"In Spirit And Truth"

Sermon Preached By The Rev. Bruce Sanguin
February 24, 2008
John 4: 5-42, Exodus 17: 1-7

The Samaritan woman was no push over. It’s clear from the outset that Jesus will have his hands full. She wastes no time throwing down the gauntlet. “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (John 4:9). She’s not the kind to dilly-dally. You see, Jews didn’t mix with Samaritans. Ethnic memory is long – as we are witnessing in Albania and Serbia today. Seven centuries earlier, Jerusalem Jews were defeated and sent into exile by the Babylonian Empire. Those Jews who lived in Samaria, only 100 or so miles away, never suffered this indignity. Because the holy Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, the Samaritans simply started to worship on their own mountain, whereas prior to the destruction they would have worshiped in Jerusalem.  When the Jews returned from exile to rebuild the Temple, the Samaritans saw no good reason to make the journey to Jerusalem. For this reason, the Jews despised the Samaritans. All of this ethnic and racial history simmers just beneath the surface of this encounter at the well.

On top of this, she was a woman, as the disciples point out to Jesus immediately upon their return from the city on a food-run. The text says that they were “astonished”(4:27). Women and men were forbidden to have contact in this culture. But Jesus was a dweller at the threshold; he lived at the edges of culture, blurring ethnic, racial, and gender boundaries –  creating maps for future generations of followers who lived on the edges of the status quo.

The banter continues. When Jesus claims to have living water to offer her (4:10), she questions his authority. Who does he think he is? Is he greater than their ancestor Jacob? (4:12) This was, after all, Jacob’s well and for centuries it had kept the community alive. Clearly, she is saying that this well, the well of her people, contains living water enough, and given that Jesus has no bucket, he’s out of luck. Then Jesus makes it clear that he’s speaking in metaphor, which she already knows, but thought she’d give him a hard time anyway. He’s talking about the waters of “eternal life”, and she’s more interested than she lets on at first.

We’re all pretty interested at this point in the story. And this is where we need to proceed cautiously. Historically, this story has been interpreted to mean that belief in Jesus as the Messiah confers eternal life upon the believer. You’ll notice that in this passage, Jesus has no qualms about referring to himself as the “gift of God” and later as “the Messiah”. This is a distinctive feature of John’s gospel. Jesus is “out there” promoting himself as the “Light of God”, the “Bread of Life”, the “Waters of Eternal Life”. Jesus is almost brash in his self-promotion in John’s gospel. You won’t find this in the other three accounts of Jesus’ life. We must conclude therefore that this is the writer of the gospel speaking and not Jesus himself.

For subsequent generations of Christians, eternal life has been interpreted to mean that those who believe will live forever and ever. Amen! So, become a Christian, and you’ll have something that the Jews don’t have, and the Samaritans don’t have and the Hindus, and indigenous people, and the Buddhists and the Muslims. You’ll be rewarded for believing with the gift of eternal life, whereas the rest of these unbelievers will have condemned themselves, by not believing, to hell. And truth be told, the writer of John’s gospel, fuelled by the same historical animosity between Jews and Christians, as existed between Jews and Samaritans, slips into this triumphalistic posturing. A progressive, contemporary Christian spirituality refuses to follow this line of thinking. So, the traffic light is yellow. We proceed with caution.

I am going to take the next exchange between Jesus and the Samaritan woman and interpret it through an inclusive, multicultural, interfaith lens. I suspect that I go beyond what the writer of John’s gospel had in mind. But in an evolutionary universe, it is inevitable and desirable that we update our interpretations according to stages of development that were not available 2000 years ago. Revelation – how we understand Spirit – evolves.

The exchange I am most interested in is the challenge that the Samaritan woman puts to Jesus in relation to worshiping God. She notes that the Jews say you must worship in Jerusalem, but her people say that you must worship on the mountain in Samaria. Jesus responds by telling her that the hour is coming when people will worship neither in Jerusalem, nor in Samaria. Worship is not about geographical location, but rather about the state of one’s heart.

“True worshipers”, Jesus states, “worship (God) in spirit and in truth” (v.23). These are the ones “whom God seeks out”. “True worshipers” may be Buddhist, First Nations, Jews, Samaritans, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Wiccan. They may worship in a Temple, a church, a synagogue, a forest, a mountain – or on a walk by the sea, in a park, in a Starbucks having a latte, in the Board Room of a corporation. What matters is what you bring to worship from the inside, not where or with whom you worship.

To worship means to confer worth. It is to sort out what is worthy of one’s heart and soul and mind and to give oneself wholeheartedly to that reality. It is to shape one’s life around that which is true and beautiful and good. Some speak of this reality as a Person – as a divine Father or Mother or Friend. But few mean this in a literal sense. To imagine God in personal terms means that God is certainly not less than what we mean by personal, but is always more – personal plus, as philosopher Ken Wilber puts it. Some speak of this Reality in third person language – as an It, as an energy, a force, a power, a radical interconnectedness. For others, this reality is the deepest part of their own being – the divine spark within each of us. I submit that true worship encompasses all three dimensions. God is the Holy Other who cares for us as loving Father or Mother or Friend; God is the Energy, Power, Source that unites all creation; and God is the deepest part of our own being. To show up Sunday morning is to set aside a couple of hours a week – so that you may confer worth, through music, prayer, reflection and connecting with community, upon what is truly worthy and sacred, the One God in whom we live and move and have our being. And by extension, to withdraw allegiance to that which has claimed all your energy and attention, but is not worthy.

Living in Truth

In order to do this, you must be committed to living in truth. When Jesus invites the Samaritan to go and get her husband, she fesses up that she has no husband. Then Jesus tells her that what she has said is “true”. In fact, she has had five husbands and the man she is currently living with is not her husband. But notice, that he has no interest in judging her morals. What impresses him is that she spoke the truth. It is this that gives her the capacity to truly worship. She is the kind of woman, Jesus says, whom God seeks out. Truth-tellers. Jesus is not concerned whether this woman is morally perfect. But he is concerned whether she has the capacity to be honest with herself and with others.  If she doesn’t have the capacity to be honest, she will not be able to worship in truth.

Most people think that Christianity is all about being good. Many don’t take communion because they don’t feel like they are good enough. Some won’t come to church because they think the church is full of good and moral people and if you aren’t you are not welcome. Others stay away labeling all Christians as hypocrites. They make the association between Christianity and moral perfection in their own mind and then watch for us to slip up – thus proving that we’re no better than they are. But Jesus didn’t say that God seeks out those who are morally perfect. He told the Samaritan woman that God seeks out those who are unflinchingly honest. Are you a drunk, come on in. Are you a cheater? You’re welcome in our midst. Did you hit one of your kids in a fit of rage? Are you hooked on pornography? Welcome, friend. Are you miserable and depressed and all pinched up and sick of your misery and all your complaining? Just be honest, rather than trying to justify your behavior. All the trouble we get ourselves into is usually a sign that we’ve conferred worth upon things that aren’t worthy of our heart and soul.

 Bruce Cockburn wrote in one of his songs, “there are so many ways to hit the ground.” All God cares about is that you hit the ground of radical honesty. Because when you do hit the ground, you’ll discover that it is strong enough to hold you up, because God is the ground of our being. God seeks out those who can be honest, because God can’t enter into a heart in denial. There is no opening. The precondition of true worship is radical honesty before God. God can help you to be a better person, but only if we face the truth about ourselves.

To Worship in Spirit

What does it mean to worship in spirit? At one level it simply means that worshiping is not ultimately about the form. It’s not about doing things in the right order; or saying the right words; or standing up and sitting down at the right times. It doesn’t matter if worship starts at 10 am or 10:30 – although just try and change the time and you’ll find out a thing or two about how attached we are to form. Of course, there is a reason we do things in the order we do them in on Sunday morning. But ultimately it’s what we bring to worship that matters more than how we structure it.

Worship is not about showing up to “get something out of it”. It’s gratifying to me when people tell me that the sermon was meaningful. But I realize that I like the opportunity to preach because it allows me to put out what is inside me out there. It is my way of worshiping in the spirit. I get to reveal to you how Spirit is moving in my life, in my heart, and in my mind. It is a great privilege. But the danger in this is that it can start to seem as though my job is to put out and yours is to take away a little something for the week.

But I want you to arrive full of spirit. I want us all to arrive with the intention of bringing our spirit to the community of faith. Spirit is love and to worship in the spirit is to arrive Sunday morning ready, willing, and able to love. Imagine if we all set our intention to greet every person we met on Sunday in the spirit of love. It’s the work and pleasure of all of us to put out – that is put the spirit of love into our connection with one another, into the songs we sing, into the way we pray together, in the way we connect with one another. In the way we are with one another we get to reveal to each other how the Spirit is alive and active in our lives.

On March 30, Raheel Raza, Muslim author of the bestseller, Their Jihad, Not My Jihad will be worshiping with us. We’ll have readings from the Koran and the Bible; she’ll preach; we’ll sing Muslim and Christian songs. We’ll transcend form and live at the border of religious culture as a sign that we follow the Christ, the boundary crosser. 

We’ll worship in the spirit, offering our love for our Muslim brothers and sisters, and receiving their love. My hunch is that we get a taste of what it is like to worship in spirit and in truth. We’ll discover what Jesus really meant by the living waters of eternal life – not living forever, but rather the timeless experience of living in unity with that which we’ve separated ourselves from. This is one well that will never dry up.