“Drinking at the Colored Well”
A Sermon by Lanny Peters
Pastor, Oakhurst Baptist Church, Decatur, Georgia
February 27, 2005
John 4: 5-42
When I was growing up, the biggest store in my hometown was Grant’s Department Store in downtown Lexington, North Carolina. Though laughably small compared to department stores today, Grant’s had the widest variety of items in town and about anything anybody needed. But that was a time before we learned to need so much. What I remember most vividly about Grant’s Department Store were the two water fountains in the basement. One was more modern looking and marked in large letters “Whites only.” The other, looking old and worn, was marked “Colored.”
When today’s gospel story opens, Jesus is sitting by a well. It did not need a sign; everyone knew it was water for colored only. The colored folks in Jesus’ time were the Samaritans. Descended from Jews who had intermarried other conquered people during the occupation by the Assyrians, this mixed race was considered unclean and impure.
John’s gospel tells us that Jesus was in route from Judea to Galilee and he had to go through Samaria. This was more about his calling than the geography. The main road, which was also the best-maintained road, bypassed Samaria. Most Jewish travelers completely avoided this “colored’ section. But in his time and still in ours, Jesus is not most people. He had to go through Samaria because of who he was. And so it came to pass that in the heat of the day, Jesus and the disciples came to a Samaritan town.
Tired and hungry, and probably grumbling at the unlikely prospect of finding decent food in a place like this, the disciples trudged into the Samaritan village. Jesus stayed alone by a well to rest. But not just any well. This well was famous for being the ancient site where Jacob had met and wooed his wife Rachel. To the original audience of John’s gospel, a story of a man meeting a woman at this place would have recalled this well –known love story.
Along came a Samaritan woman with a huge water jar on her shoulder. Normally, women came to the well in groups early in the morning or in the late afternoon to avoid the heat. This woman came in the middle of the day to avoid the other women. She had had five husbands and was living with a man who was not her husband; she was not part of their circle. Given her social status, she would not have raised her eyes or acknowledged Jesus in any way.
Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” The woman was stunned. That a rabbi would have spoken at all to a woman in public would have been shocking, even forbidden. This man was nonchalantly breaking very strong taboos. Was this some kind of a joke, an insult, or one very bad pickup line? All she could do was state the obvious: “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” The narrator of the story points out that she was right since, “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.” They should not have been talking, much less sharing a common cup. And yet they have this amazing conversation, which Joyce Hollyday describes this way:
A foreigner, a woman, a sinner, and poor- she was a paramount outcast of her time; which is why Jesus’ conversation with her was so outstanding. Jesus took her very seriously. He chose this most unlikely of candidates to reveal that he was the Messiah, the Christ, the Savior. He did not pick the emperor or the chief priest or even one of the disciples. He chose a simple, marginal woman who is not even named in her own story.
Their dialogue is the longest recorded conversation Jesus had with anyone. While the religious leaders tried to trap him with their theological questions, she hungered simply to understand-and believe. She wanted to know where people should worship: on the mountain where the Samaritans had their rituals or in the Temple at Jerusalem. Jesus explained that such sites of worship were unimportant. “God is spirit and truth.” (John 4: 24.) The message was clear. It does not matter where you worship, what race or gender you are, how much money you have, how many times you have fallen or failed; what matters is what is in your heart. What matters is your thirst for living water. . Clothed With the Sun, (Westminster John Knox Press, 2004) p. 211.
Her notorious past does not bother Jesus in the least. Jewish law permitted women to marry only up to two times, and certainly not to marry five times and then live with a man while unmarried. Jesus lets her know he is quite aware of her sexual history and yet goes right on with the conversation. Kari Jo Verhulst rightly points out that Jesus acts “as a wise teacher who challenges and provokes, but neither shames the woman for her past nor ridicules her for requiring time to come to an understanding of who he is. …
He addresses her past in order that an honest relationship might develop, removing it as a possible source of shame that might prevent her from moving toward him.” Sojourners Magazine. September-October 2001.
During the season of Lent this year, I am attempting to connect our lectionary texts to various mediums such as poetry, literature, cinema, and music. We’ve had a postlude by Willie Nelson, poetry by Peter Junker, and a song today by Sue Witty. I connected it with today’s Old Testament text with the Israelites in the wilderness longing for a home. In Sue’s song, I also heard echoes of the Samaritan woman and the emptiness she brought to the well that fateful day.
I want to also share with you today a story from a book that reminds me so much of the story of the Samaritan woman. It comes from Ann Lamott’s memoir, Traveling Mercies, from which I once shared her reflections about forgiveness. Today, I want to read to you Ann Lamott’s wonderful story of how she found Jesus. At the time this excerpt takes place, Lamott was living in a small space on a houseboat berthed in Sausalito on San Francisco Bay. She writes: “I did not have a car. I had had a very stern conversation with myself a year before, in which I said that I had to either stop drinking or get rid of the car. This was a no real no-brainer. I got around on foot, and by bus and friend. In the dust of (nearby) Marin City, a wartime settlement outside Sausalito where black shipyard workers lived during World War II, a flea market was held every weekend for years.
If I happened to be there between eleven and one on Sundays, I could hear gospel music coming from a church right across the street. It was called St. Andrew Presbyterian, and it looked homely and impoverished, a ramshackle building with a cross on top, sitting on a small parcel of land with a few skinny pine trees. But the music wafting out was so pretty that I would stop and listen. I knew a lot of the hymns from the times I'd gone to church with my grandparents and from the albums we'd had of spirituals. Finally, I began stopping in at St. Andrew from to time, standing in the doorway to listen to the songs. I couldn't believe how run-down it was, with terrible linoleum that was brown and overshined, and plastic stained-glass windows. But it had a choir of five black women and one rather Amish-looking white man making all that glorious noise, and a congregation of thirty people or so, radiating kindness and warmth. During the time when people hugged and greeted each other, various people would come back to where I stood to shake my hand or try to hug me; I was as frozen and stiff as Richard Nixon. After this, Scripture was read, and then the minister named James Noel who was as tall and handsome as Marvin Gaye would preach, and it would be all about social injustice--and Jesus, which would be enough to send me running back to the sanctuary of the flea market….
I went back to St. Andrew about once a month. No one tried to con me into sitting down or staying. I always left before the sermon. I loved singing, even about Jesus, but I just didn't want to be preached at about him. To me, Jesus made about as much sense as Scientology or dowsing. But the church smelled wonderful, like the air had nourishment in it, or like it was composed of these people's exhalations, of warmth and faith and peace. There were always children running around or being embraced, and a gorgeous stick-thin deaf black girl signing to her mother, hearing the songs and the Scripture through her mother's flashing fingers. The radical old women of the congregation were famous in these parts for having convinced the very conservative national Presbytery to donate ten thousand dollars to the Angela Davis Defense Fund during her trial up at the Civic Center. And every other week they brought huge tubs of great food for the homeless families living at the shelter near the canal to the north, I loved this. But it was the singing that pulled me in and split me wide open.
I could sing better here than I ever had before. As part of these people, even though I stayed in the doorway, I did not recognize my voice or know where it was coming from, but sometimes I felt like I could sing forever.
Eventually, a few months after I started coming, I took a seat in one of the folding chairs, off by myself. Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.
Something inside me that was stiff and rotting would feel soft and tender. Somehow the singing wore down all the boundaries and distinctions that kept me so isolated. Sitting there, standing with them to sing, sometimes so shaky and sick that I felt like I might tip over, I felt bigger than myself, like I was being taken care of, tricked into coming back to life. But I had to leave before the sermon.
Anne Lamott then tells in a rather graphic and very honest way about getting pregnant by someone she had just met, who was married, and no one she "wanted a real life or baby with." She had an abortion. Afterwards, she isolated herself and smoked dope and drank for a week. A week later, drunk and bleeding heavily in the middle of the night, she was able to stop the bleeding. She writes:
I got in bed, shaky and sad and too wild to have another drink or take a sleeping pill. I had a cigarette and turned off the light. After a while, as I lay there, I became aware of someone with me, hunkered down in the corner, and I just assumed it was my father, whose presence I had felt over the years.When I was frightened and alone. The feeling was so strong that I actually turned on the light for a moment to make sure no one was there--of course, there wasn't. But after a while, in the dark again, I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus. I felt him as surely as I feel my dog lying nearby as I write this.
And I was appalled. I thought about my life and my brilliant hilarious progressive friends, I thought about what everyone would think of me if I became a Christian, and it seemed an utterly impossible thing that simply could not be allowed to happen. I turned to the wall and said out loud, “I would rather die.”
I felt him just sitting there on big haunches in the corner of my sleeping loft, watching me with patience and love, and I squinched my eyes shut, but that didn't help because that's not what I was seeing him with.
Finally I fell asleep, and in the morning, he was gone. This experience spooked me badly, but I thought it was just an apparition, born of fear and self-loathing and booze and loss of blood. But then everywhere I went, I had the feeling that a little cat was following me, wanting me to reach down and pick it up, wanting me to open the door and let it in. But I knew what would happen: you let a cat in one time, give it a little milk, and then it stays forever. So I tried to keep one step ahead of it, slamming my houseboat door when I entered or left. And one week later, when I went back to church, I was so hungover that I couldn't stand up for the songs, and this time I stayed for the sermon, which I just thought was so ridiculous, like someone trying to convince me of the existence of extraterrestrials, but the last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape. It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling and it washed over me.
I began to cry and left before the benediction, and I raced home and felt the little cat running along at my heels, and I walked down the dock past dozens of potted flowers, under a sky as blue as one of God's own dreams, and I opened the door to my houseboat, and I stood there a minute, and then I hung my head and said, “F--k it. I quit.” I took a long deep breath and said out loud, All right. You can come in.”
So this was my beautiful moment of conversion.
And here in dust and dirt, 0 here,
The lilies of his love appear.
I started to find these lines of George Herbert's everywhere I turned,--Simone Weil, Malcolm Muggeridge, books of English poetry. Meanwhile, I trooped back and forth through the dust and grime of the flea market every Sunday morning till eleven, when I crossed the street from the market to the church.
I was sitting through the sermon now every week and finding that I could not only bear the Jesus talk but was interested, searching for clues. I was more and more comfortable with the radical message of peace and equality, 'with the God in whom Dr. King believed. I had no big theological thoughts but had discovered that if I said, Hello? to God, I could feel God say, Hello, back. It was like being in a relationship with Casper. Sometimes I wadded up a Kleenex and held it tightly in one fist so that it felt like I was walking hand and hand with him.
Finally, one morning in July of 1986, I woke up so sick and in such despair for the umpteenth day in a row that I knew that I was either going to die or have to quit drinking. I poured a bottle of pinot noir down the sink, and dumped a Nike box full of assorted pills off the side of my houseboat, and entered into recovery with fear and trembling. I was not sure that I could or even wanted to go one day without drinking or pills or cocaine. But it turned out that I could and that a whole lot of people were going to help me, with kind eyes and hot cups of bad coffee…
If I were to give a slide show of the next ten years, it would begin on the day I was baptized, one year after I got sober. I called Reverend Noel at eight that morning and told him that I really didn't think I was ready because I wasn't good enough yet. Also, I was insane. My heart was good, but my insides had gone bad. And he said, “You're putting the cart before the horse. So—honey? Come on down” My family and all my closest friends came to church that day to watch as James dipped his hand into the font, bathed my forehead with cool water, and spoke the words of Langston Hughes:
Gather out of star-dust
Earth-dust
Cloud-dust
Storm-dust
And splinters of hail,
One handful of dream-dust
Not for sale.
In the next slide, two years later, I'm pregnant by a man I was dating, who really didn't want to be a father at the time. I was still poor, but friends and the people at my church convinced me that if I decided to have a child, we would be provided for every step of the way. Pammy really wanted the kid. She had been both trying to conceive and waiting to adopt for years. She said, “Let me put it this way, Annie. We're going to have this baby?”
In the next slide, in August of 1989, my son is born. I named him Sam. He had huge eyes and his father's straight hair. Three months later he was at St. Andrew…
Then there would be thousands of slides of Sam and me at St Andrew. I think we have missed church ten times in twelve years. Sam would be snuggled in people’s arms in the earlier shots, shyly trying to wriggle free of hugs in the later ones. There would be different pastors along the way, none of them exactly right for us until a few years ago when a tall African-American woman named Veronica came to lead us. She has huge gentle doctor hands, with dimples where the knuckles should be, like a baby's fists. She stepped into us, the wonderful old worn pair of pants that is St. Andrew, and they fit. She sings to us sometimes from the pulpit and tells us stories of when she was a child. She told us this story just the other day:
When she was about seven, her best friend got lost one day. The little lost girl ran up and down the streets of the big town where they lived, but she couldn’t find a single landmark. She was very frightened. Finally a policeman stopped to help her. He put her in the passenger seat of his car, and they drove around until she finally saw her church. She pointed it out to the policeman, and then she told him firmly, "You could let me out now. This is my church, and I can always find my way home from here?”
And that is why I have stayed so close to mine--because no matter how bad I am feeling, how lost or lonely or frightened, when I see the faces of the people at my church, and hear their tawny voices, I can always find my way home.
Traveling Mercies (Random House, 1999), pp. 45-48; 50-52; 54-55.
On the cover jacket o the book, Lamott’s Traveling Mercies is described as “an exuberant mix of passion, insight, and humor (that) takes us on a journey though her often troubled past to illuminate her devout but quirky walk of faith (and how) against all odds, she came to believe in God, and then even more miraculously, in herself.” Doesn’t that sound just like the Samaritan woman’s story!
Speaking of which, when the disciples returned that day they were astonished to find Jesus talking to a woman by the well. No doubt they remembered what had happened the last time a man talked to a woman by this well and were appalled. But Jesus did not want a wife; he wanted a witness! And that is just what he got! The woman ran off leaving her water jar behind and told everybody in town, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?”
As I look back at my hometown, I realize that Jesus would have walked right up to the colored water fountain in Grant’s Department store and drank deeply. With his actions and his words, he would have said that segregation was wrong and not what God intended. It took black church leaders to act on behalf of Christ while the white church for the most part did not have the courage to follow Jesus during the Civil Rights Movement. Jesus’ love crosses barriers.
The story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman turns out to be a love story after all, for only one who loves you knows you as you are and not as you pretend to be. Only one who loves you knows your deepest desires. Only one who loves you can look at your past without blinking. …When something terrible in us gets brushed by the love of God, (all we can say is) ‘Thank you.’ We Christians know a lot about real love, not make-believe love, but only because ‘he told me everything I ever did.’” (Richard Lischer; “ Christian Century” February 24, 1999.)
And if this story were not shocking enough already, Jesus does the unimaginable. He accepts an invitation from the Samaritans to come and stay with them in their homes, play with their children, sleep in their homes, eat at their tables, fulfilling the ancient promise of the 23rd Psalm that God is in the business of laying a table for us in the presence of our enemies.
Jesus enjoyed it so much he stayed a second day. Many Samaritans in that city believed in Jesus because of the woman’s testimony and over those two days many others came to believe because they experienced for themselves the transforming power of Jesus’ love. They said to the woman, once ostracized and outcast but now in community, we now see for ourselves what you told us. “We know this is truly the savior of the world.”
I have no doubt that a vibrant church grew up there in Samaria founded by a woman. With her gift of proclamation, she was likely their church leader. That church would have had a spirit much like Ann Lamott’s little church. A place where everyone can be accepted and loved even when they know everything about you, the good and the bad, the pretty and the ugly; a church where you can know and love your bothers and sisters, and be willing to be known and loved by them. Let’s be like that, a church that is the spirit and body of Christ.