Third Sunday in Lent, Year A

Earlier this week, I was reading something written by a mother of a young woman who is in college now. The mother was remembering a time when her daughter, let’s call her Meredith, was in fourth grade, and one day, on the car ride home from school, she complained about this new girl, Bethany, at school who was annoying. When the mother asked her to tell her more, Meredith said she always followed her and her circle of friends around and tried to start conversations.

Bethany’s great offense was that she wanted to be included;
she wanted to belong and be known.

The mother called Bethany’s mother and confirmed what she had heard – her own daughter and her friends hadn’t done anything outright to be mean to Bethany or to hurt her, but they didn’t welcome her either. The mom’s solution was simple enough, but it provoked dramatic angst in Meredith; the mother told her she needed learn three new things about Bethany the next day and be able to share those on the car ride home. Well, Meredith protested and moped and glared but when she came home the next day, she knew three things about Bethany that she hadn’t known the day before. Maybe you can guess how the story ended; soon, the girls were good friends, and when Bethany’s family moved again a few years later, the girls said tearful goodbyes.

The story stayed with me because it illustrates how relationship happens in conversation.

If we never speak to a person, if we never ask them, “Tell me about yourself” or listen to them, we cannot be in relationship.

In today’s gospel, there’s another story about an outsider, and an invitation to be known.

A road weary Jesus has left Jerusalem, the center of power, and is traveling north through Samaria. 

Samaria isn’t actually on the route from Jerusalem to Galilee, and it wasn’t a travel destination; it wasn’t even someplace you might choose if you wanted to go exploring “off the beaten path.” So when the Evangelist writes that Jesus had to pass that way, it wasn’t out of geographical necessity, or compelling curiosity, but because God was up to something.

The evangelist makes sure we know how unusual this scene is when he writes, “Jews use nothing in common with Samaritans.” Their animosity was grounded in six hundred years of feuding. While the Jewish people were descended from the people who had returned to Jerusalem after the exile, Samaritans were descended from the colonial powers who conquered the region and the Israelites who had stayed. This was no playground spat or even a rivalry like we see in these days of March Madness; it was a centuries old division.

Truly, only God knows why Jesus is in this place and with these people when he meets a woman at a well there in the middle of the day.

We don’t know her name, and while you may have heard sermons preached about her immoral past, it is just as likely that she had been abandoned for being barren, or she had been widowed, or both.

Remember the story I began with? Imagine if, instead of asking Bethany about herself, Meredith and her friends had ignored her, or worse, bullied her and teased her. Perhaps, she too, would have chosen to go to a part of the playground where no one was, or eat alone at a lunch table, rather than face rejection or insults again.

This woman that Jesus meets was at the well in the hottest part of the day to fetch water. She was doing what was necessary to survive, but she was also doing what she could to protect herself against the callousness of people.

But Jesus doesn’t ignore her or avoid her. He doesn’t heckle her. He invites her into a conversation.

He knows her and can tell her all she has ever done, but he knows her first as a child of God,
and invites her to see herself as God sees her,
wonderfully made and beloved.

Writing about the Lord’s Prayer in the third part of his catechism, Luther describes how Jesus gives us the words and “invites us into a personal and intimate relationship with God.”[i]

Luther writes, “God wants us to believe that he is truly our Father, and we are truly his children, in order that we may ask [for our every need] boldly and with complete confidence.”[ii]

Prayer, after all is conversation, speaking, and listening, to God. And, as I said at the beginning, relationship happens in conversation.

And the Lord’s Prayer, especially, begins with a reminder that we share something in common, as brothers and sisters in Christ, we all call on God as “our Father.” The shared address also reminds us that we belong to and are responsible for each other, because faith is lived out as we are known in community,
and not as banished outcasts.

As we encounter God in Jesus this Lent, may we remember that God already knows us, sees us, and loves us, and welcomes us into the family of God as beloved children, and may we welcome and love others in the same way.

Let us pray….[iii]
Holy God,
we often allow the divisions in our world and in our families to make us believe that you love us more than others. Purge that lie from our lives.
Send your Spirit to help us to build bridges across the artificial divides which prevent us from seeing your divine image in others.
As we continue this Lenten journey, keep showing up in the Samarias of our lives, in the places where we least expect you, so that we might find your salvation even beyond the ends of the earth.
We pray this all in the name of your Son,
our Lord and Savior Jesus.
Amen.

[i] Book of Faith Lenten Journey 
[ii] “Lord’s Prayer,” Book of Concord.
[iii] Adapted from Faith Lens, http://blogs.elca.org/faithlens/