SPEAK THE WORD JOHN 4__16—26
What did he say? Did he say anything; anything that made sense? Such questions arise after the usual Sunday morning sermon.
Words, words, words. In this time and place, do the words uttered in church mean anything?
One doesn’t have to search very far in our world to realize that we live in a culture that doesn’t trust words very much. We are the “Information Age.” We process words by the billions, but we don’t trust them very much. We know that words can be slippery weasel things. Words can be used to conceal, to deceive, to distort. Words are so commonly misused during the much too long electoral process that our people rate our executive and legislative branches of government as the worst ever.
Words are cheap; people can hide behind words. The confusion in the Christian world and the extravagant claims of preachers cause people to mistrust what comes from religious sources. Likewise, when a politician gives a speech, what do we say? “Promises, promises.” We don’t trust words.
Talk is cheap. People don’t want talk; they want substance. As Eliza Doolittle said to her two suitors in My Fair Lady: “Words, words, words. . Is that all you blighters can do?” Or, as Edgar Guest put it, “I’d rather see a sermon than hear one any day.”
This distrust of words is nothing new. Reading in Genesis the story of Adam and Eve, the misuse of language in Eden began when the serpent raised the possibility that words just might not be all that they seem. God had made man in his own image; and hence man was a living, immortal soul. The serpent asked, “Did God say you shall not eat of any tree in the garden?”
Eve understood what God said, for she repeated it accurately. “You shall not eat the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden; neither shall you touch it, lest you die.” Satan said, “you will not die. No, you will not die. God knows when you eat that fruit, you will be like God, knowing good from evil.”
Satan’s words were deceptive and vicious. Adam and Eve, having been made in the image of God, were already like God in their immortality. Was Satan correct in saying their eyes would be opened and they would know good from evil? Apparently not; our tribe is still learning right from wrong.
Words are a gift from God. They were, in a sense, the first sacramental elements of communion. Whatever else we lost in Eden, we lost the trust-worthiness of language. Men and women became afraid, and because they became afraid, they began to hide from God and each other, They hid behind fig leaves and behind lying words.
God asked Cain, “Where is your brother?”
Cain’s response was, “I don’t know; am I my brother’s keeper?”
Now all of this should give us some concern as we contemplate the work of a mission church in the world. The church has few tools with which to work. It has little influence the state. We haven’t enormous wealth; we have only words. Sermon words, prayer words, liturgical words.
Where there is sorrow, pain and death, the Church has words of comfort.
Where there is injustice the church has prophetic words.
Where there is complacency, the church has challenging words. Words, words, words.
That is why it is important to hear this day the claim of the gospel that,
in Jesus Christ, we get our words back, that the words we speak can
become filled with grace and truth, instruments of redemption.
The story of Jesus and the woman at the well is illustrates the redemptive power of good words..
What did Jesus really do for this woman? He did not heal her of any disease; he did not raise her child from the dead; he did not dazzle her by turning the water into wine. He simply talked to her. Words, words, words. But the words he spoke were so radically different from the other words she had heard. Jesus’ words were filled with grace and truth. After hearing them she was never the same again.
Notice that this story does not begin with words. It begins in silence. Not gentle, tranquil silence, but hard, cold silence because she who came to the well was a Samaritan and he who rested at the well was a Jew. She who came to the well was a woman; he who rested at the well was a man. Between the Samaritan woman and Jewish man there was a wall of silence; each brick put in place over the years with prejudice and hatred. No word was allowed to pass the wall between Jew and Samaritan..
“Would you give me a drink of water?” said the Jewish man to the Samaritan woman, and the wall came tumbling down. One word, one seemingly ordinary phrase, a quiet word cutting against the grain of the culture, and the wall came tumbling down.
It is amazing how significant ministry takes place in not very dramatic ways. Most of the time, ministry is something like the speaking of a single surprising word.
Think on the December day in 1955 when a bus driver in Montgomery Alabama, ordered four people in a row of seats to move to the back of the bus. It is said that one of these people, a department store clerk named Rosa Parks, spoke so softly that it was hard to hear her voice over the noise of the bus. What she said was, “No,” and a wall came tumbling down. (2)
William Willimon of Duke University told about a young woman named Anne who was a member of a congregation he served. After college Anne had entered pharmacy school, but from time to time she came home and wor-shiped with her parents. One Sunday evening, after one of her visits, Will received a telephone call from Anne’s father:
“Do you know what’s happened?” he said. “Anne just called us to say that she has decided to drop out of pharmacy school.”
“Really?” Will said. “What on earth is leading her to do a thing like that?”
“Well, we’re not sure,” he said. “You know how much Anne likes you.
We thought maybe you could call her up and talk some sense into her.”
Will did just that. He reminded Anne of all her hard work and her achievements and how she should think carefully before throwing all of this away “How in the world did you come to this decision?” he asked her.
“It was your sermon yesterday that started me thinking. You said that God has something important for each of us to do, in our own way I thought to myself, ‘I’m not here because I want to serve God. I’m here to get a job, to make money to look out for myself.’ Then I remembered the good summer I spent working with the church literacy program among the migrant workers’ kids. I really think I was serving God then. I decided, after your sermon, to go back there and give my life to helping those kids.”
There was a long silence on Will’s end of the line. “Now look, Anne,”
he finally said, “I was just preaching.”(3)
Sermon words. . .and the wall came tumbling down. When the wall falls down between Jesus and the woman, she seems startled, perhaps even frightened. There’s something comforting about a wall. It may hem us in, but at least we don’t have to face what is on the other side of it. The woman fires a flurry of words at Jesus in disbelief that the wall has fallen, perhaps even trying to rebuild the wall as a hiding place. Beneath the words, Jesus heard the person; in the windstorm of her words, Jesus heard the woman.
“Why is it that you, a Jew ask for water from a Samaritan woman?” she asked.
Jesus said, “If you knew the gift of God, you could have asked, and he would have
given living water.”
“Who do you think you are? You haven’t even got a bucket. Even Jacob had to have a bucket. Are you greater than Jacob?”
Jesus responded, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, but those who
drink of the water I give will never be thirsty”
It was then that the woman said the fatal word, the word that caused
the death of her old self and gave her new life: “Give me this water that I may never be thirsty.”
“All right,” said Jesus. “Go call your husband.”
“I have no husband.
“That’s right. You have no husband. You’ve had five husbands, and the one you are with now is not your husband. You told the truth when you said you have no husband.”
Commentators have criticized the woman at Samaria, accusing her of immorality. Women in the first century did not have the option of easy divorce as people have today. She has not devoured husband after husband; she has been devoured by a social system that, for whatever reason, has passed her from man to man to man until she no longer has even the dignity of marriage. When Jesus talks about her husbands, he is not so much exposing her sin as he is naming her wound. With a word he has touched the issue in her life.
A graduated from seminary and became the pastor of a small Presbyterian church, small enough so that the pastor set the goal of visiting every family on the roll in the first six months. At the end of six months, the tasl was almost done. Only one family had not been visited. “They haven’t been here in two years,” people said. “Don’t bother; they aren’t coming back.”
The pastor drove out to the house. Only the wife was at home. She poured cups of coffee, and they sat at the kitchen table and chatted. After small talk, they talked about the problem that kept the family from church. Two-and-one-half years earlier she had been at home with their young son. She was vacuuming in the back bedroom and had not checked on him in a while, so she snapped off the vacuum, went into the den, and did not find him. She followed his trail, across the den, through the patio door, across the patio, to the swimming pool, where she found him. “At the funeral, our friends at the church were very kind. They told us it was God’s will.”
The minister said, “Your friends meant well, I am sure, but they were wrong.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean that God does not will the death of children.”
The womaha face reddened and her jaw set. “Then whom do you blame? I guess you blame me.”
“No, I don’t blame you. I don’t want to blame God either,” the minister said.
“Then how do you explain it?” she said, her anger rising.
“I don’t know. I can’t explain it. I don’t understand why such things happen either. I only know that God’s heart broke when yours did.”
The woman had her arms crossed, and it was clear that this conversation was over. The minister left the house wondering about the wisdom of talking frankly about the hurtful subject.. “Why didn’t I leave it alone?”
A few days later the phone rang; it was she. “We don’t know where this is going, but would you come out and talk with my husband and me? We have assumed that God was angry at us; maybe it was the other way around.”
With a word we touch the issues in people’s lives. When Jesus named the issue in her life, the woman at the well changed the subject:
“1 see that you are a prophet,” she said. “Now let’s see, you prophets like to talk theology, isn’t it interesting that you Jews worship in Jerusalem, and we Samaritans worship on the mountain. Isn’t that a fascinating theological difference? Would you care to comment on it? After you do, maybe we can move on to eschatology.”
“Woman, I tell you,” said Jesus, “the hour is coming, and now is, when the mountain, the temple, it won’t make any difference. What will make a difference is you—your worship in spirit and in truth.”
“Me? Make a difference? To God? When hell freezes over. . .when Messiah comes.”
That’s when Jesus said the best word of all: “I am he.” The One who comes to you. I am He. With a word, broke down the wall and freed the Samaritan woman. Jesus is the One who, with a word, touches the deepest wounds in your life. “I am he,” Jesus says, “Come to me everyone of you with your tears and sorrows and weariness. I will give you rest.”
In the beginning was the Word. . . and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. “I am he.” Jesus was the Word, and because she was transformed by
that Word, she who had been locked in silence left that place with a word to live and a word to speak.
A person does not have to be an ordained clergyman to bring the peace of Christ to a hurting person. Few words need be spoken when people are in deep grief because of illness, death or other loss. Christ the Word of God communicates through the presence of a Christian who comes with compassion and love.
Because the Word became flesh and dwells among us, so will it be for you, too. So will it be for you as you go and offer encouragement to the broken hearted in this world.
Notes
1. Outline and some illustrations from REV. DR. THOMAS G. LONG The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, New Series, Vol. 12 (November 1991), pp. 314—19.
2. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954—63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), p. 129.
3. William H. Willimon, What’s Right with the Church (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), pp. 112—13.
Charles Scott
Church of the Good Shepherd, Indianapolis
crscott@email.com
goodshepherdindy.org
