John 4:5-42
March 3, 2002
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church of San Francisco.
Growing up I used to have a Jack in a Box toy. On this colorfully painted cube box, there’s a crank that you turn and a little melody plays. And as you turn and hum along with the tune, suddenly and unexpectedly, the top flies open and a clown looking Jack pops up! It was never Jack’s face that made the toy fun, it was anticipating the unexpected moment when Jack comes out. (Maybe that’s the reason why I don’t eat at Jack in the Box. You are never really sure what’s in that white bag.)
Keeping things neat and tidy means keeping your things in a box. It’s like opening again your dresser drawer and stuffing back in the end of your pajamas that stuck out. It’s like after you have put away all the Christmas decorations in their respective boxes and you’ve already brought them downstairs and stored them away that you suddenly discovered that here’s this Christmas pot holder that’s still in your kitchen drawer. Or it’s like after you thought you have put away all the sharp knives for Chinese New Year only to realize that your forgot one in the dishwasher. When we put things in the box, things are where they should be. We have a sense of knowing what to expect.
I went to seminary in Boston at the Andover Newton Theological School. It’s the oldest Protestant seminary in the whole country. I learned about all these European theologians and what they thought. And in 1974 when I graduated, I thought I had a pretty good education. Until I came to FCBC in 1975. As your CE pastor in the seventies, I discovered that there were theologians from Asia and in the West Coast working on Asian American Pacific theologies. This was all new to me. The box that I had God in studying in the East Coast didn’t include the way people in the West Coast were beginning to understand God through Asian eyes. We like it when we have God in a box.
There’s a bumper sticker that says it all, “The Bible said it, I believe it, that settles it.” End of discussion. We all like to close up and tape up the boxes in life so that we can keep things together—not having things hanging out. And it comes to knowing God, we like it that way too.
Boxing in God
Now if you get your theology off bumper stickers, then today’s Scripture, the story of Jesus and the woman at the well, may not be for you.
But before we start thinking about ourselves as open-minded and educated, let’s be honest. We may snicker at people who shrink-wrapped their simplistic faith on bumper stickers, but if we are honest with ourselves, we too have a tendency to sheer off the grand reality of God to fit the narrow confines of our thoughts in our boxes. We want to stuff back into the box all of our questions and surprises that we have about God.
As modern and educated people, we ask, “How could any intelligent person believe that Jesus was conceived of a virgin?” It’s impossible according to the “laws of nature.” It’s like breaking the law! Or “How on earth are we to believe in the bodily resurrection?” When we look in the mirror, we say, “We don’t want this body resurrected!”
While we prize ourselves as modern people who think that we can stretch our imaginations and understanding, most of the time, we want a God in a Box from Toys ‘R Us.
But God won’t fit into anybody’s even best built box. As modern folk, we are under the delusion that we possess, already within us, sufficient abilities to understand the world around us. We believe that all we have to do is to think harder to come up with answers to our tough questions. And if no answers are apparent, like what many of us do, we stuff these dangling questions about God back in the box and keep the lid on.
Outside the Box Relationships
At Jacob’s well around the noon hour, Jesus was tired from his journey when a Samaritan woman comes to get water. Jesus wanted a cup of water from her. According to laws and social expectations, no man, no rabbi would be speaking to a woman in public. And on top of this, she was Samaritan.
Calling someone “Samaritan” was like calling someone a bad name. As far back as to the times when the Assyrians invaded the Northern Kingdom in 722 BC, some of the Israelites started to inter-marry exiles that were brought into Israel from other lands. The Samaritans were considered half-breeds, ritually impure. While the Israelites worshipped in Jerusalem, the Samaritans worshipped God at Shechem on Mount Gerizim. They were separated even in worship.
He’s a Jew. She’s a Samaritan. When Jesus spoke with this woman, he broke down the boundaries that were set up to keep people apart. Jesus told her about “living water,” water more life-giving than the water she came to draw. He spoke to her of a depth even deeper than the well she was visiting. Jesus knew more about her than even she knew about herself. Jesus took her deeper to a place she would not have gone had she been left to her own devices. Jesus didn’t just speak to a Samaritan, he had an in depth conversation with her.
Now if the disciples were not in town shopping, they would have been upset with Jesus. This was not a respected woman. She was too ashamed to get water when the other women would come later in the day when the sun wasn’t so hot. She was acting and behaving according to the rules and expectations of her. She was in her proper box. And the disciples following Jesus as their leader had their own assumptions and expectations of Jesus. He should be regal and respectable—hanging out with people with power.
But Jesus confronts her and tears open the Samaritan woman’s box and revealed for her that what she has done was wrong. He points out how she has lived in infidelity and lies.
He offers her salvation in living water and reveals to her that the Messiah that she was waiting for is right here in her presence. “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”
Jesus went outside the box people put him in to talk with the woman at the well. Jesus opens the box that the Samaritan woman was in and gave her back her integrity and self-esteem. If they stayed inside their respective boxes, nothing at Jacob’s well would have happened. Jesus went outside the box and many came to believe in him.
All Boxed Up
One of the most hopeful and promising news this past week was a peace proposal by Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. He proposed that full diplomatic relationships would be established with Israel if all Israeli occupied land from the 1967 war is return to Arab nations. We know that there’s a lot of unanswered and still to come challenging questions. But for the first time in many months, someone in the Middle East was thinking outside the box. Prince Abdullah was confronting the violence and impasse he sees. Instead of being all contained and boxed in with our assumptions and expectations of what is and what can’t be, there’s a glimmer of light that is shining out of this box. We must pray for this encouraging possibility.
When President Nixon named Justice Harry Blackmun to the Supreme Court, Blackmun was considered a constitutional conservative. Blackmun surprised everyone—including himself—by gradually broadening his understanding of the law. One former clerk remarked that Blackmun grew in his sensitivity to the needs of those people lurking behind the pages of court briefs. Based on his Christian faith, Blackmun began to understand compassion as the basic foundation of judicial reasoning. Another colleague said Blackmun worried about the “little people who had no angels on their shoulders. He insisted on seeing the people as individuals, and not as abstract categories.”
The world and the church need more people like Harry Blackmun who arbitrated outside of the box and saw his important role on the bench was to watch out for people outside the boxes society had put them in. Blackmun confronted the injustices he saw and made a difference.
Like the Samaritan woman, we may be all boxed up too—shrink-wrapped, taped up, and hid away. We come in the middle of the day so no one can see us and try to open up our boxes. Jesus doesn’t just take a refreshing cup of water from this woman and goes on his way. He engages her as a child of God—her brokenness, her weakness, her corruption, her need, and most of all her deep, deep thirst for a sense of purpose and worth.
So Jesus confronts her. He confronts her with her sexual history, her marriage history, her inability to truly love herself or to love others. He tells her, with her tightly wrapped box all opened up now that until she encounters God, she will never experience abundant life.
Until she drinks deeply of the Living Water, the very roots of who she is will remain dry and barren. Because she is so ultimately worthy in the eyes of God, Jesus reveals to her in glaring detail the unworthiness of how she is living. Jesus confronts her in loving compassion.
What happens is that our sister in faith is transformed. Far from being all closed up in her secret box, she sees herself honestly for the first time and she is changed. With courage, she wants relationship and intimacy back into her life. So leaving her water jar behind, she runs back to the village where others have rejected her and pours this Living Water that she has received for others.
She said, “Come, my friends. Come see the man who told me everything I have ever done! He is the Messiah! He is the God who sees us as we are—not hidden in our tightly wrapped boxes. He is the God who loves us as we are. He is the God who empowers us to become who we still need to be.”
No Box Big Enough
I spend a lot of my life with people in our church. I am encouraged by the faithfulness and trust that you have in God. When life seems so overbearing, like the woman at the well, you continue to break out of the boundaries and limitations placed on you and you become transformed. And in your life, you testify God’s good news.
God’s life-giving living water can’t be contained in our little boxes. When the world tried to box Samaritans away from Jews, Jesus broke open that box. When women were not allowed to talk to men, Jesus broke open that box. When a prostitute was destined to a life of disgrace and shame, Jesus re-wrapped that box and made her a preacher. When a fallen woman’s box is tattered and ripped up, Jesus repaired her life to become a community leader helping many more believe in Jesus is the Messiah.
We all want to keep God contained in a box so that we can simply understand him according to our definitions. But Jesus the Messiah comes in a form other than the one we expected. Jesus the savior comes to save us when we didn’t know how to come to him ourselves.
We all have our expectations of what can be and what can’t be done. We have categories that we put people into. And most of the time, we just like it that way. But Jesus intrudes, disrupts, and expands our expectations. Like a Jack in a Box, God suddenly and unexpectedly comes into our world and in to our lives to change us even when we like the way we have our lives all boxed up and in a certain proper order.
By the end, those in her town who heard the woman’s testimony were able to say, “this is truly the Savior of the world.” So might we, if we are willing to be surprised, willing to think outside the box, willing to see God is outside the boxes we create. And there we will find Jesus, the Messiah.
5.
Let us pray. Gracious Lord, we pray that you would open our eyes, our ears and most of all, our hearts to understand the world as you have created for your glory. Help us to not keep you in our safe and secure boxes. Lead us to see you in new places where you transform lives and make them whole once again. Surprise us, God by granting us mercy and your love. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.