In the summer of 2015 Pam and I climbed aboard a charter bus with our Youth Group for a 625 mile trip to Detroit Michigan for the ELCA youth gathering. It felt like a really long trip, that is until we moved to south Florida and had to travel back to North Carolina. We had a great time experiencing all the fun and fellowship that a big event like that has to offer. Watching young people being exposed to new things, realizing they were looking across a river at Canada, finding exciting places to eat, hearing fantastic speakers and exciting music and worship, but right beside all of those things was a different type of growth experience, one of the transformative types that is unsettling. That’s where the connection to the word happened for me this week. After reading the Gospel for today and the first lesson, I started to learn more about them. Here’s a few tidbits and trivia. You know how fairy tales tend to follow a formula? Damsel in distress, some evil person or being, handsome prince type, big rescue, kiss, happily ever after? Well as it turns out Wes Howard-Brook noticed that in the case of Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, or Moses and Zipporah, the dynamics are remarkable similar: A man comes to a well, finds a maiden there, asks her for a drink; they converse; she runs home to tell her people what has happened; they return with her to the well and approve the man; he returns to their home and marries the maiden. And Richard Eslinger added to that list, in every case, the resulting marriage alters the course of history for the covenant people! So here we are with Jesus and a woman by a well! The formula probably would not have been missed by the early audiences of the scripture. This story, two strangers talking, is the longest conversation recorded by John. These events come very shortly after Jesus’ interaction with Nicodemus and the woman is pretty much the mirror opposite of Nicodemus, Jew/Samaritan, Man/Woman, marginalized/insider and leader, dark of night/light of day, she gets it/ he doesn’t, he remains silent/ she tells everybody. A big deal in John’s writing are the Seven I am statements “I am the bread of life, the light of the world, the door, the good shepherd, the resurrection and the life, the way the truth and the life and the true vine. But did you notice that this too is an I am statement and that for some reason it is not counted in the statements. Actually it is the first I am statement and it is not metaphorical like the others. Jesus reveals his identity as the Messiah to a female, non-Jewish, with an interesting marital history and living situation that we are not privy to. Here’s a really cool thing. This was intentional. It was God’s plan. How do we know? There’s a little Greek word that falls right before the reading for today. Why they left this out, I don’t know because its really important. It says, “Now he had to go through Samaria.” Pastor, of course he did, Samaria is in the way of where he wanted to go. True , I would expect that to be the case too, but I found out about this little word ”dei”. That’s the word that gives us the words “had to”. The thing is that that word is used in John to show divine necessity or intent. Another word would have been used otherwise. Also, by the book Jesus should have traveled around Samaria. So God’s plan was for Jesus to be in Samaria. And last little tidbit, by the law, everything about the interaction would have made Jesus unclean, touching her ladle and jar, much less drinking from them. So, all of this information and my thoughts turn to the Detroit bus? Yes, in combination with the first lesson, I saw a study question that asked if I had ever been thirsty. I thought about that long and hard. I thought about the Israelites out in the wilderness and the panic that must have set in and the anger that they felt in their panic and wondered if I had ever been even close to that type of situation. I leaned back in my chair and thought, “I seriously doubt it”, but I gave it a whirl. I thought about weirdness and water coinciding in my life. In just a moment I thought of Jake and Garrett and our trip. It was service project day and we had begun the day standing in a pouring rain for about two hours waiting on the bus to take us to our location. We got to a neighborhood where they where they were trying to get abandoned houses torn down because they were creating a lot of problems. They had very few resources like plywood and the law stated that a house had to be boarded up so many days before it could be demolished. They also had little availability of folks that knew how or were able to do such a thing. I said that I could take two of my guys and that we could get it done because they had some plywood that was pulled off another razed house. See the problem at that time and really continuing on until today is that as the auto industry declined, people fled the Detroit area. The population went from over 2 million down to 600 thousand. Lot’s of abandoned houses and a destroyed tax base. Times are very hard there and the year before the city had started an aggressive water bill non-payment initiative. In 2014 they had cut off the water to 33,000 households. That’s non vacant households and were continuing into 2015. This also coincided with the Flint water crisis just down the road. So surrounding us in the neighborhood we were in were folks with no running water. I had Jake and Garret on the other side of the house getting some measurements and I was trying to get the ladder set to board a window. I stepped on the bottom rung and the legs sunk into the ground, all the way to the rung. Good grief, a couple hours of rain and the ground is really soft here. That’s about when the guys came to me and told me that there was some water in the basement. “Guys, this house is all messed up and it poured down rain, of course there’s water in the basement.” “OK” I’m struggling with this ladder and window and awesome water in the basement of a house that’s going to be torn down! Inexperienced young people! Am I right? I kept working. They reappear shortly. We think you should come check this out. “OK” but a little frustrated with the mess on my side of the house and being interrupted. Little did I know that they had used their time to grill up a whole platter full of crow for me to eat. I followed them and they pointed into the exterior basement door. It was bright outside and dark inside. I didn’t see a problem and almost stepped in. My eyes adjusted. The basement was full of water. It would have been close to over my head. It was good clear water and it was running into the backyard at my feet. I looked back at the guys. “We told you so!” That’s why the ground was so soft. It wasn’t the rain. The backyard was a marsh. The house had been stripped. That means all the copper had been pulled out and the water company that was so protective of its water hadn’t turned off the water, so, free flowing water into a basement… for at least three months we found out. You got a real sense of that thirsty Israelite anger there. Why would anyone mention it, that’s the water companies problem, a big problem. All that real life water, everywhere. There are many stories of life without running water there and making do. A mom that gathers loose change and fills buckets at the car wash so that she and her children can bathe and many other stories. So I had been to the heart of a water crisis, one that still continues. So our feet were wet with water, that if you drank it or bathed in it, you would be thirsty and dirty again. I almost swam in it. In actuality, in reality, it was abundant. With that amount of saturation, I was surprised the house was still standing. On one of our wagon trips down the street to get the used plywood, that’s when the three of us walked through Living Water. A woman was standing in front of her house with tears in her eyes. She approached us and thanked us. I didn’t feel like we were doing anything special. I love doing carpentry. I wasn’t having to shovel trash. The three of us were happy and having a good time. No thanks necessary. She then shared. That was her friend’s house. Someone did a drive-by and she was shot, while pregnant. “They” had come by the next night and tried to burn the house. Her friend had survived but she was gone. The lady was so glad that this reminder of her sadness was going to be gone. She saw no way it was going to get boarded as there were so many other problems in the neighborhood and no resources. She told us that her prayers were being answered. Oh, wow. The real thirst is for living water. The woman at the well was there at midday, that’s not the time that women went to draw water, so she’s an outsider in her own outsider community, probably because something was up with her marital relationships and Jesus sees her, talks to her, knows all about her and even asks to drink after her, a really, really big deal, an embrace in the midst of thirst and aloneness. And she goes and shares it with others. It says in Hebrews, Continue in brotherly love. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it. We had no idea. We weren’t engaging in some lofty, noble pursuit. We were trying to help out. Maybe it’s like that dei greek word with divine agency. I struggled pretty hard with the living water thing and not thirsting anymore, but I think the key is, that where the Spirit is, God makes a way. God sends us. If God’s people care for one another no one will be hungry or thirsty or naked or alone. So, as the people ask Moses in Exodus, “Is the Lord among us or not?” The answer is a definite yes, to overflowing. Sometimes we are just unaware that our mission is to be God’s presence. God’s Work, Our Hands, like the Samaritan women sharing living water
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