Third Sunday of Lent -February 24, 2008

(Preached at Providence Lutheran Church, Holland, Ohio

by Pastor Dennis R. King)

"God Knows Us!"

(John 4:5-42)

The Grace and Mercy of our Lord, Jesus Christ, be with you today and always. Amen!

There is an East Africa story about a woman and her bulky Bible. She never was separated from it. So the villagers began to tease her. "Why always the Bible?" they asked. "There are so many other books you could read." Yet the woman kept on living with her Bible, neither disturbed nor angered by all the teasing. Finally one day, she knelt down in the midst of those who laughed at her. She held up the Bible, high above her head, and said with a great smile, "Yes, of course there are many books which I could read. Yet there is only one book which reads me."

This story seems appropriate as we look at the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman. It must have seemed to Jesus' disciples a very improbable meeting. Pharisees hated Samaritans. Rabbis avoided speaking to women in public. But with His customary practice Jesus ignored the human barriers of His day and spoke to this woman at the well.

Remember this was a woman who had been married five times and now was not married and yet was living with a man. Her emotional life, no doubt, carried the scars of rejection. In Jesus this hurting woman encountered a man who did not reject her. Instead he began to speak to her, not just superficially, but truly to speak to her even to her soul. The love and concern in His voice empowered her to cry out. "Sir, give me this water so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water." Jesus gave her that water. Jesus gave her himself. The hopes and fears of all her years were met in Christ Jesus, in that incarnation of God's love whom she saw there before her. Jesus knew her, her sorrow, and her needs like a book. When she went back to town, she could say to people, "Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!"

Often pastors, myself included, have encouraged their congregational members and others to read and study the Bible, but that African woman grasped the very genius of Scripture when she suggested that really, it is the Bible which reads us. As the Samaritan woman learned, encounters with the living Christ are really exercises in self-discovery. The Bible is not so much about exotic places and peoples as it is about you and me. Its message fills our empty places with His unconditional love. Truly His love is a gift to anyone whose life has experienced grief, anguish, sorrow or distress. The Bible reveals God's love so that we come to understand how well God really knows us. This is why the Bible remains so important to us even in the twentieth century.

It has been said by some that we live in a culture where religion is on the wane, and that the Bible's significance is declining. However, this is sheer nonsense! In some quarters the institutional church may be on the wane. However, the search for meaning and purpose, which is at the heart of religious life, is conducted as feverishly today as ever. We seek to find a God who knows us, who cares about us, and who keeps His promise to us. Often we seek Him in the wrong places while failing to recognize that He is the one who is seeking after us.

"E.T." is one of the most successful movies of all time. It is about an extraterrestrial creature who heals cuts with the touch of his finger, who raises dead flowers to life, and who, himself, is raised from the dead. Then he departs Earth on his spaceship leaving behind a rainbow in the sky. I would guess that people who have never entered the church have seen "E.T." and been moved by it. They saw in "E.T." a source of hope. They saw love in action. They saw a power that overcame even the darkness. "E.T." is an illusionary character who does not know us. While Jesus is God's Son who not only knows us but He enters our illusionary world to show us just how well He knows us.

In Tolstoi's The Death of Ivan, Ivan could resist the pain of his cancer as long as he believed his life had meaning. When he lost a sense of meaning, however, he could only scream. When people are repeatedly looking for an escape from their present situation, a world of drugs, a fantasy world, or their own selfish world, they are really screaming too. They are crying. "Does anybody care about me?" "Does life really matter?" "Does it matter to anyone what I am doing?" "Does anybody love me?"

In today's Gospel the Church has an answer to these questions. We have just the word which we have been groaning in travail to hear, a word of God's unconditional love revealed in His Son. The God who knows us reaches out to you and me.

James Knight was a Navy chaplain in World War II. On Wake Island, he tried to minister to an American engineer who was dying from tuberculosis. The man said to Knight, "I am frightened and alone. I have no philosophy of life adequate for living or dying. I always went to church and was reared in a religious home. But all I was given in church was a series of negatives-don't do this, don't do that-about smoking, dancing, and card playing, and other forms of social activity. In prison camp, where I remained for almost four years, I had no philosophy for living, and now I have no philosophy for dying." In all his years of churchgoing, he seems never to have heard the Good News at the well. What about you and me? Have we heard? Do we hear the message this morning?

Are we like that African woman who carried her Bible with her everywhere she went? Are we like her-sustained by God's word in all times and in all places? Have we realized that the Bible knows us, searches us out in all the unlovely places of our lives as Jesus did that woman of Samaritan? Have we allowed God's grace to permeate our troubles and all of our lives with the unshakable conviction that we are known and loved? Are we able like the woman at the well to share with others God’s all knowing love? Are we able to extend to others the Good News that they are known by a living God who wishes to grace them with His love and concern?

Jesus gives us living water. He gives us Himself. As we are baptized in His name, we are made stronger. We are stronger because we know there is a God behind the very structure of all creation who says that He not only loves us and cares about us but He loves us and cares about us and He knows us. He really knows us as we really are, and He still loves and cares for us.

Amen!