Come to the Water
Wildwood, March 19, 2017
by Ken Bechtel
John 4:7-15
The springs
The story is told about a holy man who found his way to a strange island. This
island was extraordinarily dry, almost barren, yet with ravines that looked like dried up
river beds. The people there relied upon the many cisterns which they had dug to collect
and store the meagre rainfall. In the distance, he could see a tall thick stone wall which
seemed to stretch the full width of the island.
As he listened to the people’s stories, he heard about a distant past when there had
been ample water, a never ending freshwater spring which watered the entire island.
When he asked about the stone wall, they told stories from their grandfather’s
grandfather’s time. First, those greedy, cruel and violent people started taking too much
of the water, and then the enemy had stopped up the spring.
One day, the holy man proposed a dramatic action. “I want to go up into the hills to
find those springs?” They warned him about the danger, enemies who must still lurk
somewhere in those hills. No one had seen them during their lifetime, but the elders had
warned them.
At dawn, the holy man set out with a pick and shovel, climbing along the wall until
he reached the summit. There he poked and prodded until he found something
interesting. He tore first one rock, and then another out of the wall. Soon the waters
began to bubble forth once again from beneath the stone wall that had stopped them up
for so many years. Soon they grew into clear refreshing streams, running down both
sides of the mountain, offering waters to both peoples.
The story of Christ’s church is the story of the Christ who came, offering living
water. It is also, alas, a story of our human ways of damming up those wells. Yet Christ
continues to offer us water that will become within us “a spring of water welling up into
eternal life.” That’s the story we gather to recognise, and to celebrate, this morning and
each Sunday.
John 4
John’s gospel tells us about Jesus and a Samaritan woman at a well.
The story of the Jews and the Samaritans is like that island tale. Each side
explained their differences as their group remaining faithful, while the other side twisted
history and Scripture. Jews dismissed Samaritans as lion converts, half breeds so afraid
of the lions that they sent for a Jewish priest to teach them how to invoke God’s power.
The Samaritans were convinced that it was the Jews who had strayed from the
historic truths and corrupted the Scriptures. Jews no longer worshipped here at Mount
Gerizim, the mount where the ark of the covenant is buried until the day when Messiah
comes and streams of living water break forth from that Holy Mountain.
And so it was that these groups, both claiming to be children of Abraham, came to
deem the other bitter enemies. Over the years, Samaritans had hindered the rebuilding
of Jerusalem’s walls and Jews had wrecked the Samaritan temple.
Not only was this a Samaritan woman, but even within her Samaritan society, she
was despised. Women commonly came in groups to draw water and socialize in the cool
of the day, either morning or evening. But this woman comes in the heat of the mid day
sun because she is a despised outcast. This is no honourably married woman. For she
has had five husbands, and the one she is with now is not her husband, whatever that
may mean.
Yet Jesus chooses to offer to this woman of all people the gift of living water that
shall well up from within her as a gift for herself and for the thirsty people around her.
That Samaritan woman at the well was the first to hear Jesus’ promise to all
believers: “14 those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The
water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”
Jesus crosses those ancient barriers, those high and wide stone walls that time,
history and prejudice had erected against the other. And Jesus offers her, and us, the
water of life.
Centred or Bounded Sets
Some 40 years ago, the noted missiologist, Paul Hiebert, published an intriguing
description of different types of churches, sets as he called them. A set is a category of
things. A set called apples, for example, would include Golden Delicious, Granny
Smiths, crab apples, fresh and rotten ones. At the ends of Hiebert’s church spectrum set
were bounded-set and centred-set churches.
Bounded set churches have strict rituals, rules and language. The group focuses a
lot of attention on those boundaries, defining and maintaining them, defining too the form
of conversion necessary to cross them. By these you know who is in and who is not.
Interestingly, however, these kinds of organizations tend to have soft centers. If asked,
many bounded-set members would have only the most general notion of their core
values.
The classic bounded-set group in the New Testament were the Pharisees. More
focused fence builders it would be hard to imagine. Their notion of being “set apart for
God” got translated into separation from sources of ritual impurity, from Gentiles,
Samaritans or irreligious Jews. For them, as for many pre-Jerusalem Council Jewish
Christians, circumcision would be their outer fence to keep out Gentile paganism. To
make sure that they didn’t accidently break even the minutest law, they erected fences
around each commandment. If the law forbade work on the Sabbath or prescribed tithes
on income, then they added further rules about things that looked like work and tiny
things like mint and cumin. The Pharisees knew exactly who was in and who was out.
Centred set churches are more concerned about people’s direction towards or
away from the centre. There will in some senses be self imposed boundaries, but more
significant is the relationship to the centre. This view of the church invests less energy in
defining who is in and who is out. Rather their primary focus is bringing others into
relationship with the centre, with the person and work of Christ, the one who said “And I,
if I be lifted up, will draw all people to myself” (Jn 12:32). Conversion is changing
direction, turning towards Christ, “looking unto Jesus, the author and perfecter of our
faith” (Heb. 12:2)
Some time ago, I came across a blog in which a Christian Reformed pastor
diagrammed the way this might look for a church in his Reformed denomination. The
fenced or bounded group would define exactly who’s in or out by their creeds and
catechisms. The centred groups would put their emphasis on their core belief. Is this
person or decision moving toward or away from that centre?
Perhaps this is what an Anabaptist Mennonite centred set might look like – a
community concerned most about what direction individuals are pointing. To paraphrase
Palmer Becker, such a church focuses on Jesus as the centre of our faith, Community as
the centre of our lives, and Reconciliation as the centre of our work. Those using Hiebert’s categories have observed that as religious groups mature,
age and decay, they tend to shift their attention from the centre toward the boundaries.
Renewal movements begin with a new focus on some aspect of the centre, yet over time
are tempted to shift their attention to the drawing of boundaries. This seems true,
whether we are talking early church, Anabaptist Reformation, Mennonite, Pentecostal or
20th century evangelical. We readily get tempted to define our faith as some variant on
the old “I’m a Christian! I don’t drink and I don’t chew and I won’t go with girls that do! ”
Where’s the Centre?
In the gospels, Jesus is challenged whenever he moves beyond one or another of
the Pharisees’ boundary definitions, whether ritual washing or healing on the Sabbath.
Note how Jesus responds to those challenges and to questions about what was
central to the law and their wish for eternal life. Jesus shifts the focus to the love of God
and of neighbour.
When that lawyer in Luke wanted to justify himself by having Jesus narrow the
definition of neighbour, Jesus broadened it instead by telling the story of the Good
Samaritan. As Jesus told one assembly of Pharisees, “On these two commandments
hang all the law and the prophets.” (Mt 22:40) In the teachings, example and person of
Jesus - That’s our centre!
Wells or Fences
We began with that story about the island where the people’s efforts at building
boundary walls against one another plugged up their springs. In Jesus’ encounter with
that Samaritan woman, he told her about a source of refreshing water, water that would
spring up within her. And as a result, she went out among her townspeople telling them,
“Come, see a man who told me everything about me. Can this be the Messiah?” Jesus
unplugged that well, broke down those dividing walls between Jew and Samaritan,
between supposedly righteous and sinner, and offered both refreshing living water.
A visitor to an Australian outback cattle ranch was intrigued by the seemingly
endless miles of farming country with no sign of any fences. He asked a local rancher
how he kept track of his cattle. The rancher replied, "Oh, that's no problem. Out here we
dig wells instead of building fences."
In the Australian outback, there is no need to fence cattle in when they are highly
motivated to stay within range of water, their most important source of life. May it be said
of us as well, that we are so focused on our centre, so centred on Jesus, that like him,
"Out here (too) we (put our energy into digging) wells instead of building fences."