5/26/23 Sermon

It’s really easy to feel like you’re drowning in this world.  I don’t think I’ve met anyone who feels like life has ended up exactly the way they imagined it.  There are dreams we have of the way things should be.  Some of them come true and some of them fall by the wayside like we’ve talked about before.  Others of them come crashing down and don’t meet our expectations.  And yet other dreams we had can turn into nightmares.  Sometimes… Sometimes its a struggle to figure out what it all means if it means anything at all.  Sometimes we don’t even know what “it” is. Sometimes we worry if our lives have any meaning at all.

Sometimes the barriers of sin in this world seem so threatening and dangerous that we can wonder how we’ll ever connect to God or to other people and dare I say, even connect to ourselves. Sometimes the road of life forks so much and so often that we wonder how we got so far off course from where we thought we were going. How did we get so far away fro what we intended?  We live in a troubling world.  And what we see going on all around us can make us question the very ground we stand on.  We can drown in the sorrows of this life.

The theologian Paul Tillich once defined sin as separation saying that it’s a separation between God, between people, and even between us and ourselves - our true selves.  And this world can seem so sinful by that definition. It can seem like everything is so separated, so divided, so torn apart that it’s hard to even imagine how it can be put back together.

And sometimes it’s just that we become convinced that we aren’t good enough, or strong enough, or beautiful enough.  That we just aren’t enough.  The worst is when whether by our own actions and thoughts or by the actions and reactions of others that we begin to think and believe that we are unlovable.  That may be the greatest sin of all. It’s soul crushing to feel and believe that you’re unlovable.  It’s a fate worse than death in my mind - To feel as though you’re unlovable.  I think it’s the greatest act of violence that a person can do against someone else - to make someone feel as though they’re unlovable.

The darkness that can put someone into.  The hopelessness it causes.  The soul-pain and despair it brings about to feel as though you are unlovable.  And yet, I think it’s a universal pain.  I think everyone at some point in their life has felt that way.  Has felt inconsequential.  Has questioned whether or not their life is meaningful and contributes anything to anyone.  I think everyone at some point has wondered if maybe they just weren’t lovable.

I don’t know the mindset of this woman at the well but I’ll admit it causes an eyebrow to raise at the realization she’s had five husbands and a potential sixth one on the way.  We all look for escapes from feeling the burden of broken dreams and shattered realities.  We all try to find escapes from the anxieties that deeply trouble our souls.  When we worry if things are meaningless or when we begin to truly understand that death will come and we question whats really on the other side for us, when we begin to wonder if we aren’t somehow fundamentally flawed, we all go looking for escapes sometimes.  Some go shopping. Others crawl into bottles. Or into food. Or exercise.  Some people crawl into the arms of another lover - hoping against hope that this will be the one where the honeymoon phase will last and we will feel loved, accepted, and like we mean something. I don’t know this Samaritan woman at the well, but Jesus does and he felt her longing and her thirsting for something. And I can understand her and what she’s doing with these men if she feels empty and hollow inside. If she thirsts and water won’t quench it, I understand that.

I can feel her shock too when Jesus calls her out on it, looking past the face she puts on for others trying to hide her pain, trying to pretend as if life is okay, trying to act normal so no one can see the hurt and loneliness and how hard life really is some days for her.  How she takes on new men hoping that somehow and at some point she will finally feel as though she’s deserving of the love she desperately wants and needs in her life.  Because let’s face it, when we’re drowning in life, we normally don’t call out for help until it’s down to the last breath - if we call out at all.  So, when someone comes along and despite our best efforts to hide it, they call us on the hurt, on the emptiness, on the struggle to breath… It’s shocking. It can be terrifying.  And if we can, we run away… or at least we want to run away.

But what’s amazing and what we don’t realize sometimes is that these people who come into our lives and see us, who actually see us for who we are. These people who come into our lives and have that ability to cut through the barriers and fake faces we put up.  These people who come into our lives and see through to the soul-hurt that we have.  These people who see us drowning struggling to stay afloat or catch our breath. These people who see us thirst for something that water, or shopping, or food or exercise or drugs or lovers just won’t quench.  These people are usually the very agents of God’s grace that we’ve been praying for.  They aren’t the ones we should be running from. They may be the ones that help us see God’s grace in our lives so much more clearly. Who help us encounter it as real and palpable. They may be the ones who show us that we are enough, even just for today, we are enough. Theses people are are agents of God’s grace - making that grace real in this world.

And what is this grace then?  What is this mysterious word that we use all the time yet struggle to understand or define?  It’s the very opposite of sin. If sin is what separates us, if sin is what makes us feel like we’re drowning, then grace is the hand thrusting down in the waters to pull us up.  It’s the cup that never runs dry.  The drink that never leaves us thirsty.  It’s the voice and the assurance that even in the darkest valleys of meaninglessness and anxieties that calls to us and tells us that we are loved. That We are lovable.  That we are NOT separated from God.  That there’s no wound so deep that God cannot heal. No pain so greatly felt that God cannot ease.  No wall we can build up that God cannot tear down.  No water so deep that God cannot reach us. No thirst so great that God cannot quench it.  Grace… Grace is the assurance that no matter what happens or what is done or what is left undone that we are loved and we are accepted.

And when the protests come that we don’t deserve to be loved or that we are unlovable or that we’ve made such a mess of things that how can we ever go back to the way it once was, God through Christ reminds us that Love isn’t something that’s earned, it’s just given.  And you are loved.

Grace is what assures us we are accepted and loved so deeply by something so profound as God that it shatters any conceptions or understanding of what God is.  You are loved and accepted simply for being.  You don’t need to do anything now, you might do amazing things later.  You don’t need to understand it now, you might have profound understanding of it later.  You may not feel it now, but you will be overwhelmed by it later.  You are loved and accepted.  That’s what grace is.  That’s what grace calls in to us.  That’s why grace transforms us.

And that’s what Jesus gives this woman at the well.  He gives her grace.  He loves her and accepts her without condition, without thought to who or what she is or even to what she’s done or is currently doing.  Jesus sees her in her entirety and still loves her, still accepts her, still gives her grace.  And she runs back to town telling everyone here’s a man who knows everything I’ve ever done and yet he still loves me, and yet he still accepts me, and yet he still gives me grace.  And before the disciples even understand what Jesus is really about, before they’ve really done anything, this woman has converted an entire town over to Jesus.  Just because he showed her grace.  Because he saw her as a whole person and loved her and accepted her.

Listen, we spend so much time pretending to be “normal people” whatever that means, I don’t know.  We put so much effort into putting our best face on for other people and acting like we don’t have problems or struggles or challenges or even pretending like we don’t have very deep wounds, tender and hurtful places in our souls. We put so much effort into pretending everything is all right and that we’re just normal people when we don’t even know what’s actually “normal” because it just doesn’t exist.  There’s no such thing as a normal person.

And that’s ok because Jesus doesn’t want normal people.  God doesn’t ask us to pretend that everything is always okay.  And when we try to do so or insist that others pretend to be normal too, what we’re really doing is denying the power of God’s grace. We’re trying to hide the places in our lives that we need God to heal.  God doesn’t want us to be “normal” people, whatever that is. God wants us to be whole people.  God wants us to know that we are loved and we are accepted.  God wants us to know that we are enough just the way we are.

And when we realize that, when we finally begin to feel that grace, that love, that acceptance fully it has a transformative quality on our lives.  When we go from feeling as though we were unlovable to realizing how deeply loved we are, when we move from being unacceptable to realizing who it is that actually accepts us, when we finally find that our thirst can be quenched through the grace of Jesus Christ - it might not be that life gets better per se. It might not be that we believe more. It might not be that we become fully whole.  But everything becomes transformed.  In that moment no matter how brief or how long that moment is, we see that sin is conquered, that we are never truly separated from God, that there is a hand that can pull us up from drowning.  And nothing is demanded of us, there’s no doctrine or belief we have to ascribe to in order to have it. We just have to simply realize that in that moment we are loved and we are accepted.

And let me just close by saying this:  if you’re sitting out there skeptical of your love and acceptance, if the dark night of your soul seems so overwhelming that a message like this just doesn’t ring true, if the water seems so high or the thirst is just too great to be quenched, I just… I just ask that you hang in there and know that you aren’t alone.  You aren’t alone.  We’ve all been there.  We all know that feeling.  At least I know that feeling.  If you, for whatever reason, feel like you’re unlovable, please, please know that isn’t true.  Let us love you until you can love yourself.  If you’re sitting  there thinking that you don’t deserve God’s grace and you’ve done nothing to earn it… Well, neither has anyone else.  And yet, we’re all given it.

Please know that being a Christian doesn’t mean that life gets fantastic all at once and that there aren’t any hardships and struggles.  In fact sometimes life can get a lot harder. But you don’t have to pretend it’s all okay because sometimes its not.  You don’t have to wait for your last breath to say you’re drowning.  Because at the core of what it means to be a Christian, at the heart of what it means to be a church, at the center of our faith is grace.  You are loved and you are accepted whether you believe it or not.  And I promise you, I promise you if you hang in there long enough one day you will be met at the well and your thirst will be quenched.  And until that day comes, let us be the hand that pulls you up. Let us love you when you cannot love yourself.  Let us show you that you are never alone.  You are never alone.  You are loved and you are accepted. You are a child of God’s Grace. And you don’t need to believe it.  You don’t need to understand it.  All you have to do is just accept it…

Amen.