SERMON High Noon

Lent 3 (A) (2008): Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 95; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42

When I hear, as we just did, about Moses and God's people in the desert and Jesus and the woman at the well, I think of High Noon -- High Noon, the movie. I do not say this uncritically.

As a child of the 1950s, I hated Westerns. They were dry, dusty, and dirty. They were familiar and trite formulas. They always looked staged. And they dominated children's radio and television. Among the cowboy heroes were the Lone Ranger, his side kick Tonto, and his horse Silver, Hopalog Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Gene Audry, The Cisco Kid, Wild Bill Hickok, Zorro. Like the Lone Ranger, each had a side kick and a horse with a name. There was nothing else on TV from 5 to 7 on week nights and all day Saturdays. Nothing. It was awful.

When I finally saw the movie High Noon, I was reminded of how much I hate westerns. As you may know, High Noon is a black and white movie that happens in real time -- beginning at 10:30 a.m. when Will Kane, the sheriff of a small western town, learns that a killer whom he sent to prison has been released and, bent on revenge, is about to arrive on the noon train. With buddies.

Now there is much about High Noon that distinguishes it from the radio and TV westerns of my childhood. The horses do not have names. The deputy sheriff proves to be no side kick and, with the rest of the town, bails out in helping the sheriff. The good but flawed guys and gals have real depth and nuance and character. Even so, all the other formulas are there: the really bad guys are really evil; things are pretty dry, dusty, if not dirty; there are lots of horses (even if they don’t have names) and a fire in the stable (Gary Cooper, who plays Will Kane, saves the horses); good faces evil; there is a real confrontation at high noon dramatically photographed from between the bad guys' legs. It is very staged and very familiar.

And it is the formula and the staged and familiar aspects of my childhood westerns and High Noon that the accounts of Moses in the desert and Jesus at the well bring to mind.

In hearing about Moses in the desert, we get the desert feel of dryness and dustiness -- we get the feel of an old west drought where there is not enough water for either humans or livestock. Fed up and angry, and just like angry cattle owners in the westerns, the people confront the authority (in this case Moses) and demand, “Give us water!” The confrontation is so serious Moses is afraid that he will be stoned.

Now, in the old west, the local sheriff or other authority would deal with the angry mob’s demands by confronting the powerful mine or land owner who has damned a river or diverted a spring and there would be a confrontation -- all very staged.

Well, here, too, there is a staged confrontation. Moses goes to the Power, the LORD God. God directs Moses: "[Take] the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go." Then God tells Moses: "I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses (who is no dummy) does what he is told. He confronts God, and the people have water. All very dramatic, staged, and familiar.

But even more familiar is John's account of Jesus and the woman at the well. It, too, has a staged quality -- a dramatic meeting at high noon.

Jesus is alone with the woman because the disciples are off getting food. And for most of us, the meeting is dramatic because Jesus confronts the woman with his knowledge that she not only is living with someone who is not her husband, but has had five husbands. In terms of drama, this is not so different from Will Kane's confrontation of the evil killers alone on the street of the small western town at high noon. About good meeting bad, and the good prevailing.

Well, it may be that, but it is not just that. Our familiarity with this story has blinded us to how truly confrontational it is -- how utterly radical and shocking it is -- and what it is really all about.

What is confrontational, so radical and shocking, about this story is not only that the woman has had five husbands and is living with a paramour. No secrets here. Only a woman with that kind of history and living arrangements would be alone at a well to get water at high noon. Respectable women went together to get water early in the morning or late in the afternoon. If our woman at the well had done that, she would have been shunned.

No, what really makes this high noon meeting confrontational and so radical and so shocking, is where it takes place and with whom.

The setting is not a small western town on the Columbia back lot in Burbank. No, this confrontation is set in Samaria. Samaria was north of Judea and south of Galilee. Its inhabitants were descendants of Jews and occupying Assyrians. In Jewish eyes, the Samaritans were bastardized Jews and ritually impure. They were suspect because they accepted only the first five books of Moses as scripture. They did not accept the prophets. Furthermore they worshiped at Mount Gerizem, near the place known as Jacob's well.

Not content with their own place of worship, the Samaritans had tried to block the re-building of the temple after the return of the Jews from exile. In retaliation, the Jewish high priest had burned the temple on Mount Gerizem. Between Samaritans and Jews, there was a great deal of blood and no love lost.

Samaria was Judea's West Bank.

You did not have to go through Samaria to get to or from Jerusalem and Galilee. But many Galileans did go through Samaria in traveling to and from Jerusalem to worship at the temple. Josephus describes how, in the first century, a group of Galileans going to Jerusalem for a festival were ambushed and slain on a plain in Samaria -- not unlike the ambushes by Indians in those childhood westerns -- which led to retaliation, counter revenge, and carnage. Samaria was no place to be if you were a Jew. In Matthew, Jesus directs: "enter no town of the Samaritans" (Matt. 10:5). The setting immediately puts us on alert that this exchange is unusual.

But what really alerts us that this exchange is unusual are the parties. The exchange is between a Jew and a Samaritan. Remember, Samaritans were ritually impure. Jews did not talk to Samaritans let alone ask them for water. But far more shocking is that Jesus, a man, is talking to a woman. Men and women did not speak to one another in public in first century Palestine. The woman herself says, "How is it that you, a Jew,"-- the word "Jew" here is meant mockingly --"ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?" Remember when the disciples return from getting food? They are "astonished"-- the word can be translated "shocked"-- that Jesus is talking to a woman. Genuinely shocked -- even though no one dares ask, "Why are you speaking to a woman?"

This is not a confrontation between good and evil. It is a confrontation between a Jew and a Samaritan, between a man and a woman. It is a confrontation between differences. It could as well be a confrontation between a Palestinian Jew and a Palestinian Arab, between an Iraqi Sunni and an Iraqi Shiite, between a Tutsi and an Hitu. And we know well how those confrontations end.

They end in the way all of my westerns ended. In the way High Noon ends. It was what I hated most about westerns. They end in revenge and in violence, sometimes in carnage and retaliation. They end with Arab and Jewish children being killed. In the bombing of Shite mosques during a week of sacred commemorations. In horrific atrocities resulting from tribal confrontations in Darfur. But none of that is true of the confrontation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman -- their exchange ends with the woman going to tell other Samaritans about Jesus and bringing them to Jesus. And that's a huge difference.

And one reason it is, is dialogue -- something that is missing between Sunni insurgents and Shite Iraqis, between Tutis and Hitus, between Palestinian Jews and Arabs. Jesus and the woman are talking. But, even with dialogue, there is confrontation. They both confront one another. And the woman holds her own. Really holds her own.

When Jesus tells her that he does not want her water but can give her living water, she asks him whether he is greater than Jacob who had drunk from this well. When, after revealing the heart of what he has to say, Jesus goes on the offensive and asks her to go get her husband, the woman is not deflected. Instead, she acknowledges that Jesus is a "prophet"-- remember this from a tradition that does not recognize prophets -- and reminds Jesus that it is this mountain, this Mount Gerizem, where the Fathers had worshiped. Jesus, in turn, is not deflected, and tells her what he is about. This prompts her to say, "When [the Messiah] comes, he will proclaim all things to us." And Jesus says to her, "I am he, the one who is speaking to you." It is only then, with recognition, she goes to the city to tell others.

So what is happening? Why is there no acrimony and no revenge? What does Jesus say that he is about? Well, he says that he has living water, a gift of God, that he will give "[to] become in [those who drink it] a spring of water gushing up to eternal life" -- the promise of the fullness of life right now. But even more, when the woman asks Jesus about worship in Jerusalem, Jesus does not deny that worship in Jerusalem is right (he is, after all, a Jew) but goes on to say:

the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. . . . But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth . . . .

What Jesus is about here is what Paul is about in the letter to the Romans. Jesus is about reconciliation -- reconciliation where Samaritans and Jews -- both as individuals and as communities of faith -- worship the Father here and now in truth and spirit.

And it is reconciliation that is also found in Moses' encounter in the desert. As we saw, there was also confrontation. But what happens when the people of God, the Israelites, fail to trust God and confront God? Does God prove the rightness of his power as the mine or landowner would have in being confronted by the western sheriff?

Not at all. God gives Moses the means to get the water -- no strings attached -- and the answer to the people's question, "Is the Lord among us or not?" is a resounding "Yes!"

For us, as for the Israelites and Samaritan woman, the undeserved free gift of God, "the Lord among us" is the gift the Holy Spirit. In the words of St. Paul to the Romans, "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given us." This is a reality that we know now, as a community, in this community, in this place. It is a reality that we know through Word and Sacrament. It is a reality whose fruit is reconciliation here and for all people -- whether in Jerusalem, on the West Bank, in Iraq, in the Sudan and Congo, or in Wicker Park -- on this block, in this church. This is our high noon. Not one of right through might but one of reconciliation by grace though faith. This morning, we pray and give thanks for the gift of the Holy Spirit that makes that reality and our mission to others possible. Amen.

February 24, 2008

Ruth VanDemark, pastor

Wicker Park Lutheran Church

Chicago, Illinois