As we move through the season of Lent, we have been reflecting on our scripture passages in light of the Six Great Ends (or purposes) of the Church. We started out with The Proclamation of the Gospel for the Salvation of Humankind, and last week I said that all the other the “Ends” flow from that one. Think of it as the foundation for the house.
We are building on the expectation that this news of love and forgiveness is good news. In fact, it is my hope that any time you hear anyone say, “The good news is…” that your brain fills in “Jesus Christ,” because the good news of Jesus is that he brings salvation! Last week we heard that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” So we share this good news in the hope of salvation, not just for ourselves but for the world.
Last week we also talked about The Shelter, Nurture, and Spiritual Fellowship of the Children of God, and how those words describe what it looks like to live into the good news of salvation. We talked about the fact that while the Christian faith offers adoption into the family and household of God, there is no one whom God does not love as God’s own child. That means it is our job to make sure that we know that about ourselves. It is our job to make sure that we know that about one another, and it is our job to make sure that everyone and anyone who has been made to feel that they are not beloved by God are instead encouraged to understand that they most certainly are.
As we continue our exploration of our reason for being as a church and as followers of the way of Jesus (aka the Six Great Ends of the Church), we’re going to go a little deeper into what salvation is all about. I’ll admit that salvation is not the first thing that comes to mind when I hear, The Maintenance of Divine Worship (which is our Great End of the day), but if there is a “why” behind our worship, I hope it is connected to our salvation. Whether we are wrestling with understanding it, standing ready to receive it, or responding to the hope it brings – worshiping God is connected to our salvation.
Today’s readings are all connected in one way or another to worship and salvation, but let’s first say a word about the Maintenance of Divine Worship. Put simply, it means a regular practice of intentionally putting God in the center of your life. To worship is to treat something as though it were a center of value – the thing or activity that sets up all of our other choices.
Unfortunately, with a definition like that, we could easily put a number of things in that space – and not all of them are bad things. Maybe it is some symbol of status. Maybe it is our job. Maybe it is something that you do for fun. Maybe it’s your family. Maybe it’s your debt load.
To say that we are to Maintain Divine Worship means that we are intentionally and regularly checking in with God and others in our faith community to ensure that God’s love for us and that our love for God is expressed through our relationships is the driving force in our lives.
Hopefully, that is what we are all here for today. If not, then I invite you to think about what that might look like in your life. I don’t say that with any condemnation. I say it with the same invitation that Jesus offered the Samaritan woman at the well.
Let’s talk about that. The text says that Jesus went from Judea to Galilee and that he “had to go through Samaria.” According to Karoline Lewis of Luther Seminary and the Sermon Brainwave Podcast, this was actually the last route a Jewish Rabi and his followers would take due to the conflicts between Samaritans and Jews. According to Lewis, “This was a theological priority. It stems from John 3:16. It’s as if Jesus said, ‘You want to see what it means to be here for the world? Let’s go to Samaria!’”
I always imagine this scene with the disciples looking in every direction possible, just twitchy as can be, and singing, “Don’t be suspicious, don’t be suspicious…” while they go look for provisions. What happens next is, well, it seems like a setup for a meet-cute in a Rom-Com. It’s the car ride from When Harry Met Sally. It’s the scene where two opposites are set up for an attraction, which is probably the absolute last thing this woman wanted – coming to the well in the heat of the day when no one else was supposed to be there.
Regardless of her motivation, it’s hard for me to see her reaction as anything other than a woman who has heard every line and is not in the mood for being hit on. What happens next is more than she bargained for. Remember how I said that Karoline Lewis said that going to Samaria was a theological priority? She also said that Jesus was looking for this woman. Maybe not her specifically, but a re-ocurring theme in John is seeking others and inviting them in (like Philip and Nathaniel).
Jesus was looking for a witness in Samaria, and it had to be a Samaritan, so he starts a conversation with her about her most basic need – water. The beautiful thing that we see here is that their conversation is not only the opposite of the one he had with Nicodemus, it is also an extension of that same conversation. Nicodemus came under the cover of night. This conversation happened in broad daylight. Nicodemus could not understand the invitation he was given. The woman received it so fully and quickly that she left her jar at the well to go get others. (I always imagine it just spinning a little like a cartoon.)
Then she became the one to say to others, “This can’t be the Messiah can it?” Even though that question is worded in such a way that it seems she expected them to say “No.” they still took it as an invitation to come and see. In the end, they said that they came because of her testimony but they believed because of what they experienced.
I’m not sure how many of you have had something like that happen to you – a person has told you about an experience of God’s love, and then you experienced it for yourself – but I feel like that happens to me over and over. It’s one of the reasons I show up on Sundays, and I hope it might be the same for you.
Although that happens to me all the time in the day-to-day of this congregation, I want to share a few times that it happened to me in our ministry with Living Waters for the World in Cuba. The first time a group of us went down there it was to tour the various partner congregations that are connected with the PSL. In one village, Nell decided to go on a walkabout. Even though Nell was doing pretty good with her rudimentary Spanish, a few of us got a little nervous and decided to tag along.
She was chatting up everyone she could along the way and introducing me as her Pastor which filled me with pride and dread since I don’t speak a lick of Spanish. One woman she spoke to got excited and offered to take us to her Pastor, which Nell quickly accepted. We followed this woman back behind a row of houses, and I will confess that every xenophobic fear that I’ve been raised with including headlines of kidnappings was very present in my mind and telling me, “This is how it ends.”
We ended up in a little wooden structure where her Pastor was meeting with two or three others for prayer and Bible study. Nell acted as our interpreter and was even willing to translate between us as we prayed for each other. In the holiness of that space, a Pentecostal Cuban and a Presbyterian American became citizens of the Kingdom of God.
It wasn’t on our agenda. It was not on our way. It was not the well or the table we anticipated, but it was a holy space where oceans and ideologies and everything that divides were set aside so that we could be centered in God’s love for us and our love for God as expressed through the relationship that we shared.
Friends, I wish I could take you all to Cuba and let you see how the Living Water that springs from our partnership in Sabanilla is providing salvation both physically and spiritually, but you don’t have to go that far to see the living water of salvation. This story, and our scripture readings, remind us that God is with us in hard places, so God must be with us in the easy ones, too.
In the end, salvation is not just about the life that is to come. It is about a life in which we recognize that we belong to God and we belong to each other because of God’s love for us. While it is right and good that we come here to re-center our lives like clay in the hands of a potter, the truly divine experiences are waiting for us when we walk out those doors. At least I pray it may be so with me, and with you, and all to the glory of God. Amen.
We are building on the expectation that this news of love and forgiveness is good news. In fact, it is my hope that any time you hear anyone say, “The good news is…” that your brain fills in “Jesus Christ,” because the good news of Jesus is that he brings salvation! Last week we heard that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” So we share this good news in the hope of salvation, not just for ourselves but for the world.
Last week we also talked about The Shelter, Nurture, and Spiritual Fellowship of the Children of God, and how those words describe what it looks like to live into the good news of salvation. We talked about the fact that while the Christian faith offers adoption into the family and household of God, there is no one whom God does not love as God’s own child. That means it is our job to make sure that we know that about ourselves. It is our job to make sure that we know that about one another, and it is our job to make sure that everyone and anyone who has been made to feel that they are not beloved by God are instead encouraged to understand that they most certainly are.
As we continue our exploration of our reason for being as a church and as followers of the way of Jesus (aka the Six Great Ends of the Church), we’re going to go a little deeper into what salvation is all about. I’ll admit that salvation is not the first thing that comes to mind when I hear, The Maintenance of Divine Worship (which is our Great End of the day), but if there is a “why” behind our worship, I hope it is connected to our salvation. Whether we are wrestling with understanding it, standing ready to receive it, or responding to the hope it brings – worshiping God is connected to our salvation.
Today’s readings are all connected in one way or another to worship and salvation, but let’s first say a word about the Maintenance of Divine Worship. Put simply, it means a regular practice of intentionally putting God in the center of your life. To worship is to treat something as though it were a center of value – the thing or activity that sets up all of our other choices.
Unfortunately, with a definition like that, we could easily put a number of things in that space – and not all of them are bad things. Maybe it is some symbol of status. Maybe it is our job. Maybe it is something that you do for fun. Maybe it’s your family. Maybe it’s your debt load.
To say that we are to Maintain Divine Worship means that we are intentionally and regularly checking in with God and others in our faith community to ensure that God’s love for us and that our love for God is expressed through our relationships is the driving force in our lives.
Hopefully, that is what we are all here for today. If not, then I invite you to think about what that might look like in your life. I don’t say that with any condemnation. I say it with the same invitation that Jesus offered the Samaritan woman at the well.
Let’s talk about that. The text says that Jesus went from Judea to Galilee and that he “had to go through Samaria.” According to Karoline Lewis of Luther Seminary and the Sermon Brainwave Podcast, this was actually the last route a Jewish Rabi and his followers would take due to the conflicts between Samaritans and Jews. According to Lewis, “This was a theological priority. It stems from John 3:16. It’s as if Jesus said, ‘You want to see what it means to be here for the world? Let’s go to Samaria!’”
I always imagine this scene with the disciples looking in every direction possible, just twitchy as can be, and singing, “Don’t be suspicious, don’t be suspicious…” while they go look for provisions. What happens next is, well, it seems like a setup for a meet-cute in a Rom-Com. It’s the car ride from When Harry Met Sally. It’s the scene where two opposites are set up for an attraction, which is probably the absolute last thing this woman wanted – coming to the well in the heat of the day when no one else was supposed to be there.
Regardless of her motivation, it’s hard for me to see her reaction as anything other than a woman who has heard every line and is not in the mood for being hit on. What happens next is more than she bargained for. Remember how I said that Karoline Lewis said that going to Samaria was a theological priority? She also said that Jesus was looking for this woman. Maybe not her specifically, but a re-ocurring theme in John is seeking others and inviting them in (like Philip and Nathaniel).
Jesus was looking for a witness in Samaria, and it had to be a Samaritan, so he starts a conversation with her about her most basic need – water. The beautiful thing that we see here is that their conversation is not only the opposite of the one he had with Nicodemus, it is also an extension of that same conversation. Nicodemus came under the cover of night. This conversation happened in broad daylight. Nicodemus could not understand the invitation he was given. The woman received it so fully and quickly that she left her jar at the well to go get others. (I always imagine it just spinning a little like a cartoon.)
Then she became the one to say to others, “This can’t be the Messiah can it?” Even though that question is worded in such a way that it seems she expected them to say “No.” they still took it as an invitation to come and see. In the end, they said that they came because of her testimony but they believed because of what they experienced.
I’m not sure how many of you have had something like that happen to you – a person has told you about an experience of God’s love, and then you experienced it for yourself – but I feel like that happens to me over and over. It’s one of the reasons I show up on Sundays, and I hope it might be the same for you.
Although that happens to me all the time in the day-to-day of this congregation, I want to share a few times that it happened to me in our ministry with Living Waters for the World in Cuba. The first time a group of us went down there it was to tour the various partner congregations that are connected with the PSL. In one village, Nell decided to go on a walkabout. Even though Nell was doing pretty good with her rudimentary Spanish, a few of us got a little nervous and decided to tag along.
She was chatting up everyone she could along the way and introducing me as her Pastor which filled me with pride and dread since I don’t speak a lick of Spanish. One woman she spoke to got excited and offered to take us to her Pastor, which Nell quickly accepted. We followed this woman back behind a row of houses, and I will confess that every xenophobic fear that I’ve been raised with including headlines of kidnappings was very present in my mind and telling me, “This is how it ends.”
We ended up in a little wooden structure where her Pastor was meeting with two or three others for prayer and Bible study. Nell acted as our interpreter and was even willing to translate between us as we prayed for each other. In the holiness of that space, a Pentecostal Cuban and a Presbyterian American became citizens of the Kingdom of God.
It wasn’t on our agenda. It was not on our way. It was not the well or the table we anticipated, but it was a holy space where oceans and ideologies and everything that divides were set aside so that we could be centered in God’s love for us and our love for God as expressed through the relationship that we shared.
Friends, I wish I could take you all to Cuba and let you see how the Living Water that springs from our partnership in Sabanilla is providing salvation both physically and spiritually, but you don’t have to go that far to see the living water of salvation. This story, and our scripture readings, remind us that God is with us in hard places, so God must be with us in the easy ones, too.
In the end, salvation is not just about the life that is to come. It is about a life in which we recognize that we belong to God and we belong to each other because of God’s love for us. While it is right and good that we come here to re-center our lives like clay in the hands of a potter, the truly divine experiences are waiting for us when we walk out those doors. At least I pray it may be so with me, and with you, and all to the glory of God. Amen.
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