Heartbroken

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John 4:4-26

January 11, 2015 • Portage First UMC

Dare I ask—how are you doing with those new year’s resolutions? We’re a week and a half into the new year, and, as I said last week, if statistics are accurate, 25% of you who made resolutions have already given up. There was an article in the Chicago Tribune this week about how business executives are using the new year as a time for trying to forge better relationships with their workers. A paper was published late last year in the journal Organization Studies that discussed a “revolutionary new finding.” According the author of the paper, a researcher at Georgetown University, relational leadership helps build trust among employees. And the paper went on to define relational leadership as “taking an active role in understanding the needs, aspirations, challenges, and skills of the people” you work with. In other words, the article said, treat people the way you want to be treated. That’s revolutionary, right? Apparently it is revolutionary enough that the Tribune decided it was news. Relationships make a difference. Treating people the way you want to be treated brings health. And business gurus act like that’s a new idea, when it actually goes back at least two thousand years to a teacher wandering the hillsides of Galilee. Jesus phrased it this way: “In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you” (Matthew 7:12). Treat people the way you want to be treated. We call it “the Golden Rule,” and something within us knows that, if we all just tried to live by that teaching of Jesus, life would be better. And when we don’t, because we don’t, we find that one of the areas in which we most experience brokenness is in our relationships.

This month, we’re looking at the ways life gets broken as we begin a new year seeking healing and wholeness. Last week, you remember, we talked about the way we get broken by failing or refusing to forgive, and on a deeper level, the ways we refuse to believe that we can be forgiven. I’ve heard Jesus’ words a lot this week: “Friend, your sins are forgiven.” Those words are freeing, aren’t they? Sometimes we just need to hear that, over and over. And that does tie in to the story we want to look at today as we sit by a well in Samaria and listen in on a conversation Jesus has with a woman who is broken by relational failure. She is lonely and basically alone, and she is broken far more than she wants to admit. She is like a lot of us, so let’s go to the well and see what Jesus offers her.

It’s noon, and Jesus and his disciples are passing through a region called Samaria. Judea, centered around Jerusalem, is in the south and Galilee, where Jesus spent most of his time, is to the north. Samaria is the place in the middle. John says Jesus “had” to pass through there, and geographically that’s not quite accurate. To be sure, it was the shortest way from Judea to Galilee, but most Jews from the south would not pass through Samaria because they considered the Samaritans to be unclean. They were halfbreeds, half-Jewish and half-something else, and there was a strong history of rivalry between the Jews and the Samaritans. However, it was not unusual for Galilean Jews, which Jesus was, to pass through Samaria. Those from the north didn’t get so hung up on all the ritual purity laws like those in the south did. But that still doesn’t explain the “had to,” because some people didn’t go through this area simply because it was dangerous. Like those places you won’t walk into after dark, Samaria was known as an area where you could sometimes be attacked and robbed, especially if it was apparent you were headed to Jerusalem (Wright, John for Everyone, Part One, pg. 40; Card, John: The Gospel of Wisdom, pg. 68; Tenney, “The Gospel of John,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 9, pg. 54). So, strictly speaking, Jesus didn’t “have to” go through Samaria, except that, I believe, he did. He had to come here and meet this woman, this broken Samaritan woman, this child of God who needed to know she could find healing and hope.

As I said, it’s noon, the heart of day, and Jesus and his disciples are headed north. When they get near Sychar, Jesus asks the disciples to go into town and get some food (4:8). Sychar was about half a mile from Jacob’s Well (Tenney 54), and Jesus sits down at the well to rest. After the disciples have gone, a woman shows up. Now, it was the custom in those days for the women to draw water for the family. However, that was usually done early in the morning, before it got too hot. This woman is coming to the well at a time when no one else is supposed to be there. As one author says, it’s a “suspicious time to be drawing water” (Card 68). Why is she there at noon? Well, it has everything to do with why she is so broken.

You have to wonder what is going through her mind as she approaches the well, expecting to see no one only to find that a strange man is sitting there. In fact, it seems that Jesus being a man is a bigger concern to her than him being a Jew. The custom was that men and women did not interact in public; in fact, typically, Jewish men did not even speak to their wives in public (Card 70). At the very least, Jesus should not have spoken to her without her husband present (Card 69; Tenney 55), and when the disciples return later in the story, there is no mention of them being surprised that he’s talking with a Samaritan. They’re surprised he’s talking with a woman. But Jesus will cross any barrier and break down any wall if it means restoring someone who has been broken. And so he is the first to speak to her: “Will you give me a drink?” (4:7).

Now, there’s a lot going on in this conversation that we don’t have time this morning to get into, but I want you to hear the sarcasm that’s in the woman’s voice. It’s not hard, even with the printed text. Jesus asks for a drink; she says, “I’m a woman; why are you asking me for a drink?” (4:7-9). Jesus then says she should really ask him for living water; she says, “You don’t even have a bucket, and the well is over seventy-five feet deep” (4:10-12; cf. Tenney 55). Jesus says, “If you drink from this well, you’ll get thirsty again. I can give you ‘water’ that will bubble up within you.” She says, “Okay, prove it. Give me some of that water” (4:13-15). And then Jesus goes straight to the heart of the matter: “Go, call your husband and come back” (4:16). And there’s silence. I picture the woman, so defiant just a moment ago, reduced to barely a whisper. “I have no husband” (4:17). Now, Jesus is not being sexist here. Within his culture, as I said, this would be a perfectly understandable and appropriate request. In fact, the woman may have been surprised he hasn’t asked this before now. But, as should be obvious by now, Jesus has no problem talking to her without her husband or another man of any sort. No, Jesus isn’t being sexist or exclusive or even elitist here. He’s slicing through her smokescreen and getting to the heart of her brokenness.

A smokescreen is anything we do that is designed to obscure, confuse or mislead others (Hunt, How to Deal with Difficult Relationships, pg. 29), and we are masters of the smokescreen, aren’t we? We like to and try hard to appear better than we are. And that’s not saying we’re bad people. What I mean is that we try to hide our brokenness behind all sorts of appearances and smiles and positive social media posts. When someone asks you how you are doing, what do you say? “Fine.” That’s not even a real answer anymore; that’s the standard automatic response because we know that people don’t really want to hear, “My life is a mess, and I don’t know what to do about it.” So we just say, “I’m fine. How are you?” And what we end up with are two “fine” broken people, desperately trying to put duct tape over the cracks in our lives. One way we put up a smokescreen is to use humor, especially the kind of humor that tears other people down. If we can make them look small or insignificant, we think we’ll feel better about ourselves. We do the same thing, with or without humor, when we say things about someone which we wouldn’t or won’t say to their face. It’s a matter of trying to feel good or better about ourselves, all the while ignoring what it does to our relationships. We fail to treat others the way we would want to be treated, and we push down that impulse that reminds us we’re made for relationships.

Here are some other ways we throw up smokescreens. We spread harmful gossip under the guise of “everyone ought to know.” We blame other people for our mistakes. We kid or tease someone else with the intent to hurt. We remind others often of their past failures while hoping they will not remember ours. We offer criticism that is anything but constructive. And we use sarcasm as a weapon, a way to attack someone else, just as this woman at the well did (Hunt 30). And, you know, two of the most common places we use smokescreens is in our marriages and at church. As far as marriage goes, two of the top ten reasons for divorce today have to do with not being real: losing intimacy and failing to work through conflict. Both of those issues escalate because we fail to be who we really are. We fail to be honest with our spouse until it all builds up and boils over. And in the church (which Paul calls, by the way, the “bride of Christ”—Ephesians 5:22-33), we get good at using religious language to cover over the hurt and pain caused by broken relationships rather than dealing with it. Could that be part of the reason why folks stay away from church? Unchurches folks often say that one of the reasons they stay away is because they feel like they have to have it all together to come here. Nothing could be further from the truth, but that’s the image we often project. I’m not saying everyone should come here depressed and mopey; not at all. But what this generation longs for more than anything else is relational reality. Who better than the church to be able to live that out?

And so, when we’re confronted with relational brokenness, we don’t want to deal with it or dwell on it, so we do that the woman does. She changes the subject. Jesus points out that she is telling the truth: she has no husband. In fact, she has had five husbands in a time when the rabbis said three was the limit (cf. Card 69), and the man she is now living with doesn’t love her enough to marry her. Now, some have suggested that perhaps her husbands had died on her, and that’s possible. We don’t know for sure, but whatever has happened has left this woman shamed enough that she avoids people by coming to the well at noon and she doesn’t want to talk to Jesus about her relational life. She’s ashamed. She’s embarrassed, and she’s the fodder for the gossips in town (cf. Wright 44). So she changes the subject. And what do you talk about when you want to make someone else uncomfortable? Religion, of course. She tries to start a debate about the right place to worship. Jesus won’t have it. She says, “Where should we worship?” Jesus says, “It doesn’t matter. Worship is a matter of the heart, and it’s your heart we’re focused on.” Then she says, “I know the Messiah is coming. He’ll explain everything when he gets here.” And that’s when Jesus comes to his point: “The Messiah is here. I am he” (4:19-26).

The Samaritans had a special name for the Messiah that tells us a lot about what they expected of him. He was to be known as “The Revealer” (Card 70). When he came, he was expected to reveal all the mysteries of life, give all the answers, clarify everything (Tenney 56). And, because Jesus comes here to meet this woman, to bring healing to this woman, that’s what he has really become for her. He reveals to her who she really is, not just what others thought about her. Her history is a difficult one. She’s been left by five men, and those are only the ones who married her. We can only speculate how many other men might have rejected her attempts to find love. Because of her history, she is a social outcast in Sychar, a woman who is probably talked about at the coffee shop and synagogue, a woman for whom conversations stop when she enters the room, a woman who has no friends and the only person who might talk to her in her life is the man she is living with, a man who wants her to fulfill the role of a wife without giving her a commitment. In that culture, that only further excludes her from so-called “polite society.” We shouldn’t be surprised to hear the sarcasm in her words we heard earlier; she’s probably found that defiance and anger and biting remarks are the only way she can survive. She’s learned that, just like we do.

And then this heartbroken woman encounters Jesus, the revealer. And after her encounter with him, in the passage right after what we read this morning, she goes running back to town (leaving her water jar behind at the well) and she tells people—people who had shunned her—she says to them, “Come, see a man who…” What? Who told me the mysteries of life? Who told me what mountain to worship on? Who told me how to get living water? No, she doesn’t say any of that. The whole conversation with Jesus seems forgotten—or is it? She says, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did” (4:29). Well, he didn’t, at least not in what John has recorded of the conversation. What I think she’s saying in those words is something like this: “Here is a man who looked inside me, saw my brokenness and pointed me toward healing. Here is a man who loved me for me and not for any other reason. Here is someone I can trust and I can love back without fear. He has revealed who I really am.” Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?

Jesus pointed her on the path to healing even as she tried to have a religious argument, and because we like to focus on the religious argument, that’s easy to miss. It’s when he begins talking about “true worshipers” (4:23). She’s worried about the right place, while Jesus is focused on the right attitude. She’s worried about winning the argument while Jesus is worried about winning her. He’s pointing her toward a life of fulfillment, a life of worship. You see, worship isn’t something we do. It’s not a service we go to. It’s a lifestyle, meant to be lived. Jesus says “true worshipers” worship in the Spirit and in truth (4:23). Spirit means they’re not bound to a place like the Temple in Jerusalem, and truth means worship is not the exclusive privilege of a few, or of only one people group (cf. Card 70). Worship is a life lived in relationship with God, focused on God, dedicated to God, because he is the only one who will never leave nor forsake us. As we discussed during Christmas Candlelight, he is the only one who is ultimately faithful. A life of worship calls us to put that relationship first, above all else.

Like many of you, I am a relational person who has experienced times of relational brokenness. Every time a break occurs, it hurts, and there’s a  piece of my soul that is gone. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about because we’ve all been there, whether the brokenness happens because of a fight or a disagreement or even just because time passes and you drift apart. And to be honest, I think social media has made it worse. We connect with people—I’ve connected with a lot of people from my hometown, people I grew up with through Facebook. But Facebook and Twitter and other technological solutions only give us the appearance of relationships. I worry about a world that relies increasingly on screens to connect us together. How, then, do we learn to trust one another? Relational brokenness, when we experience it, make it hard to trust. The hurt lingers, and we determine to varying degrees that we will not be hurt like that again. Until the next time. Because we are relational people, we continue to seek relationships even when we’ve been burned. In fact, I would go so far as to say we tend to substitute relationships here with people we can see and touch and talk to for a relationship with God through Jesus. We may say that our relationship with Christ is important, just as the woman at the well would have said that worship was important, but she, like we, was looking for connection in all the wrong places. We’re just not confident that, in the end, God will be enough or that he will come through. We don’t trust others because we struggle to trust God. And that makes me think of a ladder.

When we were in Jerusalem last fall, one of the places we visited (as groups always do) was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the traditional location of both Calvary and the empty tomb. Standing outside the church, our guide was giving us some of the history of this church that is owned by six different Christian traditions. Some of the church is considered “common ground” and other parts of it are held by these particular groups. The “common ground” idea is so important that no one group actually controls the entrance to the church; the keys are held by a Muslim family and have been since 1187 because the Christians can’t trust each other enough to decide who locks and unlocks the front door.

But even more ridiculous is the story of what has come to be known as the Immovable Ladder. Above the main entrance, on a balcony that was once a flower garden, sits a ladder under a window. It was placed there sometime before 1852; actually, there is a drawing of the church that shows it in place in 1839 and possibly another one showing the ladder there in 1728. Now, why is it there? Well no one seems to know exactly why it was put there, but it’s there today because in 1853, a rule of “status quo” was put in place, meaning that anything in the common areas could not be moved without the agreement of everyone who owns the building. Six Christian groups, all worshipping Jesus in the building, and no one will agree to removing a ladder from under a window. Every time someone has attempted to move it, violence has broken out. And what’s the point of this ladder story? As I stood there and listened to the guide talk about this wooden eyesore, I couldn’t help but think how much that reflects the way we often approach each other and, even, the way we approach God. Other things become more important than relationships. Other things become more important than putting God first in our lives. Other things take priority over trusting God and trusting others. How does a ladder on a balcony help people know Jesus better? It doesn’t! It’s a striking condemnation of the inability of Christians to love one another, which is, by the way, how Jesus said others would know we are his people (John 13:35). Yet, rather than doing that, we fuss and fight and argue over who is right and insist on our own way and leave friends heartbroken behind us. Jesus says it’s because we’ve lost our way, and we’ve forgotten what is most important and we focus on things like ladders. “True worshippers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth” (4:23).

If we get the relationship with God right, when we put that first,  everything else falls together. Does life immediately get better? Maybe or maybe not, but when our lives are rightly ordered, we will find our deepest needs are met. External circumstances may or may not change, but God will meet our relational needs the way we need them met. He’s the only one who can. If our hearts are whole, being healed (and not just having duct tape put on them), we can then love others as God intended us to.

Ordering our relationships correctly calls us to begin with things like prayer and Scripture and corporate worship. What place does prayer (talking to God) play in your life, in your decision making? You know, when we have an important decision to make, Cathy and I talk it over, work it through. Why don’t we do the same thing with God? If our relationship with God is most important, why do we not talk with God about the things going on in our lives, ask God to direct us as we make decisions? Over the last few years, I have made it a priority to begin my prayers as soon as the alarm goes off. Before my feet even hit the floor, I begin talking to God about the day ahead and inviting his presence in it all. And then I make spiritual disciplines (reading my Bible, corporate worship, meditating on Scripture) a high priority in my day. For me, I do them first thing in the morning. That’s when I’m at my best, but some folks are more alert at night. Priority is a matter of carving out time that we will not give up to anything or anyone else. More of us do make going to the gym an untouchable priority than we do going to God. If we want other relationships in our life to work, we have to make our relationship with God a priority.

Now, I don’t know that the woman at the well was instantly welcomed back into the city or the culture. Don’t you wish we had a scene or two of “what happened next” in her story? But we know she was changed, and John tells us so were many of her townspeople. So you’ve got to think that their relationship to her changed as well once they began to accept Jesus. When it comes, then, to dealing with interpersonal relationships, the first and hardest thing we have to do is do the hard work of forgiveness, which is why we began with that topic last Sunday. As I said then, maybe the first thing we have to do is ask God to give us the “want to.” We may need to pray, “God, help me even want to forgive them.” And we may need to pray that over and over and over again. We keep praying it until God makes us ready to move ahead and to stop allowing that person to control so much of our lives.

And then, the next part has to do with communication, what we say to people that builds rather than tears apart relationships. Living, as we do, in a world where people are told they have no worth, we must let people know they have value, they are worth consideration. The Bible says all people are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). All people are of sacred worth. That doesn’t mean we automatically affirm what they do. But even the person who engages in a shooting spree, such as we saw again this week, is made in the image of God and is a person of inestimable worth. Their actions are despicable, but they still have sacred worth. Or when the world says, “You’re unacceptable,” we say just the opposite. “You’re accepted. You’re wanted. You’re loved.” Tuesday night, I reminded the folks who gathered here for Vision 2015 that there are many things the church cannot do, and many things the church can do but can’t do better than other organizations. But in this world where people are longing for connections—as evidenced by our obsession with social media—the church ought to be the very best at offering relationships, loving even (or maybe especially) the unlovable. And in a world that seems to excel in tearing people down, we need to remind people they don’t deserve to be insulted. Our culture trains us to do that. Watch any sitcom on television, and even the most family-friendly of them relies heavily on insults for their comedy. We ought to be better than that, even when we are treated poorly or insulted. Remember: we treat others thew ay we want to be treated. Peter, in writing to the first-century church, offered this timeless word: “Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing” (1 Peter 3:9; cf. Hunt 38). When we bless rather than curse other people, Peter says, we will receive a blessing. What, do you suppose, we will receive if we spend our time insulting and cursing others?

So we begin with pursuing forgiveness, then change the way we speak to and treat one another. And third, we take the risk of trusting. The woman at the well had to take the risk of talking to people who had talked about her, people who had taunted her, people who had shunned her. But what she found in Jesus was worth the risk. And finding healing from relational brokenness is worth the risk in our lives as well. Will you get hurt again? Probably. We have to be wise about the level of trust we offer to others, and we have to remember that whenever you have relationships, there is always the chance of being hurt. But the risk is worth it, because God made us as relational creatures.

One of the first images we encounter in the Bible is that of friendship with God, a relationship. It’s Adam and Eve, walking in the garden with their creator. But then came the sin that broke that friendship, and ever after that moment, a sacrifice was needed to heal the breach. The same is true for us. Something needs to die, whether that’s our pride or our bitterness or our anger, for healing in relationships to take place. Thankfully, in our friendship with God, Jesus died so that we could be restored. Paul, in the book of Romans, puts it this way (in the Message translation): “If, when we were at our worst, we were put on friendly terms with God by the sacrificial death of his Son, now that we’re at our best, just think of how our lives will expand and deepen by means of his resurrection life!” (Romans 5:10). If God can forgive our sin and welcome us back into friendship, then can we do no less toward those with whom we have relational brokenness? Healing is possible. Healing is available. Put God first. Then, begin with forgiveness, communicate differently, and take the risk. And, just like the woman at the well, our broken hearts can be mended, healed and restored. It’s possible. Will you take the risk? Let us pray.