The God Who Knows Us...and Loves Us Anyway

[This sermon was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]

John 4:5-42
In the movie, Return to Me, a young widower, at one point, is set up on a blind date with an obnoxious woman. In her one scene in the film, which takes place in a restaurant, the obnoxious woman insults their waitress, while ordering a particular brand of bottled water. Tap water makes her nauseous, the obnoxious woman claims. She goes on at some length about the superiority of her bottled water over what you get from the tap. The waitress leaves to put in the order and get the woman’s water. But, fed up with the treatment to which she’s been subjected, the waitress pours out the precious special water the obnoxious woman wants and replaces it with tap water. When the woman opens up and tastes her bottled water, she raves about it.

Water, of course, is pretty much water wherever it comes from, one of the most common elements in the universe. But it’s also essential for our living. It's so important, that doctors tell us that we should drink about eight glasses of water every day.

I bring all of this up, of course, because of our Gospel lesson. There, we find Jesus and His disciples traveling through a Samaritan village called Sychar. You know the Samaritans. They were a population once part of God’s people, the Hebrews, Israel. But after the reign of Solomon, the nation split in two. A northern nation, called Israel, with its worship life focused in a city called Samaria, went one way. The southern nation, with a greater claim to faithfulness to God, called Judea, went another. Its worship life centered on Jerusalem. Jesus was a Judean.

Judeans looked down their noses on Samaritans. They regarded them as idolaters, people who worshiped other gods. And, in fact, as Jesus intimates in the lesson today, the Samaritans did try to hedge their bets when it came to their religion. They claimed to worship the God of the Bible. But at the same time, up on Mount Gerizim, not far from Sychar, the Samaritans worshiped the puny false deities of at least five other cultures.

When Jesus’ party gets close to Sychar in today’s Gospel lesson, the disciples enter the village to buy some food. They leave Jesus sitting by a well. That’s when a Samaritan woman arrives to draw water.

Ordinarily, we would expect that she would have drawn the water while Jesus sat in stony silence. Men and women not married to each other weren’t supposed to speak together in public in those days. And Jews never spoke to Samaritans. But Jesus asks the woman to give Him water. One thing leads to another, culminating in Jesus telling her, “If you just ask, I’ll give you living water.”

Of course, Jesus isn't talking about ordinary water. This water yields more than passing refreshment or even vital fluids for the functioning of physical bodies. This water is the very presence of God in our lives. It’s forgiveness for the repentant sinner. It’s new life that never gives out for all eternity.

A woman facing death once asked me, “What can I do?” It struck me as odd that a person flat on her back in a hospital bed, unable to move, and near death thought that there was something she could do to get into heaven.

I told her that it was simple. She needed to turn her life, even her sin, over to God and believe in Jesus. She needed to do the hardest thing in the world for us to do: She needed to do nothing, to simply let Christ take her in His arms, forgive her, and guide her. Jesus is the source of living water, of life that lasts forever. All we have to do is ask for it and receive it.

And this water doesn’t just help us in the sweet by-and-by. It can bring us life today! In one of his books, the late missionary, evangelist, and author E. Stanley Jones, a friend and confidante of Mahatma Gandhi, talks about a woman of his acquaintance.

Her marriage ended and whose life was a mess. Then, she came to believe in Jesus Christ. New hope came to her. She became so certain of the new possibilities that life with Christ brought her, that she enrolled as a student at a local university, paying her way through school by working as a full-time secretary. She graduated cum laude with her Bachelor’s degree. She then went on to graduate school, where she received all A’s. She later wrote to Jones:

Wasn’t God amazing? I don’t know why any Christian should discard miracles. I believe in miracles. [Jesus] healed me. What could be more miraculous than the forgiveness of sins? Or the taking away of all bitterness, all resentment? And the peace and joy that follow are indescribable. The laughter that comes bubbling up at most unexpected times, in me who thought a few years ago that I would never laugh again...it rises from a well of living water that will never cease. I am grateful beyond words.

Jesus doesn’t promise, of course, that when we follow Him, all our troubles will go away. But He promises to be with us, to help us forge through life with hope and joy and, above all, the very life of God filling them with a vitality that belies our years, our scars, our regrets, and our biographies.

Shortly after her conversation with Jesus, the Samaritan woman to whom Jesus had promised living water ran into town. Literally, she says to the other villagers from Sychar, “He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” That’s hardly a ringing endorsement of Jesus’ lordship. It's sort of like saying, "Meet my new husband. He can't possibly be a good guy, can he?"

But what the woman said was the most her faint, embryonic faith could muster at the time. What’s more, it was enough, more than enough, to turn an entire village to Jesus Christ!

What’s really interesting to me, though, is that it wasn’t the promise of living water that turned this woman into one of the unlikeliest evangelists ever! It was something else about her encounter with Jesus.

An old saying tells us, “A friend is someone who knows all about us and loves us anyway.” Through Jesus, the Samaritan woman came to experience that God gives the ultimate expression to that kind of friendship.

Jesus knew all her. But He didn’t preach at her. He didn’t scold her. He didn’t even tell her to repent. He just displayed a knowledge of her life story and reached out to her anyway. That was what turned her into a witness for Jesus.

On the day after Easter, you know, I’ll begin offering a five-session class called Witnesses for Christ. It’s designed to help all of us who believe in Jesus to be more confident in inviting others to get to know Jesus. I hope that lots of folks will be part of the class.

But, you know what? The Samaritan woman in our Gospel lesson never took Witnesses for Christ. In fact, some might say that she didn’t even do a very good job of witnessing.

Instead, she met Jesus sort of like you and I are this morning and then, amazed that God loved her and wanted her just as she was, invited others to get to know Him, too.

Near the end of today’s lesson, we see that her townspeople, having responded to her tentative witness and met Jesus for themselves, tell her, “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.”

Jesus Christ knows all about you and me and He loves us just as we are. He knows our regrets. But He wants us forever. He wants us right now. He wants to erase our sins. He wants to fill us with living water that erupts into new life for us today and always.

That’s good news for us. And it’s good news just as worth telling in Logan, Ohio on February 24, 2008 as it was in the ancient village of Sychar in Samaria two thousand years ago.

Maybe, like the woman at the well, you too could tell someone you know here in Logan, “I don’t know everything there is to know about Jesus. But you can meet Him next Sunday morning with me.”

Who knows what might happen if you and I tell others about the giver of living water who knows all about us and loves us any way. All of Logan might suddenly bubble with the living water of new life from Jesus Christ. I don’t know about you, but I would love to see that happen!