Who Are We? : Worship

If you weren’t here last week, we’ve started a new sermon series that’s all about answering the question “Who Are We?” I think we can all recognize that we’re coming out of a rather tumultuous season. There’s been so much disruption to the normal flow of life over the last couple years, and that disruption has affected not just our lives individually, but our life as a church community as well! We’ve gone through a lot, and we’ve changed a lot!

And so as we begin a new season of ministry this fall, it’s a perfect time to re-establish who we are as Redeemer Church. What lies at the core of our identity and purpose? And so we’re taking five weeks to re-focus on what God has called us to be about as we continue the work of ministry here in Lawrenceville.

Last week we established that at the very center of who we are and what we do is the gospel - the announcement that God is redeeming and restoring all of creation in and through Jesus. First and foremost we are a community where the gospel grounds who we are and directs what we do.

Today, we move on to the second aspect of our identity, which is that we are a community that is learning to worship the Lord.

So this morning, I want to look at a surprising moment in the ministry of Jesus, when he encounters a Samaritan woman as she comes to draw water from a well. This is a famous story from the gospel of John, and this morning I want to view this text through the lens of worship and listen to what it has to say about who we are as Redeemer Church.

Now, a brief word context. This Samaritan woman was making her daily trip to the neighborhood well at noon. This was not normal. Normally, the women of the town would gather water from the well early in the morning or later in the evening, and I think we can understand their strategy because in Georgia, unless we have to, we’ll never choose to do any kind of manual labor outdoors in the middle of the day. Like, would you ever mow the lawn at noon? Or weed the flower bed at noon? Maybe in March or October, but never in August! In the same way, women would not usually go to the well in the middle of the day.

So why is this particular woman going in the middle of the day? Well, we will come to find that she is an outcast. She’s carrying a good degree of shame, and it isn’t private shame - no her scandalous past is public knowledge. She’s been married five times. Now, today if you heard of someone who had been in five marriages, you’d raise an eyebrow - even in 2022. Well in first century Palestine, it was ten times more scandalous.

Now, we do not know why she’s had five husbands. We don’t know if the issue lay with her or with the men she had married. We don’t know the circumstances of her past, but we know the consequences - which is a public shame that has caused her to feel shunned by her neighbors to the point that she is actively avoiding them.

So she wants to be alone, and who does she meet at the well? She meets her worst nightmare. A Jewish Rabbi. We don’t have enough time this morning to dive into all the cultural intricacies at play here, but trust me when I say that the last person she would want to encounter as a Samaritan women with a suspect past would be a Jewish Rabbi. But surprise, surprise: here come Jesus. Or rather, he’s beat her there. He’s waiting at her well.

Verse 7-15:

7 A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8 (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.)

The women is taken aback, because Jesus is breaking a lot of cultural norms with this request. He’s not supposed to be talking to her - he’s a a guy, she’s a gal. He’s a Jew, she’s a Samaritan. And so she calls him out on it.

And then Jesus responds in a way that he often does, which is…he get’s a little weird. He takes the conversation in a completely different direction than his conversation partner would expect.

10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

Jesus says, “If you knew who I am, and if you knew what I’ve got to offer, this “gift of God,” this fresh running water (living water), than you would have seen me here and you would have asked me for a drink.

Now, this rightfully confuses the woman. What on earth is this man talking about?

11 The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” 13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again,

Jesus begins to demonstrate that he’s not talking about H2O. He is using water as a symbol or a metaphor for something else. Because Jesus sees that this woman is thirsty for more than just water. He knows that this woman has unmet desires and longings in her life. She’s thirsty.

And Jesus says that this well will not satisfy you. This thing that you are running to is not capable of quenching your thirst, which is why you have to keep coming back to it again and again. You drink from it every day, but it will never give you enough. You will always grow thirsty for more.

But, he says:

14 but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” 15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”

So what is happening in this conversation? Jesus is using the image of water to talk about worship. We know that because for the rest of their time together, their conversation will be dominated by the theme of worship.

Worship is a universal human experience. Everybody is a worshipper. Whether you would describe yourself as a religious person or not. We all worship something. We all set our love and affections on something and we pursue that thing and trust that it will bring us life.

American author, and non-Christian, David Foster Wallace gave a famous commencement speech in 2005 where he makes this very argument:

here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship...

Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And therein lies the problem. To use a famous quote from Indiana Jones…We often choose poorly. We often choose to set our love and affections on things that are simply not worthy.

My son Peter has two stuffed animals that he loves with his whole heart. Moose and Cow are their names. He sleeps with Moose and Cow every night, and every morning he will not get out of his bed unless Moose and Cow climb the crib railings, skip along the top, and dive headlong into the nearby basket. He loves these stuffed animals. If you were to give Peter a choice between keeping Moose and Cow or $100,000, he would choose his two friends in a heartbeat. Every time. And of course he would! He’s a child! He doesn’t understand the difference in value between Moose and Cow and $100,000. He doesn’t understand that he could have a thousands upon thousands of Mooses and Cows if he took the money!

We say that would be a childish response, but what do we call it when we ascribe ultimate worth to our possessions, or our careers, or our hobbies, or our finances, or our relationships all the while failing to see the “gift of God.” Jesus says to the woman at the well, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is speaking to you…If you knew the infinite value of what I have to offer you, you would never search for life in anything else.”

Jesus is talking about worship. We all have things that we turn to again and again to find life, but they never satisfy us. Confession time: since having kids, I have noted a significant increase in stress and anxiety in my life. Now, when I’m feeling overwhelmed, there are many times, more than I’d like to admit, where I am quicker to run to a drive-thru to find comfort and peace, rather than to turn in prayer to the Lord of the Universe who’s greatest delight is to give his weary children rest from their heavy burdens. And I can tell you that no Chicken Deluxe or Waffle Fry has ever given me the lasting peace that I’ve sought from them.

These things that we run to, these wells that we run to- they always leave us wanting more. And I’m confident that you know exactly what I am talking about, because you’ve also run to the wells of entertainment, or food, or relationships, or career and they have all left you unsatisfied - because they can’t provide you with the kind of water you seek.

13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

So who are we? We are those who say “no more” to the countless wells of stagnant water that leave us continuously thirsty. We are those who say “no more” to what the prophet Jeremiah calls broken cisterns that can hold no water. We want the fountain of living waters. We want the spring of water welling up to eternal life. We want the gift of God that Jesus offers, and we want Jesus himself.

This is why our service every week begins with an acclamation of worship. The very first thing we do when we gather together is we declare what we’ve come to do. We have come to worship the Lord. “Blessed be God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And blessed be his kingdom, now and forever.” To use Tim Keller’s words, we’ve come to ascribe ultimate worth to the One who is ultimately worthy. We have come to worship, because we believe that in the presence of God we will be truly and fully and forever satisfied.

And the good news for us is that Jesus doesn’t require the Samaritan woman to earn his gift of living water. He simply beckons her to ask for it. We don’t have to earn the living water, we don’t have to save up our money and purchase it, because it’s a gift for us. Jesus has purchased this gift for us. He has taken upon himself the full weight of our idolatry, the full consequences of our seeking in created things what only the Creator can provide - Jesus has taken all of that upon himself, and he bore the consequences of our failures so that he could then freely offer us this “gift of God.”

There is this beautiful poem in Isaiah 55, that really gives voice to the invitation of Jesus. In Isaiah 55, the Lord is speaking to his people who have turned away from him yet again and pursued other gods and other avenues of satisfaction and worship, only to find that they are still thirsty. The Lord calls out to them, and in his voice we should hear the voice of Jesus:

55 “Come, all you who are thirsty,

come to the waters;

and you who have no money,

come, buy and eat!

Come, buy wine and milk

without money and without cost.

This is the invitation of Jesus - come and be satisfied in me.

Who are we? We are a community of people who have heard the invitation of Jesus, and who are turning from our empty wells, and who are running to Christ. We are a community of people who are learning to worship the Lord. Learning to treasure him above all else. Learning to set our love and affection squarely on him. We are learning to worship the Lord.