gray.

And so she was “nobody’s nothin’” that stifling and dusty day that she walked to the village well to draw her water for drinking, for laundry, for washing the front stoop. And for us who hear her story through the narrative of John’s gospel, it is worthy of our applause, for once again, John not only tells a good tale, but he overlaps it with layer upon layer of subtleties, fluid dimensions, and double entendres – as only the Gospel writer John can.

Like many of John’s stories, this conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman is a marvelous example of the need at times to read the Bible metaphorically with ears attuned to meanings wrapped in meanings and metaphors heaped upon metaphors.

It is noon time, and the disciples have left Jesus at the well to go into town to buy the lunch hour vittles. Now the village well was most likely in a stone cellar-like structure where the walls were damp and cool to the touch – out of the blistering sun. There Jesus rested his cheek against the damp stone of the wall, his eyes closed. There he heard the footsteps first and then saw the silhouette of a woman with an empty water jug balanced on her head.

As she came more closely into view and his eyes adjusted to the play of light and dark, he saw that she was wearing the usual village garb, a loose fitting dress that swished about her sandaled feet, kicking up wisps of road dust as she walked. Made of something cheap like burlap, her robe looked rather like a large potato sack gathered about her waist with a corded rope. A scarf of the same dull color covered her head. And before her eyes had quite adjusted to the dramatic change from light to dark, Jesus spoke up and asked her for a drink of water. “Woman, give me a drink.”

Immediately taken aback and from the outset wary of encountering a man alone even at this time of day, particularly with her reputation in town, the woman was unsure of how to respond. After all, everyone knew that men were prohibited from publicly speaking to women – and surely even she deserved that meager bit of adherence to the law.

Besides, this particular man was clearly a Jew. His dark eyes and olive ruddy skin betrayed his ancestry. And though she did not know a lot about Jews, the woman knew enough to remember that Jews had all sort of rules and rigamole about who they could eat and drink with.

What’s going on?” she asked herself. “Has he lost his faith or something?”

She wasn’t dumb. She knew that, as a good Jew, he certainly could not drink from her bucket because Jews would not have anything to do with Samaritans. She knew that in Jewish eyes, all her people were considered to be ritually unclean – and probably presumed to have personal hygiene issues as well.

And yet, in a brief moment, this uppity man had managed to cross – or obliterate – or at the least completely ignore - both of these fundamental gender and racial lines.

Now the woman never knew what possessed her to respond so flippantly and honestly to his leading question, but she did. “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of water from me, a woman of Samaria?"

Jesus ignores both the gender and racial questions that she raised to parry his own, and John the Gospel writer is off to the races, setting up a conversation that twists and turns and leaps and swirls from the literal to the metaphorical.

"If you only knew,” Jesus says, “who was asking you for water, you would have asked him for water, and he would have given you living water." Like so many others before her in John’s gospel, the Samaritan woman has trouble catching on to the drift of his statement.

"Oh, go on," she snips. "This is a deep well and you haven't even got a bucket.” Is she poking fun at Jesus – maybe even doing a bit of flirting? After all, he is a man, and she is a woman – and quite a woman at that!

"You have nothing to draw with and this well is deep,” she continues. “Just how did you suppose you would get this living water of yours? Our father Jacob drank from this well. Do you think that you are better than he is?"

Look at her, will you? Here she is talking about depth, and her own life is so despairingly shallow! However, perhaps so she might appear smarter than she really is or perhaps to keep up the flirting game that she can control so well, she continues by saying. “Sure, give me that water of yours. I would do just about anything not to have to come to this crummy old village well ever again.” At that point, Jesus calls her bluff on all those hidden meanings behind the words she has spoken by directing her to go and get her husband. In an instant, he has cut to the chance and exposed her dark side.

Now she is really in a predicament. She pauses and wonders - Is he joking, or fishing for a way to find out if I am “available”, or does he really know who I am, and how much I hate my past - and my present, and how much I hate this community that despises me too, and how much I hate this village well that symbolizes the loathing that everyone living here has for me?

This living water business has thrown her for a loop – the way Jesus said it, the way he spoke without judging her, the way he simply talked to her – not at her or down to her or about her behind her back. But he creeped her out, none the less. After all, she thought, you can not be too careful around this place. I mean, he is getting awfully personal. If this man knew about her six husbands, what else could he find out by looking at her with those dark Jewish eyes?

And so she tried, but to no avail, to bring the dialogue back to religion, back to safe grounds. But their conversational tap dance continued. She retreated into shadowy secrecy, and he shined the light of truth on her. She stepped backward, and he stepped forward. And through it all, she kept wondering - Who is this Jew?

Until finally she realized that she had somehow, in spite of her best efforts to the contrary, been talked into a corner, and the choice now was hers. She could take her earthly water and leave him only with the sight of her hips swaying gently beneath her robes as she walked away – or she could stick around and receive this living water, which in her heart of hearts she knew was more filled with life than anything she had ever known.

Her choice made, she whispered to herself, “Yes, give me that living water, so I will never be thirsty again.” And something inside of her impelled her to proclaim out loud, “Even here in Samaria we have heard that the Messiah will come and will be able to tell us everything – just as you have told me everything.” And Jesus says, “Bingo! You are right. I am he.” And so for the Gospel writer John, for the very first time, Jesus owns up to who he is for the struggling Christian community to whom John wrote nearly a hundred years after Jesus walked the earth and met the woman at the well.

And the woman, in turn, drops all her inhibitions and forgets that she has no place in her village and no voice in her community and proclaims to everyone she can find that Jesus as the Messiah, making her the first evangelist, the first to spread the good news of God’s Kingdom of justice and compassion to a despised and marginalized people.

As Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “It is a moment of full disclosure, in which the triple outsider and the Messiah of God stand face to face with no pretense about who they are. Both stand fully lit at high noon for one bright moment in time, while all the rules, taboos and history that separate them fall forgotten to the ground.”

Taylor continues by reminding us that “By telling the woman who she is, Jesus shows her who he is. By confirming her true identity, he reveals his own, and that is how it still happens. The Messiah is the one in whose presence you know who you really are--the good and bad of it, the all of it, the hope in it. The Messiah is the one who shows you who you are by showing you who he is--who crosses all boundaries, breaks all rules, drops all disguises--speaking to you like someone you have known all your life, bubbling up in your life like a well that needs no dipper, so that you go back to face people you thought you could never face again, speaking to them as boldly as he spoke to you.”

We are half way through Lent now, half way to Jerusalem. And if we are still not sure of who we are or whether we can admit who we are – which is part, at least, of what this season of self-reflection is all about – then this story of the woman at the well is for us.

Oh, we are probably on the surface not at all like this woman who was married as many times as Elizabeth Taylor, and most of us have not been shunned by our villages and communities, but as surely as not, each one of us at our very core has everything in common with the woman at the well because each one of us has those deep and dark and secretive places that we must to be sure that nobody will ever go. Our spiritual needs run deep – and like the woman at the well, we do not need condemnation. Instead, we need living water.

And the good news of this story in John’s Book of Good News is that the living water Jesus offered to the woman at the well is offered to us as well – wherever we are. Like the woman at the well, God meets us in the dark places, the basements of our lives.

And God accepts us – whoever we are and wherever we are on our life or Lenten journey. Through Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well, the truth of this story emerges into broad daylight – the truth that God embraces the whole cosmos and everyone – everyone – in it with love and compassion. No matter who we are, God offers us forgiveness.

God does not come to us scolding but rather comes to us with a jug of cool clear water, living water – to quench the depths of whatever spiritual thirst we have. And when we take the cup to our parched lips and drink, we are no longer by “nobody’s nothin’” thirsting for meaning in our lives but rather women and men nourished enough to walk the way that Jesus has set before us.

Sermon - February 24, 2008

“Nobody’s Nothin’”

By Rev. Nancy Foran John 4:5-42

By Rev. Nancy Foran
John 4:5-42