Unravelling Shame

John 4:1-29

October 24, 2021

Emmanuel Baptist Church

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/_THYpJZsfEI

Jesus and the woman at the well. Most of us have heard this story multiple times. It doesn’t make us squirm. We don’t pick up on the cues that would have raised the tension and made first century readers uncomfortable. Let’s see if we can raise the ante on that.

They meet at a well. In fact, it is the well where Jacob met Rachel who would become his wife. Meetings at wells led to marriages between Jacob and Rachel, between Isaac and Rebecca, between Moses and Zipporah. The first readers of John’s gospel knew that pattern. They would wonder if it was about to be repeated.

They are from two different races, male and female. Jews and Samaritans have a history of animosity. Men and women who are not married are not to associate in public. We have heard this before, but I don’t think we feel it like they would have. So, what if we imagine this scene taking place on an elevator? A white woman and a black man, alone on an elevator. Or it could be a black woman and a white man. Neither of them might intend harm to the other, but because of the history of men and women, the history of black and white people, each of them might be suspicious. They might be afraid of each other, afraid of assault, afraid of false accusations. They might be concerned that the other person might be afraid and uncertain how to set them at ease.

If you are one of the people on the elevator, what do you do? Do you initiate conversation or just stand quietly in your corner? Jesus decides to initiate conversation. He asks her for a drink.

Let me digress for just a moment. In the other gospels, at certain points, Jesus sends the disciples out on mission without him. When they go, he tells them not to take provisions or money, but to depend on strangers to receive them and provide for them. In this passage, Jesus models what he taught his disciples to do. He has been walking. It is noon. He is hot and thirsty, but he doesn’t have a bucket to draw water. So he asks the woman for a drink. He puts himself at the mercy of her hospitality.

She went to the well at noon, in the heat of the day. That was not the usual time to fetch water. Women were the primary water fetchers. They still are in many places. They went early, when it was cool. This was the habit of so many women that the well became the place to meet and greet, to catch up on the news and the gossip. But this woman was there at noon, fetching water alone, when none of the others were there. Biblical readers often take that scrap of information along with the tantalizing morsel that she has been married 5 times . . . then we decide we know who this woman is. She is someone we can cluck our tongues and shake our heads at. Or maybe, if we are feeling kind, someone we might pity.

The text doesn’t say that she always gets water at noon. Maybe there’s a reason that she’s there at that time today. Maybe she has company coming and has already used the morning’s water for extra cleaning. Maybe her household water jar sprang a leak. Maybe the job takes less time if she comes when there’s no line. Most of us have been told that she came at noon to avoid the other women because she was an outcast, shunned by the others because of her assumed immoral lifestyle, but the Bible doesn’t say that she does this every day. It doesn’t say that she is shunned.

Biblical interpreters have not been kind to her. The wonderful preacher Fred Craddock said, “Evangelists aplenty have assumed that the brighter her nails, the darker her mascara and the shorter her skirt, the greater the testimony to the power of the converting word. [And] Moralizers . . . have painted her as dangerous: beware her seductive ways, her mincing walk, her eyes waiting in ambush.”[1]

One contemporary Baptist preacher called her “a worldly, sensually-minded, unspiritual harlot from Samaria”[2] He said that “she is spiritually dead from the effects of years of sexual and relational sin” [3] which is a big leap from the meager facts presented in John’s gospel and the way the story ends.

Believing her to be shameful, they have heaped more shame upon her, which is how shame works. Something happens to us or we do something which seems out of boundaries of normal or good, and then those things get stuck onto us as part of our identity from that point forward.

Brene Brown is a sociologist at the University of Houston and a best-selling author. Her work on shame and courage and vulnerability has helped many people. She makes an important distinction between shame and guilt. Guilt, she says, can be helpful. Guilt holds up our behavior against our values and creates psychological discomfort when there’s a gap between them. Guilt recognizes that we did something wrong.

But shame goes deeper than that. Shame, she says, is the intensely painful feeling of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.

“Shame is a focus on self; guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is “I am bad.” Guilt is “I did something bad.” [4]

Guilt says I’m sorry. I made a mistake.

Shame says I’m sorry. I am a mistake.

Do you hear the difference?

Shame is the intensely painful feeling of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.

Traditional interpreters say that the woman at the well is ashamed, that she practices social distancing because she has been told that she is not pure enough, not whole enough, not beautiful or lovable or good enough to be worthy of participating in the community.

Maybe that interpretation is so compelling because we all carry some shame. We all have memories of things we did or failed to do that bring us pain, things we want to bury down deep so that no one else knows or has a chance to judge us for.

Shame is such a powerful force that it functions like a propeller for Lutheran pastor Nadia Boltz-Weber. She says, “I think I am not alone. I mean, the wounded parts of me –whether those wounds were inflicted by the sin of others or by my own sin, are what keep me in motion – because I have to try and make up for them, or try and convince myself and everyone else that they aren’t there, or I have to try and get them healed by the love and attention of other people even though none of that ever works….. but wow, it sure does keep me in motion. I mean, I think that if shame could be bottled as an energy source it could easily replace fossil fuels.”[5]

Now, it is likely that this woman is viewed with suspicion. We don’t know why she has had five husbands. Has she been widowed multiple times? Have some of her husbands divorced her? She didn’t have the legal power to initiate divorce herself. Whatever the details are, they must be painful. And it is certainly possible that other people avoid her because they don’t want to suffer the same pain – as if it is contagious. It is entirely plausible that they hold her responsible for her own misfortunes. Blaming the victim is not a new thing. If she has been treated that way long enough by enough people, she may have internalized a sense of shame and unworthiness. Not necessarily because she is guilty of any wrong-doing, but because shame comes from messages we receive from others.

She may be ashamed, but Jesus is without shame. He is shameless about breaking convention, about ignoring the gender and racial barriers between them. Jesus knows that she has had five husbands, but he doesn’t seem to care why. He makes no moral judgments about her. He never says, “Go and sin no more.” Instead he engages in the conversation that she wants and needs. It is Jesus’ longest-recorded conversation with anyone.

In the blazing noon sun, out in front of everyone, the Jewish rabbi and the Samaritan woman break all the rules. They share a drink from the same dipper and they talk personally, meaningfully about life and faith, relationships and religion. Jesus seems to know her, to accept her without condemnation. He sees her as she really is, everything she has ever done, everything she tried to be, everything she has had to do to survive. He gives her his attention, his insight, his knowledge of himself and of God as if he has all the time in the world and she is worthy of it. Their deep and long conversation is life-changing for her and ultimately, for her village.

James Allison is a Catholic theologian. He describes faith as trusting the totality of our lives to God. When the woman says “He told me everything I’ve ever done,” I think she is conveying that kind of trust. Jesus knows all about her and doesn’t condemn her. James Allison describes that total trust of faith as relaxation. Faith in God is not subscribing to a set of intellectual propositions, he says, but putting faith in God is like relaxing in the presence of someone whom we’re confident is fond of us,[6] someone we don’t have to pretend in front of.

That sounds lovely to me, like a gift of living water. My faith has been shaped more by a focus on the supposed shamefulness of the woman in Samaria than by Jesus’ invitation to relax and enjoy the conversation. I share Nadia’s sense of shame as an energy source to rival fossil fuels, but I am trying to learn how to relax.

In the book The Color Purple, Celie and Shug have a long talk about God. Celie has been abused by life. She tried to be what she was taught was a good Christian for a long time, but now she has given up. Shug asks Celie to describe the God she doesn’t believe in. Celie says “He big and old and tall and grey-bearded and white.”

Shug replies “If you wait to find God in the white folks’ church, that’s the one who is bound to show up. When I found out God was white and a man, I lost interest.”

Shug is the Samaritan woman. She hears a new voice and learns to worship in Spirit and truth. She says, “God love everything you love and a mess of stuff you don’t. Praise God by liking what you like. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see God always trying please us back. Once us feel loved by God, us do the best us can to please God.”[7]

Jesus comes to unravel our shame, to love us as we are without condemnation. When we feel loved by God, when we relax into total trust, we do the best we can to please God. May it be so for you and for me. Amen.

[1] Fred Craddock, “The Witness at the Well”, The Christian Century, March 7, 1990 https://www.religion-online.org/article/the-witness-at-the-well-jn-45-42/

[2] https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/god-seeks-people-to-worship-him-in-spirit-and-truth

[3] https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/the-tragic-cost-of-her-cavernous-thirst

[4] Brene Brown, TED Talk: Listening to Shame March 16, 2012, https://youtu.be/psN1DORYYV0

[5] https://thecorners.substack.com/p/if-shame-could-be-bottled-as-an-energy

[6] https://www.christiancentury.org/article/editorpublisher/faith-gift-relax

[7] Alice Walker, The Color Purple, (New York: Pocket, 1982), pp 199-204