2023 03 12 Sermon
Friendship With God
Lent 3 A
John 4:3-42; Romans 5:1-11
Rev. Karl-John N. Stone
I started off that morning carrying a good gallon of water in my backpack but it wasn’t enough. There I was with the Boy Scouts climbing Pikes Peak in Colorado, way above tree line, still a mile’s hike from the summit—meaning at least an hour to go. My water bottle was just about dry. Every part of my body kept saying “turn around and go back down”—except one little part of my brain which still had a small capacity for rational thought in the thin air. And that one little brain cell kept reminding me that the closest water source was at the top, where there was a visitors’ center. So if I wanted to make it back down without getting dehydrated, the best thing was actually to embrace the difficulty and just keep hiking up. When I finally made it, there I was—on top of the world—with a view that stretched hundreds of miles in every direction.
But in that moment none of that mattered. I didn’t care what I was looking at. What did matter? Water. After water? Food. After food? Rest. Luckily, I had friends who had arrive at the top of the mountain before me. They gave me water. They fed me food. They let me rest. Then we took a quick look around, took a couple pictures, filled up our water bottles one more time, and started back down the mountain together.
It was necessary for me to go up even though it was more difficult, before I could make my return journey. As we look at today’s gospel story, we find a similar thing happening. If you remember from last week, Jesus has just met Nicodemus in Jerusalem, and we heard the beloved verse from John 3:16, “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son…” Now in today’s story, Jesus is heading out of Jerusalem, back north to his home base in Galilee. To make this journey, there were different routes he could have taken. The easiest and most common would be to walk through the lush Jordan River valley. Instead, the gospel of John tells us, it was necessary for Jesus to go through Samaria. Rocky, hilly Samaria. This is more than a “throw-away” detail, because of how Samaritans and Jews looked upon each other back then. They couldn’t stand each other. Nowadays, we think about the “Good Samaritan”, who took care of the man beaten by robbers. It’s easy to forget the irony of a Samaritan being a hero. Samaritans were supposed to be the bad guys!
So Jesus (as he would later do in choosing the way of the cross) makes a point of “embracing the difficulty”; of not taking the easy way. He decides that it’s necessary for him to travel through Samaria, so that he could put feet and legs to the truth that God so loves “the world.” God so loves…Samaria, and Samaritans. God so loves this place full of “bad” people like that, whom the disciples wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with. Of course, as far as Samaritans were concerned, the feeling was mutual.
Yet even mutual animosity has a chance to be transcended when our basic humanity is at stake. If you try hard enough, you can perhaps find one good thing about the person who you think is your enemy, and that one good thing can lead to a well of fresh water bubbling up to new life. As it turns out, Samaritans and Jews back in Jesus’ day didn’t hate each other so much that they would deny a cup of cold water to a thirsty traveler who stops to rest by a well under the hot noonday sun.
In the Bible, significant events often happen at water wells. At a well, Rebekah meets Abraham’s servant, who is seeking a wife for Isaac. Rebekah marries Isaac. At a well, Jacob meets his future wife Rachel. At a well, Moses meets his wife-to-be Zipporah. When a Bible story about a well comes along, it’s like the bells start ringing “ding ding ding”—because someone is going to get married. But in this case, things take a turn from expectations. We know that Jesus never married, and we learn from his conversation with the Samaritan woman that she had felt mostly heartbreak from the five times she’s been married. The way things were back then, this poor woman had been through some combination of being widowed and/or divorced by husbands who had been unfaithful to her. Maybe this is why Jesus sought her out in particular—because he knew that she was in need of compassion, and that she needed to experience the love of God in her life.
“God so loved the world that he sent his only Son….” As I mentioned in my sermon last week, the world that God so loved, “the world” as the gospel of John means it, is the place where you experience the pain and brokenness of humanity. And—instead of condemning “the world” for its flaws, difficulties, and imperfections—God loves the world! And Jesus is the sign that God is doing everything possible to bring the good, healing things of heaven into the pain of human existence—including having a conversation with a hurting woman of Samaria, where he offers her “living water”. As it turns out, this encounter changes her life. New life is hers for the taking, because of a God who loves everybody, and who offers divine friendship to this particular Samaritan woman.
This is how she finds salvation—through friendship with Jesus! St. Paul makes the same point in Romans 5: “We can rejoice in our wonderful new relationship with God because our Lord Jesus Christ has made us friends of God!” “Friendship with God”, is how the New Living Translation puts it. Jesus offers us this gift of friendship, as a way to grow in our life of faith. Faith comes through friendship with God.
Faith as “friendship with God” looks like the life-changing encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. When we look at this story, we see that this kind of friendship involves things like: Asking questions of each other with a sense of curiosity instead of judgmentalism. Being honest with each other. Helping each other. Bearing one another’s burdens. Celebrating one another’s joys.
And you can pursue the same kinds of things in developing your own friendship with God. These are the kinds of things you can do anytime, anywhere. As Jesus puts it when talking with the Samaritan woman, it’s not about being in a certain place like Jerusalem or Mt. Gerizim. And for us as Christians, it’s not even about being in a church or holy place. It’s not that these places are without value or unimportant. They have value and importance, but they are not supposed to be ends in themselves. A church building is not an end in itself. But there is always a temptation for us to turn a holy place into a false god; when what a holy place is meant to do is point us beyond itself, point us to the larger community that gathers to be the church; point us to the community that is built up in a place like this. And it’s supposed to point us to the bigger reality of God, in whom we live and move and have our being.
And this God is seeking people who will worship in spirit and in truth. So it’s about developing a certain attitude of heart and soul and mind in the middle of everyday life—in the middle of “the world”—an attitude that looks to Jesus to be our divine friend, wherever we are, in whatever situation, because he is already the Savior of “the world”. And he promises to meet us there. Amen.