Preacher: Canon Karen
Date: 15/03/2020
Exodus 17: 1-7
Romans 5: 1-11
John 4: 5-42
Today there are two aspects to our service. One is our celebration of Lambing Sunday and the second is the third Sunday of Lent.
Perhaps you were wondering why there are toy lambs in church today – we had hoped to have the live variety, but unfortunately circumstances worked against us – but we do have their representation in the cuddly toys. The reason they are here is because we are giving thanks on Lambing Sunday for lambs, for their safe delivery, and for all who work with sheep and lambs. So do go and have a look at them after this service, if you haven’t already done so, and keep those working in this industry in your prayers, mindful of the difficulties they have faced over this winter with the flooding and the ongoing hard conditions as the floodwaters recede.
And now to the second focus of today – the third Sunday of Lent – and Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well. And perhaps we may find a connection between lambs and that encounter.
In the baptism service, as parents and godparents gather round the font with the child to be baptized – or the adult candidate with their sponsors – we hear a summary of the place of water in the history of the Hebrew people and its significance.
The prayer opens with thanks for God’s gift of water without which life is not sustainable and then continues with the Holy Spirit moving over water in the beginning of creation, the journey from slavery to freedom through the water of the Red Sea, Jesus’ Baptism and the symbolism of dying and rising to new life in the Baptismal water.
Water is life, water is the means to freedom, water is the means to sharing in Christ’s death and risen life. And water is what brought Jesus and the Samaritan woman together and through them many others to drink in new life in Jesus.
As you know there was no love lost between the Jews and Samaritans. For a Jew to be called a Samaritan was a term of contempt, and not only did Jesus engage in conversation with a Samaritan but a Samaritan woman. Having any dealings with a woman in public, even a husband talking with his wife, offended against the culture of that time, just as it offends against some cultures in our own time.
But Jesus saw the woman for who she was – a fellow human being – and someone who could minister to his need for a drink even as he then went on to minister to her and to her people. Water was washing away the barriers between Jew and Samaritan and between male and female.
Our passing through the water of Baptism is the beginning of our journey to the freedom of living life with God but also of our working with God to reveal him to our world – to make disciples by offering others the water of life which is Jesus.
There are different traditions in the Christian church of baptism – should babies be baptised or should it be by profession of faith later in life, but what is important is what happens in the act itself – being made different, starting out on a journey. And although we perhaps sometimes question the reasons people come to Baptism – is it perhaps only a rite of passage, a family event, a cultural ceremony, it is not for us to question people’s reasons, but to acknowledge that God can work through every opportunity. Just as Jesus seized the unlikely opportunity to make a disciple of the outsider.
Jesus was tired and thirsty – not the sort of situation which we might think is the most conducive to being a minister of the Gospel, but it was in meeting an outsider when Jesus was weak that he revealed God in himself. And we can do the same. We each have a ministry. Even today we can find that mindset that it is the ordained clergy and licensed lay people who do ministry and the people in the pews who are done to. That’s not how Jesus saw it. He commissioned his friends, his disciples, in effect to go out and multiply. Jesus’ disciples didn’t have any special qualifications other than that they knew him for who he was. And that was the only criterion.
In the floods of this winter we saw pictures of water permeating everywhere. For those suffering the effects of that water, it was a truly devastating, a very negative experience but those images can be positive to encourage us in our role as missioners to permeate where we can and not be stuck in the all constraining pipes and culverts – something of the image in that song Shine, Jesus, shine where we sing Flow, river flow, flood the nations with grace and mercy…
Our Baptism is our commission. Having died and risen to new life in Christ, we are to bring that new life to others. The power of the water is life sustaining and life generating; water is both powerful and unstoppable – remember those pictures of the recent floods – but all too often we as Christians are better at building dams around ourselves which keep God out. God’s commission to us to make disciples is a responsibility but it doesn’t have to be a burden. In the church context ministry is team work. We need to see one another’s gifts and skills and not be afraid to tap them on the shoulder and tell them what we see.
My Training Incumbent and I sometimes reminisce, when we meet, about his gift of discernment when he told me, when I was a member of his congregation, that he thought I would make a good Reader. He said I responded by giving him a right hook. I don’t remember it quite that way but although becoming a Reader wasn’t the vocation which was discerned for me, it was that tap on the shoulder which moved me on in my ministry, which enabled the tide to turn…and the rest is history.
We’re not all called to being up at the front in church but we are all called to something. There’s a job for everyone in the life of the church and those jobs are ministry.
And there’s a huge spiritual hunger and thirst in people today just as there was in Jesus’ day.
I received a mailshot some while ago from a beauty salon and I was interested to note that in amongst the wide-ranging treatments aimed at improving the appearance of my body I could also sign up for a session of spiritual guidance and other techniques to promote my emotional well-being.
At £15 for 20 minutes of spiritual guidance Jesus could have been a rich man. But although he gave of himself for free – free to us, that is – at the ultimate cost to him – I think he would have been pleased that the salon understands that we cannot just be made new from the outside. Important though our bodies are, it’s what happens inside that will make me a new me, and you a new you. It’s being immersed in the water with Jesus and fed by the living bread and water which is Jesus which will satisfy and enable us to become the people Jesus sees we can become.
So lambs and the woman at the well? – it’s all about new life
I wonder when she woke up that morning what that Samaritan woman had planned for her day – fetching water had probably been the first job and then probably returning home to do what she usually did in looking after her home and her partner and perhaps catch up with her friends in the face to face equivalent of Facebook. When the Samaritan woman woke up that morning the last thing she would have expected was to meet the Saviour of the world at her well and tell her friends that she had met someone whom she thought was the Messiah and through those half a dozen words lead many others to come to know the Saviour for themselves.
When you wake up tomorrow what opportunities will you see and use to make a disciple?