Jesus and the Samaritan woman clearly were not complying with the rules about social distancing.
We are well aware of these rules in our own world right now. We have strengthened our literal rules about social distancing, and paid a whole lot more attention to them over the past few weeks. How long does the coronavirus live on surfaces? How far do you need to be from someone who’s been infected and not be infected yourself? If I drop off groceries or laundry at your house, will I get the virus if I just put everything at your door and scamper back to my car?
Churches here in this diocese and across the country are rightly taking these rules seriously. We are “closed” today, though the word “closed” always has quotations around it when we’re talking about Church. Buildings close; service schedules close; whole parishes and even dioceses close; but the Church is (to borrow a very old metaphor) the “bride of Christ.” Jesus loves all of us who are in the world, and he loves us to the end. So in that sense, we, Christ’s Church—we never close.
But sometimes we literally, if not spiritually, keep our distance. We do that today, but not because we are respecting ancient cultural artifacts that separate people by their biological sex assignment, and not because one group among us has a mixed ethnic ancestry and rejects major portions of our Holy Book. (Those were the problems Judeans had with Samaritans, by the way. The Samaritans were a group that was more like them than all the other groups, but different enough to be upsetting. Think of your cousins in another state, and how they are annoyingly similar to you and different from you, all at the same time).
No, we keep our distance from one another today for a better, simpler reason: we know how epidemics work, and so we are trying to do our part to flatten the curve on this outbreak, to save as many lives as we can. Today, not coming to church in one big room is good news for the most vulnerable among us. It is, in its own odd way, a powerful Christian witness.
Yet we have other social-distancing rules, and they should worry us. They’re not about physical health. They’re about social stability, and social power. In Jesus’ day, a man was forbidden to talk to an unchaperoned woman he did not know. And what would they talk about, anyway? As a woman, she was to stay in her place: home and family. Women simply did not talk to men about politics or religion or business. We can look on this from the far distance of twenty centuries and allow ourselves to feel more enlightened, more progressive. But if we reflect longer, we may see that in our own day, we have plenty of rules like this, and some of them are still about policing the space between men and women (and typically not for the sake of protecting the safety or dignity of women).
We have rules about social and economic class, too. When is the last time I spoke to someone from a socio-economic class radically different from my own? I really do not know. Maybe it was the week we hosted the anti-hypothermia shelter. That’s one week a year… I have classmates who hail from all over the country and from around the globe, so perhaps I routinely interact with someone whose socio-economic difference from me is not obvious, but there in plain sight, if I only had eyes to see. But all of us at VTS have access to graduate education, a mark of socio-economic class that inherently causes social distancing, and keeps the whole student body together on one side of the divide.
We can see, then, that the disciples are understandably astonished: the conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman is extraordinary. It is bizarre. It is astonishing.
And this woman from Samaria—she is quick on her feet. She goes from calling Jesus “man” to “sir,” then “prophet,” then “Messiah,” and finally “savior of the world,” in half of one afternoon. She leaves her jar at the well to go and tell her friends about this astonishing encounter, and in that small act she reveals that she really gets it: she grasps what Jesus is talking about when he talks about living water. He is not just talking about fresh, moving water from a spring or a well, the kind of water that is so valuable in the hot dry summers of the eastern Mediterranean. She understands the metaphor. She gets that he is talking about being baptized for eternal life in a new, a radically new, community. She has been evangelized. She has been catechized. And she immediately becomes an evangelist herself.
But she wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place! It is noon, a terrible time for a woman to go and get her water. Terrible because it’s hot at noon, yes. Terrible because she does not enjoy the safety of her female friends and neighbors, most of whom likely do not have five ex-husbands. But her presence at the well at noonday is terrible also because at that hour, men would be near the well. It is “marketplace” time, not water-gathering time. This encounter happens because both the Samaritan woman and Jesus ignore the time-honored rules about social distancing, rules so timeworn and trusty that public places like Jacob’s Well don’t have to have posted hours—everybody knows when and when not to go there.
Today, this week, this month, our task is to notice our own rules for social distancing, and to discern which of these rules our faith tells us to follow, and which of them our faith tells us to break. Christian faith—Christian baptism—is like that: it forces hard choices on us. Our baptismal identity asks a lot of us. Today, I offer two tasks that our life in Christ bids us to do:
First, it is our task, it is our identity, to be agents of health and safety in this time of great anxiety. We step back from our physical church sanctuary so that our more vulnerable friends won’t go there and get sick. We wash our hands, yes, and stay connected online, and—if we are not ourselves in isolation—we bring groceries and send texts and call each other and reach out to someone we haven’t heard from in a while. Our vestry is activating our “Flocks” ministry, the one that divides the parish into several “flocks.” Please watch your email for a message from the vestry member leading your “flock,” and please let us know if you haven’t been contacted, or if someone you know is still waiting to hear from us. We do all these things because, like Jesus, we are to love and care for one another, no matter what the social-distancing rules of our culture might be.
Second, about those social-distancing rules. While we do follow the ones that control for disease outbreaks, our baptismal identity pushes us to break the rules that separate women from men, or separate people by the political construct of race, or separate people based on economic class, country folk from city folk, haves from have-nots, young from old. These are the rules that Jesus and his new Samaritan friend know better than to follow. The new community in Jesus is not about those distinctions; in fact, it shatters them.
Together, we build a community that shares in the excitement, even the thrill, of those Samaritan villagers who were just going about their typical weekday and discovered to their profound astonishment that here, right here, the living water is welling up and overflowing; here, right here, is none other than the savior of the whole world.
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Preached online on the Third Sunday in Lent, Year A, at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Burke, Virginia, March 15, 2020.
Exodus 17:1-7
Psalm 95
Romans 5:1-11J
ohn 4:5-42