2014 03 23 Quarreling with God from John Knox Kirk on Vimeo.

A sermon preached at John Knox Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on March 23, 2014.

Exodus 17:1-7
and John 4:3-29, 39-42 

Mark Ramsey warns us about our tendency

to try to keep score with texts such as these:[i]

For those who are tempted to keep score with this text,

         the woman—the unnamed woman at the well

–is NOT Elizabeth Taylor (may she rest in peace)

with a string of marriages to multiple men

living it up in some swirl of indulgence.

This woman is not “living in sin” with a man not her husband.

She is NOT being called out by Jesus for her lack of faith or morality.

Look for it, and those words just aren’t there.

Maybe closer to the truth is the poem that the thirty year old

Emily Dickenson began with the words:

I’m nobody! Who are you?

                           Are you nobody, too?

                           Then there’s a pair of us – don’t tell!

                           They’d banish us, you know.

In first century Middle Eastern culture,

a woman didn’t have a choice when it came to husbands.

This woman – who didn’t even merit a name – a NOBODY –

–had either been widowed or divorced,

and thus passed from man to man to man

probably in the midst of some forced, desperate downward mobility.

* * *

For those wishing to keep score, WHO shows up alone, at noon

in the scorching mid-day heat, at the town well?

Only those who are shunned from “normal” society.

Only those who are NOT welcome in the daily give and take of a village.

…And while we are at it: what’s that despised foreigner, a Jewish man,

                                                                        doing there too?

* * *

While we are keeping score,

there are SO MANY things wrong here:

women didn’t come to the well at noon;

men…didn’t come to the well at all—

–they sent women or slaves to do that;

men and women did NOT speak to each other in public;

Samaritans and Jews didn’t speak to each other PERIOD. [Read more…]