From Shame to Freedom

Have you ever done anything that you’ve been ashamed of after the fact?

Maybe you did something that after the fact you realized that you shouldn’t have done it and you felt ashamed especially if you got caught doing it.

Maybe you said something that was insensitive or maybe even mean and you realized later you should have kept your mouth shut.

I can remember a time or two in my life that I’ve said or done something that later I felt shame for. Usually it involved saying something that at the time I thought was witty but in hindsight it was incredibly rude or insensitive. As a kid you could get away with it because people would just look at you like you’re a dumb kid, but as an adult and particularly as a Christian you have to go and apologize for it.

I remember a time that my one brother and I got in trouble at school. I won’t spill the beans on what it was totally about to protect my reputation, but it involved a school bus, a knife and minor vandalism.

I don’t know how we got caught, but we did and we had to have a meeting with the principle of the high school. Unfortunately for us our parents had to attend the meeting. It was bad enough getting caught doing something you shouldn’t, but it was much worse because our parents were called and they had to make a special trip to the school to hear the principle lecture us.

I don’t remember there being any punishment involved with our short lived crime spree although I was expecting the worse. That was back in the day when nearly every teacher had a “board of education” hanging in their classrooms if you know what I mean. I think I’ve got a mental block about the outcome of that meeting.

The one thing that I do remember is the shame that I felt as I sat in the conference room with my parents as the principle berated us for what we had done.

Sometimes I think that shame can be used as a positive means to effect change in a person’s life. We’ve seen examples in recent years of parents making their child wear a sandwich board on a street corner describing what they had done wrong in an effort to change the child’s behavior when everything else failed to change it.

Lots of things that 30 or 40 years ago were considered shameful are now celebrated and endorsed by society as a whole and even by the church either explicitly or by turning a blind eye to something.

The problem with sin and shameful living is that it places us in a trap, locked up. Oh it might seem like we’re locked up, but sin is nothing but a prison of guilt and shame that holds us captive.

The woman in our scripture text this morning was trapped by sin and shame. It would be easy for each of us to just zone out this morning because we’ve heard this story so many times. We know it by heart, we know what’s going to happen by the end of the encounter of Jesus with this woman.

I’d like us to approach this story like a little kid who has just discovered the joy of books and they have read over and over again the book to them. They are just as excited to hear the story read to them the 15th time you’ve read it to them as it was the first time you read it to them. I loved Dr Seuss when I was little; I had all the books memorized. I couldn’t get enough of Green Eggs and Ham and that guy named Sam.

The thing about the story that gets lost is that we think of just the rhyming that goes in it. Sam has all sorts of places and situations that he won’t eat green eggs and ham. He has all sorts of excuses for why he doesn’t like them. Ultimately the story is about Sam who had never tried Green Eggs and Ham and when he finally tried them he discovered that he did like them.

This encounter of Jesus with this woman at the well in Sychar is ultimately about a woman who has royally messed up her life and has all sorts of excuses to avoid talking about herself. She ultimately hears the hard truth about herself and she responds positively to the freedom that Jesus offers to her.

John opens this scripture with the statement that “he had to go through Samaria.” If you read that quickly you might be tempted to think that Jesus was going out of his way to go to Samaria, however if you look at a map you’ll see that it was the logical way to travel.

Jesus was in the southern part of Israel in Judea and he was going to be headed to Galilee which was in the northern part of Israel. In the middle between Judea and Galilee was this area called Samaria. Judea was where Jerusalem was located. Galilee was where Nazareth and Cana was. The most logical route if you were going to travel from Jerusalem to Nazareth would be to head due North.

The problem for the Jews was the people who lived in Samaria. The Samaritans where descended from people that were Jews who had married outside the Jewish faith. There was a great amount of animosity between the Jews and the Samaritans.

The Jews would routinely travel over to the east side of the Jordan River and travel north that way in order to avoid going through Samaria. The thing about Jesus, about God, is that He often calls us out of our comfort zone in order to bring the Gospel to someone we might ordinarily avoid and never interact with.

Jesus was about to have an encounter with one person that was going to not only change her life but the life of the town she lived in.

John tells us that about noon Jesus and his traveling companions arrive in the town of Sychar and they stop at the well that is just outside the town. It’s actually a well-known well, it was Jacob’s well. It is here that they stop, John says that Jesus is tired and the others head into town to buy some groceries.

It is here at Jacob’s well that Jesus begins to break down some social barriers in order to give the good news to people who need to hear it. I think all too often that the church wants people to change before they set foot in the door of the church rather than to reach them where they are at.

I remember a church where I was the Youth Pastor in Mississippi that the pastor told us what streets and sections of town that we were not permitted to go to in order to invite children to Vacation Bible School. The mentality of the pastor and the leadership of that church was that we don’t want those people in our church. In this case it was a case of racism and they didn’t want any non-white people in the church.

I’ve known churches that didn’t want to reach out to the poorer people in town because we don’t want to those people coming to our church because they’ll make a mess. I was told in another church that we were in that I couldn’t bring snacks for the kids for Sunday school because they only reason they’d come would be for the food and that they’d make a mess.

About 14 years ago Darlene and I started out attempting to plant a church in the west end of Johnstown and we targeted the Oakhurst homes area. Everyone knows about Oakhurst and the problems with crime there. We were questioned by well-meaning people from other churches why we would want to go there. Several told us that we needed to target Richland Township, that it made more sense to work there because there were rich people there who could support a church. My standard answer to them was that there were no churches working to reach that community for Jesus. Richland has all sorts of churches, from small to really large ones.

In the three years that we operated there we had contact with over 85 kids that had never heard of Jesus before. We were able to plant the seed of faith into their lives.

Such silly reasons for not reaching out to others. What barriers do we have today that is stopping us from reaching out to others?

This woman was one of those that many would ignore and walk away from and not associate with. She was coming to the well at about noon. That wasn’t the normal time of day to come to the well. Normally the women of the town would come first thing in the morning to get water for the days need.

This woman came at noon when she hoped there would be no one else there. She had a reputation and it wasn’t a good one in town. When you’ve got a reputation you avoid contact with those who are going to talk about you. I’m pretty sure the she has been the subject of a lot of gossip by the people in her small town.

I can almost picture as she approaches the well and sees this stranger sitting near it. I imagine that she’s hoping that he doesn’t talk to her, that she can just get the water and get back home.

Jesus breaks on of the societal rules. He speaks to her. That was not appropriate; a man doesn’t speak to a woman who is not his wife. He not only speaks to her, but he asks her if she’ll give him a drink.

She recognizes that he is a Jew and asks him how could he even consider asking her for a drink. Another societal rule was that a Jew couldn’t touch something that a Samaritan had touched because it would make them unclean. He’s broken another rule.

Jesus is about to offer her the greatest gift in her life and even she is stuck on the rules. Jesus told that if she really knew who was talking to her that she would ask him for a drink which of course started a conversation on her part about how he was going to draw water from the well since it was very deep. Jesus wasn’t talking about drinking water, he was talking about life giving, living water.

Listen again to what Jesus said:

Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

In the follow up to my kidney stone episode last fall the doctor told me that I needed to drink more water. He said I needed to drink 2 and half to 3 liters of water a day. I thought that I’d float away if I did that. I needed some encouragement to get me to drink that much so I found an App to put on my phone that I put in my goal and it gives me a reminder every hour to drink more and I can enter the amount I drank so I know when I’ve hit my goal for the day.

The funny thing about thirsty is that you are never satisfied. You’re body tells you when you need more. My goofy phone app reminds when I need more. Jesus said that if you drink of that water, meaning the well water will be thirsty again. That’s just the way God created us, our bodies need water.

But, Jesus says that whoever drinks of the water he gives will never thirst. That is a completed action, but it’s not just one time event. Jesus in His sermon on the mount said:

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

I think that this thought from His sermon is running through His mind as he tells her this. This living water quenches the real thirst in our lives. God created us in His image. That image was broken by sin.

Salvation, this living water brings us back into relationship with God. We are reconciled, things are set right. The Holy Spirit begins that work of transforming us into the likeness of Christ. Jesus says that we will be filled.

He says to this woman that that this living water will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life. Jesus said over in chapter 10:

The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.

That statement only makes partial sense if you stop reading with the phrase “I am come that they might have life.” We have life, physical life, but Jesus is talking about a different kind of life. He’s talking about eternal life. When you read the rest of the sentence it adds so much more to what he has just said. Jesus said “that they might have it more abundantly.” It’s not just life, it’s not just eternal life, but it’s abundant life, here and now.

Keep that thought in your mind as you look again at what he said to this woman. He said it “will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” There is action happening there.

When I was a kid we lived in company housing and the water for the 4 houses and the warehouse was supplied by a spring. It was and still is some the greatest water in the world. The water was pumped up the hill to a holding tank so that there would be enough water pressure. My dad was the foreman and he instructed his sub-foreman to have a company come and clean out the spring.

Unfortunately the sub-foreman wasn’t the brightest bulb in the package and he contracted with the company to drill down by the spring. I was visiting one of my brothers that summer so I missed what happened, but when they drilled down they hit water and lots of it. They hit an artesian well. My parents told me the water shot out of that well for days way up in the sky until they got it capped off.

That is sort of what Jesus is describing here when he talks about a “spring of water welling up to eternal life.” He’s not just talking about some trickling flow of water out of a pipe. He’s talking about an artesian well that is flowing out under pressure. It’s bursting out of the ground into the sky released from the confines of the ground that has held it.

That’s what happens in the life a new Christian. For way to long sin and guilt and shame has held the person captive. In salvation we are set free and it’s like Jesus described a spring of living water bursting out of us. There abundant life in salvation. There is joy that as the old song says is joy unspeakable and full of glory.

That is what Jesus came to give us.

Now this woman doesn’t totally get it when she asks Jesus for this type of water. Jesus now tells her to go and get her husband. Jesus with that request of her hits right at the heart of her shame that she is living in. She says she has no husband.

Jesus doesn’t let her dismiss his request so easily. It’s really easy when confronted with sin in our life to try to make excuses or to pass it off and make it sound better than what it really is. Jesus doesn’t do that, he goes to the heart of the situation and here he says “You are right….the fact is you have had five husbands, the man you now have is not your husband.”

The reason for her shame is that she has been married 5 times and now she’s just living with a man without the benefit of marriage. That’s not very shocking in our society today. We all know someone who is living with someone without being married. It is so common place today that people hardly bat an eye at it any longer.

As Christians, God ordained marriage between a man and a woman that is the norm for human sexuality. Throughout scripture a sexual relationship outside of the marriage of a man and a woman is called sinful because it is not what God designed.

This woman when she heard this was hit again with the shame that she’s lived in and she tries to change the subject. She tries to come up with something else to talk about other than her sin. We get very uncomfortable talking about our own sin. It is easy to talk about someone else’s sin, but not ours.

In verse 28 John writes:

Leaving her water jar, the woman went back to town and said to the people, “come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?”

Everything that she's been looking and longing for is wrapped up in this man that is sitting next to the well.

It was there beside that well I believe that this Samaritan woman was set free from sin. The answer to all the questions that she had were answered. The longings that she had I believe were filled.

What did she do? She runs back into town and told them to come out to the well and see this guy. Could he be the Messiah? Did she just go to the crowd that she normally hung out with? Did she tell everyone she met along the way? We don't know for sure, John says that she told the people. Remember this was the woman who came to the well at noon-time to avoid the other women of the town and all the gossip. Now she's inviting them all to come and see Jesus.

That is what happens when Jesus sets us free from sin. She was changed. The guilt of her sin that had been weighing her down was gone.

Do you remember what it was like when you first came to Christ and received salvation? Do you remember the peace that was there? The love you felt from God? The hope that you sensed for the future?

All that and more is what I believe that she experienced. The first thing she wanted to do was to go tell everyone about Jesus. John tells us that the Samaritans came to him there at the well. We don't know how many from the town came but I think it's safe to assume a large number did. They urged him to stay for a while so he stayed for two days. John said that many more became believers.

This woman who came to the well with a purpose and she received more than she could have ever hoped to. She received living water, Jesus.

The first she did was to go and tell others. That is our mission, to tell others about Jesus. We are to point people to Jesus. Notice what the people said to her:

“We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.”

The people listened to her at first because they saw the change in her. She then pointed them to Jesus and they believed because they came to Jesus themselves. Has there been a change in your life?

If they see that same change in you and me - they will listen to us too! If you do that, then it will be a simple matter of directing them to Christ. After all when you’ve been there - you know where to go!

If it is true that 83% of our friends and acquaintances would join us for worship if we would only invite them, then the fields are riper than we ever imagined! (Jason Matters, Folio 2014)