Welcome to the Lightly Salted Podcast.
These are the readings and sermons of St. John's Lutheran Church of Park Rapids, Minnesota.
They are offered so that the Word of God would shape and strengthen you to be what He calls you to be, salt and light.
You can find us at stjohnspr.org.
Now, on to the Word.
Our Old Testament reading for this amazing grace, the woman at the well,
comes from the prophet Isaiah, the 35th chapter.
Those words of promise and invitation that God extends through the prophet.
Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters, and he who has no money, come, buy and eat.
Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Listen diligently to me and eat what is good and delight yourselves in rich food.
Incline your ear and come to me here that your soul may live.
And I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.
This is the Word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Our epistle reading is from the Revelation of St. John, the 7th chapter.
John has a second vision of the glorious throne room.
It's changed a little bit because now it's not just the throne of God, but now there's the lamb who's standing there,
looking as though he had been slain, but is alive forever and ever.
And then he sees something more.
After this, I looked and behold, a great multitude that no one could number from every nation,
from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the lamb,
clothed in white robes with palm branches in their hands and crying out in a loud voice.
Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the lamb.
And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures,
and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God saying,
Amen.
Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever.
Amen.
Then one of the elders addressed me saying,
Who are these clothed in white robes and from where have they come?
I said to him, Sir, you know.
And he said to me, These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation.
They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb.
Therefore they are before the throne of God and serve him in his temple day and night.
And he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence.
They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore.
The sun shall not strike them nor any scorching heat.
For the lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd.
And he will guide them to springs of living water.
And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
This too is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Our Gospel is recorded for us in the Gospel of St. John, the fourth chapter.
It's not going to be the verses that are listed in your service.
Most of John chapter four is about Jesus encounter with the woman at the well.
And you will hear most of almost the entire chapter in the sermon.
So I thought that what I do is sort of that, you know, we'll start at the end
and then we'll go back, you know, a couple hours before and lead into what we hear now.
Many of the Samaritans from the town believed in Jesus because of the woman's testimony.
He told me everything I ever did.
So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them.
And he stayed two days.
And because of his words, many more became believers.
They said to the woman, we no longer believe just because of what you said.
Now we have heard for ourselves and we know that this man really is the savior of the world.
This too is the word of our Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Grace to you in peace from God, our Father and from our Lord and our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Fear, doubt and shame.
They are very powerful emotions that can isolate us and impact our activity and our behaviors.
Freedom from fear and doubt and shame comes from the love, the grace and the forgiveness given to us by the work of Christ.
Consider one particular encounter of that grace for one who was living in fear, in doubt and in shame.
A Samaritan woman who had simply come to draw water from the well.
Now most of the other women would have already come to the well earlier in the day in order to draw water.
But she came at about noon.
She was not expecting to meet anyone.
In fact, she most likely was counting on that.
And that might already be a clue to her shame.
Imagine her awkward surprise to find that somebody is sitting there by the side of the well.
And then to make matters worse, the one sitting there is a man.
Now she doesn't know who this man is, nor does she know that he's tired from a long journey,
nor does she know that his disciples are in town getting food.
She just wasn't expecting an encounter of any kind.
And then complicating this rather awkward situation,
she recognizes that the man is Jewish.
She's a Samaritan.
And to put it bluntly, Jews and Samaritans didn't exactly get along.
There were a lot of prejudices, a lot of divisions, a lot of hostilities.
Not that we would know anything about that.
Because we never encounter prejudices or divisions or hostilities in our own lives, do we?
In fact, we don't encounter them all the time because we tend to avoid those situations.
But what we're going to see is grace.
Grace makes unexpected encounters.
And as if it's not bad enough for this poor woman in this particular setting
to be caught out at noon looking for water, encountering a Jewish male, a stranger,
this man now has the audacity to speak to her and in fact he uses an imperative,
you know, exclamation points at the end.
Give me a drink, he says.
What Jesus does here is a total breach of all social customs.
He should not be seen with the Samaritan woman, let alone speaking with her.
The awkward silence is now broken by an even more awkward request from this unknown man
to a woman who simply wanted to be alone.
But might as talking to her in this very unexpected and awkward moment also be the moment
in which grace is coming to this woman?
Maybe.
She probably didn't see it that way, at least not at first.
In fact, she makes a point of it, putting up barriers that have divided not only genders, but peoples.
But also hiding some of her deeper frustrations and concerns.
How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?
She has a very quick comeback to Jesus and that might put him off a little bit
or maybe get him to offer up an apology.
But Jesus isn't put off and he's certainly not going to leave her alone.
He knows that she already has so much of being alone, that loneliness going on in her life.
And it's not that she's exactly alone in that either.
Loneliness is also a pandemic in our society.
Yet instead he dares to speak to her again to make this a grace moment.
So he explains his intention of grace to her, if you knew the gift of God
and who it was that is saying to you, give me a drink,
you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.
Sir, you have nothing to draw water with and the well is deep.
Where do you get that living water?
Are you greater than our father Jacob?
He gave us the well and drink from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.
Sir, that's a nice and respectful way to address somebody we don't know
and yet we're interacting with them whether we want to or not.
And perhaps this first use of the word sir has pretty much that same connotation.
It's respectful, but it's only so far.
But now the woman does seem to be intrigued maybe.
Jesus mentioned living water.
Where does he get it she wonders?
Where are the flowing streams of water so that she can go and find it for herself whenever she wants?
She'd like to know so that she wouldn't feel so constrained to coming to the well day after day,
always in hiding and instead find these flowing streams.
But Jesus graces her life even further saying,
everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again.
But whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again.
The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.
Sir, give me this water so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.
And there it is again, sir.
But maybe this time she's drawing a little closer and not so cold.
Maybe she's a little more curious about this Jewish man in this odd talking about water that flows and gushes in his eternal.
Maybe she's starting to let down her secret a little bit.
What she does for sure betraying this moment is that she is tired of her mundane daily attempts to keep coming out to the well of Jacob.
But now Jesus will call that out from her.
That's secret.
Not so as to embarrass her or to make her feel any more awkward than she already does,
but to free her, to give her the courage to stand in truth.
And so Jesus says to her, go, call your husband and come back.
I have no husband.
Keep in mind, Jesus pursues this conversation at this point with gentleness
in order to free her from the darker truth that she does not wish to have exposed.
So he makes his next statement to her with the spirit of affirming gentleness.
You are right in saying, I have no husband.
For you have had five husbands, and the one you are now with is not your husband.
What you have said is true.
This is a moment for her freedom.
This is a moment for her freedom from shame and from fear, from hostility and from division.
She doesn't need to be afraid of Jesus' presence.
He knows all about her secret, but he still sees her with grace
and wishes her to be free in that grace.
Jesus accepts her as a woman, as a Samaritan,
as one who has had a number of broken relationships and marriages
and is now living with another man.
And he doesn't look upon her with shame, but with grace.
We have our own deep, buried, dark secrets, the quote-unquote skeletons in the closet.
There are things we're afraid of, the truth disclosing.
Afraid of the criticism, afraid of the judgment,
afraid of being mocked, rejected or scorned by others, so we keep them hidden away.
But even for us, Jesus does not look upon us with shame, but with his grace.
And his grace, it is far superior to all judgments, real or imagined.
In Christ we need not be afraid or ashamed.
Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.
Our fathers worshiped on this mountain,
but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.
Sir, we hear it again.
But I would say we hear it with more passion and closeness.
She's waking to who he might be,
but also at the same time she throws up a challenge for him.
How will you overcome the barriers of hostility and prejudice that have been in place for so long?
How will you overcome the great divides that keep us apart from so many others?
In gender, in race, in values, in politics, in being shunned, being isolated.
The list could go on.
Some we don't even want to discuss openly and candidly because of fear and shame.
But for all of this, Jesus will point to where his journey is leading.
His will be the hour that will bring the reconciliation between us.
And that hour is his own cross,
where all prejudices and hostilities between peoples are put to rest in his body
and his blood shed for us.
Where the path of violence and hostility gives way to the path of peace.
And where the shame of all of our sin is overcome by healing and wholeness.
His hour, his cross will indeed bring this grace to us all.
So Jesus says to the woman,
woman, believe me, the hour is coming and is now here.
When the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.
For the Father is seeking such people to worship him.
God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.
Grace makes for unexpected encounters.
And will continue to make unexpected encounters.
It encounters all of us in our darkness and frees us to the truth
that we really do not need to be living in fear or in alienation from peoples.
That we do not need to be afraid of our own past or the truth of our sins.
Instead, we have been given a new spirit.
We have been brought into the deeper truth of God's grace filled work in Jesus himself.
For the woman at the well, this truth now stands before her.
And she's now just a heartbeat away from her own bold confession of faith.
I know that Messiah, the one who is called Christ is coming.
When he comes, he will tell us all things.
And Jesus says to her,
I who speak to you, am he.
There. That's the climax of the story.
And we sort of expect her to say, Lord, I believe just like the blind man did.
But just then, at that moment, the disciples return.
They see Jesus speaking to her.
Perhaps they like us were just a little bit embarrassed,
still caught up in the old ways of keeping up the walls and barriers and good appearances.
Perhaps it even seemed to them a very awkward moment.
But the Bible tells us none of them were willing to ask, why are you talking to her?
But in that moment, the woman flees the scene.
But she's not running in fear or shame.
She leaves behind her water gyre of the very reason for her coming.
And she is fleeing with the newness of the living waters as running through her veins.
The gift of grace that she's received from Jesus.
For her, it's sort of like Easter morning.
So instead of looking at Jesus and saying, Lord, I believe she's going to run and tell others about her encounter with Jesus.
And she will tell it with the boldness of a new woman with such truth and spirit that makes her shake with the sheer joy of it all.
For she was once afraid and ashamed.
And now is forgiven.
What lies ahead now is a life of living in a newfound grace and freedom.
Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done.
Surely he cannot be the Messiah, can he?
The woman now witnesses to others.
And now this is the first of many such grace encounters.
Others will now come to Jesus and will not miss their own chance of encounter with him in his grace.
And like the woman, they too will let go of all the truth of their old lives of fear and shame and sin.
And embrace instead the boldness of Jesus living waters running through their veins.
There are no more barriers to grace.
Jesus the Christ has come.
He told me everything I have ever done.
So the others of Samaria come to be with Jesus.
And there would be celebrations of grace.
He would spend more time in their presence.
And in the sharing and the gathering of his grace, they would also make their own bold testimonies.
Saying to the woman with gratitude, but also with personal joy in the presence of Jesus.
It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves.
And we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.
And when Jesus would rise from the dead, he would give a singular instruction to his disciples.
That they were to take the message of his amazing grace.
And they were not supposed to proclaim it only in Jerusalem.
But they were supposed to proclaim it in all of Judea.
And not only in Judea, but they were to proclaim it to all of Samaria.
And not just Samaria, but take the message to the very ends of the earth.
So that joy and freedom may abound for all.
Because grace makes unexpected encounters.
Grace breaks down the walls of angers and hostility, sin and death, fear and shame.
And we have been given this gift of living waters of Jesus the Christ, who has overcome our own fear and shame.
Now with the living waters of Christ in our own veins, we are free to go and to make some unexpected encounters of our own.
So that through our own witness, we may also testify to the Savior of the world.
So that others know that they also are free.
Amen.