Cornerstone Mission Church, Sunday Sermon February 8, 2009
This week, I picked up a book titled “Growing Healthy Asian American Churches.” I want to quote from this book for you. It says,
congregations grow most optimally when their explicit (theology, that is proclaimed faith) and implicit theologies (practiced faith) are congruent with one another and thus reinforce one another[1]… when our congregations’ belief and actions mirror one another, when our churches are orthodox and engage in orthopraxis, our churches will continue to grow as healthy households of God.[2]
Along with this book, I just finished reading, “The Emotionally Health Church.” And, here is a quote from the book about the author’s reflection from the movie, “The Apostle” by Robert Duvall. He plays Sonny, a preacher, an evangelist from his boyhood, but terribly marred by his temper, lust, addiction to alcohol, and in rage he killed a man with a baseball.
Sonny, like most of us, is a complex individual. He is a zealous committed Christians whom we admire, and yet he is also terribly inconsistent. Most painful, perhaps, is his lack of awareness of the harm that will come from appearing more than he really is. In some ways he is an imposter. He easily compartmentalizes his faith and spirituality from the totally of his humanity.
Does believing about the right stuffs, orthodox, explicit theology, proclaimed truths get readily translated into the right living, orthopraxis, practiced faith? What we believe and how we live our lives… are they congruent, or is there a gaping disconnection between them? I’ve been doing quite of soul searching lately. This gaping disconnection between what we know as truth and living out this truth, Jesus calls it hypocrisy. When hypocrisy rules, we measure the spirituality with the yard stick of whether we’ve done our quite time, whether we prayed, whether we attend serviced, whether we abstained from the obvious moral failings. We neglect the whole vast domain on how we treat each other, strangers, the poor, the people who are different. When hypocrisy rules, we don’t want to deal with the angry heart that resents, attacks, lying heart that betrays trusts, lusts that erodes purity, the numbed emotions that only gets excited over entertainments. When the gaping disconnection takes place between what we believe and how we live, we would become “disturbed by the thought of an alcoholic, adulterer or exconvict sitting in the pew next to them in Sunday’s worship service,” to quote from Nancy Sguikawa and Steve Wong.[3]
I am asking myself, if God is truly awesome in his incomprehensible love for us in his Son, why isn’t there growing affection for God, why are we not getting restless in growing excitement for him, why are we not zealous and passionate, why are we not jumping up and down and dance like David when the Ark of God returned?
I am convinced that unless I attack this gaping disconnection of head and heart, orthodox and orthopraxis, proclaiming truth and living out truth, we as church will grow dead, we as individual may be nice, but become cynical hypocrites who are no good for the kingdom of God.
So, I’ve been looking for the truth that will help me draw this gaping disconnection of hypocrisy. And the Lord led me to today’s passage. The remedy for hypocrisy, the gaping disconnection of head and heart is to fight for change in grace.
1. Fight for change in grace of Jesus who connects with you.
Imagine sitting next to you now is an alcoholic, sexual addicts, homosexual person, filthy and dirty homeless guy smelling like urine, and imagine your unspoken reactions. In many ways, this is how the Jews felt towards Samaritans.
John 4:9, the Samaritan woman speaks to Jesus about this disparity, distance, disconnection, even hatred, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans)”. Let me speak to the historical background that might help you see this disconnection.
Samaritans were not pure Jews. After the northern kingdom of Israel were conquered & exiled by Assyrians in 722 B.C., Assyrians repopulated the Samaria from all different places. So, purity of Jews ceased to exist, instead Samaritans were the Jewish remnants mixed with Persians and other conquered peoples. By adopting relationships with non-Jews, Samaria also adopted the many practices of paganism. Eventually, Judaism won over the paganistic beliefs and practices, but severely affected their belief system.
Samarians rejected all scripture except Pentateuch that is the first five books of the Old Testament because other books emphasized Judaism centered on Judea and David’s line. Samaritans rejected the worship in Jerusalem, but instead created their own center of worship on Mount Gerizim. By Jesus’ day, a smoldering tension existed between the regions of Judea and Samaria for racial and religious and even political reasons.[4] “Samaritan woman” represented this off shoot of Judaism, hostile to the Jews; Jews too found the Samaritans as appalling moral failures to be shunned away.
And, add to this the culture of Jesus time when it was not common at all for men to speak to women in public, even if they were married, and the absolute taboo for single men to speak to or touch women at any time.[5] What you have is a shocking account of Jesus, a Jew, talking with a Samaritan woman.
This is why John 4:27 says that when the disciples returned, they were surprised to find him talking with a woman.
John 4:6, “Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour,” that is noon. We see a glimpse of Jesus’ humanity here. He got tired just like we get tired. In his humanity seeking for rest from his tiredness turned into the divine moment. He crossed the cultural, religious, political, emotional barbed wires to engage the Samaritan woman, unthinkable to human eyes, but it just the sort of thing Jesus did all the time.
“Will you give me a drink?” Jesus asked in John 4:7. He was countercultural and reached out to the Samaritan woman; and he did it by asking for her help. This is how Jesus began reaching out to the untouchable, through his humility of acknowledging his human need as the Son of God.
This is how Jesus connected in grace counterculturally and humbly!
2. Fight for change in grace of Jesus who gives you the living water.
The Samaritan woman knew all the locations for every water source around Shechem, but here was Jesus talking about “living water.” John 4:10, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” Living water is water that is kept fresh through constant streams of flowing like a spring or river. The Samaritan woman knew that in Shechem there was no fresh living water source with steady streams. That is why going way back even Jacob had to dug well for water (John 4:12).
But, we know that Jesus wasn’t talking about physical living water, but spiritual living water.
Concerning this living water Jesus said in John 4:13-14, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirst again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
What Jesus said about him being the source of this living water is reflected in what God said about himself in Jeremiah 2:13 says, “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”
The living water is offered to all who are thirsty and it was already envisioned in older days of Isaiah. Isaiah 55:1 says, “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the water.” And, Zechariah 14:8, “On that day living water will flow from Jerusalem, half to the eastern sea and half to the western sea, in summer and in winter.”
Jesus picks up the theme of living water again in John 7:37-39, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believed in me, as the Scripture had said, streams of living water will flow from within him. By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive.”
It is this constant flow of living water, the Holy Spirit from Jesus, his grace overflowing, the key remedy for the disease of the gaping disconnection of the head and the heart.
3. Fight for change in grace of Jesus who overcomes your shame and isolation.
When the Samaritan woman asked Jesus in John 4:15, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water”, we see that she was thinking literally physical water.
It is interesting that instead of answering her directly that she was mistaking spiritual living water with temporal physical water, he told her to bring her husband. What may have been a benign request since it was a common understanding for a woman to talk with a man only with her husband present, now became a moral probing over her life that has been crippling her with deep spiritual shame and social isolation.
She drew water at noon which was far from the ideal time; early morning or at dusk was when the women came to the well to avoid the Mediterranean heat. In John 4:18, we see Jesus revealing why this woman isolated herself. She was socially stigmatized as morally loosed woman; she had five husbands and the one she was with currently was not even her husband. Ill-informed theology, her immoral lifestyle disconnected from her knowledge of what was right from wrong, her misplaced hope in men… she tried very hard to hold on to these false securities. But, Jesus kindly but firmly dealt with her sins.
But, the heat was too much. The Samaritan woman did what any of us would have done if someone were to encroach into our personal space and yet we don’t want to completely close the door on conversing with this person. Her strategy was to take the focus off herself, and to talk about something else. In her case, she deflected the focus from the reality of her shame filled life of sexual promiscuity and isolation to an impersonal and lofty theological controversy of her days.
John 4:20, the woman deflected Jesus’ omniscient probing eyes; “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.” The Samaritans argued for the superiority of worship in Shechem rather than in Jerusalem because they rejected all the books of the Old Testament except the first five books. According to Genesis 12:6-7, it was at the site of great tree of Moreh at Shechem, the LORD appeared to Abram and said, ‘To your offspring I will give this land.’ So he built an altar there to the LORD, who had appeared to him.” And, by rejecting the rest of the Old Testament that speaks to God’s choice of Jerusalem for worship and the line of David to rule, the Samaritans legitimized their false worship.
Jesus refuted them by affirming the inadequacy of Samaritan worship in Mount Gerizim because salvation is from the Jews (John 4:22). But, to Jesus this argument over where God should be worshiped either in Jerusalem or in Schechem was irrelevant because worship was no longer restricted to certain places; instead worship was to take place in one’s relationship to Jesus. John 4:23, Jesus said, “Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks.” The time Jesus referred here is the time of his crucifixion and his resurrection from the dead. His sacrificial death and his rising from the dead was the key pivotal moment in the history where we now get to worship God in Jesus and through the enabling power of the Spirit regardless where we may live.
So, the notion that we only worship on Sunday right now here in the church is misnomer. You are called not only to acknowledge God’s loving rule over you with his Almighty power in this given moment, but in 24/7 anytime, anywhere. This is why we must attack the hypocrisy of reducing worship to the domain of Sunday worship services. It also means we can fight for grace of Jesus who overcomes our shame and isolation without limitation.
The Samaritan woman didn’t grasp the truth about Jesus. So, she tried to deflect him. She said in John 4:25, “I know that Messiah… is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.” Essentially she was saying to him, “Well, you have very good points, but really the Messiah will decide on who’s right about this.”
The Samaritan woman tried very hard to deflect Jesus from seeing her shame and isolation. But, Jesus already knew. The fact was that he knew her better than she knew herself. Jesus shined his light on her but in shame she sought to isolate herself from him. But, Jesus didn’t pull back. He didn’t give up because he knew that what she really needed was his grace to break her from shame and isolation. So, he declared to her, “I who speak to you am he.”
To a woman who lived with deep shame and lonely isolation, Jesus offered to her his grace to overcome her shame and the power of isolation.
4. Fight for change in grace of Jesus who gives you testimony.
John 4:28 says, “Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, ‘Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ? They came out of the town and made their way toward him.”
She was touched by Jesus. Jesus helped her to move from seeing Jesus as an ordinary Jewish man, countercultural, possessor and dispenser of eternal life, the Messiah. And in Lean Morris’s word, “She abandoned the bringing of water for the bringing of men.”
She went from a woman who lived in isolation poisoned by in shame and guilt to a woman who now invites others to discover the Messiah who knows her so completely. She went from a woman in deep shame who picked the hottest noon time to draw water to isolate herself from the judging eyes to a woman who now was zealous to tell others about the person she met at the well; she met the Messiah who knew everything about her, yet didn’t distance himself, instead drew near to her. Shame and isolation no longer defined her; she was now a transformed, changed woman in grace of Jesus Christ.
This narrative about Jesus and the Samaritan woman is interrupted by the disciples who returned. Jesus told them in John 4:35, “open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest.” As Jesus was speaking about the plants ready to be harvested at any moment, the Samaritan woman was leading the crowd to Jesus. They were making their way to Jesus because of the testimony of this woman.
What was the effect of her testimony? John 4:38 shows the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” Their faith journey did not stopped here. They believed in Jesus because of her testimony, but later they said to the woman in John 4:42, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.”
When a person is gripped by grace, giving testimony isn’t done out of obligation, but out of living relationship. In that living with relationship with Jesus, he gives us testimony about him.
Conclusion
Do you have a testimony of what Jesus is doing in your life? Is your gap of disconnection being narrowed? Is Jesus changing you? Let’s fight for change by staying in grace of our Lord Jesus.
[1] Peter Cha, S. Steve Kang & Helen Lee, ed., Growing Healthy Asian American Churches. IVP, 2006, p. 13.
[2] Ibid., p. 14.
[3] Ibid., p. 30.
[4] Burge, Gary M. “Jesus and the Samaritan Woman (4:1 – 26)” In NIV Application Commentary, New Testament: John. By Gary M. Burge, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000. p. 141.
[5] Ibid., p. 142
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