Holy Conversations
John 4:7-26
June 5, 2022
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Our Jewish siblings are celebrating Shavuot this weekend. In ancient Israel, Shavuot happened at the time of the wheat harvest. It was also called the Feast of Weeks, because it fell 7 weeks after Passover. Seven weeks is approximately 50 days. The Greek word for fifty is Pentecost. The Jewish and Christian calendars operate separately nowadays, but sometimes, our holidays still align. In 2022, Easter and Passover fell together, which is why Shavuot and Pentecost both fall on this weekend.
On that day in Jerusalem, fifty days after Jesus’ death and resurrection, there was a festival going on. That festival already had a name in Greek and in Hebrew, but the Greek name, Pentecost, has become associated with the Christian festival from that day forward.
Something happened on that Pentecost. Something unexpected and highly unusual. Something hard to describe. Acts 2 tells us that some people experienced it like wind. They felt the force of a violent wind, maybe like a hurricane. Maybe it sounded like a freight train, as people often report the sound of a tornado. Some people experienced it like fire – the raw power of flame which danced in the air, hot and colorful, but somehow without consuming any thing. Other people described it as words and language coming through something like a universal translator. A few weeks ago, I attended a Zoom meeting with translation. My language setting was on English. When the speaker lapsed into Spanish, I could faintly hear them and I could see their lips moving, but in my ear, I heard the voice of the translator, speaking their words into English. I wonder if it was like that for those people in Jerusalem.
There was a powerful event on Pentecost. The event felt like wind. It felt like fire. It felt like a message you received in your birth language. The event was visceral. It was hard to describe. And then there was the interpretation of the event. The event happened. And then Peter stood up to explain it. There was an event and then interpretation.
I want to suggest today that that sequence is repeated over and over again in our lives. Something happens and then we interpret it. Something happens and then we talk about it, we name it, we tell a story about it. It is how we do life with God. It is how we do life in general.
Something happened one day at a well in Sychar. Jesus was thirsty, so he asked a Samaritan woman for water from the well. That was the event. It was an event because Jews and Samaritans had separate drinking fountains. They had separate places of worship and separate Bibles. They stayed as far apart from each other as they could. Jesus didn’t stay in his place. If he had travelled the roads his people usually did, he wouldn’t have gone through Samaria in the first place. Then he wouldn’t have been thirsty at the well in Sychar and wouldn’t have asked this woman for a drink. That’s why it was an event.
The woman knows it is an event and she immediately tries to interpret it. “How come you are asking me for a drink?” she says. She is suspicious, trying to figure out his angle. She is wondering how dangerous he is and looking for her safest way to exit.
Jesus asks her for water. He deliberately breaks all the rules about social engagement. Because he does that, they have the longest recorded conversation in the New Testament. Jesus talked to her, this unnamed woman, longer than anyone else in all of the Gospels. She is a triple outsider.[1] She is a Samaritan, an identified religious enemy. She is a woman. Men and women who were unrelated kept their distance from each other in public. There is something unusual about her marital history which also makes her suspect, outside the lines of respectability.
Today we might use the word intersectionality to describe the overlapping identities which shape her life experiences. Her relative lack of power in the world is limited by her gender and her race and her marital status. All of that is implicitly and explicitly part of the long conversation which she has with Jesus.
This is an important conversation, a hard conversation. They talk for a long time about deeply personal stuff and about very controversial stuff.
Jesus starts it, by asking her for water. Think of the stories you’ve heard – about black people in this country being punished by daring to drink from white only water fountains, about farm workers in hot fields not able to share canteens or water bottles because of the fear of contamination by members of other races. Jesus’ request is an event. It ups the ante of tension between them.
But Jesus doesn’t stop there. He brings up the issue of her husband. It is a sore subject. She isn’t married right now, but she has had five husbands. She probably had very little choice about that. However it happened, it would have been the decision of the men in her life. So even though the marriages are something that happened to her, she is somehow responsible for having had so many. It becomes a reflection on her morality, a classic example of blaming the victim. It isn’t polite of Jesus to bring that up.
Maybe she is trying to turn the tables when she raises the question about where to worship. She mentions that her people and Jesus’ people worship in two different places. This is a controversial thing. What they both know is that the Samaritan temple on Mt. Gerazim had been destroyed by Jewish troops about 150 years before this conversation. Jesus will have been taught one version of that history. The woman will know her people’s version. It is an ugly and uncomfortable history. She doesn’t avoid it out of politeness. She brings it into the conversation, puts it on the table.
James Baldwin was a black, gay man, an author and activist of the last century. He was a truth teller, one who brought uncomfortable issues into conversations about politics and history. In 1968, he testified before a US House subcommittee on Negro History and Culture. He said, “If we are going to build a multiracial society, which is our only hope, then one has got to accept that I have learned a lot from you and a lot of it is bitter, but you have a lot to learn from me and a lot of that will be bitter. That bitterness is our only hope. That is the only way we get past it.”[2]
Two people meet at a well. One is male and Jewish. He has an entourage, people who look to him for leadership. The other is female and Samaritan. She is alone and marginalized in multiple ways. Across those differences, despite those differences, they have a conversation.
They have a conversation which begins with vulnerability. Jesus is thirsty. She is alone and unprotected. Each of them takes a risk. In this conversation, they speak, they reveal themselves and yet they also listen. They attend to what is not said – the shared history that unites and separates them, their own individual circumstances, the personal choices which led the woman to the well at noon and Jesus to be in Samaria. They give the conversation the time that it takes. They stay present and authentic to each other. They share some bitterness.
This is a Pentecostal moment. Something happens, like the rush of wind or the dance of fire which is hard to describe, but is full of power. This is the kind of Pentecostal moment which we desperately need to overcome and transform the detachment and distance and enmities which pervade our lives. What comes out of this conversation is transformation – for the woman and then for her village, and probably for Jesus too.
Holy conversations take time and energy. They require attention to the events of history and personal circumstance and the ways that we interpret them. They require vulnerability and listening for differences in our shared history and continuing to listen when it is controversial or painful or offensive.
Friends, these conversations are hard work. They don’t usually happen spontaneously. We make them happen, by going out of our way to be in the neighborhood, by asking for a cup of water, by showing up with vulnerability and courage.
I invite you to be alert for the opportunities to have these kinds of conversations. The Thrive team tries to provide some of them as we grapple with books and movies on the shared history of racism. The Exec Team will be calling us to conversations in the fall about who Emmanuel has been and is now and how God is shaping and transforming us. I hope you will engage in those.
And I hope that you will find other opportunities for deep and careful conversations with friends or family or neighbors or strangers. Keep on listening. Keep on telling your truth in love. And may the Spirit arrive in those conversations with transformational power. Amen.
[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, “Living By the Word: Identity Confirmation John 4:5-42,” The Christian Century February 12, 2008 https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2008-02/identity-confirmation