Worshippers Who Witness
Lent 3 - March 23, 2014
Watch & listen to this sermon here.
I imagine that many of you are familiar with the song, “If We Are the Body,” by Casting Crowns. But in case you’re not, or you need a refresher because your coffee hasn’t had a chance to kick in quite yet, the verses describe first a girl coming into worship, trying to avoid attention, trying to melt into the crowd, hearing the other girls laugh at her behind her back, and then a man, a traveler far from home who also seeks to be invisible, only to meet the judgmental stares of the people around him, letting him know he’s really not welcome, that he’d have been better just staying out on the road. And then the chorus asks these questions:
[But] if we are the body, why aren’t his arms reaching?
Why aren’t his hands healing?
Why aren’t his words teaching?
And if we are the body, why aren’t his feet going?
Why is his love not showing them there is a way?
There is a way…
Now, I don’t know how you hear these words, but whenever I hear them or sing them in worship, I take them as a call for me to stop judging people based only on what I can see on the surface, as a call for us as the church, as the Body of Christ, to be open and welcoming and seeking to live out the love of Jesus, that we would go past all of the boundaries we set up between us and others, reaching out for a hurting world. And obviously, that’s a worthwhile goal. It’s certainly something we should strive for.
But I was wondering this week about those times when we are on the flip side of this song, the times when we are the girl who tries to be invisible and feels mocked, the times when we feel like the man out on the road, not welcomed in, all of those times when we feel the burden of being an outsider looking in and longing to belong. I was thinking of the ways we sometimes feel like we need to hide or cover up who we really are, lest we suddenly find ourselves cast out by the court of public opinion. I was reflecting on the masks we wear in public, even and often especially in worship – masks that try to cover up the depression or anger that wells up within us, the addictions with drugs or alcohol we or someone we love fights against, the loneliness we experience or the grief over a lost loved one that we carry as a wound that lingers for years, the relationship teetering on the brink of the end – and yet we pretend to those we meet that everything is okay. We are masters of this, hiding our vulnerabilities, numbing our pain and anxiety and stress with food or TV or the Internet or constant busyness, never letting our guard drop, never letting anyone in, rarely letting anyone else have even the opportunity to be the hands and feet and heart of Christ to us.
But the woman at the well who we encounter this week in John’s gospel has no such mask. There is no way for her to pretend about her struggles. People in Sychar know all about her, know her life story: married 5 times and now living with a man who is not her husband. This doesn’t necessarily mean what we’ve often been taught to believe it means. We assume she’s promiscuous, living in sin, hopping from man to man; but remember for a moment how life was in Jesus’ time, how women were treated mostly as property, at the mercy of their fathers or husbands. It’s just as likely that this woman has been widowed one or more times, or cast aside by these men because she was barren, unable to give them children, and that her husbands have divorced her one after the other as it was their right to do for pretty much any reason – and that she is now living with another man simply out of necessity if she is to survive. Perhaps she is shunned by the other women in town because they fear her bad luck is contagious, or they just don’t know what to say to a woman who is so beaten down by life. But whatever the reason, this unnamed Samaritan woman comes to the well in the heat of the noon sun, when you normally wouldn’t meet anyone else there, coming once again to draw water for her household’s daily needs. And it is here that she comes face to face with Jesus. Jesus, who has the prophet’s gift of knowing things about her that he has no natural way of knowing. Jesus, who has his longest conversation with her out of anyone in John’s gospel. Jesus, who senses her thirst to know and be known, her inability to hide her hurts, and her hunger to be welcomed and accepted just as she is. Jesus, who offers her living water that she may never know thirst again, a spring of water gushing up to eternal life. Jesus, who then invites her, shunned Samaritan woman that she is, to worship the Father in spirit and in truth.
Did you hear that? Jesus calls her to worship in truth. To put aside any pretense about who she is, to set aside the masks that she may try in vain to wear as self-protective gear, to come before God just as she is: vulnerable, broken, human. “…for the Father seeks such as these to worship him” (v. 23).
This is the life of worship Jesus calls us into today too. To stop spending so much time and energy on hiding who we are and to be real. To stop wearing the mask of self-sufficiency and admit our need for help, for welcome, for acceptance. To acknowledge before God and each other our brokenness and sin and pain, trusting that God can handle it, daring to believe that God can heal us, despite ourselves, having faith in the One who offers us living water that will quench our thirst, a spring that gushes up to eternal life.
We see what happens when the woman at the well does this… when she sees that Jesus sees her for all that she is and all that she may be, she drops her water jar – symbol of her thirst and longing – and races back to town, the same town that has set her aside and dismissed her for so long. She runs back, the water of life overflowing from her heart. “Come, see a man who told me everything I have ever done!” she says. “He can’t be the Messiah, can he?” And something about her is so profoundly different, so radically transformed that the townsfolk come hurrying to meet Jesus. The woman becomes a worshiper who witnesses, daring to speak of this One who has found her and known her, not worrying that she’s not qualified or not good enough for anyone else to believe. In fact, I’d bet it’s the very fact that her brokenness was so well known in town that causes the people to come and see, curious about who this was that caused such a dramatic change in her.
Just so with us! We spend so much time worrying about appearances and looking like a “good Christian”, whatever that means, that we are afraid of sharing our story with others – but so often, it is when we reveal our failings and frailties and our experience that Jesus knows and loves us anyway, without judgment, without condemnation, but instead with compassion and love – that’s when we become worshipers with a witness.
That’s when we become part of the body of Christ, arms reaching, hands healing, words teaching. The people around us? They don’t need a perfect example, they need a living example, someone who has been where they have been, or at least has struggled too – and can testify, witness to the ways that Jesus knows, claims, heals, restores, invites, loves us all – so that they may come to see for themselves and come to believe that Jesus is truly the Savior of the world.
Go, be a worshiper who witnesses.
Amen.
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