John 4:1-15
Many of us live with regrets: choices we’ve made or decisions we’ve tried to avoid; times when we should have done better; life-transitions when we failed to show the best that’s inside of us.
Regrets are a natural and essential part of growing. That’s our conscience guiding us to a better way. When we know we’ve made a mistake or acted out in morally wrong ways, it’s good to feel bad (or badly).
But sometimes our regrets get us stuck and become a burden that grows over time. We may feel we’ve been unfairly singled out for suffering. We may cry out in our pain. In times of loss or loneliness, grief or tragedy, we pour out our anguish in a lament – a cry of grief that comes straight from the heart.
Our holy writings are filled with these lamentations – not just in the Old Testament book of that name but woven throughout. At the core of any lament is that age-old question: is the Lord with me or not? In pain and loss and sorrow, is God here? Does God care?
These questions are central in the book of Exodus, including today’s lesson that comes maybe half way between the flight from Egypt and the arrival in the Promised Land. The children of Israel were deep in the Sinai peninsula in the wilderness called Sin. They certainly weren’t cut out to be desert dwellers or wandering nomads. They’d endured the harsh reality of slavery in Egypt but there, at least, they knew they’d have the necessities.
Now they were in the middle of nowhere following a leader who claimed to be following God. They had no water and no shelter. So they grumbled, murmured, complained. Their common lament was this: “Moses — why did you bring us out of Egypt; to kill us with thirst?” As always, Moses turned to God and God told Moses what to do. The people got their water, and forever after that place has been called Massah and Miribah – Hebrew words which mean “to test,” and “to complain.”
Even in their testing and complaining God knew them. And God knew they were thirsty. Long before their laments, God knew their need. God was on their side and would never let the chosen people die in the wilderness. They didn’t fully trust that. So they lamented – nostalgically remembering the days of slavery.
A critical truth is that God has never promised to give us precisely what we want. God has promised to give us what we need. In my mind that’s the hardest part of faith – trusting God so completely that even when we don’t get what we want, we believe what we get is really what we need.
So we lament – we relive the past as though we could rewrite it; we hold on to old slights and wounds and sins, imagining a different outcome.
Like the Israelites we translate our hard times and wilderness experiences into the same question they asked: “Is the Lord with us or not?” The people push, pull, murmur and argue with Yahweh. {The very name “Israel,” in Hebrew means “to wrestle with God,” coming from Jacob’s famous contest}. Time and again the people murmured and made their complaints. Time and again God gave them what they needed. Was that because they complained? No! It was because God had made them and God kept the covenant.
Our murmurs and lamentations don’t change the heart of a distant deity. God is already close and engaged. For then, as now: God knows us. God loves us. God promises us. God provides for us.
We may not be very good at seeing this truth that’s right in front of us. In the same way we can see the face of God in others. In Exodus, it was Moses. In the New Testament it was Jesus. I read a daily devotional this past week that wisely said:
I can’t take a good hard look at God, but I can take a good hard look at Jesus. The question of the historical accuracy of the gospels misses the point. These are testimonies to Jesus’ impact, not scholarly records. Just as my way of speaking is not yours, Mark’s is not John’s. Moved by the same spirit, we respond differently.
What we’re given to respond to is a strong sense that God is personally involved with us. The divine is human. The ultimate is intimate. What matters most is right at hand. Jesus discloses and embodies this in all he said and did.
Eleanor Roosevelt told of taking a taxi cab shortly after her husband’s death. The driver said to her, “I didn’t know Franklin Roosevelt, but he knew me.” That is how Jesus’ followers today feel about him… I didn’t know Jesus, but Jesus knows me — and shows me that God is with us, too, wherever we are.
Reflection by William C. Green, at StillSpeaking Devotional:
http://act.ucc.org/site/MessageViewer?em_id=32622.0&dlv_id=38202
“I didn’t know Jesus but Jesus knows me…” There’s no better example than our lesson from the Gospel of John. Jesus and his disciples were going from Jerusalem back home to the Galilee, taking the direct route right through the middle of Samaritan country. The Samaritans were first cousins to the Jews, but they had parted ways in the 8th century before the Christian era, during the occupation by the Assyrians. Matters got worse in the second century BCE because the Samaritans believed they could worship God from a local mountain without making the trip to Jerusalem to the temple on Mount Zion.
So most Jews avoided the region of Samaria all together. Not Jesus. He was heading home and he came to a well and stopped for a drink. There he met the enemy – nameless, female, Samaritan. Three strikes. Immediately Jesus modeled a barrier-breaking relationship. He was both direct and compassionate. Their regard for each other was mutual.
She acknowledged that she didn’t have a husband. Then suddenly he showed his extraordinary knowledge of her: “Not only do you not have a husband; you’ve had five husbands and you’re not married to the man you’re now living with.” {I’m thinking here of Elizabeth Taylor who died this past week, who remarked on the eve of her 8th marriage that it was the triumph of hope over experience!} She knew instantly that he was a prophet. If he knew this, what else did he know about her? Now she was really listening. And then she realized that he was talking about her real thirst, her real spiritual dryness, her real lamentations. He saw her in all her vulnerability but didn’t judge or reject her. He embodied God’s love for her in a way she’d never experienced before.
Now you and I are certainly not Jesus, but we’ve seen God’s loving welcome through him. When God acts for us it’s most often through the hearts and hands of another – a doctor, a teacher, a spouse, a spiritual friend, a sister or brother, a neighbor, a loving stranger. Any who acts with compassion and faith, self-consciously doing what Jesus would do, is engaged in ministry and embodies the love of God.
So I ask: who is there for you in your lamentation? Is there anyone who will sit with you, listen to you, help you get unstuck? If there’s no one open your heart and draw the circle large. Is there someone already in your life through whom God can quench your thirst and feed your hunger and ease your laments? If no one comes to mind don’t despair for God knows your need. Share it with another.
Second: is there someone you know who’s hungry and thirsty and lonely, for whom you can be the avenue by which God can move in and meet that need? This may be an unfamiliar – even uncomfortable – question. But draw the circle large. Is there someone already in your life for whom you can embody the love of God through patient caring and listening?
When we’re wandering in the wilderness it’s hard to remember, hard to believe that God knows us, God cares for us, God promises us, and God provides for us. But life and scripture are filled with ample evidence of this Good News.
All this is possible because God places us in community – side by side with others who laugh and weep together, sharing the joy and sharing the load.
And God calls us to ministry – to be the heart and hands of a loving Lord who has come as the loving Christ.