Lent 3 A

We hear about a well today, a famous well a well that had been around for hundreds of generations of God's people. The best description that we have for the well is that it is a deep well. So deep indeed that a person would need a long rope and a bucket to get water. It wasn't easy to pull water from this well.

A deep well is really a sign that water isn't abundant. If you can dig a shallow well and always have enough water, flowing water, say from a stream just near the surface, living water as it would have been called in the bible, water that moves, then you are very fortunate, if you have to dig and dig and dig and dig before you finally get deep enough to find water that will fill a well at a reasonable rate so that a whole community can draw from it you are most unfortunate indeed. These wells are notorious. They go dry, they have problems that are very hard to solve because they are so deep. And in the days before electric pumps and indoor plumbing a deep well would have been a lot of work. At a shallow well at least the work of getting water is mostly carrying it from the well to where it is needed. If your well is deep the work starts much sooner, you must lower your bucket and then through great effort pull the water all the way up the depth of the well before you can take it anywhere. A miserable task if your fingers are cold and a sweltering task with the sun at your back.

In the gospel lesson today there is a dusty and thirsty traveler, a Jewish man sitting at this deep well in Samaria. Who knows why he choose to stop there or how long he had been sitting. Who knows why he choose a well with such history. It was famous for the people in the town who knew it was Jacob's well. Jacob being a patriarch of the people of God, grandson to Abraham. But I'm sure there wasn't a plaque there, no way for a stranger to know. Nonetheless this was a famous place with history and gravity like going to the family homestead or the church that your great great grandfather helped to build. And here sitting in this Holy place, at a place that was at least Holy to Samaritans was a Jewish man, a man who would sooner spit on than talk to a Samaritan, a man who certainly wouldn't talk to a samaritan woman. These people hated each other, envied each other, resented each other and were hurt by their common history.

So there is a dusty Jewish man looking for a drink and a Samaritan woman with a bucket to draw water from this deep well. Will he talk to her, will he not, will she draw water for him, will she ignore his very presence? Well she went about her business, she needed water, she had a bucket and there was a well so she began to draw water. And as she did the dusty foreigner talked to her. He asked for a drink and she asked him why. Why when your people think my people will make you unclean would you want water from my bucket. He tells her that if she understood how God works at that very well, she would have asked and he would have given her living water. Water that runs. Now we've already covered that this well is anything other than a place with abundant flowing, living water. But maybe because of how he said it she asks just what he means, just what he knows of living water. maybe she is thirsty too. Maybe she knows more about the history of the well than he thinks, this is Jacob's well she says the one where God blessed our people, mine and yours. Where does water live more than it lives here in this ancient and sacred place?

Here is where we need to know a little bit about this woman. She had been coming to this well her entire life. Day after day and things had gotten worse and worse for her. She had married and lost a husband. She needed someone to support her so she married again, again her husband died or left her, who knows exactly but again and again she had been broken and abandoned and again and again she had broken her own relationships until she got to the point where she finally decided to have no more ties and so she came to the well, to Jacob's well alone during the hottest part of the day, high noon. Where she could think of the promise of her ancestors, the love of God for Jacob's children, her own connection, her only connection to a real promise that had really worked and a real blessing from God. Now here was this man telling her he could make the water come alive.

So, she pleads, give me the water you speak of. And he tells her to wait, to bring her husband. What a cruel trick she was so close but it turns out her sin and misfortune would prevail again. She would have to confess. Head hung low she says I have no husband...

There is a pause and she holds her breath, maybe he will accept this answer without question. She so wants for new life to come to her through this precious well. The traveler tells her that she is right that her answer is true that he knows her, he knows her past whatever it was. And she is elated!

Somewhere in here she figured out that this is no dusty traveler but the Messiah, Jesus, the Christ, the one sent by God and she was thrilled that he knew all of her pain and dirty secrets. I don't know about you all but in general I think the more esteem that I hold someone in the better that I want them to think of me. If I were to meet the Son of God face to face I imagine I would be the opposite of elated if he then told me that he knew in detail about each and every one of my regrets.

But it turned out that for this terrified and broken woman God knew her every regret, her every move and still came to a deep and sacred place in the middle of the day to ask her for a drink.

We try to stress the need for confession during Lent. Confession is a hard word. It implies guilt which leads so naturally to punishment but when we think like that we miss the point entirely. We confess like the woman at the well did because God asks us to and when we do we hear that nothing we could ever say or do is unknown to God and yet what he calls us to do is to hear His word, be cleansed by His living water, eat at His table and praise Him right where we are in the midst of hanging our heads and hoping He won't notice just how deeply we need water from the living well.

At the well Jesus said in Spirit and truth you samaritan woman whom my people hate, God wants you to worship him right where you are, right here at this well, right in your town where people know your secrets. right here in the world out in the open, God who knows you asks only that you share living water with strangers in the overwhelming heat of the day. Amen