Chance Encounter

 

Scriptures:     II Corinthians 3:12-18, John 4:7-26

 

This story told by the Gospel writer John of Jesus’ encounter with a woman of Samaria at a well is one of the most dramatic in the New Testament.  We spoke about it briefly last June in talking about Jesus as “the bread of life” and his presence with us during communion, even as he was with those on the hill who were being fed loaves and fishes.  To the Samaritan woman he will offer “living water”.  But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

Lots of things are going on in this story.  Most of Jesus’ responses to her questions have double meanings or are not quite responsive to what she has asked – although a case can be made that he was being responsive to what she was really asking beneath her surface questions.

Because it is such a dramatic story, it’s not surprising that playwrights have seen opportunities to turn it into drama.  A few years back a one-act play was written called “The Well”, which tries to look at what this woman’s life might have been like before and after her experience at the well.  The play’s premise was that hers was a self-centered, greedy existence which was influenced to such a depth by her encounter with Jesus that she then began to change the people around her.  The scene where she actually meets and talks with Jesus is only a very short scene in the middle of the play – just as the real experience of the real Samaritan woman was only one small event in a lifetime of events.  Yet, for this woman everything that happens to her both before and after is centered in this encounter.

When I first saw this play and thought afterwards about the brevity of the central event, I was struck with the thought that so many of life’s turning points come out of brief, chance encounters like this.  And this led me to the further thought that we who have accepted the responsibility for carrying Christ’s love to the world probably have innumerable chance encounters through which we have the possibility to influence – even change – lives.  What we do with our chance encounters is one of the most significant yardsticks we can use to gauge how we are responding to Christ’s love in our lives.

Now, I know what some of you might be thinking at this point:  how can I have the same depth of insight Jesus did?  How can I react to someone else like he does here?  He seems to know so much about this woman without ever having met her before – her past history, her motivations, her need to accept the kind of spiritual presence that is indicated by the term “living water”.  Now, as I’ve said before, it certainly is true that Jesus was a great psychologist – although here his knowledge of her past relationships with men borders on the uncanny.  No, we shouldn’t expect to have this kind of knowledge about people we’ve just met.  Yet, the most important part of this meeting is the woman’s need to be aware of the kind of life that can spring from a well of living water – and this is where Jesus directs her attention.  Such an awareness as Christ demonstrates here can come out of ordinary human sensitivity – the kind of sensitivity that is highly conscious of another person:  who she is, what she is really saying through the garble of words that make up our usual conversations, the nuances of emotions that come across if we are truly paying attention to the other.  The first thing, then, that we can take into our chance encounters is a heightened sensitivity to another person which gets us outside of ourselves and directly into the life of this other being.

The second thing we can look for in order to have a deeper awareness is a turning point which indicates that what is happening here is real meeting – real people being honest with each other.  In this story the turning point comes when the woman asks of Jesus, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”  Now the opening has been offered.  The Samaritan woman has expressed a real need, a real desire to be open to what this strange man with his strange words has to offer.  Up until this point Jesus had simply been laying before her some general thoughts on the nature of the spiritual life in the form of an analogy about water being taken from a well.  But now these thoughts have taken hold, and she is saying to him, in effect, “I’m not sure I know where this is going to lead, but I feel that what you are saying makes sense for what my life has been and where I would like it to be.  Tell me how to discover the meaning of this living water.”

Now Jesus can get down to cases and talk about where this woman is and where she is going.  The opening was there, and Jesus was wise enough to see it.  Often in our chance encounters we prefer to shy away from this kind of an opening – if we recognize it at all – fearing that taking the next step will start to make demands on us that we are not quite sure we can meet. Certainly, such demands were placed upon Jesus.  He was entrusted with revealing to her some of the shallowness of her past life.  This was a dangerous, though necessary, step if she was ever to be able to accept the full depth of what living water meant.  Jesus did not shy away from this demand placed on him, even though it could have meant hostility, anger, rejection.  He followed here what was one of the cardinal principles of his whole life and ministry:  telling the truth in love.

Being sensitive to another’s needs and accepting the crucial opening that comes can then lead to a third element in our chance encounters – one which, strangely enough, could be called a sense of worship.  Now, worship is usually thought of in a formally organized kind of setting – like what we are all about right now.  But I’m sure that all of us have had the experience of a sense of worship in unlikely places – when a song or a line of a poem or just silence elicited a feeling of the numinous.  Worship is where people are genuinely concerned about one another.  As a line from a hymn says, “To worship rightly is to love each other.”

So, in our chance encounters we may well come to the point where there is that feeling of community, that realization of honest and open communication which is what we mean when we speak of a sense of worship.  This kind of a moment was opened up at the well by Christ’s honesty and the Samaritan woman’s need.  She herself brings up the topic of worship:  “Sir, I see that you are a prophet.  Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.”  But Jesus takes this rather prosaic comment about worship and makes of it a sense of actual worship in the moment.  Worship does not depend on the place, he is saying to her, but on the spirit and the truth which are possible in any moment.  To the extent that you are open to me and honest with yourself we are experiencing worship right here, is his implied thought.  Your inner crying out for living water and my awareness of who you are haveopened up a spirit and a truthfulness which is God with us.  When the woman then proclaims, “I know that Messiah is coming,” she is extending the moment of worship – for Messiah, Emanuel, is“God with us”.

Now, let’s pause for a moment.  We need to realize that most of our chance encounters don’t follow anything like this pattern.  The people whom we meet by chance who are ready and open for sensitivity, responsiveness, and worship are not easy to recognize.  Who are those people that we can so meet?  Some years ago a sociologist noted that our relationships can be divided into three categories:  primary (which include family, close friends, business associates with whom we work closely), secondary (people we see frequently such as shop keepers, workers in the same office building, a neighbor with whom we have a nodding acquaintance), and tertiary (people rarely met more than once:  a cab driver, a nurse in an emergency room, a couple who come to church once and then are not seen again).  (As a sidebar comment:  I wonder whether you would include your church community as primary or secondary relationships?)  It is in the third category – the tertiary – where chance encounters will take place most often, and the problem then is that most of our tertiary relationships are functional – that is, we expect either a service or some kind of impersonal response from these relationships.  The people involved become objects to us to be used in order to gain a desired end.  Quite often they are not really present for us aspersons but only as the tag we can put on them:  a cab driver, a nurse, that couple who came to church once.

But now notice that this chance encounter at the well could very easily have been that kind of tertiary relationship.  Jesus was thirsty.  He needed someone to draw water for him, and this woman seemed likely to comply with the request.  She was someone he had never seen before and most likely would not see again.  Yet, instead of seeing her only as a water-drawer, he saw her as a person.  And this is what gave the encounter its meaningfulness.  To look beyond the surface activity – the giving of a drink – required that this person be seen in all her uniqueness.

What this says to us is that we need to look at ways within our chance encounters to make them meaningful.  We cannot be content to accept only the surface, objective, functional aspects of this brief relationship.  When we creatively struggle to see the other person as she or he really is then we will discover the God in her and him.  Perhaps this is the clue – to begin by seeing each person we happen to meet as a part of God is to see that person as real and whole and human, not simply an object to be used.

When we are able to do this we are acting, as Paul says in his second letter to the Corinthians “with great boldness”.  Perhaps few of us want to believe that we are capable of such boldness.  But notice how Paul prefaces this admonition:  “Since, then, we have such a hope…..”  We have such a hope in the one who has greeted us just like he greeted the woman at the well. We have such a hope because we do not have a veil over our faces like Moses.  We have such a hope because God strengthens us in every opportunity where we come into the presence of someone who needs to feel the hope that God provides.

Such a hope is needed more today than ever.  In a world where a surprising earthquake can rattle the East Coast (though, thankfully, no one was killed) and a Hurricane Irene can batter that same East Coast today (including, possibly, threatening our house in New Jersey), in a world where tsunamis and floods do kill, in a world where deaf ears are so often turned to the cries of those in pain, in a world where even in a peace-loving and gentle country like Norway a deranged Anders Breivik could go on a shooting rampage killing 77 at a political camp for youth, in a world where people who claim to be people of faith are as likely to be at one another’s throat as sitting down to talk and pray together, in a world that is still so far from a just peace, in such a world hope must ultimately override all of these things that tear at and beat down our spirits.  And hope begins, just possibly, with that small, unexpected, chance encounter with someone you didn’t know you were going to meet today.

The opportunities which chance encounters offer to us are not to be dismissed lightly.  To be present with a sense of Christian love for another person is something that can make both you and the one whom you have encountered more real, more alive, more Christ-like.  Seizing upon those opportunities which chance encounters give us is a form of ministry, and that idea should not be foreign to us since we accept the priesthood of all believers.  This ministry means simply being sensitive to another person’s real needs, recognizing the moment of responsiveness, and lifting up the reality of worship that can come out of such a moment.  If we take these possibilities into our chance encounters, we will find ourselves growing more real as persons.  And we will find that we can be for others even as Christ was for the Samaritan woman who just happened to be at that well.

 

Amen.

Dave Pomeroy

 

First Congregational Church, UCC

Las Vegas, NV

August 28, 2011