Jesus, Lonely Wells & 127 Hours – John 4:1-30
Introduction: Thank you so much for the privilege to share today’s sermon with you. My wife Claudia and I and our children want to say thanks to Marilyn and this community for being so hospitable, inclusive and encouraging. We’ve had a great experience worshipping with you and developing new friendships here at TUMC.
Preaching this sermon today is a very unique experience for me. I have actually never had this much time to prepare for a sermon. Marilyn assigned this passage to me almost 7 weeks ago. So no excuses for a bad sermon. But what’s so unique is that I’ve never had this much time to prepare and never had so little time to present it.
In my role as a church planter my first impulse with this story of the woman at the well is to approach it thru encountering Jesus while being on mission with him. It’s a story that inspires and models how we as Christ’s followers can respond to people in need all around us. How Jesus shatters racial, social and gender barriers to show love. And yet how often, like his disciples (who are off getting take-out food, busy with other things…) we can miss out on being with Jesus in life-transforming relationships. It’s almost comical as the story goes on and people from this woman’s village are amazed at her transformation and they are streaming out of the village to meet this Jesus and the disciples response was: “Rabbi, don’t you think it’s time we had some biscuits and tea?”
— I could spend 127 hours on this missional approach to the story.
But today we enter this story in a way that may be a little more fitting for this season of lent. Coming to the story and reflecting on how Jesus meets you and me in our places of longing and thirst.
Have you ever been really thirsty? I mean desperately thirsty. Can you think of time when you didn’t have access to water for an extended period of time? I remember I tree planting in Northern BC one summer and went about 3 hours in the dusty heat without water. Awful experience. But nothing compared to what Aaron Rulston had to endure for 127 hours. For 5 days in April 2003, the mountaineering Rulston fell while climbing and found himself trapped and pinned alone against a canyon wall in Utah, with a liter of water, literally dying of thirst. Alone, trapped, and thirsty. And to make matters worse he hadn’t told anyone where he was going for his climbing excursion.
Maybe you’ve seen the film 127 hours, based on the experiences of Rulston during these five days. Throughout the film the theme of thirst and water is very evident. At one point in the film when Rulston is suffering extreme thirst, the film maker brilliantly creates all these flashbacks and images of how accessible and abundant water is for us. Rulston is dying of thirst and then you see all these images of water and liquid and drinking: water freely flowing from a tap, a large tub of ice cold beer, a can of pop cracking open, flowing rivers, oceans…
And this is mostly our experience when it comes to thirst. Water is so accessible and abundant in our culture and civilization we don’t really know what it is to be really thirsty.Unlike a Middle-Eastern culture and climate where this story of the Samaritan woman takes place. They knew what it was to be physically thirsty. The ancient stories of the
Israel people tell of wilderness wanderings and extended periods of drought… real desperate longing for water. And throughout Scripture you find this metaphor of thirst and God and his ways being the answer to that thirst.
So we don’t know much about physical thirst, but do we know what it’s like to really thirst in our souls? To long, to yearn… for healing, belonging, meaning, freedom. To
experience the thirst in our souls to be loved, to be validated, to be forgiven, to be accepted? When, where how do we experience that kind of thirsting?
Well, it might have something to do with being alone at a well? It was quite ordinary for women to draw water from wells during Jesus time. However, drawing water at the
hottest time of the day? Drawing water from a well some distance from the village where you live? She’s hiding. Whether it’s the internal struggle with her own value and worth, or the judgmental glares and criticism of her community… She has made the choice to be alone. It’s not want she truly wants, but it feels safer. And she needs water.
What are the experiences that take us to lonely wells? When you feel so hurt, or so ashamed or so angry, or so sad, that you just feel it’s safer to withdraw into the thoughts of your own head and heart and close everyone else out. (pause)
And in those places, we feel so alone, so ashamed, so rejected, so hurt that we may often wonder, “God where are you?” Or, “God, could never meet me at this lonely dark place.” But the story we’re entering today tells us that Jesus is already there at that place. Asking you for a drink of water… don’t you know who I am? What I’ve done? What’s been done to me? Would it be accurate to say that those are the places where we might meet God the most and in the most profound life-changing ways?
I believe everyone of us longs for the transformation we see in this woman’s life. To go from hiding, hurt and alone — to being fully alive and boldly living with meaning, actively engaged in community. But there’s a conversation that needed to be had before that transformation could begin. A conversation about thirst and receiving living water. And about brokenness and religion…
As the Samaritan woman and Jesus get into this conversation and she’s struggling to understand the spiritual overtones of the metaphor, is it just me, or does anyone else want to jump in and say, “lady, why can’t you get it? He’s not talking about physical thirst, he’s talking about thirsting in your soul. Why do you keep thinking it’s physical water?” Maybe that part of the story connects with me that way, because I to often settle for the physical and temporal means to quenching my thirst. I, more often then I want to admit turn to my own strength, human ingenuity, intellect, my own self-indulgent solutions to quench my internal thirst. Can you relate? Choosing the still stagnant well waters that are all around us. When there is flowing, refreshing living water being offered to me as a gift from God.
Jesus isn’t suggesting the only valid and important desires and longings are spiritual ones or that our deepest longings are only met via religious activity. It wasn’t too long ago that he took a wedding party into over-time by turning water into the best wine, after many would have had a healthy amount of it. And now he himself is asking for a drink from this well.
We must avoid the dualistic view of the world that sees the “heavenly or spiritual” as good and the “earthly-physical” as bad or unimportant. That’s not how Jesus and his Hebraic understanding of the world would approach this matter of desire and longing.But this story does alert us to the human tendency to drink of things other than God for ultimate fulfillment. Which just keep us coming back for more… still thirsty, still lonely, still broken, still unfulfilled because it’s still well water.
So I think Skye Jethani, the senior editor of Christianity Today’s, Leadership Journal is asking the right question, he writes: “How do we learn to elevate our true desires in a society engineered to cultivate false ones? Anyone feel the urge to get an ipad 2 this week? And you already have the ipad 1? In our cons
umeristic culture of comfort and convenience we are bombarded by messages that tell us “you need to keep going back to the well… it will quench your deepest thirsting and longing,”. And in a culture like this it’s so easy to find ourselves just slightly dipping into or even completely dismissing our deep need for God.
But even after all those repetitive attempts at quenching our thirst by that familiar still well water, there’s something inside of us telling us there must be something more. And like the Samaritan woman who doesn’t fully understand what she’s asking for, we say, “yes Jesus, I want this water that you’re offering, so I don’t have to keeping coming back to these lonely wells.”
And this is where things in the story get a little awkward. “Go and get your husband.”Jesus says. Now before we start thinking this is about one particular area of brokenness, or dysfunction and start thinking “phew, that gets me off the hook, I haven’t had that those kinds of struggles.” I don’t think we miss the spirit of the text by imagining Jesus saying, “Go and get your wife… credit card, your prejudice, your day-timer, your bitterness, your treadmill, your computer, your television, that website, your 6pack, your clothes, get your rage, your cheque book. Or go and get your hurt, your loss, your brokenness.” And that’s never easy to hear.
But Jesus is only revealing the reason we keep coming back to lonely wells and still water. He’s providing the way to freedom. The way to living, flowing, refreshing,
cleansing water… the way to eternal life – the deep, wide life with and in God here and now. It’s his call for us to embrace the truth about our lives and name whatever it is that keeps us going back to lonely wells that never ultimately satisfy. For us to lay down our burden or shame & set us free.
And how do we often respond to that kind of truth about ourselves? Try to wiggle our way out, we minimize or justify. And we might even raise a really good and valid
question about religion or theology as a diversion. I was at the dentist this week in
which I had to face the truth about my teeth, flossing… I was tempted to change the subject like, “With all that’s going on in the world, Japan – what’s that all about? And Lybia, more violence really will that work? Isn’t there more important things to bead dressing than my teeth?” But one thing I discovered with the truth in a dentist chair, though it always hurts, it never ultimately harms.
And Jesus graciously and patiently listens and responds to the woman’s valid
theological question regarding places of worship, and uses those questions to eventually reveal the truth about himself, that he is Messiah, the one she too is longing for.
Conclusion: This movie 127 Hours about Aaron Rulston’s experience, was nominated for best picture. I think partly for how it as was made and the powerful message it communicated. When you watch the movie The picture you’re watching often splits into the multiple pictures. And it adds so many dimensions to the story. If I was making a film about this story of the woman at the well, I would split the concluding scene into three pictures. The middle picture, the woman running back to her village, exuding confidence and joy. Next to that would just be her empty water-jar by itself, left next to the well. And then the 3rd picture would be Jesus hanging on a cross. Because the next time we hear Jesus ask for a drink is while he is thirsting, at the loneliest place on the planet, the place where his wondrous sacrificial love is poured out, where he bears the weight of all the guilt and shame and brokenness and pain of all humanity. This is the Jesus who still meets us, waits for us, at the lonely thirsty places of our lives.
Let me conclude with an encouragement towards application. And this takes us back to the powerful message in 127 Hours. Throughout the lonely thirsting 5 day episode of Aaron Rulston, the film does numerous flashbacks into his life, revealing how in many ways he had become an independent self-made thrill seeker who thought he really didn’t need anyone. He could do it all on his own. Well by the end of the film all of that changed. And one of the final scenes of the film in his desperate thirst and his last attempt to get water, he struggles to get the words out but he finally yells: “I need help!”
And while we can express those words to God in prayer on our own, one of the most transformational ways Jesus can meet us is by sharing those words “I need help”, in community… with another human being. Trusted safe people. A person who would
listen, and pray for us and not judge, but also not be afraid to tell us the truth. And what I’ve observed and heard so far in the 6 months we’ve worshipped with you here, is that this seems like a very safe community to find those kinds of people in.
So may we in our journey towards the cross and the empty tomb, encounter the gracious patient Jesus who is already there in the lonely places of longing in our lives.And may he grant us hope and give us the courage to name the truth about ourselves with safe others, that we might begin to drink deeply of living water and experience, here and now, eternal life. Amen.