“BELIEVERS IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES”
February 5, 2012 ~ The Rev. David Moore
Scripture: John 4:1-18 | PDF print version

I’m excited that we are doing a class on evangelism coming up, February 25. Come and invite folks from other churches. I would remind you we are not in competition with other churches; we are competing against the gates of Hell. So invite everyone who might be even remotely interested. My style of evangelism is mostly friendship evangelism, the thought being that many people don’t care what you believe until they know that you care at all.

I’ve seen lots of street preachers. I know that sometimes that can be effective, but for me, I seem to be a bit more subtle. I want to earn the right to be heard. I’ve seen the opposite approach. When I was at Wheaton College, one of my friends went to a church on a bus one Sunday. Apparently the pastor of a particular church was giving away a trip to Hawaii for the person who brought the most visitors to the church through the year. One enterprising lady had hired a bus, came to Wheaton College, a Christian college, and tried to persuade as many people as possible to go to her church for one Sunday. She wanted the trip to Hawaii. She came to Wheaton because the kids were already Christians, and coming to church would be a no-brainer. My friend said there were 7 people on the bus, and the ride to the church was a good 45 minutes. One way. I think word spread and no one was really interested in going with her again. She’d have to do some real evangelism instead.

I always find it interesting who hears the call to come and worship. It isn’t always the people we think it should be. I, at least, have this deep subconscious point of view that people who should be coming to church are people like me. I think we all, if we think about it, have that subconsciously. After all, I’m a Christian, so people like me should be Christians. But that hasn’t always been my experience. My experience is that all sorts of people are called to follow Christ, not just people who look and think like me, who have similar basic life experiences. [Illustration re: guy doing outreach to Muslims, just making friends. –Ask Pastor Dave for details.]

Let’s look at Jesus with someone completely different. John 4:1-18

Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, “Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John”--although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized—he left Judea and started back to Galilee. But He had to go through Samaria. So he 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 cane 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 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 than 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 draws 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!”

Let’s pray.

The last time we had regular church, we looked at John 3:16, “for God so loved the world that He gave His only unique Son, that whoever believes in Him might not perish, but have eternal life.” You might remember that Jesus was in Jerusalem, celebrating the Passover, the first of three visits to Jerusalem during His ministry in Israel. Now in chapter 4, Jesus is returning to His primary place of ministry, northern Israel, around Galilee. But to get from Southern to Northern Israel, Jerusalem was in Southern Israel, a person would have to travel through Samaria. Samaria was a land of half-breeds. They had been Israelites who had intermarried with local people groups, whose religion had become a bastardized version of the Jewish faith. The Israelites considered them to be beneath contempt. In fact, when traveling from Northern to Southern Israel, or back the other way, most Jewish people would go many miles out of their way across the Jordan river to avoid going through Samaria at all.

The other contextual issue you might miss is that Jewish men did not talk to women, except in the privacy of the home. It was scandalous for Jesus to talk to this woman. She was a woman, a Samaritan woman, and Jews would have nothing to do with Samaritans, much less a Jewish rabbi, which Jesus was. Jewish rabbis were supposed to be the most pure, the most knowledgeable, and would be the very last people to ever talk to a Samaritan woman.

So they are traveling up through Samaria, the disciples have gone into town to find some food, leaving Jesus at the well. It’s noon, the exact wrong time to draw water, and yet, here comes a Samaritan woman, the exact wrong sort of person. Jesus, though, asks for a drink, and the woman is blown away.

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 flocks drank from it?”

Jesus, I think, always wants people to think, always wants to move people forward, and wants to connect them with God. Jesus isn’t messing with her, but wants to get to the heart of the matter. But this woman isn’t at the place yet where she understands who Jesus is and understands her need for Him. So they have what must have been a bewildering conversation, at least from her point of view. The strange man has asked for a drink, and is now offering her a drink of something He calls living water, but He has no bucket, and nowhere to draw this different sort of water except the same old well. What is He talking about? Why is He talking to me anyway? Many travelers would have an animal skin with which they would draw out water, but apparently the disciples have taken it with them into the city. Living water was another way of describing running water. Where is Jesus going to get running water? There is only still water from the well.

It is interesting to compare and contrast this conversation with the one Jesus had with Nicodemus. Both times Jesus talks about something figuratively, and they try to understand it literally. And both of them, if we’re honest, are exactly the wrong sort of people for Jesus to talk to about faith. Nicodemus, the Pharisee, already knows everything, and the Samaritan woman knows nothing, and doesn’t seem to care about how off-track her life has become.

Maybe she’s starting to get that Jesus is a bit different. “Are you better than,” as she asks Him, their ancestor Jacob (because He as a Jew and she as a Samaritan would have common ancestors, like Jacob)? There are some interesting thoughts about this woman. Many folks write her off as a harlot, but I’m not sure. Why would she have had so many divorces? The penalty for sleeping around was death, at least for the Jews, so it may have been the same for the Samaritans. But this woman, with all these husbands, was never punished. It has been recently speculated that this woman couldn’t have kids for whatever reason. So all the husbands had tried to have kids, and when that didn’t happen, they moved on. She comes to the well when none of the other village women would come with their children, the embodiment of what she was supposed to be, a mother, but couldn’t be. And then I think depression sets in, so the man she is currently with isn’t her husband, and who cares anyway because she’ll never have kids and the depression starts its awful downward spiral. I’ve been there. But then Jesus shows up.

Don’t we all want someone to pull us up out of the mess? Maybe you’ve been in that place where life was just a mess, having to go by yourself to draw water at the worst time of day, so shunned by others that it was easier to go by yourself to do the chores of life than it was to look at other people, to interact with others simply because of the shame. Jesus seems to ignore that people want to be ignored. He reaches past the pain right to the heart of the matter. And that’s what is the matter: this woman needs a new heart. She needs to know, despite all she’s been or done, that she is known, she is seen, she is important. She too can have this living water; she too can be a part of what God is doing. The wrong person, in the wrong place, can make a huge impact for God’s kingdom.

Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water than 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 draws water.”

I read this and I wonder if she is being sincere, or if she is politely mocking Him. She still is dealing on a literal level with Jesus. I wonder at what point in the conversation she believes that Jesus is different, I think it is still coming, when Jesus tells her about herself. Then the conversation begins to go deeper quickly. 

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!”

Ah. So this man by the well really knows. No more joking around, this guy knows who she is. He has known all along. He knows what her life has been. He knows her pain. He knows her depression. She is the wrong sort of person, and yet God knows her completely, through and through, and still offers her this living water, His presence in her life, He offers her Himself.

The whole chapter is about their interaction and I’d love to tease out the entire thing, except that you all need to go home at some point. The woman quite simply comes to faith. She in confronted with who she is, that she is a sinner in need of redemption. This is really the moment of faith, when we understand ourselves, stripped of our bravado and our precious self-esteem, and through that lens we see God coming to us, not to punish, although it is what we deserve, but to forgive. And in that moment, we see God clearly. He is a God of grace and forgiveness, a God who want to heal us and help us, not a God who commands us to grovel before Him. This is what I think this woman realizes. She comes to faith because she sees God, because she realizes that God is for her and loves her just as she is. God is unwilling to see her wallow in misery, but wants her to become her best self.

So she begins to ask about worship, given that she is speaking to the Holy Man. She asks where should people worship? The Samaritans have a mountain on which they worship in Samaria, while the Jews have Mount Zion, Jerusalem, where the Temple is and that’s where they say to worship. Who’s right? Jesus replies that worship is about having the right spirit, the right heart, and not about the right place. You also must worship in truth, and know the truth… who God is. Then she says she knows the Messiah is coming, and Jesus says, “You’re right, in fact, here I am.”

The woman runs off to the city, passing by the disciples as she leaves. The disciples are puzzled that Jesus would speak to a Samaritan woman, but are smart enough not to challenge Him. The woman runs back to the city, and starts to tell everyone about Jesus, that a man she met by the well told her everything she had ever done. Could this be the Messiah? They must see and hear for themselves, and they do. They even compel Jesus to stay a couple of extra days to teach them. These, you remember, are the wrong sort of people. This is a Jewish rabbi, and these are Samaritans, half-breeds, worshipping as best they can. But they hear and see Jesus, and they become followers too. They tell the woman that they no longer believe because of what she said, but because they had met Jesus, and now they too are convinced that He is the Savior of the world.

That seems to me to be a good description of our jobs. I think it is very interesting that quite near the beginning of John there is this story of non-Jews coming to faith, coming to hear Jesus, and then follow Him. She leads her neighbors to Jesus, based on her testimony, and then they get to meet Jesus for themselves. And they believe too, that all these different people, who had been so hostile to Jews for so long, although the Jews seem to have started it… all these wrong people come to faith in Jesus.

I have heard the testimony of all sorts of different people though the years. My good friend Matt met a guy at Princeton who needed a place to stay in LA for a few days, so my parents put him up. He had been raised a Hassidic Jew in New York, and had found a Gideon Bible in a hotel room, read it (he was a genius) and became a Christian. He was a music person, but studied at Princeton Seminary in his spare time. Hassidic Jews are very insular, very distrusting of outsiders, and especially don’t want their children to hear about Jesus. But my friend’s friend, the wrong sort of person, had come to faith, and was sharing his new faith with his family and friends.

When I was at Pepperdine, I joined a fraternity. There was a lengthy pledging process, and eventually I and 14 other guys joined. When it was my chance to invite people to join, I realized there were two schools of thought. First, try and find exactly the right people, who fit in, who we are comfortable with, who fit our image of who we were (a service fraternity, I’m sure I’ll mention them again because they helped form who I have become). The other school of thought was to let everyone in, or at least most people in, and eventually either they will become one of us or not, but that was their loss, not our mistake. The more I think about the church, the more I think we’re that second way of letting people in.

All sorts of people should be invited here. We live in such a great multicultural area, and it is my prayer for us that we come, over time, to reflect that multiculturalism. We are to invite the right sort of people, but also the wrong sort of people. I heard the story one time of a prostitute who was invited to church and her response was, no, she couldn’t go. She had been too bad for too long and would never be accepted by church people. That’s tragic. And wrong. I think if she had gone to church, she would have discovered a different life. At least, I hope so.

I hope we are always becoming the sort of church that all kinds of folks can come to and find themselves encountering Jesus. All sorts of folks are welcome here, because we seek to serve a God who reached out to different people. Let’s face it. We are the product of someone somewhere reaching across a barrier to either our forefathers or us. We live in a wonderful place, but it is one of the least churched areas of the country. I recently heard that less than 3 percent of people in and around San Francisco consider themselves to be followers of Jesus. That doesn’t mean they are in church on a given Sunday, just that they believe in Christ and want to follow His ways. It used to be different, but times have changed. And we have to figure out how God is going to use us both as individuals and as a community of believers to build His kingdom in a place and time where the gospel is desperately needed. That’s why I’m excited about this “doable” evangelism seminar that’s coming up, because as I understand it, it isn’t about what to say, but about praying for the lost, and putting ourselves out there to be available for people, all sorts of people, because all sorts of people make up the body of Christ: folks with musical talent and without. Folks with different gifts, people of different ages, different mental acuity, serious folks, funny folks, folks who can do math, folks that can write, all sorts of differences are all welcome in the church. We’re the wrong sort of folks, but we have the right sort of Savior.