"A Spring of Water Gushing Up to Eternal Life" A sermon preached by the Rev. Martin L. Smith at St. Margaret’s, Washington, on the Third Sunday of Lent, February 24, 2008

When bird watchers approach too close to a plovers' nest, the mother bird will suddenly appear on the ground before them pretending to be wounded. Dragging her wing on the ground, and staggering pathetically, she tries to lure the intruder away from the nest. "Come and get me instead, don't bother with the stupid nest, in my wounded state you'll easily catch me." I saw this for myself every spring on the barrier islands of Massachusetts' north shore, and it always moved me. Somehow it made me think of the tricks we use to keep each other from getting too close to our pain and our dreams. Sometimes when another person threatens to get too close to a very vulnerable part of ourselves, we will create some kind of diversion to lure them away from a topic we don't want opened. It takes a special kind of friend, or a very skilled therapist, to see through our diversionary tactics.

John the evangelist loves to demonstrate Jesus' extraordinary insight into the human condition, and the way he refused to be distracted from the task of probing the deepest wounds of the human heart by people's rationalizations and arguments. Today's story about Jesus' intimate conversation with a stranger, a Samaritan woman, is the best example of the way Jesus homed in on the human heart and how he tried to disarm their resistance to God's love.

There's no need to think of this story as a transcript. This is an artistic recreation of a conversation. Now, it's hard to answer the question "what is a work of art?"' but most of us know what an authentic work of art does. We know a painting is a true work of art, when instead of us looking at the painting, it feels as though the painting is looking at us, questioning us, searching us, moving us, mysteriously touching our hearts. The poet Rilke ended his poem about encountering a stone torso of Apollo in a museum with the words, "There is no part of it that does not see you. You must change your life."' Artworks speak to us, reach into us, change us. So John is telling a story that we are not meant to read. The story is written so that it will read us.

The scene opens with sexual tension. In the middle east then as today, there is a rigid taboo forbidding young men from chatting up women in the streets. Jesus calmly shatters the taboo and asks this stranger for a drink from her water jug. And there's racial tension. She belongs to the despised mongrel tribe of heretics—the Samaritans. Jesus breaks the race taboo between mixing, and his audacity gives the woman her excuse for getting out of this compromising conversation. She hits back. “What are you thinking of, young Jew, asking me for a drink? You are right out of line”

Jesus now shows his cards. These distinctions have no force for him at all. His business is breaking taboos. And he is here to break the biggest taboo of all. The taboo against opening up the wound of disappointed desire that we all have, Jews, Samaritans, modern Americans. So Jesus presses on. "If you knew what God want to give us, and if you knew who I am, you would be able to admit that you are really thirsty for living water and you would ask me for it." Jesus uses a symbol for the heart's unsatisfied desire. And subconsciously the woman knows she mustn't let this man go there. She must stay on the literal, common sense level of normal chatter. "Look, what's your name Jewish guy, we've already got a well, it's been running just fine since Jacob's time. Why are you talking about something that ain't broke and don't need fixing? You don't even have a bucket."

Jesus' is completely undeterred. He holds out to her a provocative symbol of the opening of the heart’s desire and a divine gift of life that will at last fulfill that desire. "The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life." Very poignantly, the Samaritan stranger backs away from the uncanny power of this symbol for new life, life

fulfilled and fulfilling. She is so threatened by it that she uses literalism again to hold him at arms length. "Well, if you are offering a system of indoor plumbing, that means I'd have a faucet back home and wouldn't have to trek out here twice a day."

Jesus sidesteps her ploy and takes an even greater risk with her. He raises the most personal issue of all-sex and intimacy. "Go and bring your husband. I want to meet him." The woman says she doesn't have one. Somehow, Jesus has guessed that partnership and marriage is the most poignant place of disappointment in her life. She has had five significant others and the guy she is with now is has commitment phobia just like the previous ones. The air seems to quiver with unspoken feelings. Feelings about co-dependency, about disappointment, about failure. Now she realizes that she is in the presence of someone with uncanny powers of insight. She has one last defensive tactic. She plays the religious card, she insists on the doctrinal gulf between her and Jesus. "I have my religion, I am a Samaritan. You are a Jew, you have your religion. We have our temple on Mount Gerizim, you have your temple in Jerusalem. We can't connect, our religions won't let us.”

Jesus responds this time by talking of God's desire. What God yearns for is for all people to worship him in spirit and in truth. Spirit-pneuma-breath. God wants men and women to experience God's presence as close as the very breath in their lungs. Truth, aletheia in Greek, un-hiddeness. God wants intimacy with us that is free from formality and gameplaying. He wants real union, authentic closeness without pretense. Transparent, sincere mutuality. This is God's desire. And when human beings turn to God to fulfill his desire and theirs, temples become obsolete. God doesn't want worshippers to go to temples. God wants men and women to become temples, to house divinity within them. And, says, Jesus, I am telling you, that the time for God to come to enter within each one of us as temples has arrived. In fact the time is here. "The hour is coming, and is now here ... As for the Messiah, there is no more waiting. I am here now for you ... "

The woman leaves the water jar behind and rushes home to tell people that she has been with a man who told her everything she had ever done. All her attempts to manage life. Now she's having a breakthrough. She no longer has to manage life. She can now come alive with God. She feels understood, known through and through. She feels no shame, no anxiety. Just extraordinary hope and anticipation. She may have just been speaking to God's Messiah. She wants her neighbors to see him for themselves. They rush out to the well and bring Jesus back home. It just takes two days, and they have the same experience as the woman. "We have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is the Savior of the world." The old days of rival sects, denominations, rituals, temples, ancestral taboos, they are crumbling. Healing has arrived that is meant for everyone, it is for humanity, the world. The story ends with a kind of chorus, proclaiming the universality of this new era of intimacy and union with God. It is meant for every man, woman and child

The evangelist move on and lets us take our leave of Samaria, but the image of the inner well continues to resonate unconsciously. In a few chapters, he will have Jesus celebrate it with a blissful shout, as the very core of the good news. "On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there [in the temple], he cried out, 'Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, “Out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water.'" Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive." (John 7:37-39)

Forty years ago, 1 made a discovery that caused me to fall in love with this story. I was doing an archaeology project near my hometown and had found ancient records of a long lost healing well. I set out to fmd it. I narrowed my search to a single field and wasted a whole day without finding a trace of water. In the end, the last place to look was in the heap of stinking manure in which a little huddle of cows was still pissing even as I pushed them away. Digging through the filth in a cloud of flies, my spade finally grated on something solid. A quarter of an hour later, and I had exposed a carved stone platform, and rising from an ancient wooden pipe in the center a crystal clear stream was welling up. I learned that day to trust that God's presence is in the last place we want to look. The mud patch of our own hearts. But that's where God the Spirit has been all along. All we have to do is allow ourselves to experience a presence within ourselves that has been there all along.