The Samaritan Woman

I think of her as the Elizabeth Taylor of her time. Granted, she only had five husbands, not eight, but she must have had the same tenacity, the same resilience. To be a woman who had managed to marry that many times, and then to be living with another man who was not her husband…Well, let’s just say that this was not the normal course of events for most women in Biblical times. Most women were much too frightened to ever divorce, let alone convince another man to marry them. She must have been strong, but also deeply troubled. And lonely. She must have led a life of hopes dashed and dreams broken.


She must also have been strong because she goes out to the well at noon. During the height of the sun, most people stay inside. The sun is simply too bright, too scorching hot. She must have been really thirsty. Or maybe the man who she lived with ordered her to fetch the water. Whatever the reason, she came, carrying a large earthenware jug, to draw water at the well. No doubt her mind was consumed with the heat. She probably ignored the Jewish man sitting there by the well. All she wanted was water and the chance to get back under cover. And then he spoke.

“Get me some water.” Did she believe that she might be mistaken at first, that he must be talking to someone else? Men did not address women that they did not know. Jews did not address Samaritans. Ever since King Solomon’s death, when the Northern Kingdom split from the Southern Kingdom of Judea, the Samaritans of the North and the Jews of the South did not speak. They did not consider each other to be human or to be loved by God. So why was this Jewish man addressing her?

With the boldness and bravery of someone beyond her time, the Samaritan woman addresses Jesus right back. And she asks him a question. She gets right to the point.

“Why are you speaking to me, a woman of Samaria?”

What is it that you are thinking, talking to a woman, an enemy, a non-person? Her question is direct and speaks of the truth. Jesus was breaking all social codes. Why?

He does not answer directly, but tells her that if she knew who he was she would be asking him to draw water for her. This really gets her curious. Jesus tries to tell her that he has water that wells up to eternal life and that she would never have to be thirsty again. Though she does not understand him fully, she asks him for this water. And he tells her to get her husband.

She tells the truth again. “I have no husband,” she says.

Jesus confirms her truth and tells her that she has had five husbands and that the man with whom she lives is not her husband. And she is overwhelmed, not by his promise of living water, but by the fact that he knew all about her. She is blown away by Jesus for the simple fact that he knows her.

When the disciples arrive, they are stunned to find Jesus talking with the Samaritan woman. When she leaves, they beg him to eat, but he keeps talking about the food of eternal life and they cannot grasp his words. They keep thinking that maybe the woman fed him. The woman goes to the village where she tells everyone what has happened to her. She was a woman who knew exactly who to tell and how to get news passed around quickly. The villagers listened to her, just as well all listened to Elizabeth Taylor when she told us to fight AIDS. The village listened when she told them that she had met the Messiah. They trusted her enough to usher an invitation. As a result, Jesus is invited to spend the night in Samaria in the homes of the sworn enemies of his people. And he accepts. In fact, he stays two nights. And the people of the village believe that he is the Messiah.

The story of the Samaritan woman is one of the longest stories in the gospels. The conversation that Jesus has with this woman is one of the longest conversations that he has with any one person in the gospels. And yet, she is not someone who you would expect to model the Christian life or become a great evangelist. She is by all accounts a moral failure and an outcast on many levels. Why did Jesus choose her?

In many Christian denominations today, the divorced are looked upon as people who have failed, who have broken the covenant of marriage. And certainly numerous divorces equal numerous failures. In the Roman Catholic tradition, divorced people are not allowed to receive communion. In many denominations, someone who is divorced cannot be ordained a pastor or priest. And yet Jesus chose to reveal his true nature to a woman who was on her sixth man. Why did he choose her? Or was it that she chose him?

I believe that Jesus saw in her not what she had done but what she could become. He saw the makings of a great evangelist, someone who would naturally tell others about him. He saw someone who was searching for the truth in a very broken world. He saw a person of hope and character. He saw far more of her than she could see of herself. And he marked her as his own forever.

I went to the beach this week on spring break with my kids. Like always, I tried on my bathing suit in front of the mirror. JD walked in and suggested that I go off looking in the mirror for Lent. What a good idea, I thought. How much time do I waste wishing that I could look like Kate Middleton or Nicole Kidman? Sometimes I think that women can’t even see themselves clearly anyway, we are so critical of our bodies. I should hang an icon in my bathroom instead and look at that. Or at least put a quote from the Psalms above my mirror, the one from Psalm 139 that reads, I knit you together in your mother’s womb…you are wonderful and marvelously made.

When Christ looks at you, he does not see what you see in the mirror. He does not see the wrinkles or the sagging thighs. He does not see fat or thin or ugly or beautiful. He does not see your past or define you by your race or ethnicity. Jesus sees with the eyes of God. Don’t you know what God sees?

I believe that God sees not what we have been or what we look like now, but God sees all that we can become. God sees all that we could be in a flash, beyond time. Our very best selves. God sees the very fullness of who we can be.

Do you remember what the parents and godparents of a child vow at a baptism? The Celebrant asks Will you, by your prayers and witness, help this child to grow into the full stature of Christ? And they answer We will.

I believe that God already knows who that child can become, what the fullness of Christ might look like for that precious human soul.

Both Luke and Jacob, my two older sons, have had growth spurts this year. We have marks on a wall in our kitchen where we record their growth. I am watching as their faces emerge from boyhood and it is like watching someone become the person that God always intended for them to be. When they were babies, they were just a fraction of themselves. But from the moment they were born, God knew what they would become. I am just watching, trying to catch up. It is like their faces are revealed gradually to me every day, just a little bit more.

When Jesus looked on that woman, he saw something more than anyone else could see. He saw more than her history of divorces, her strong will or her propensity to gossip. He saw a woman of courage and of truth. He saw someone who had the potential to really grasp who he was and to share that with others. Maybe it was her misfortune that made her able to see him as the Son of God. Maybe it was her brokenness that made her capable of being saved.

I think that we are going about it all wrong when we claim to know who God would accept and who God would reject. We cannot see what God sees. We cannot know the depths and the strength of those who seem to have lost everything. How can we judge one another? We cannot even seem to see our own selves clearly.

Now we see in a glass dimly, St. Paul once wrote. Then we will see face to face. Then I will know even as I am fully known.

It is not just God who is unknown to us. It is not just God who is a great and powerful mystery. It is us. We do not understand ourselves. We do not know all that we can be, all that God hopes and dreams for us to become. God wants us to grow into the full stature of Christ.

When the world tears you down, do not believe it. They do not know you. Only God can see who you really are.



Amen.

The Devil

A few months ago, we had a tragedy in my family. My son Jacob’s beloved gecko died. Now you may think that this sounds like a small deal, but it was not. Jacob is ten years old and he loved that little African fat tailed gecko, his name was Sunshine. And when Sunshine’s light went out, when his tail got thin and he would no longer eat, there was real despair in our house.


The afternoon that the gecko died, Jacob stood with the tiny creature in his hands, and Max, my six-year-old, tears pouring down his face, said, “Oh, why did Adam have to eat the apple?”

Sometimes, I want to say the same thing: Oh, why did Adam and Eve have to listen to that snake?

Where did that snake come from? He was somewhere in Eden, waiting. Waiting to disrupt perfection and separate us from God. He was somewhere amidst the creation that God made. We are not told how he came to be. And all that snake does is introduce a thought, an idea: disobedience. He simply poses a quesetion:

What would it be like to disobey God?  What if it made you like God?

That snake introduced a bad idea.  Whenever we try to be like God, it ends in a mess. What were we thinking?

So Eve eats and Adam eats.

And my heart breaks when I remember the very first thing that God said to them after the fall.  God says,
Where are you?

Because from that moment on, we were estranged. We were separated. And from that moment on, we entered a battlefield. It may sound strange to you, coming from an Episcopal priest, but I do believe in the battle between good and evil. And I believe that it is waged right here, in Jacksonville, Florida.

I sat with a business man about three weeks ago at the River Club. We ate lunch and looked out over the city of Jacksonville. Why are things so broken? He asked. And I thought of the children who can’t receive a decent education and the people who are homeless and the soldiers who may be giving up their lives in Afganistan. “I guess that we just wanted to do things our way and not God’s way and that’s when the mess began,” I said.

The story of Adam and Eve tells us a deep truth about who we are. But it is not just about us trying to do things our way. It’s also about something else. Something other than you and me and God. There is another party involved in our lives at times. There is another force. It is about the Adversary.

It may sound strange to you, especially coming from an Episcopal priest, but I believe in the devil.

This one goes by different names in Scripture: demon, devil, Satan (which just means Adversary or the one who opposes), the one who actively pulls us from God’s presence.

The Church in this century has done a poor job of discussing the Adversary. We either scare people to death with horror movies that depict incredible gruesome gore or we write Satan off as a medieval notion, a red man with horns and a tail. No educated person could swallow such a caricature. So we ignore his existence.

When you ignore the existence of the Adversary, you end up blaming humanity for the state of the world. We are just rotten people, or broken people. But sometimes this is just not adequate. Sometimes there is no denying a force that pulls us away from the good.

I think that is why we are so attracted to movies and stories where the good battles clear evil. It speaks a truth to us, though in our world the Adversary is always cloaked and longs to remain hidden.

All of these thoughts that you and I have: these worries, these crazy obsessive thoughts, they do not come from just you. Do not blame yourself for them. They are temptations and they come from a source outside yourself. There is something else that pulls you from God. There is truly a tug of war going on in your mind.

Jesus came to show us the way back to God. He meant for us to follow him. And the first thing that Jesus did, after his baptism, before he did any ministry at all, the very first thing he did was to get to know his own mind. The first thing that he did was to bring out the devil in broad daylight. He let the tempter speak to him and he listened. And then he said no.

Jesus went out in the desert to meet the tempter face to face. He met that ancient snake, that being that opposes the will of God. Jesus knew that out in the desert, with nothing to distract him, he was bound to hear the voice of something other than God, the voice of the tempter.

The tempter is usually hidden to us, but he was not hidden to Jesus. Jesus was so sure about who he was and how he was loved by God that the only way the tempter could appear was to just appear in plain sight and to openly ask the questions.

Jesus was so pure, so clean of heart, that he fasted and prayed for forty days before the tempter would come out and challenge him. But finally, the tempter arrived and tested Jesus in three ways: He challenged Jesus to feed himself, relying on his own self and not God. He asked Jesus to test God by trying to kill himself. And he asked Jesus to worship Him. To all of these temptations, Jesus said a clear and definitive No.

The tempter will also come to you in three fundamental ways. Firstly, the tempter will say, “Let your life be about you and only you. Help yourself! You poor thing! Save yourself! Hold onto your money!” That is a primary way the tempter separates us from God, by getting us absolutely absorbed in ourselves. I once knew a woman who lived in a kind of hell. She lived alone, never having a successful relationship because she was never treated perfectly. Everyone hurt her or betrayed her. She went from one church to another with people disappointing her left and right and she never could admit to being wrong. She had not a friend in the world but still, she was right and she was unfortunate. She lived in hell, but she was right! And the tempter was happy with her.

The second way the tempter works is to get you to despair. Throw yourself down from this height, he says to Jesus. Maybe God will send angels to rescue you. Or to us, he might say, “It is not worth it. Your life is a mess. You are a mess. No one loves you. You deserve to die.” I have seen this kind of temptation live most in an alcoholic who was drinking himself to death and did not care. I had to watch as he threw his life down and for what? Because he couldn’t say No to his temptation.

And lastly, the Devil loves to be worshipped. Serve your temptations, he says. Become obsessed with your vices, your addictions, your needs, your wants. Worship any and all things that separate you from God and you will become so wrapped up in all of it that you will forget who you really are. Worship your relationships. Worship your career. Spend all your time worrying about your weight or how much people like you. Agonize over your money. Serve these things rather than God and you are bowing down to the tempter. And you will spend years of your life running after things can cannot feed you and do not deserve your adoration. You will be like a hamster running on a wheel, running and running and getting nowhere. And the tempter loves every minute of it!



CS Lewis had to write about the devil in story form, because he knew that people would either laugh or they would become frightened were he to openly discuss the issue. So he wrote letters from the Devil’s apprentice to his nephew. He called this compilation of letters The Screwtape Letters. But these fictional letters made some brilliant points.

Let the man become obsessed with protecting his finances. Let him think that he just can’t get up in the morning to get to church. If he does make it to church, let him become annoyed with the loud voice of the woman in back of him who sings off-key. Distract him by getting him worried about his appearance, anything to turn his mind from the gifts that God is offering to him in the Holy Eucharist. Anything.

There is a war going on in your minds. It is not just about you being lazy or a worry wart. There is such a thing as an outside force that enters your mind and pulls you from God. You cannot make that tempter go away, but you can say no to him, just as Jesus did.

Lent is a time in which we dare that tempter. We challenge that one by refraining from something that we love, or doing something extra for God and when the temptation arises and we think “oh, I should just take one piece of cake, after all it’s a party!” Or maybe you wish you had changed your fast to fasting from beets instead, when the doubts and temptations arise, you can see them for what they are- attempts to get you derailed. And you can say no. I am staying the course.

People are not born bad. No baby is evil. People who become evil become so because they have let that temptation carry them into an abyss. Don’t listen to it! Just because you have violent thoughts to selfish thoughts or inclinations does not mean that you are evil. Even Jesus had temptations. You are good and you were made for God. But there is another force at work that is actively seeking to pull you from all that God created you to be. To admit this fact, the truth of the existence of evil, is to admit that there is an enormous battle going on for your soul. And you are the greatest warrior in that battle. And God has given you the tools to succeed.

And when God calls to you and says, “Where are you?”

Turn back from your worries and obsessions and say to God, “Here I am. I am still here.”

About Him

When Jesus went to pray, he usually went alone. He would walk off by himself. “I am going up the mountain to pray,” is all that he would say. And off he went. What happened up there between Jesus and God was a mystery, and no doubt the disciples wondered. Jesus did not seem to feel guilt or the complicated emotions that come with trying to please people, he just did what God asked him to do. And God wanted to be alone with the Son, a lot.


So it must have been a shock when Jesus asked three disciples to accompany him up the mountain. “Peter,” he said, “James. John.” “I want you to come up the mountain with me.”

What an incredible privilege, to go with Jesus to pray. They must have felt as if they had been invited into the in group. This was it. They were going with Jesus into his inner world. He must truly trust them. It must have been like when a friend finally invites you into their home for a meal but even more intimate. This was Jesus’ inner sanctum.

The Scripture tells us that Mt. Tabor was the mountain. And Mt. Tabor is no joke. It’s not Mt. Everest by any means but it would take at least four or five hours to walk to the top. My husband and I drove a tiny white rental car up Mount Tabor years ago and it took awhile. I wondered if our car would make it. Walking with Jesus on foot would have been a true hike.

Why was it that God chose mountains? Moses was instructed by God to climb a Mountain as well. Mt. Sinai, and there God revealed the Ten Commandments to Moses. Moses too had a face that shone so brightly that no one could look at him. And Elijah, he found God on a mountain. Was it the mountain air? The High altitude? Was it partially because the ancients believed that heaven was up and hell was down? Was it just that mountains are hard to climb and it is easy to be alone there? For whatever the reason, Jesus met God on the mountain, just like the prophets did before him. He encountered God in a place that was not easy to get to. And when Jesus came into direct contact with God, his appearance changed.

In many of the world religions, those who encounter God directly always are painted with light shining from their face. They seem to glow. Travel the world and you will see pictures of Krishna in Hinduism, The Buddha, Moses and Elijah and others with light that emanates from their heads. Some call it a halo, some have no words for it.

What happened to Jesus made a halo look like small potatoes. He became light itself. The Gospel of Matthew says that he becomes dazzling, blinding. The disciples found it hard to look at him. And the brightest part was his face. He radiated light.

When Moses was on the mountain, and he asked to see God, God told him that he could not look, but he could look at God’s backside, or the ancient Hebrew really means at the place where God “just was.” And when Moses came down the mountain, his face seemed to shine with light.

Einstein based his entire theory of Relativity on light, as if the Universe hinged on the stuff. So it does not come as a surprise to me that God would show up as light. After all, it was the first created thing. God separated the light from the darkness. God is the opposite of nothing, the opposite of darkness. God is light.

I have no doubt that those who are close to God glow. I have seen it. Even my friend Marcella, when she went on a silent retreat to meditate all day, seemed to have light shining from her eyes when she came home. When I visit the sick or dying, you can see light shining from the eyes of those who love God. It is just so obvious. God seems to have some kind of residual effect and those who encounter God shine.

Moses and Elijah also showed up. I know how strange that must sound. Two dead guys appear. They were standing all around smiling like they are at some kind of family reunion.

I believe that true communion with God involves communion with those who we love who have died. That is why we call it communion. It is a gathering of all who we love. Everybody is there. God simply embraces them all. The Church calls this the communion of saints. To have a love affair with God is to see God in the people you love and the people you love become part of God. Those who we love return to us within the heart of God. So Moses and Elijah, who lived in God, came to visit Jesus, to stand with him in his ministry.

All this light and communion of saints was so beautiful that Peter freaks out. And how does he respond? He gets busy. Just like us. Peter decides he needs to package this moment, to hold onto it. He decides to plan out a few homes to let the saints reside there for a bit. “Don’t move,” he says. “I want you all to stay just this way and I will make houses for each of you and we can just stay here, right here. Let’s just freeze the moment.” I can just hear Peter’s plans in his mind. Size, shape, dimension, how long they will take to make, the kind of materials he will need. He gets so involved with his idea, so distracted, that God has to interrupt.

God speaks. “This is my Son! Listen to Him!”

Peter and James and John fall on their knees. They are scared. Terrified. It was not the picture of Jesus standing their blinding them, nor was it the appearance of the prophets that terrified them, it was God’s words that scared them. God spoke and Peter was afraid.

Why was he afraid? Why do all of us get scared when we come close to encountering God? Why do we say we want to grow closer to God but then run if God gets too close? What is it that we are so afraid of?

I think that, at that very moment, when heaven met earth, Peter was scared because he realized a fundamental truth. Peter realized that his life was not about him. He realized that although he, Peter, was loved, he was not the center of the Universe. He realized that it was time for his life to be about someone else.

In each of our lives, we have one fundamental choice that we are asked to make. Is your life going to be about YOU or is it going to be about God? We are asked this question over and over and over again. Who is going to be the center of your Universe?

When you pray, many of us talk. We send up lists to God of the sick and the grieving, of our own needs and those of others. But God told Peter to listen. God told Peter that it was not his agenda that was important. Peter did not know what was best. He was not capable of planning what to do in that moment. His attempt at trying to orchestrate the transfiguration fell flat, just like your attempt to orchestrate your life will fall flat. You are not designed to direct and rule your life. Only God can do that.

“This is my Son,” God says. “The Beloved. Listen to Him!”

In other words, it is not about you, Peter or you, John or me or Sally or my elderly aunt Sherry. It is not even about you when you are sick or suffering, when you are struggling to raise a child or figure out what you are supposed to do with your life. It is not about You. It is about Him. And your life will not work, it will not even come close to working, until you get that straight.

Our job is not to plan or manage or orchestrate. It is to listen. It is to listen.

Maybe that’s why Jesus took them up the mountain. So that they could look down and see how vast and beautiful it was below. So that they, for just a moment, could realize that they did not see everything clearly. Does a child make its own decisions about what to eat and when to sleep? No, the parents decide all that and the child must listen. And we too, as children of God, we must listen to the God who made us and knows who we truly are.

It took Peter until after his betrayal to realize that his life was about Jesus and not about himself. And when he finally handed his life over to God, that is when he became powerful. That is when the church began.

Letting your life be about God is truly scary. It terrifies me. It terrified Peter. But it’s the only way to be.

Just be still and listen.