Today's Scripture Readings
Exodus 17:1-17 (NRSV)
From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. The people quarreled with Moses, and said, "Give us water to drink." Moses said to them, "Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?" But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, "Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?" So Moses cried out to the Lord, "What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me." The Lord said to Moses, "Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink." Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, "Is the Lord among us or not?"
Psalm 95 (BCP., p.724)
Romans 5:1-11 (NRSV)
Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person-- though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.
John 4:5-42 (NRSV)
Jesus came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.
A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, "Give me a drink." (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, "How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?" (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, `Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water." The woman said to him, "Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?" Jesus said to her, "Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life." The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water."
Jesus said to her, "Go, call your husband, and come back." The woman answered him, "I have no husband." Jesus said to her, "You are right in saying, `I have no husband'; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!" The woman said to him, "Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem." Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." The woman said to him, "I know that Messiah is coming" (who is called Christ). "When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us." Jesus said to her, "I am he, the one who is speaking to you."
Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, "What do you want?" or, "Why are you speaking with her?" Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, "Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!
He cannot be the Messiah, can he?" They left the city and were on their way to him.
Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, "Rabbi, eat something." But he said to them, "I have food to eat that you do not know about." So the disciples said to one another, "Surely no one has brought him something to eat?" Jesus said to them, "My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. Do you not say, `Four months more, then comes the harvest'? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, `One sows and another reaps.' I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor."
Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman's testimony, "He told me everything I have ever done." So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, "It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world."
Blog Reflection
If you are still reading this blog after reading all the Scripture verses for this Sunday's Liturgy, thank you ever so much. Please keep reading. The fun has just begun.
Beginning with the Third Sunday in Lent through the Fifth Sunday in Lent in Year A, the Gospel readings get longer. They get longer because the Church and the Lectionary are drawing us into a deeper awareness and meaning of the Passion and Death of Jesus. They show us how boundless the love of God for us really is.
When I first read the story from Exodus a few years ago, I felt somewhat bad for the Israelites. They were wandering in the desert and would be for the next forty years. Many of their generations would not actually see the Promised Land the Lord God promised to them through Moses. Their concern about being thirsty was legitimate was it not?
One can look at it that way if one has not read the preceding chapters of Exodus. God did amazing things in front of their eyes. The plagues in Egypt. The leaving of the Israelites from Egypt in to the wilderness and finally through the Red Sea, with Pharaoh's chariots and charioteer's drowned in the Red Sea. The manna that God provided them with in the wilderness. God had showed God's people how faithful God is to God's word many, many times. But, rather than wait upon Yahweh to give them what they most needed, they quarreled and complained. Even after miracle after miracle, they still had more faith in their former life in Egypt than they did in where God had them in the wilderness. It took the prayer of Moses and the striking of the rock to release the water that gave the people what they most needed.
It is so very appropriate that the Psalm for this Sunday should be what we begin the Daily Office with. Psalm 95. The adoption of using this Psalm at Matins (Morning Prayer) comes from the Benedictine Tradition. Ester de Waal in her book, A Life-Giving Way: A Commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict gives us an explanation to the importance of this Psalm in our daily prayer. Psalm 3 "is followed by Psalm 94 (95) with its invitation to come in, joyfully (1), reverently (6), and penitently (8). It also has in verse 7 that wonderful line that brings us back yet again to the opening word of the Rule and to the underlying theme, "O that today you would listen to his voice." Praying should be a dialogue of listening with the "ear of your heart" (Prol., 1), and I am given this daily reminder so that I must never let my ears be closed or my heart be hardened" (page 72).
What sorts of things do we grumble about with the Lord?
In what ways are we not seeing God's gracious and mighty works in our lives?
How can we see what God is giving us as gift, and live in an attitude of thanksgiving for it?
In what ways do we harden our hearts to keep from listening to God?
Now we turn our attention to the heart of this Third Sunday in Lent Year A. The meeting of Jesus with the Samaritan Woman at the Well of Jacob. The significance of this meeting gives us two amazing surprises. Once again, Jesus demonstrates that He is listening for how God can turn the established order of things over on its head, and accept it as God's will. Here, Jesus breaks through the boundaries of cultural and sexist bias. He is not only talking to a woman which is pretty much forbidden in that time, but He is also talking to a Samaritan woman.
What was the issue with the Samaritan's you might ask? Well, you see back in the era of King Alexander the Great in the writings of the Apocrypha, he had destroyed the Temple and persecuted all of the houses of Jewish worship. Alexander ordered that all of Israel that remained worship his gods. The Jewish people within the southern part of Israel at the time had outright refused to worship the foreign gods of Alexander the Great. The Samaritans in the north accepted Alexander's commands, and that was the end of that relationship. Even though the Samaritans were a people with roots in the Jewish Tradition of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and even Moses, the fact that they gave over their religious freedoms to what were considered to be pagan gods, was just something the Jewish People could not over look. As we see, Jesus Himself is not afraid to cross that cultural boundary to reconcile God with those cut off from the local community. Not women. Not Samaritans. Jesus wants to impart the life-giving water of God's salvation to all people In so doing, Jesus lives out what it is to be pure of heart (or single-hearted) and a peacemaker. Here we read that Jesus is willing to empty Himself of even his reputation to draw this woman closer to God through His magnificent love.
Thomas Keating in his book, The Mystery of Christ: The Liturgy as Spiritual Experience writes the following.
The single-hearted see God in themselves, in others and in the ordinary events of life. Jesus said, "The Son cannot do anything by himself--he can only do what he sees the Father doing." Thus, he is always looking at the Father. What Jesus does is to translate his vision of the Father into his daily life and teaching and ultimately into his passion and death on the cross. This is an important point for our practice. Contemplative prayer is the place of encounter between the creative vision of transformation and the actual incarnation of that vision day by day. Practice of the creative vision into the concrete circumstances of each day (page 103).
On the subject of being a peacemaker, Keating writes:
The commitment of the spiritual journey is not a commitment to pure joy, but to taking responsibility for the whole human family, its needs and destiny. We are not our own; we belong to everyone else (page 104).
Jesus' interest in this woman is to see the image of God in her, and to glorify God in upholding her dignity and help her to find peace with God.
Notice that in Jesus' exchange with this woman, once she and He get to the subject of how many husbands she has, He does not dwell on, or call her on that issue. David Lose in a terrific article on this subject, wrote in The Huffington Post:
And that's it. That's the sentence that has branded her a prostitute. Conservative preacher John Piper's treatment is characteristic. In a sermon on this passage, he describes her as "a worldly, sensually-minded, unspiritual harlot from Samaria," and at another point in the sermon calls her a "whore."
Yet there is nothing in the passage that makes this an obvious interpretation. Neither John as narrator nor Jesus as the central character supply that information. Jesus at no point invites repentance or, for that matter, speaks of sin at all. She very easily could have been widowed or have been abandoned or divorced (which in the ancient world was pretty much the same thing for a woman). Five times would be heartbreaking, but not impossible. Further, she could now be living with someone that she was dependent on, or be in what's called a Levirate marriage (where a childless woman is married to her deceased husband's brother in order to produce an heir yet is not always technically considered the brother's wife). There are any number of ways, in fact, that one might imagine this woman's story as tragic rather than scandalous, yet most preacher's assume the latter.
The difficulty with that interpretation is that it trips up the rest of the story. Immediately after Jesus describes her past, she says, "I see that you are a prophet" and asks him where one should worship. If you believe the worst of her, this is nothing more than a clumsy attempt to change the topic. But if you can imagine another scenario, things look different. "Seeing" in John, it's crucial to note, is all-important. "To see" is often connected with belief. When the woman says, "I see you are a prophet," she is making a confession of faith.
In this exchange between Jesus and this Samaritan Woman, He shows us how we are to see in each person the dignity and integrity of the Beatific and Incarnational vision of God. God is not limited to our biases, nor does God live by them. God does not cease to welcome the stranger, the person of a different race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, immigration status, economic status, health status, language, etc into the embrace of God's mercy. And neither should we. Jesus in His Death and Resurrection has freed the waters of Baptism to flow from His own pierced heart of love into all nations, races, peoples and faiths. In Canticle 18 in The Book of Common Prayer on page 94 we pray these words:
And yours by right, O Lamb that was slain,
for with your blood you have redeemed for God,
From every family, language, people and nation,
a kingdom of priests to serve our God.
Jesus in this Gospel extends His invitation to everyone to drink from the Living Waters of Baptism, and to continue to receive from the Sacrament of Holy Communion the outpouring of God's love through the Body and Blood of Christ.
We as the Church, as the Body of Christ are called through our Baptismal Covenant to love our neighbor as ourselves, and to strive for peace and justice in all persons, by respecting the dignity of every human person. In so doing, we too have the opportunity to live out the Beatific and Incarnational vision of having a pure heart and being a peacemaker. It does not end with our Sunday Eucharist, and does not stop at the doors of our churches or homes. The Living Waters of Christ are ever flowing in and out of our lives into the wider ocean of God's mercy to be shared with others, without prejudice or violence.
This past week, Rev. Fred Phelps of the insidious Westboro Baptist Church died. His sad legacy of the horrible "God Hates Fags" picketing and rhetoric cannot be undone. His tone and those who followed have done their damage to God's holy children who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning. Their work is responsible for the spread of more prejudice that did not stop with LGBTQ people, but also went towards immigrants, African Americans, Native Americans, women and more. Yet, even in Phelps' death, those of us who have experienced the hurt of his rhetoric, have also the experience of Christ's forgiveness and mercy in our own lives. Our response to Phelp's death should should be to forgive those who have hurt us, and to pray for those who continue to hurt us. We must never give up the work of speaking out against prejudice, injustice and brutality in the name of any religious conviction. That must include returning prejudice and hate towards one who ever so sadly provoked it. Our prayers for Phelps' soul should be for God's mercy and the forgiveness of everyone whom his campaigns have injured. Our response should be the Gospel response and in the words of The Rule of St. Benedict: "and never despair of God's mercy" (Preferring Christ: A Devotional Commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict, p. 66).
May our Lenten Journey lead us back to the Living Water that is in our Baptism to find refreshment from Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, that we may also be examples of what it means to live with a pure heart and be a life-giving peacemaker.
Amen.
Prayers
Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves
to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and
inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all
adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil
thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus
Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy
Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (The Book of Common Prayer, p.218).
O God, you made us in your own image and redeemed us
through Jesus your Son: Look with compassion on the whole
human family; take away the arrogance and hatred which
infect our hearts; break down the walls that separate us;
unite us in bonds of love; and work through our struggle and
confusion to accomplish your purposes on earth; that, in
your good time, all nations and races may serve you in
harmony around your heavenly throne; through Jesus Christ
our Lord. Amen. (The Book of Common Prayer, p.815).
Almighty God our heavenly Father, guide the nations of the
world into the way of justice and truth, and establish among
them that peace which is the fruit of righteousness, that they
may become the kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Amen. (The Book of Common Prayer, p.816).
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