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Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent – February 24, 2008
“Glory is that bright tragic thing/that for an instant…warms some poor name that never felt the sun.” Well, you could feel it that day. Instead of the cool concealing darkness of the Jerusalem night like last week, this time the conversation occurs in the blinding, sweltering brightness of the Samaritan day; the sun shining straight above; casting no shadows, offering no hiding places. High noon heat such as only the desert can generate; everyone with any sense is inside, waiting for the air to soften, waiting for the light to fade, waiting, in the case of most of the women, to go to the well to draw water when they will be sure of meeting their friends.
But the one who meets Jesus today – the one who in the dazzling brightness is still able to perceive his glory; the one who, despite the climate, doubted she would ever be warm again - is not most women, just as Jesus is certainly not like most men you would come across at a well – kind of a biblical singles bar. Their meeting, while seemingly a chance encounter, is far from romantic and far from happenstance. There are no chance encounters in John’s Gospel; and the kind of love Jesus gives is unlike any this woman has ever known.
He knew that, of course, even before he got there. That he is sitting by that particular well waiting for that particular person is made clear just before our story begins, when Jesus announces that “He had to go through Samaria.” Just as John likes to preface Jesus’ important remarks with the phrase, “Very truly,” so whenever Jesus is about to make a point of revealingGod’s presence, he drops little clues. Just before the feeding of the five thousand, when Jesus sees the large crowd coming toward him, he asks Philip, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” John comments: “He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do.”
We know what he does; he feeds the hungry mobso abundantly that there are leftovers spilling out of the baskets. John says, “When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, ‘This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.’”
Later, when he is walking with his disciples and they see a man blind from birth, “his disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned…that this man was born blind?’ Jesus answered that ‘…he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day.”
After restoring the former beggar’s sight, a lengthy controversy ensues, ending with Jesus standing before the newly healed man and asking: “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” And the slightly slow witted response: “Who is he, sir?”“Jesus said to him, ‘You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.’ He said, ‘Lord, I believe.’”
It’s daytime in Samaria, a place Jesus had to go through because he knew what he was going to do. He goes for one reason only, to meet with this woman, yes, but more, to be a sign from God; to do the work of God; to be a light that shines so brightly it eclipses the noonday sun; shines so brightly it is seeminglyabsorbed by the woman with whom he sustains the longest recorded conversation he has with anyone in the Bible. A conversation which ends with the woman returning to the city saying, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?”
“Her spirit rose to such a height/ her countenance it did inflate/ Like one that fed on awe.”
Filled with awe, the Samaritan woman, like the blind man, now believes; sort of. As the New Testament scholar Fred Craddock says, “‘A man who told me all I ever did’ is not exactly a recitation of the Apostles Creed.” And she is not totally convinced: “This cannot be the Christ, can it?” is what she literally says. Despite that, it’s a beginning; she believes.
“I never saw a moor/ I never saw the sea/ yet I know how the heather looks/ and what a wave must be. I never spoke with God/nor visited in heaven/ yet certain am I of the spot/ as if the chart were given.”
Despite her uncertainty as to whether she actually spoke with God or not, the woman knew that she had come across on a small spot in Samaria something she had only dreamt about but never dared believe was true: love without condition. She believes; she’s eager to share what she’s found and her witness must be convincing because John says that “Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony.” Unlike Nicodemus, who shows up later in John’s Gospel, this is the last we hear of the Samaritan woman, at least in the Scripture. For those in the communion of the Orthodox Church, though, her story is just beginning.
According to that tradition, this woman became a convert to the Christian faith, taking the name “Photini” at her baptism, literally, “The Enlightened One.” Contributing to the spread of Christianity and occupying an honored place in the Church, she is called “apostle” and “evangelist” and is said to surpass the male apostles and evangelists.
Legend says that she converted the Emperor Nero’s daughter to Christianity and he was so upset by that he condemned Photini to drink poison which, of course, caused no ill effects on her at all. Finally, after subjecting her to much torture, Nero had her thrown into a deep, dry well before burying her alive. (Discipleship was not for the faint hearted back then.) “Photinigrieved that she was alone,” the story goes. “Night and day she prayed for release from this life. One night God appeared to her and the vision filled her with joy. Many days later, Saint Phontini gave her soul into God’s hands.” To this day, a Samaritan woman, whom the Bible gives no name, is venerated by millions of believers.
Not bad for someone whose dubious history and questionable living arrangements – married five times and “the one you have now is not your husband” - combine to make it necessary for her to come to the well at a time when she is least likely to run into her neighbors - who think they know her but in reality judge her - and more likely to run into someone who really does know her and refuses to judge her.
Typically, this woman is viewed as on a par with Mary Magdalene, someone lacking in moral rigor. It’s those five husbands, you know. But, as assorted commentators have pointed out, no woman in that culture could ever have gotten a divorce. If this woman had had five husbands and now had none, it meant that either five husbands had died or five men had married her and then abandoned her. Her problem was loneliness not laxity, grief not guilt. It was to this person – this nobody, really – that Jesus showedan interest and affection she had likely never known before; letting her know that she mattered.
“I’m nobody! Who are you?” wrote Emily Dickinson, the author of these little poems I’ve been sneaking in. “Are you nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us – don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know.”
On the face of it, you wouldn’t think that a 1st Century Samaritan peasant with five husbands and a live in lover and a 19th Century American poet who never married and lived alone would have much in common.
“Sometimes called the “Belle or the nun of Amherst,” Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 into a Massachusetts family of moderate wealth andoverwhelming religious convictions. A rigid Calvinism pervaded her childhood; everywhere she went - home, school and certainly church, she was inundated with the lessonthat human beings are born totally depraved and can only be saved if they undergo a life-altering conversion, surrendering completely to Christ. Not only was this seen as the only path to eternal life, it was also seen as the only path to respectability and public acceptance.
Still, despite the overwhelming social pressure, Emily was the only member of her family who did not experience conversion or join Amherst’s First Congregational Church. At the age of 16, perhaps to encourage her, Emily was placed by her parents at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, now Mount Holyoke College.
According to one of Dickinson’s biographers, the founder of the school publicly “placed each student in one of three categories. Those who had confessed their faith were known as ‘professors of faith.’ Those who seemed close to doing so were known as ‘hopers.’ Those who showed little or no desire to convert were termed ‘no-hopers.’” After one year, Emily Dickinson left Mount Holyoke a ‘no-hoper.’
Yet while her poetry is infused with a sense of solitude and abandonment – “God gave a loaf to every bird, but just a crumb to me” - still her words are not without hope or faith. Neither was her life without friends – and, some say, suitors - that knew her and loved her, despite her reclusive existence. It’s just that her faith would not be contained in approved language or expressed in public displays of piety; her hope would not be forced on her but would grow from within; her friendships and her loves would not be fleeting or superficial. In that she is much like another solitary woman – another ‘no hoper’ - who felt the warmth of God’s glory, whose spirit soared to sacred heights, who found her spot in heaven’s kingdom; a nobody who met somebody who knew everything she had ever done – who saw everything she was - and loved her anyway.
My friends, isn’t that the essence of worship in spirit and in truth? No matter what words are used – ancient creeds, glorious prayers, or sublime poetry - is it not our desire to sit in the presence of the one who, by showing us who we are, shows us who he is – the Messiah - the one who died a nobody and rose to glory that we might know the love of God and become somebody’s?
And is it not also the essence of true worship and true faith to be bearers of that message to the banished – drawing living water for those who thirst, filling with the bread of life those who hunger for more than crumbs; offering long talks and loving companionship to those who yearn for a release from loneliness? If we can do that, we’re not promised sainthood, or literary immortality; what we are promised is a life in which the Spirit of God is poured into our hearts; a life which, when we pour it out for others, is well lived.
St. Phontini had such a life. Each year, on her feast day, February 26, this prayer is offered: “Illumined by the Holy Spirit, all Glorious One, from Christ the Savior you drank the water of salvation. With open hand you give it to those who thirst. Great Martyr Photini, equal to the apostles, pray to Christ for the salvation of our souls.”
Emily Dickinson had one, too. Of her almost 1800 unnamed poems, just about all have the feel of prayer: “If I can stop one heart from breaking/ I shall not live in vain/ If I can ease one life the aching/ or cool one pain/ or help one fainting robin/unto his nest again/ I shall not live in vain.”
That is enlightenment.