Sermons
June 16 and 17
Sermon from June 16 & 17th, 2007
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker
Isaiah 12:2-6
John 4:7-41
When you’ve walked into worship the last few weeks you may have noticed the play house that was being built. Some lucky person will discover that they have the winning raffle ticket and off it will go to its new home to be worn in and eventually worn out with love. But the story doesn’t end there. Those who don’t have the winning ticket still hold something priceless. That ticket was bought with money that is going to go to support the missions of Christ Church—work done outside our walls that is part of the new life and the full life of God in Jesus Christ. But before we go further in thinking about mission, I would like to share a story that offers sound wisdom about how we need to prepare for such work.
There once was a religious person who came to see a wise monk to learn about God and the life of faith. The monk began sharing his thoughts but the person kept interrupting saying that he had heard that already or that he’d been taught that already. Finally, the monk stopped talking and poured his guest a cup of tea. He kept pouring even after the cup was full and tea overflowed onto the table and the floor. The guest exclaimed in surprise, “Stop! No more can fit in the cup.” The monk responded, “Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I teach you until you first empty your cup?” The guest paused for a moment and then slowly poured most of the tea from cup into an empty bowl at his side.
Over the centuries there has been a lot of talk about mission. There have been varying approaches to mission and different tactics. Due to them millions of people have come into the Church and there are Christians in virtually every country on earth. Some we look back on with shame and horror and some still inspire us to this day. We point to that and see that we have indeed, in the words of Matthew, gone therefore and made disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. Mission is often hard to live out. And this passage reveals the danger. We go and we tell and we do and do for. Almost imperceptibly and often without noticing it, a misunderstanding of our place and our role can creep in. Mission is not about anyone changing anyone else or forcing them into something; it is about all of us being changed by God and becoming a place of living water.
Mission may look very different today than it did 2000 years ago when Christians were a small persecuted sect with a strange story that seemed to most outside observers to have little chance of surviving more than a handful of decades, but some things have remained as true and eternal touchstones for mission across time and space: seeing God already present everywhere and in all persons and meeting with others as the Body of Christ is a reality that transforms both in ways neither could have imagined. And for either of these to happen we need to empty ourselves, pour out most of what is filling our cup, so that we can receive the living water that never runs dry.
Which is why I thought of the story of the Samaritan woman at the well. Now, it is long passage and there is much it teaches that there isn’t time to talk about today. I am going to highlight certain elements of the story and sadly have to leave others for some other sermon. The woman at the well represents Samaria—an ancient people who traced their lineage to Moses as did the Jews, but who had over time found a widening chasm between them and those who in the Gospel are called the Jews. It reflects the divisions of history and time. Samaria were the descendants of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Jews were the descendants of the Southern Kingdom or Judah, David’s line. Both were convinced that their understanding of God and their tradition were the right ones and the others were pretty much hopeless.
The dialogue between her and Jesus about the source of salvation is one of the most sophisticated theological exchanges in the Bible. She is a smart, savvy woman who knows her stuff and values her tradition and its riches. But the one great gift she has is the ability to let what she knows be challenged and to be open to new insight and new discovery. When Jesus tells her that the true worship of God in reality transcends both Mt. Gerezim where the Samaritans had their temple and Jerusalem, she is able to accept a greater reality of God’s presence found in Jesus Christ, a new vision, rather than retreating into defensiveness and rigid adherence to her past understandings.
And if you decide at some later time to read closely their whole exchange and learn more what their words were referring to—not at all self-evident to us so far removed in time and space without some help—please the bit about the five husbands and leap to sexual literalism. Given the way the Gospel of John is structured and the history of Samaria which this woman represents, the five husbands are not literally referring to the marital history of a woman divorced and remarried five times. It is not a sudden diversion in the text that’s purpose is a personal moral shaming of a specific woman.
Throughout the Bible there runs the image of God as the husband/bridegroom and his people as his spouse/bride and when they fall away it is described in terms of adultery. Samarians, after captivity by the Assyrians, had returned to their land and had merged the worship of the gods of five foreign tribes into their faith based on the covenant from Moses. The five husbands are most certainly a euphemism for these five gods. Jesus is calling his bride back to a new, a renewed, belief in God revealed in him.
This woman has discovered the living water of God. She has been missioned by God through her willingness to let go of her certainties for the gift of a stronger, deeper, life-giving faith. She doesn’t have to reject her heritage and tradition. But she sees that the revelation of God is not necessarily and only identical to her particular traditions and teachings. The living God is always drawing forth newness for God is always acting in the world. The God of living water draws things forth from our traditions and continues to mold them anew. There is never a time when time stops and nothing can be changed or re-understood. It is this reality that mission reveals. And we do it through tangible acts of love, presence and participation. We do it through the presence of Jesus and with our actions and words that point to him, either silently or aloud.
And it is this reality the woman lives out. She, like so many other disciples, leaves her work—her water jar—to go and share the Good News she has received. Notice how she does it though. She doesn’t argue or try to convince them. She simply tells them her experience and invites them, through a wonderful question of mutual invitation, to check it out. And they go. And because of their encounter with the living water that they begin to drink they too are missioned by God. They went at her encouragement ready to hear him out and like her were able to then make the choice to open up to receive the gift. Sadly, the disciples seem to stay on the outside of both the experience and the understanding because they can’t get over the stumbling block the woman and the Samaritans are to their sensibilities.
Ask anyone who has gone on a mission trip anywhere and I will bet you dollars to doughnuts that where they met Christ was in the encounter, in sweating side by side, of singing songs with children in a language you don’t understand but realizing you really don’t need it any way for the meaning is right before your eyes, in hearing stories from flesh and blood men and women and children of their hope and experience of God and seeing the holy in what is familiar and unfamiliar in them, in sharing the bread and the wine and the stories of our belief, in living intensely with other people as they are where they are and discovering together where this new creation is to go next. They met Christ when they were able to put down their water jug. They met Christ when they were able to see a new truth that incorporated what they already knew and took it to a new place. They met Christ when they could let go of preconceived expectations and let the living water flow over them and into them. They met Christ where the doing of love drove home the point in neon lights that love makes a way through our differences. They met Christ when they discovered the richest mission field was first their own heart. I know that this was certainly true for me.
Mission is about coming to the place where Jesus offers us together the living water. Mission is the experience of drinking that living water with one another. Mission is opening ourselves up to let God transform us into something richer, deeper, holier. Mission is the willingness to let what we think be open to be changed by the experience of sharing someone else’s experience on the shared common well of Christ. Mission is helping build a school in Sudan, or a medical clinic in Peru, or putting new sheetrock up in Pascagoula, or in Church Hill, or youth going to Pittsburg, or eating meals with homeless families in our milling area, or listening to a grieving child. Mission is caring for someone else in a moment of confusion or pain and truly listening to them. Mission is taking the risk to tell our story to someone else about the life-giving water we have discovered in Jesus. Mission is making ourselves available to God and to each other and it is putting ourselves out there as living water for the whole world.
Mission can be that place where we discover the living God in the heart of each other and in the midst of whatever is before us. When it touches us we know wholeness, peace and most wonderfully a sense of connectivity with all that is. Such a moment of divine favor can happen in circumstances both joyful and tragic and reminds us that the proof of God or of faith is not that everything is fixed or turns out alright in our immediate terms, but that God is the hidden ground that lets us be embodied love in it all. Mission is that place when we see that infinite worth of one another, we see how small we are individually yet how amazing we are in the eyes of God. It is a place of truth and revelation that sends us forth to bring that living water to a world so torn and ragged and self-absorbed that it can often only see God as either it’s uncritical supporter or a cruel joke. Mission can indeed change the world, but first it always, always changes our own heart.
I invite you to discover the missions of Christ Church this weekend. See the pictures, but mostly hear the stories of those who have gone. See how God has poured living water into their hearts. And consider going on mission yourself. All you need to be prepared is a cup that you are willing to pour most of the water out of and trust that God will fill the empty space.
