Pastor Detweiler’s sermon for Feb. 24:

If we trust in God, we can face life - and even despair - with hope

Exodus 17:1-7; John 4:5-42

A few years ago, a youth group met to listen to and talk about their music. One person brought a CD by a rock group named "Crash Test Dummies." (Just the name of the group points toward a despairing attitude toward life!) We listened to a song, "God shuffled his feet," that presents a common modern point of view of God. These are the words - I wish I could play it for you - I like the music too.)

I think that the "Dummies" want to portray God as distant and out of touch, uninterested in us: reasons for despair. But I find a different message: for those who are locked in despair nothing God can do - even throwing a picnic with wine and bread, or sending his son, or seeing him face to face - will be enough. We need human messengers of hope - Christ embodied in people - who will accept us but challenge our despairing and take us by the hand and walk us away from despair and toward the God we know in Jesus.

The Samaritan woman that Jesus met by the well in the middle of the day was someone who had turned toward despair some years before she met Jesus. Since she was not married or living with her parents, she had to support herself. It seems that her means of doing that was via the oldest profession in the world. One preacher (Fred Niedner - Valparaiso) has said that what a woman who went to the well in the middle of the day wanted, you couldn't take home in a bucket.

Women in the Ancient Near East were to go to the well for water only in the early morning or in the evening - and only in groups. Women were not to speak to men who were not their husbands. This woman by the well was breaking a lot of rules (it's no wonder Jesus' disciples were astonished he was speaking to a woman and did not pry into what they were talking about). But then, that the rules had been used against her and she had been cast off five times might have had something to do with her going to the well in the middle of the day.

Women could not divorce husbands, but a husband could divorce his wife. All he had to do was give her a writ of divorce and say three times "I divorce you" in the presence of witnesses. This woman had gone through that five times. We are not told why she was cast off, but it is no wonder she was reluctant to try marriage again.

Notice that Jesus accepts her. He does not either condone or make a big deal of her lifestyle - he lets her know that he knows, but then leads her out of her despair by challenging her assumptions about life. He tells her that a time is coming when the rules of where and how to worship, the rules that have kept her in despair - will not matter. All that will matter is God's own nature - which is spirit and truth - and clinging to him. God can transcend all human categories of gender, race, tradition and place. The fact that this man says these things to her - does not take advantage of her but instead points to hope even for her - is a challenge that moves her away from despair.

Her response is to go into the city and to share her hope with her friends. She creates her own "Bring-a-Friend Sunday" and brings people to Jesus without a rousing statement of faith. She goes with a question: "Could this be the Messiah?" but that was enough. It was the change in her that attracted: the despair had been broken by this Jesus who gave her hope.

In the early church, this text and last week's and next week's gospels, were used to prepare candidates for baptism. The "living water" was taken as a symbol of baptism. What Jesus does for this woman by the well is what he does for us in the well of the font. He takes away the "No outlet" sign over our lives and replaces it with his death and the promise of our resurrection. Because of him we know that we are not trapped, that God is interested in us, spreading a picnic of wine and bread to renew in us what he gives through the living water of baptism: eternal life. Jesus is for this woman by the well and for us the rock from which the water of life gushes as it did for the people of Israel.

Despair has not been part of my make-up, but when my mother was in decline with Alzheimer’s, I struggled with despair. We had been very close: we talked about almost anything - it is from her that I get my directness and willingness to ask or say what no one else wants to, and also a concern for the weak and forgotten. She was slipping away from me; there, but less and less able to communicate. It took me a few years to connect my despair and her decline, but once a friend asked me what my despair looked like and I replied without thinking “My mother in her gerichair.”

What helped me were the Psalms and especially Psalm 130, which begins, “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.” It is the basis of Hymn 295 by the same name, which we sometimes sing on Ash Wednesday. Rabbi Harold Kushner in his book, “Who Needs God?” talks about the Psalms as antidotes to despair. "... when I wonder if God cares about injustice, or hears prayer, or whether good will indeed triumph in the end ... On days like that, I need to turn to the Psalms, not to find answers (I'm not sure their answers are that much better than mine or yours), not to be told what to believe, but to be reminded of what the world looks like when seen through the eyes of a believer" whose faith is tested.

To those, like the psalmists, who have faced despair, "God is no longer the parent who keeps them safe and dry; He is the power that enables them to keep going in a stormy and dangerous world. And like the bone that breaks and heals stronger at the broken place, like the string that is stronger where it broke and was knotted, it is a stronger faith than it was before, because it has learned it will survive" despair. (pp. 40 & 41)

Most of you are acquainted with despair. Some of you have been abandoned by husbands or wives who died or left you. Some of you have despaired for promises never kept and wondered if you could ever trust again. Still others of us have experienced the slow abandonment of parents or spouses, or even children who have slipped away from us emotionally or physically. The savior comes to the despairing to accept, to love and to challenge to believe and trust again. Our baptism assures us that God is faithful and will never abandon us by the well of our despair. (Michael Foss)

He sends us messengers of hope to walk with us out of despair. For those who are locked in despair, nothing God can do - even throwing a picnic with wine and bread, or sending his son, or seeing him face to face - will be enough. We need human messengers of hope who will accept us but challenge our despairing and take us by the hand and walk us away from despair and toward the God we know in Jesus. Jesus did that for this woman by the well. She received the water of life, the treasure of the gospel, the good news we have received and can share. She used that water of life to invite others to “Come and see.”

It is to Jesus Christ, the giver of the water of life that she welcomed people. It is through him that we can face life - and even despair - with hope. God is with us at the foot of the cross, on the apparent dead end street and at the font. With Jesus' life and death he shows he accepts us, loves us, and challenges us to take his outstretched hand and follow him. Then the water of life gushing from the rock and the picnic of wine and bread at his table are dramatic reminders of God's infinite love which conquers our despair and gives us hope in him.