Living in the Light and Facing our Pain

John 4:5-15

January 31, 2016

Mark S. Bollwinkel

Bob Ebling was one of the engineers at Morton Thiokol in Utah who tried to warn the NASA launch authorities that the “O” rings on the solid rocket boosters for the Space Shuttle Challenger were likely to fail in the freezing cold of that Florida morning thirty years ago last Thursday.  They insisted in a number of heated debates with NASA that the failure could be catastrophic.   No one in authority for the launch would listen.    As we all remember the ship with its crew of seven blew up 73 seconds into the flight precisely due to the failed “O” rings. 

For the first time in a public interview, 89 year old Mr. Ebling has identified himself as one of that team.  Although he and his team were not responsible for the disaster, he shared the guilt and pain he has carried for thirty years.  He has not been able to forgive himself, in his words, for “…not having done enough to stop the launch.” (UPI/NPR 01/29/16). 

It is hard enough to forgive someone who has hurt you.   It may indeed be harder to forgive yourself. 

"Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is an attitude."  (Martin Luther King, Jr.) 

Consider our scripture reading for this morning.

The verse just before our text today says, "But he had to go through Samaria."   He didn't have to go through Samaria.  There were other ways to get there. In fact the Hebrews would avoid travel through the apostate Samaria when they could.  There were a number of popular alternative routes.*

Pious Jews would consider themselves ritually unclean if they associated with Samaritans whom they considered to worship a false religion (2 Kings 17:24-34).  The Hebrews and Samaritans had a long history of animosity and distrust.  Jesus was well aware of this history and instructed his disciples accordingly.  When Jesus sent out the twelve he told them not to enter any city of the Samaritans (Matthew 10:5).  The disciples would be rejected when traveling through Samaria on another occasion (Luke 9:51-56).

Yet this time Jesus insists on not just traveling through Samaria but stopping there for lunch.  The disciples run off to buy some food.   Tired from the journey, Jesus sits down at the water well of Sychar.   He encounters a Samaritan woman coming to fetch water at noon.   Pious and righteous Jewish men, let alone respected rabbis, did not go out of their way to travel through Samaria, did not associate with Samaritans and certainly did not speak with unaccompanied women in public.  What was Jesus thinking?

Maybe it was that "forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is an attitude." 

Jesus had to go through Samaria to teach his disciples, and us the readers, that there are no social conventions, no religious barriers that limit God's love.  And so he goes where few dare to go.

The liturgical season between Christmas and Lent is a time to focus on the person of Jesus as God's incarnation of unconditional love.  Specifically, it is an opportunity to wrestle with the implications of such love in our lives.  During this worship series we will look at moments in Jesus' life when God's love transforms those facing the same challenges in life that we all do.  In this Epiphany season we ponder the in-breaking of God’s light into the world, the real world of flesh and blood, fear and failure, brokenness and loneliness.  What good is all this talk of God’s love if we are still carrying the guilt and shame born years ago?   What good is all this talk of God’s love if we can’t forgive ourselves? 

It turns out that the woman at the well comes at noon, the hottest time of day, to avoid the taunts and scorn of Sychar's other women who do such a physically demanding chore in the cool of the morning.   This woman has had five husbands and is now living with a man to whom she is not married. (:18)   We can only imagine the shame and woundedness she must carry from a lifetime of exploitation and broken dreams.   

Jesus doesn't just imagine it.   He can see it.  He can see right through to her heart that yearns for healing, for a life lived in isolation that yearns for community.   

How often do we learn to live with the hurt in our lives, adjust to it, and assimilate it into who we are rather than face it head on?  How often do we look for love in all the wrong places? 

Do you remember the actress Patty Duke?  (You baby-boomers will!)  In 1962, Patty Duke was the youngest person to win an Academy Award for the role of Helen Keller in "The Miracle Worker".  Patty Duke's life is an amazing story of survival and healing.** 

Born Anne Marie Duke in 1946 to an alcoholic father and a clinically depressed mother prone to violence, at the age of eight her talent manager, Ethel Ross, changed her name to "Patty" and promoted her as a child actress.  Patty had amazing talent and found a variety of opportunities in New York City, eventually landing the role as the young Helen Keller in the Broadway production of the play "Miracle Worker".  By the time she was emancipated at the age of 18, the Rosses had taken most of her money.  Patty would be using drugs and alcohol herself as she struggled with what would eventually be diagnosed as bi-polar disease.  She would have four marriages.   For those who remember Patty Duke's many TV roles and productions, she performed many while addicted and suffering from mental illness. 

The turning point in her life came in 1982 when her manic-depression was diagnosed and she began appropriate treatment for it.  She would reclaim her birth name Anne in the title of her 1987 autobiography.  It was a sign of her liberation from the pain of her past.  Today along with the occasional acting role she is a tireless advocate for mental health issues, testifying in Congress and supporting the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI).   

She has said: 

"It's toughest to forgive ourselves, so it's best probably to start with other people. It's almost like peeling an onion. Layer by layer, forgiving others, you really do get to the point where you can forgive yourself." 

Jesus doesn't travel to Samaria to forgive the woman at the well of her apostasy and moral sin; although that occurs.  He really goes there to give her permission and power to forgive herself; something far more difficult to do.   

The Lord offers her a well of “living water” that can quench any thirst, heal any hurt and never run dry.  She has the wrong religion, the wrong social status, the wrong moral history and yet Jesus offers even her "living water"!  She leaves her jar behind and goes to the very people who have rejected her.  She tells them the good news of the Messiah who has come to offer the whole world "living water".  Many in the city will come to hear Jesus for themselves, and believe in him for themselves.  He stays two days at the hospitality of those his faith tradition considers unclean.  

Our text describes the power and possibility of forgiveness.  How is it that two people separated by gender, race, nationality and social status...who should have nothing to do with each other...find common ground in the promise of new life?

What is in the way of us claiming ours? 

How many hurts do we hold on to by denying that they are there?   How many slights and insults and wounds do we lug around in our inventory of disappointments?  Even more difficult, how many of us as children believed that no matter what we did we would never be good enough?   How many of us still believe it today as adults?   

"To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you."  (Lewis B. Smedes) 

An ancient Chinese story tells of two friends who were walking through the desert. During some point of the journey, they had an argument, and one friend slapped the other one in the face.  The one who got slapped was hurt, but without saying anything, he wrote in the sand: "Today my best friend slapped me in the face."  They kept on walking, until they found an oasis, where they decided to take a bath.  The one who had been slapped got stuck in the mire and started drowning but his friend saved him.  After he recovered from the drowning he wrote on a stone: "Today my best friend saved my life."  The friend who had slapped and saved his best friend asked him, "After I hurt you, you wrote in the sand, and now, you write on a stone, why?"  The other friend replied, "When someone hurts us, we should write it down in sand, where the winds of forgiveness can erase it, but when someone does something good for us, we must engrave it in stone, so no wind can ever erase it." Learn to write your hurts in the sand and to carve your benefits in the stone.  ("Sand and Stone", author unknown) 

Shouldn't we do the same for ourselves?    

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.

(Martin Luther King, Jr.) 

If the living water of God's unconditional love can be offered to the likes of the Samaritan woman at the well...or a wayward prodigal son returning home to the embrace of a father...aren't we good enough to receive it? 

And it is my prayer that someday soon Mr. Robert Ebling can find it as well. 

Amen.

*Ferrell Jenkins, "He had to pass through Samaria", Ferrell's Travel Blog May 4, 2009. 

**Patty Duke and Kennen Turan, Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke, Bantam Books, 1987