Sermon — Easter Sunday, April 9, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Alleluia! Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!

Now, on any other day I would start with a cute story or an illuminating anecdote that perfectly fits the theme of the sermon. But it’s Easter Sunday. And some of our younger members, in particular, may be very wired or a little tired, and if I recall correctly I actually put a couple of them to sleep with my Easter homily last year.

So let me get straight to the point, just like Jesus would: The angel of the Lord who appears to Mary and Mary at the tomb is a liar. Or at least he fibs. In any case, the angel certainly doesn’t tell the whole truth. “Go and tell the disciples,” the angel says, “‘Jesus has been raised from the dead. He’s going on ahead of you to Galilee, and you will see him there.’” (Matthew 28:7)

Now you can imagine the women’s confusion and delight, as they hurry off to find the other disciples. It’s a three-day journey on foot from Jerusalem back to Galilee, but they can’t wait. And you can imagine the two Marys composing their thoughts as they go together to find the other disciples. You might sometimes find yourself rehearsing for a big conversation like this, too: “Now, I know it’s going to be hard to believe, but while you were sleeping in, we went down to the tomb, and Jesus’ body wasn’t there. And there was an angel, and the angel told us that we should all head back to Galilee, and Jesus would appear to us there. So pack your bags, and let’s go see him!”

And while Mary and Mary are on their way, while these two apostles to the apostles are rushing along the road to share the good news of the Resurrection with Peter, James, and John, to tell them that the sooner we get to Galilee, the sooner we’ll see Jesus again, a man appears along the road, and says, “Hello!” and I like to picture one of the Marys recognizing him first, and doing a double take: “Jesus Christ!” And I did not just take the Lord’s name in vain, because there he is, the Risen Lord himself. And she stops and walks toward the one she had been running to try to find.

“Jesus is risen,” the angel says. “Go to Galilee, and you’ll see him there.” And as they hurry on along the road—before they’ve arrived at their destination or even packed their bags—he appears. Not in the tomb where they expected to find him, not in Galilee where they were told he would appear, but here instead, exactly where they are, along the side of the road.

Most of us spend most of our lives thinking about points on a map. We spend years thinking about the next step, and then the next one, and then the next one; about an education, a career, maybe a family; about our personal growth or spiritual journey or physical fitness. And at a certain point, perhaps, we begin to fear the next step: the next joint to be replaced, the next sense to start to go, the next partner or friend who starts to fail. And perhaps, in moments of reflection or of hope, we think about our final destination, about the end of the road, the place where we will finally see God face to face, and be reunited with the people we’ve loved who have gone before us.

But God appears to us along the way. Not in the places we’ve been told to look. Not at the highest holy days or in the greatest milestones or at the most abrupt turning points of our lives. But halfway down the road, while we’re on the way to pack our bags, expecting to go and meet God somewhere else.

God shows up in quiet moments along the way. God shows up in small encounters that we sometimes miss. Again and again, God shows up in our lives, and says, “Hello!” And most of the time, we miss the signs, and don’t stop and turn aside, and then God shows up again a little further down the road.

This is the true power of the story of the Resurrection: Not that Jesus came back to life, two thousand years ago, simply to impress us or to prove a point. But that Jesus lives. That God still walks among us. That the Holy Spirit is, even now, moving among us, in small and sometimes very quiet ways, surprising us with moments of love and comfort and grace. And if we want to meet God face to face, we don’t need to make it all the way to wherever we’re hurrying off to be. We simply have to stop. And look. And see the one who stands along the road.

Because God is not waiting for you up in heaven. God is not stuck somewhere in a story of the past. God is not even trapped in this church, thank God. The God who died for you and rose again is all around you, everywhere, walking beside you and inviting you into a new and better life, not just in the world to come, but in this world, here and now.

Alleluia! Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!

Sermon — April 2, 2023 — Palm Sunday

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last.
At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two,
from top to bottom.” (Matthew 27:50-51)

There’s no symbolic barrier or divide in our world that’s more pointless than the curtain you find on some airplanes that exists only to separate first class from coach. It’s not a locked door that can prevent passengers from going to one side or the other. It doesn’t humidify the air on the first-class side while your skin dries out in coach. The same enticing odor of mingled airplane foods wafts throughout the whole cabin. It’s not even substantial enough to block the sound of a baby crying a few rows back in coach. There are real differences in comfort and treatment between the two sections of seating on the plane, and that’s fine—people paid for those perks—but the curtain itself doesn’t contribute in any meaningful way. It simply hangs there as a symbol of the distinction, as a border crossing between that part of the plane, where people are packed like sardines into a tin can hurtling through the sky at several hundred miles an hour, and this part of the plane, where we recline in relative luxury.

There’s something deep in the human psyche that loves a good symbolic barrier. You can see it as far back as our history goes. When God gave instructions to Moses on how to build the Tabernacle, the shrine that the Israelites carried with them through the wilderness, God carefully warned him to hang a curtain before the Holy of Holies, so that the inner sanctum, the most holy place in the world, would be separated from the rest. (Exod. 26:31, Lev. 16:2, et al.) And when the Temple was built, the same process was applied: at the center of the Temple building, in the inmost sanctuary, an elaborately-woven curtain, sixty feet high and 30 feet wide, divided the Holy Place from the Holy of Holies, and only the High Priest himself ever crossed through that curtain, and only once a year, on Yom Kippur. The curtain stood there, every other day and for every other person, separating an imperfect and unholy world from the perfect holiness of God.

You see the same kind of thing when the crowds welcome Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. You’ll notice we’ve adapted this one slightly. We waved palm branches like they did, in celebration and joy, but you’ll notice nobody asked you to take your coat off and put it on the sidewalk. But that’s what they did. They removed their cloaks, and laid them on the ground, so that the dust and dirt of the road wouldn’t touch the royal feet; not only Jesus’ feet, but even the hooves of the donkey he rode on, were too holy and good to come into contact with the ground. They let their own coats be trampled into the dust just so they could enact a barrier between the Son of David and the dirt, between the Holy One of God and the messy realities of life—a mobile curtain between the Holy of Holies and the world.

But when Jesus dies, the curtain of the Temple is torn in two.

Now, there are several ways to understand this event. Some point to it as a foreshadowing of the destruction of the Temple, which had probably already come to pass by the time Matthew wrote these words. Others say that they reflect the fact that Jesus himself is the Temple, the place on earth in which God fully dwells, and that the ripping of the curtain parallels the tearing apart of his own body. But to me, the fact that it’s the curtain tearing and not a stone falling or some decorations crumbling is the key. When Jesus dies, the curtain separating the Holy of Holies from the rest of the world is torn in half; the dividing barrier between creation and the glory and the holiness of God is removed. When Jesus dies, the last thing that separates us human beings from God goes away. God’s very immortality seems to have come to an end; yet we know that Easter Day is coming, and that what comes to an end this week is not God’s immortality, but our mortality.

This is some heady, theological stuff. So let me put it to you in a different way.

The story of Palm Sunday, from the Procession to the Passion, is a story in which God plays the role of an airline CEO—better yet, for anyone who’s going to be pedantic with me, he’s the owner, the sole proprietor of the airline. And God, who’s accustomed to flying on private jets, comes down among the common folk, and flies commercial—but first class, of course. He’s treated like a king. He gets to board when he wants. They come to him first with a warm blanket and complimentary drinks. The flight attendants lay down their jackets in the aisle so his shoes don’t pick up anything nasty off the carpet.

And halfway through the flight, he takes a walk down the aisle. He stands outside the bathroom in coach, waiting on line. He offers to trade seats with someone trapped between a man-spreader on one side and a nap-leaner on the other. And some of the passengers realize that hey, this is the guy who’s responsible for all this! This man is the reason we’re eating this nasty food, and sitting in these cramped seats. Let’s throw him off the plane! And as they shuffle him toward the front, he tears the curtain down. And they think that they’ve gotten rid of him once and for all, but he reappears. And he makes an incredible announcement. He doesn’t just offer a first-class seat on the next flight to anyone who believes in him. He actually starts inviting people up into the empty seats up front, people who hadn’t paid for first-class tickets at all. “There’s plenty of room up here: Enjoy.”

The curtain has already been torn down. We can already walk into first class. Jesus promised us eternal life, that we would see God face to face, and this was not a promise for the future, for heaven, for life after death. It’s a promise that’s being fulfilled even now.

“God’s desire,” writes Brother David Vryhof of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, the Episcopal monastery over in Cambridge, “God’s desire is to bring us into larger life, to join us to that eternal life that the Father shares with the Spirit and the Son – not only in heaven, but now and here, in our daily lived experience… This larger life is available to us all.  God has not hidden it or made it hard. The secret lies in self-surrender, in handing ourselves over to God and in trusting God completely to do in us and through us what we cannot do for ourselves.”[1]

We all seek the peace, and the contentment, and the joy of eternal life. But try as we might, we can’t seem to achieve them for ourselves. We comfort ourselves, maybe, with the hope that we’ll find them in heaven. But the curtain has been torn in two, and the kingdom of heaven is already among us. God is already here, working in us. And the God who knows the depth of human pain, the God who knows the power of death itself, is inviting us into eternal life.

“Hosanna!” we cry on Palm Sunday, every year. In Aramaic, if you don’t know this, that’s “Save us, please!” And that’s what Jesus does. He tears down the curtain that divides us from God, and God’s holiness spills out into the world and draws us back in love towards God’s very in self.

So “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!” (Mathew 21:9)

[1] https://www.ssje.org/2011/05/29/the-secret-to-self-surrender-br-david-vryhof/#more-2721

Sermon — March 26, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

There’s a phrase in our liturgy that has a special place in my heart, and appropriately enough, it’s the one I say the most often during our service on any given Sunday morning. Think about the words that come out of my mouth during this hour of my week. What do you think I say the most? Is it “Amen”? “The Lord be with you”? Maybe “Let us pray”? No, it’s something else, and interestingly enough it’s the only thing I say to each one of you, as individuals, not to you as a collective and not to God. Can anyone guess what it is?

“The Body of Christ, the bread of heaven.”

Now, much ink and much blood have been spilled over the phrase “the Body of Christ” in the history of the Church, with philosophers and theologians debating and sometimes armies even fighting over what exactly Jesus meant when he said those words. But it’s actually that second half that means the most to me, week after week. This is the Body of Christ, yes—and it is “the bread of heaven.”

To me, this is more than just a poetic phrase or a symbolic idea. It’s a way of expressing the alternate reality we enter in this room. It means the same thing that it means when I say, week after week, that “joining our voices with Angels and Archangels and with all the company of heaven, we forever sing this hymn.” These are not just pretty words. They are a statement of faith that in this Eucharistic meal, in this Holy Communion, we are united with the whole communion of saints. We gather around the altar with the whole choir of heaven. When I say “the bread of heaven,” it means that this is the bread they are eating in heaven; that there is just one eternal banquet happening with God across all of time and space, and we dip into it for a while, week after week, and we take another bite of heavenly food. And when we eat that bread, we are sharing in a holy meal with people from generations before us and generations yet to come, and even though we can’t see them or hear them, they are somehow, mysteriously, present with us here.

This is what makes these words mean so much to me. There are some people I think about every week as I give you this bread, people some of you have loved and lost, people with whom you wish you could share another meal, and as I say the words “the bread of heaven” I pray that you may feel them present with you here, sharing this bread with you across eternity. There are many more of you whose grief I do not know. But all of us, above a certain age, come to this altar bearing pain and loss, bearing the memories of people who have died or who won’t talk to us any more or who talk to us all the time, but can’t remember our names any more. And so I pray for every one of you, every week: may this bread unite you with them again, wherever they are, as we will all be reunited again in heaven.

In Christian life, we hold two things in constant tension: we proclaim our faith in a God who is good and who loves us and cares for each one of us, and we live in a world in which tragic things happen. Philosophers can debate the question of why; John the evangelist just tells a story. And it’s a story that has a few things to say about how God responds and how we can respond to all this grief and pain.

First: Mary and Martha’s story tells us that sometimes God doesn’t do the things we wish that God would do, and when that happens, it’s okay to point it out, to blame God for God’s visible absence from our world, for God’s failures to heal and cure and save us from harm. When he’s told that Lazarus is ill, Jesus inexplicably, unbelievably, delays for two days. He waits until Lazarus has died, and then he goes. And Martha and Mary blame him, as they should: “Lord, if you had been here,” Martha says, “my brother would not have died.” (John 11:21) And she piously adds something to soften the blow: “But even now, I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” (11:22) But when Mary comes, she doesn’t add all that. “Lord, if you had been here,” she says, “my brother would not have died.” (11:32) And Jesus doesn’t rebuke her for her lack of faith.

He does something else. He weeps. And this is the second thing the story tells us: God is a God of compassion, empathy, and love. When all our questions fail to produce any answers, when all our prayers fail to produce a result, God is not far off, distracted or unmoved. God comes to us, and loves us, and God’s heart breaks for us. Jesus loves us like he loved Martha and Mary and Lazarus, and he sees our pain, and he is “greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” (11:33) And perhaps this is a part of God’s answer to our pain. Where is God in our grief and pain and loss, where is God in the midst of all our tears? God is right there, weeping with us; and in fact, God is right there, dying with us. Thomas reminds the other disciples that the powers that be have it out for Jesus, and they do. This journey to Jerusalem, in fact, is the beginning of the end: Thomas is right. Jesus is traveling toward his death. The only person who’s dead at the end of this story is God. Lazarus’s tomb is empty, and Jesus’ tomb is full.

But that’s not all that God does. Jesus does not absorb our anger as we vent it, like an infuriatingly-calm therapist. Jesus doesn’t just weep with us or comfort us, like a loving, compassionate friend. Jesus doesn’t just die with us and for us. Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. And he doesn’t just do it at the end of time, in the general resurrection on the last day, as Martha says. (11:24) No, Jesus says, it’s better than that. “I am the resurrection and the life.” (11:25) And he actually raises Lazarus from the dead. (11:43) And a couple chapters later, on the night before Palm Sunday, on the night before Holy Week begins, Jesus visits his friends in Bethany, and they share a meal—Jesus and Martha, Mary and Lazarus—and it’s as if Lazarus and Jesus have traded places, Lazarus coming forth from his tomb, and Jesus turns toward his own. In Jesus, the two sisters and their brother who has died break bread together again, and that’s the good news: that the power of death that separates us from the people whom we love will never win in the end; that though we die, we live, and we will rise again.

We don’t get the same certainty that Mary and Martha had. We aren’t given the miracle meal. “We walk by faith,” as the old hymn goes, “and not by sight.” “Those who believe in me,” Jesus says to Martha, “even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” (11:25-26) And then the question he asks her becomes the question he asks each one of us: “Do you believe this?” (11:26)

We live in the world as it is. Most of us carry with us, through our lives, a hundred small losses and a couple big ones. And there’s nothing I can say or do to soften the blow. There’s no prayer I can teach you to pray that will bring about a miraculous change. But God has promised that the story doesn’t end here. And there’s an invitation, amid it all: When your “bones are dried up,” when “hope is lost,” when you are “cut off completely” from the joy of the Lord, you are invited to share a meal, by the one who tells you he is the resurrection and the life, by the one who offers you the bread of heaven, who invites you to come and eat, and be in the presence of those who are long gone. To know that, as my favorite prayer from our funeral service goes, “to [God’s] faithful people… life is changed, not ended”; that although we cannot see them, they live, and they are here, and we will one day see them again.

Sermon — March 19, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Page

Last week, a thirty-five-year-old man was released from the prison where he had spent the last eighteen years after being convicted for a murder he did not commit. In 2004, Sheldon Thomas was arrested after a witness recognized Sheldon Thomas’s picture in a photo array provided by police officers, and identified him as one of the men who’d been in the car at a drive-by shooting. But there was one problem. The Sheldon Thomas in the photo wasn’t the Sheldon Thomas who was arrested. In fact, there were two different Black men named Sheldon Thomas living in the precinct at different addresses, and the one in the photo was not the one the police picked up. What’s worse, as the district attorney’s office reported this year, the detectives, prosecutors, and judge in the original trial knew that the Sheldon in the photo array was the wrong Sheldon Thomas. The one who was arrested had been involved in a confrontation with the police earlier that year, and when the shooting occurred, they leapt into action, prompting a witness to identify the photo of one Sheldon Thomas and arresting the other.

The defense commissioned a study in which 85% of law students of color who examined the photo array accurately reported that the Sheldon Thomas who’d been arrested wasn’t in it. The lead detective admitted on cross-examination that he had provided false testimony about the photo array. But the witness who’d identified one Sheldon Thomas in a photo array then identified the other in three in-person line-ups, and despite his claims of innocence, the Sheldon Thomas who’d been arrested—who does not look very much like the Sheldon Thomas whose photo had been used, apart from his age and the color of his skin—was sentenced to 25 to life, and the years that I spent, aged 14 to 32, going to high school and college and getting married and going to seminary, he spent aged 17 to 35, in jail.[1]

Now, it’s possible the witness was entirely unaware of what was happening. The FBI itself recognizes that even law enforcement officers’ unintentional actions can actually distort eyewitnesses’ memories. For example, if an officer says, “I know that was hard for you, but you did a good job” at the end of the session, the witness actually becomes more likely to identify the same person again in the future.[2] Human eyes, it turns out, are not cameras, objectively capturing a scene: our vision is shaped as much by what we expect to see as it is by what’s actually in front of us. The stories we tell about someone shape our memories of the past and even our perception of reality in the present.

Just ask the man born blind.

The characters in this story think they see the blind man for who he is. Both the disciples and the crowd treat the man as though his blindness is a judgment from God, a punishment for sin. The disciples ask Jesus: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2) But Jesus says, “Neither.” The underlying premise of their question is completely false. The man’s impaired vision is not a punishment for sin. No disability or impairment or illness, in fact, is a punishment from God. Later, the crowd repeat the same idea, in less polite tones. After the man points out that surely, Jesus must come from God, or he couldn’t have done this miraculous healing, they dismiss him. “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” (9:34) They think they know the man’s story. They take their own prejudices for granted, and use them to tune him out. “You were born blind, and therefore you must be a sinner”–what? he was sinning in the womb?—“and therefore we don’t have to listen to a word you say.” The story is settled. The case is closed. Ironically, the people who’ve been able to see their whole lives fail to see what’s happening right in front of them. If the man’s blindness was a judgment from God, then surely his healing must be a blessing. But the people refuse to consider the evidence of their own eyes. The ones who can see become, metaphorically, the ones who are blind.

In fact, some of them become almost literally blind. After the man washes his eyes and is healed, John writes, “the neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, ‘Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?’” And some of them said, “Yeah, it’s him!” But others said, “No, it’s just someone who looks like him.” And he kept saying, “I am.” “I am.” “It’s me!” (John John 9:8-9) But some of them just won’t believe him. They are so convinced that this man’s story is already set in stone that they literally can’t see that it’s the same man. It’s the neighbors who’ve always been able to see who have never seen him for who he is, who literally can’t recognize his face or his body because they only recognize him as “that blind beggar.”

Their vision is so warped by their preconceptions that they can’t even see their own blindness. Jesus says that he’s come into the world “so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” (9:39)Some of the Pharisees hear Jesus’ say this and ask, “We’re not blind, are we?” (9:40) Look at this man, Jesus says, and look how you’re treating him. If you admitted you were blind, it would be okay. But if you tell me that you’re seeing him as you dismiss him as one was born in sin, it’s clear that your sin remains: you are still deceiving yourself. (9:41)

The stories we tell are powerful. They shape how we see one another. They shape how we see ourselves. They can put a man in jail for half his life. They can convince us that a man we’ve seen every day in the street asking for change must be a different man from the one we see now, healed of his impairment. They can convince us that people can’t ever change, that we can’t ever change, that we are trapped in our circumstances or our situations and there’s nothing that we can do about them. We look at one another through eyes of judgment, or distrust, or fear, and our minds warp our vision.

But as God says to Samuel, “the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7) And this goes deeper than “don’t judge a book by its cover,” “don’t treat people different even if they look different.” Those are the negative commands, the things that the disciples and the crowd do that we should not do. But there’s a positive command, an invitation, something that we really ought to do. And that’s what modeled for us by the man who was born blind himself: a humble recognition of our own ignorance, and the integrity to admit it. The Pharisees call the man back to testify before them that Jesus healed him on the Sabbath, and they ask him—actually they tell him—“We know that this man [Jesus] is a sinner.” (9:24) And the man simply says, “I do not know whether he is a sinner.” Maybe he is, maybe he’s not. “One thing I do know: that though I once was blind, now I see.” (9:25)

So what are the stories you tell that shape the way you see things? What are the stories you tell about people from __________—from this side of the neighborhood or that one, from Texas or Nebraska or San Francisco or DC or wherever, that stop you from seeing them as your siblings in Christ? What are you the stories you tell about someone who wronged you ten years ago that stop you from seeing how they’ve changed? What are the stories you tell about yourself that stop you from being able to change? What are the things you know for certain that simply aren’t true? What are the places in your life, in your own mind, where God is inviting you into the humility of the man born blind, to say aloud in public, “I do not know.”

These are hard, hard questions to ask and to answer. Almost by definition, we can’t answer them for ourselves. We don’t know the things we don’t know. We can’t see the things we can’t see. We need somebody to spit in the mud and rub it in our eyes, and tell us to go and wash it off. And if that seems gross—that’s about as uncomfortable as it can be, to have to break apart those preconceptions that we have. It’s an unpleasant thing. But it’s an incredibly important thing.

So may God rub the mud in all our eyes, so that we may see things as they truly are; may God give us the wisdom to recognize the places where our own assumptions divide us from the truth; and may God give us the courage to admit our own ignorance, and trust in God’s guidance, all our lives. Amen.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/09/nyregion/brooklyn-exoneration-sheldon-thomas.html

[2] https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/perspective/perspective-the-photo-lineup-an-important-investigatory-tool

Sermon — March 12, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

This year I’m serving as a chaplain to the Episcopal Service Corps program in Boston. Every two weeks, I drive down to St Mark’s in Dorchester and spend the morning with a community of six young adults who live in a house there together, who’ve given a year of their lives to work in churches and non-profit organizations around greater Boston. And they’re wonderful people, and they’re very hospitable people, but they’re not always all on time for our 9:00 am meetings in their living room, and I’m usually there a little early, so I often arrive when people are still shuffling around, and making breakfast, and so on, and they kind of trickle in. And so it’s very common for me to have the experience I had on Friday—three separate times over the course of ten minutes or so, one of the six walked into the room, and said, “Hi, Greg! Do you want anything? Some tea? Coffee? Water?” And I said, each time, “No, no thanks, I’m all set.”

These offers of hospitality are common for us. You probably have the same interaction pretty often. And they’re easy offers to make or accept. If I said, “Yeah, actually, I’d love a glass of water,” someone would go to the sink and fill one up. But imagine how different it would be if you went to visit someone, and they said, “Can I get you a glass of water?” And you said, “Yes.” And they said, “Great. Let’s go down to the well. It’s only a couple blocks away.”

This has been the way life works for most people, for most of history. Maybe you wouldn’t literally have to walk down to the well together to get a drink, but to offer someone a drink isn’t a matter of turning a faucet. It’s to offer something you hauled out of the earth and carried home. This is the world in which Jesus finds himself today. This Gospel is a strange story. It’s a long story. In fact, it’s the longest conversation Jesus has with anyone in any of the gospels. But it’s not just the length that’s strange, and it’s not just this unfamiliar scene of a woman drawing water at a well. What makes it surprising to me is the sheer number of things about which Jesus seems simply not to care.

Some of them are things we also aspire not to care about, and so we applaud Jesus for them. Jesus doesn’t care, for example, who you are, your ethnicity or nationality or ancestry. “‘How is it that you, a Jew,’” the woman asks, “‘ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)” (John 4:9) Jesus doesn’t really answer the question. He deflects. But even simply ignoring the question is remarkable. Samaritans and Jews really were unhappy neighbors. There really was ethnic tension. But Jesus doesn’t care. Jesus doesn’t discriminate on the basis of nationality or race; he reaches out across those divides, and we can and we should applaud him for it.

It may be more surprising that Jesus doesn’t care what your religion is, or where you worship. This is, after all, the primary thing that distinguishes Samaritans from Jews, and I say in this in the present tense because a small community of Samaritans does still exist: Samaritans and Jews live in neighboring regions, worship the same God, read the same Torah, but while Jews believe that the Temple in which God needed to be worshiped was on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, Samaritans believe this was incorrect and that the Temple God had chosen was actually the one on Mount Gerizim, just to the north. So the Samaritan woman tries to draw him out: “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain”—until the armies of the Jewish high priest destroyed it, a century or two before—“but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” (John 4:20) Now, Jesus is a good Jew. He acknowledges that his people, not hers, are right. But then he says that it’s irrelevant: “the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem…the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.” (4:21, 23) It’s not where you worship that matters, Jesus says. (And the Vestries and the welcoming committees of a thousand parishes recoil in horror.) It’s in what Spirit you worship.

But what may be the most surprising is that Jesus doesn’t care what you have done. He says to the woman, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” And she answers him, “I have no husband.” “You’re right,” Jesus says, “for you’ve had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband at all!” (4:17-18) But Jesus simply doesn’t care. He doesn’t condemn her serial monogamy, he doesn’t wag his finger at her extramarital cohabitation. Even though this is Lent, there’s no call to repentance or offer of forgiveness. Jesus offers no moral judgment at all, simply an observation, and the only role this seems to play in the story is that it convinces the woman that Jesus is a prophet, and sends her back to the city to tell other people what he’s said. This is not like the stories of the repentant tax collectors in the Gospels who promise to amend their ways. it’s simply a surprising and most-likely not-so-public fact, which Jesus seems miraculously to know. But Jesus doesn’t respond in a moralizing tone. What’s surprising is not just that Jesus doesn’t care about her nationality or her religiosity; he doesn’t even seem to care about her personal morality.

He’s there for something else. Not to avoid her because she’s a Samaritan, not to warn her that she’d better start worshiping at the right Temple, not to condemn her for having a man who is not her husband hanging around the house. No, he’s there to ask for a drink from the well, and to offer her something in return: a “gift of God,” something better than any water she could draw, “living water,” a “spring of water gushing up to eternal life,” so refreshing that those who drink from it “will never be thirty.” (4:10, 14) That’s the only reason Jesus is there: to offer something that can quench her thirst.

And the woman responds in the only way you could imagine, if you had to draw your own water out of the well and carry it back home with you: “Sir, give me this water.” (4:15) She goes back to the city, and tells her neighbors and her friends, and many of them believe her, and they go out to Jesus too, and ask him to come for a visit; and he stays with them for two days. (4:39-40) And when they encounter Jesus face to face, they say to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.” (John 4:42)

It doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from. It doesn’t matter where you worship, or what you call yourself. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done; it doesn’t even matter that much what you do. And it certainly doesn’t matter what anyone else has told you about God. It matters whether your thirst has been quenched, whether you yourself drunk from the living water that gushes up to eternal life; whether you have invited Jesus to come, and stay with you for a while.

And this can be good news, or bad news, or sometimes both.

It can be especially good news if you sometimes feel like the Samaritan woman. “I don’t have right background.” “I didn’t grow up in the church.” “I’m fumbling with the prayer book.” “I don’t like these hymns.” “I’m not sure I believe.” “I’m not sure I’m really that good.” If you ever feel this way, then I’m happy to say that Jesus doesn’t care. Not about you—God cares about you very much—but God doesn’t care about any of that. It doesn’t bother him a bit. And that is pure good news.

But for some of us on the other end of it, it can be tempting to lean on the very things that Jesus doesn’t seem to be so worried about. “I’ve been an Episcopalian all my life,” or “my family have lived here for eighty years.” “I go to church twice a month,” or maybe twice a year. I’m a good, upstanding, respectable person. I’ve put in hard work. I’ve given back to the world. And I’ve held onto the faith my family taught me, and I’ve passed it on. I’m a priest, for heaven’s sake! (I’m on the Vestry! I’m in the choir!) Isn’t that enough?

And all of this is good. Don’t get me wrong.

But there’s something more at stake—or maybe something less, or simply something else.

We come before Jesus without any of the labels and stories that define us, as thirsty people in a dry place. We come before Jesus, as the Psalmist says, “athirst for the living God,” (Psalm 42:2) and he offers us a drink. We come with souls that are heavy-laden, bearing great burdens, and he offers us rest. We come before him, feelings like there’s also more work to be done, and he sends us out to “reap that for which we did not labor.” (John 4:38) When we come before God we don’t do it as cradle Episcopalians or half-traumatized Catholics, as skilled musicians or as silent hymn-mumblers, as perfect people or notorious sinners. We come as people who are too worn down to imagine drawing that bucket full of water up from the well and carrying it all the way home, and he gives us something to drink.

So “Come, let us sing to the Lord; *
    let us shout for joy to the Rock of our salvation.
Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving *
    and raise a loud shout to him with psalms…
For he is our God,
and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.” (Psalm 95:1-2)