Sermon for March 8 2026

0:00The Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to St. John. What are you, Lord Christ? So Jesus came to a Samaritan city called Psycar, near the place, near the plot of the ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, and Jesus tired out by his journey with sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, give me a drink. His disciples had gone to the city to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to him, how is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria? But Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans. Jesus answered her, if you knew the gift of God and who it is and is saying to you, give me a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.

1:00The woman said to him, sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flock drank from it? Jesus said to her, everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give them will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life. The woman said to him, sir, give me this water so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water. Jesus said to her, go and call your husband, and then come back. The woman said to him, I have no husband. And Jesus said to her, you are right in saying, I have no husband,

2:01for you have had five husbands. And the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true. The woman said to him, sir, I see that you are a prophet, our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem. And Jesus said to her, woman, believe me, where people, and people said, woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know. We worship what we know for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming and is now here when true when the true worshipers will worship the father in spirit and truth for the father seeks such as these to worship him.

3:06God is spirit and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and truth. The woman said to him, I know that Messiah is coming who is called Christ. When he comes he will proclaim all things to us. Jesus said to her, I am he, the one who is speaking to you. Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking to a woman, but no one said what do you want or why are you speaking with her. Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, come and see the man who told me everything I have ever done. He cannot be the Messiah, can he? They left the city and were on their way to him. Meanwhile, the disciples were urging him, rabbi, eat something, but he said to them, I have food to eat that you do not know about. So the disciples said to one another, surely no one has brought him something

4:07to eat. Jesus said to them, my food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. Do you not say four months more than comes the harvest? But I tell you, look around you and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving the wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life so that the sour and the reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true one so's and another reaps. I send you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored and you have entered into their labor. Many Samaritans from that city believed him because of the woman's testimony. He told me everything I have ever done. So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them and he stayed there two days and many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, it is no longer because of what

5:13you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves and we know that this is truly the savior of the world. The gospel of the Lord. In the name of the one who loves us as we were made, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen, please be seated. Could that gospel lesson be any longer? Oh my gosh, even the acolyte was like, oh, then I couldn't read because I felt like I was on a boat. Oh my gosh, and then my eyes started tweaking anyway. It was, I read it much better at eight o'clock but it felt a lot earlier at eight o'clock. It's like to have that long gospel at daylight savings time. I don't know who made that choice. Anyway, before I begin my sermon, I want to point out that we have replaced the music stand with a pulpit. It's actually lectern but I'm going to call it a pulpit

6:20because this is where I'm standing and I think about, it's not given in memory of anybody specifically but I think about the past preachers who have stood in this place who are no longer with us and just in my time alone, Jim McLeod and Carol Cook, Beth Phillips and Carla Coon. I think those are the four preachers that have passed. Anyway, they're on my heart today. There's a certain kind of exhaustion that comes from trying to manage how the world sees you. And I'm talking about physical tiredness. I'm talking about something deeper than that, right? This tiredness of caring stories about yourself that other people have written for you or the tiredness of navigating spaces where you are never quite sure where you belong

7:24or the tiredness of wondering which parts of your life must be hidden just to make it through the day. When we meet the Samaritan woman at the well, this is the kind of tiredness that she is caring. She comes to the well at noon which is not the normal time to come, right? At noon it's the heat of the day, it's really hot and she's going there at noon and she's pretty sure nobody else is going to be there. In that culture women typically gathered in either the morning or in the evening to go get water and they did it together as a group and they did it when it was cool outside, not when it was high noon because noon in this context is a lonely time. Noon suggests avoidance. Noon hints that this woman has learned how to move through the world by

8:25herself. And she has good reason, right? The text makes clear that her life is not fit. Her life does not fit the tidy expectations of community. She's had five husbands, she's living with a man who not her husband. We don't really know why. There could be lots of reasons and I'm pretty sure that none of them would have been her fault, right? But the gospel doesn't actually tell us the circumstances behind these facts. But we know this, we know that she has been marked and labeled and reduced. We know that society has already decided who she is. And then seemingly out of nowhere Jesus shows up. And right away Jesus just starts breaking down those boundaries. First he said Jews speaking to a Samaritan and that should not happen because the

9:26Jews of the Samaritans are not very friendly with each other. And then also he's a man who's initiating the conversation with a woman in public and a woman who doesn't have her male guardian with her, right? That should not happen. And he's a religious teacher engaging with somebody whose life story would have made most religious leaders just back up and not engage with her. Everything about this encounter goes against expectations. And notice what Jesus does not do, right? Jesus, he does not begin with correction. He does not start giving her some kind of moral instruction about how she should be or live. He does not begin with shame, shaming her. Instead, he begins with his own vulnerability and need. He says to her, give me a drink. He's thirsty.

10:29Give me a drink. Before anything else, Jesus is positioning himself as one who needs something from her. He honors her agency and he treats her as somebody who has something to offer. In a world that has reduced her to a problem to be avoided, Jesus meets her as a person to be engaged. That's the first movement of freedom, I think. Being seen as a person instead of being seen as a problem, right? Freedom often begins when somebody looks at you, really looks at you, right in the eyes, and doesn't flinch and doesn't turn away. I have seen that kind of freedom up close personally in my own life and I bet you have too. Now, I have always been supportive of the LGBTQ community

11:31and their rights. Because I believe with every ounce of my being that God creates each one of us in God's image and God's image echoes love in many forms. Mutual love, self-love, wide and expansive love and where that love is present so is God. But too often, honest and good and holy human beings are expected to conform to what society thinks their identity should be, which is usually pretty narrow. Society wants people to deny large parts of who they understand themselves to be. I have a nephew who is trans and I got his permission before this to include him in this sermon in case you're worried about it. I have a nephew who's trans. He transitioned maybe

12:32about, I don't know, it's like four or five years ago. But let me tell you this, before cadence became cadence, he was desperately unhappy. He was a kid that he never fit, he didn't fit in his body, he didn't fit in his friend groups, he didn't fit in his own perception of himself, and he was struggling, struggling mightily with depression and anxiety and he had no vision for the future. He was the one that we worried most about, right? But then when cadence became cadence, everything changed, everything changed. I'm telling you it's like a miracle. I have rarely seen such transformation. He went from somebody who is living in this kind of deep shadow, sad all the time, to somebody who is confident and ambitious and gentle and loving, he is amazing. He's not the

13:39one we worry about anymore, he's the one we look up to, right? Right now he's a junior at UC Berkeley and he's studying microbiology because eventually he wants to be a medical examiner and I have no doubt that he will get there. Caden found freedom in being exactly who he understands himself to be. That is what happens when a person is finally able to live in the truth of their god-given identity and that is the kind of holy freedom that is unfolding at the well for us this morning. The conversation with Jesus continues and as it does, something remarkable happens. Jesus shows that he knows the Samaritan woman's story, he knows the Samaritan woman's story, not the surface version, right? But the complicated truth, right? She has a complicated line who amongst us does not

14:46have a complicated life. The moment of rejection, which is what she is expecting and anticipating, it never comes. Instead, Jesus names her life without shaming her and he sees her fully without dismissing her and he tells her the truth and he stays with her. This is holy ground, holy ground. So many of us have internalized the opposite story. We have learned from family, from culture, even from church that acceptance is conditional, that belonging comes only after we fix ourselves, that we must become more presentable before we are worthy of this living water that Jesus offers. But in this story, the story between Jesus and the woman at the well, acceptance comes first.

15:46Before her life circumstances change, before her reputation improves, before she feels like she has to prove anything, acceptance comes first. Jesus reveals himself to her clearly and directly, and this doesn't happen often in the Gospels, but it happens here. When she says that she knows the Messiah is coming, what does Jesus respond? He says, I am He. I am He. I think it's one of the most intimate moments of self-revelation in the entire Gospel. And this revelation is given not to the powerful, not to the respectable, instead it's given to a woman who is navigating the margins of her own community, which tells us something about the heart of God. God's grace is not waiting on the other side of our self-improvement. God's grace is not waiting for us to conform to society's

16:52expectations. Instead, God's grace meets us at the well exactly as we are. And then the story turns. The woman who came to the well alone, she leaves her water jar behind and goes back to the very community that she had been avoiding. It's subtle, but it's profound, that jar that she leaves behind, that jar, that's the symbol of her daily burden and she leaves it behind. Something in her has shifted. She's no longer organizing her life around avoidance. She's no longer being defined by the story that others have told her. She's no longer hiding. Instead, she becomes astonishingly the very first evangelist in John's Gospel. She goes back to community and

17:54she says, come and see. She tells others, come and see. The freedom that she receives ends up being the freedom that she shares. And this is the good news for all of us. When Jesus meets us, like truly meets us exactly as we are and where we are and who we are, the goal is not that we just feel personally comforted, though there is that and that's important. But the real goal is to allow that transformation to ripple outwards. When we are freed from the exhausting work of proving our worth, we're trying to be something that we're not pretending as we go day by day. If we are freed from all of that, we suddenly have energy for something else. We have the energy to witness, to connect with others, to have courage and to love.

18:57Many of us are still carrying our jars at noon. Still managing impressions or bracing for rejection that you're sure is going to come. Still wondering whether the truest parts of our story might disqualify us from belonging. But this story at the well, the story of the Samaritan woman, it says otherwise. It says that Christ is already sitting sitting in the heat of day. The Christ is already crossing the boundaries that we think are fixed. Christ is already speaking our name, speaking our name without flinching and without turning away. And when we finally hear, and I mean, finally, really, really hear and know it in our hearts that we are known and still welcome.

19:57And something in us loosens. You can relax a little bit. And then the jar, it gets lighter and the road back to community opens and then living water as Jesus promised begins to flow. Amen.