Lifestory Conversations

"Lifestory Conversations"
John 4:1-29


Probably the most painful thing a person can experience is meaningless.  Life no longer makes sense.  The present seems dead, and you are just going through the motions.  Your past may seem to lock you into this endless, repeatable loop that makes you wonder if you will ever be able to jump off the merry-go-round.  You feel cursed by a sense of emptiness.

Most of us feel this way at some time in our lives.  But at other times, everything seems to make sense.  Our past, present, and future are like a bus that’s going somewhere, taking us somewhere.  We clearly see who the leading characters are in our story; and where the significant turning points have been.  We are able to name that which is really insignificant.  We understand the lessons that we’ve learned.  We have passed through a number of challenges coming out on the other side as better people.  We see life as a great quest that we are on, and it is good.

But circumstances can change in the blink of an eye.  Or the slow hurt of discontent, of apathy, and of meaninglessness empties out our glass.  In those times, what are we to do?  Where are the places we can turn to refill those emotional and spiritual drinking glasses?  Who are those we can lean on who will remain strong and not let us drop?  How can we start writing a new chapter, when the previous one ends?  Or will we be able to write a sequel when the first story of our life seems to have come to an end?

That’s where the woman at the well is.  Her glass is both literally and spiritually empty.  There are a number of signs of her emptiness in this story.  The first sign of it is created by John, the storyteller.  John doesn’t tell us her name.  In the flow of this story we don’t even find out who she is.  She’s just a Samaritan woman.  Emptied people feel like they have no name.  They could be called anything and anyone--it wouldn’t matter to them.  They are nobody’s who don’t even have a name to hang a person on.

Enter Jesus, thirsty and so tired of dealing with people who not only have names--they have titles.  People like the Pharisees.  People who tried to put him in direct competition with John the baptizer, rather than recognizing both John and Jesus were living under the same God.  All of this stuff of his ministry made Jesus feel, as John describes it, “wearied.”  Jesus himself is feeling a bit emptied.  Maybe, not only for the woman’s sake--the woman with no name--Jesus strikes up a conversation, hoping to find some strengthening for his own empty weariness.  Two strangers looking for something real to fill them up.  Engaging in conversation.

How much are we the walking weary?  Even in smaller towns like ours it’s not hard to become a community of strangers because we’ve lost the art and grace of engaging in real conversation.  Even in church we can say polite hellos and shake hands, greeting each other, but still go away feeling lonely and disengaged--in a word, empty.

The late Samuel Miller, a commentator on modern American church life, wrote often about how we in the church have used corporate business models by which to organize church life.  By doing that we end up relating to each other in a mechanically forced way.  He wrote:
Organization can be a quick substitute for redemption.  When two people are relating to each other--and it takes time, reflection and imagination for that to happen--then both are changed, whether they like it or not.  In organization, people merely make contacts, and the result is that no one is changed.  The redemptive quality of human relationships is dropped out; there is no time for it.  It is easier for a church to organize 3,000 people than to redeem one of them.  (Dilemmas of Modern Belief, p. 65)

Add to that what the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber concluded that “all real life is meeting.”  Not “meetings” but “meeting”:  Hearing and sharing conversation, of what I call “lifestory” sharing.  Meeting and conversing with a real person.

That’s what unfolds between Jesus and the nameless woman at the well.  A conversation.  Jesus masterfully moves the conversation from small talk to God-talk, or by the theme of this sermon series, from being empty to being filled.

I’ve talked already about how we may need to be emptied before we can be filled.  That, that is a painful process fraught with huge choices that create all kinds of anxiety.  In this message we find out how we can be a part of that emptying and filling process for another.  We do that through an ongoing conversation where two real people meet and go away changed--maybe even redeemed.

The first part of the conversation between Jesus and the woman, in order to fill her glass, is “making contact.”  Someone has to take the first step.  Someone has to take the initiative to open up the conversation.  Someone has to say, “Hello.”

Jesus’ way of doing this is by asking for a drink.  His opening hello is a statement of his need.  He needs something.  He’s thirsty.  He’s tired.  He’s weary.  He doesn’t even have the strength to lower the bucket into the well.  He doesn’t have anything to drink with, even if he got the bucket raised up out of the well.

Often we come at people we think we can help from a misguided sense of power.  We posture ourselves into some Tarzan-like position, swinging in on our vine, calling out our arrival to signal we are here to save all the helpless natives.  “I’m here to help you,” is what’s being exuded from all of our pores.

Jesus reverses that position of power and puts himself in the position of the needy one.  He gives the woman a sense of power she may have not felt for a long time.  He expresses his dry and tired need and casts the woman in the position of being his Tarzan.  It was a pretty amazing tactic Jesus used.  But the point still is, no matter how you do it, someone has to take that first step.  Why not you?

Secondly, in order to engage another in a lifestory conversation, you may have to risk bridging barriers.  You might have to charge through long held prejudices and preconceptions.

When I was pastoring in Nebraska, I was in the small town of Hickman.  It was a hamlet of 1000 people.  There was only one church.  The Presbyterian Church.  It was started by a town that had basically transplanted itself from Wisconsin to Nebraska.  They were German Presbyterians, close knit and interrelated.

About five miles to the south and east was the little town of Holland.  It was smaller than Hickman, and it had only one church--the Holland Reformed Church.  As you can imagine, they were all Dutch.

The Hickman German Presbyterians called the Holland Dutch Reformed people “peelunkers.”  I have no idea what that derogatory term means, and wasn’t able in the eight years I was there, to find out.  None of the Hickman people even knew what it meant anymore.  Or so they said.  Maybe it was too callous of a term to tell the meaning to their pastor.  The German Presbyterians weren’t allowed to date a Dutch Reformed.  God forbid they’d intermarry.  All that went on up to 20-25 years before I arrived on the scene.

For the woman at the well she was conditioned by over seven centuries of prejudice that went all the way back to the Babylonian conquest of Israel.  The Babylonians transplanted a bunch of their people into Israel to intermarry and intermix.  Those people became the Samaritans.  The Samaritans were thus looked down on by the Jews who were “pure blood,” and culturally “uncompromised.”

That’s what Jesus and the woman had to cut through in order to have filling conversation with each other.  They could have used the past 700 years to beat each other over the head with, and further empty each other.  Or they could set it all aside so true meeting and conversation could happen.  Some times that has to happen in order to have a filling conversation.

The third aspect of Jesus and the woman’s conversation is helping the other find the intersections of their story with The Story--with God’s Story.  The Biblical story is such a profound story because of its many entry points.  It’s those entry points that you can make available to those who are feeling empty.  Ultimately you have to usher an emptied person into something much bigger than just your advice.  You have to bring them to the many doors of God’s Word, and God’s Story.  To help those who are feeling meaningless to be able to say, “God’s Story is my story, too.”

I have found that if I look deeply enough into God’s Story, I don’t find it, it finds me.  The more you connect with God’s Story, the more you can help others make the same connection and say, “I am Adam.  I am Eve.  I am Moses.  I am Ruth or Naomi.  I am Nicodemus.  I am Mary.  I am Martha.  I am the nameless woman at the well.”  In God’s story there are so many intersections we can cross where we can say, “I’ve been here,” or, “I am here.”

Fourthly, know what you have to offer, and don’t be tricked into giving something else.  The woman at the well was trying to pull Jesus into a discussion he didn’t want to have.  She was asking something from him, baiting his hook, that he didn’t want to bite on.  She was asking for answers to questions that ultimately didn’t matter.

Jesus had the “living water” to give, and he wasn’t going to be dissuaded from offering that and giving it to her if she asked.  Living water is a term that was used back then for flowing, fresh water.  That’s what she was hearing.  But Jesus was using the term to mean something else.  In John’s Gospel, whenever Jesus talked about “living water,” he was meaning the Holy Spirit  (7:38-39).  What Jesus knew he had to offer her was the Holy Spirit who comes like a drink of fresh, running water--not stale well water.

So, when we are in conversation with someone who is emptied it’s important to discern what they need, not what they want.  It’s important to see beyond the smoke screens hurting people blow out, masking their needs.  Once their needs are discerned, if you have that to give, make sure that’s what you give.

Fifthly, understand the other person’s pain.  Seek to understand before you are understood.  For the nameless woman, there are a number of indicators of her pain.  First, she came to the well at noon.  Women normally came in the morning, congregating, chatting, filling water pots.  The fact that the nameless woman came at noon means, possibly, she was avoiding the other women.  Avoiding their mean gossip.  Avoiding the judgements.  Avoiding their taunting and catty comments.  That is part of the woman at the well’s pain.  She was ostracized.

The other part of her pain is that she’s been five men’s wife.  Jesus went right for her pain on that one.  In Israel at that time, a man could give a certificate of divorce to a woman, but a woman couldn’t do the same to a man.  And a husband could simply abandon his wife for very trivial reasons.  The wife was powerless to do anything about it.  She could have been kicked to the curb for simply accidentally burning the toast.  Who’s to blame for that?  As with any divorce, and the pain associated with it, it’s important not to be quick to judge.  Jesus certainly showed no judgement.  He simply commended her for being honest about her past.  Jesus was asking for a glimpse into her pain, and she let him in.

When I was serving a church up in Lincoln, Kansas, I went to visit an elderly woman who lived out in the country.  I was looking around her living room, and asked about one of her pictures.  It was her and her husband.  “Is this your husband?” I asked.  She immediately burst into tears.

I asked her what was wrong.  Her husband had died about 10 years previous.  Right after he died her adult children gave her a trip to Hawaii to “get away from it all.”  When she got back, all her friends wanted to talk about was the trip.  No one wanted to talk about her husband and the great loss she was feeling at his death.

She had never worked through her grief, and had no one who was willing to walk with her in her pain. They created this conspiracy of silence around her.  For ten years.  Until I arrived, and in a simple pastoral visit, asked an innocent question about a picture.  As a result of that question, she let me in on her pain.

If we are going to participate in God’s filling up of a person with the living water of the Holy Spirit, we must first fully gain a glimpse into the pain that bubbles up out of people’s emptiness.

Sixthly, we want to bring the emptied people we know into the presence of God, not the presence of religion.  As I mentioned before with point four, the woman kept trying to find her answers in the traditions of her religion.  Jesus kept bringing her back to God.  Jesus, finally, tried to bring the woman back to relationship with himself.  It’s not about religion.  It’s about relationship.

That’s the seventh and final aspect of having filling conversations with people.  In the conversation of bringing the woman into the presence of God, Jesus revealed something important about himself, that up to this point in John’s gospel, he hadn’t revealed to anyone else.  That’s how Jesus brings this healing conversation to a close, in a daring and caring self-revelation about who he really is.  Jesus brings her back to dealing with a person, not a religion.  Instead of avoiding through traditional theologies, the woman is being forced into a relationship with Jesus.  “Forget about what you knew,” Jesus is saying.  “Here I am.  Deal with me.”

In that way, Jesus’ surprise self-disclosure is a gift to the woman.  She gets in on a divine secret that elevates her sense of self-importance way above anything she’s felt before.  She’s included, by God, in the divine mystery of the Messiah.  She is!  And that self-disclosure creates a sense in the woman that this guy is genuinely interested in her as a person, and is showing caring concern for her.  For her!  Don’t be afraid to reveal something of yourself that creates the bridge of genuine caring between you and those who you talk to who are empty.


The story ends with a masterful storytelling stroke.  The woman leaves Jesus by the well (did he ever get that drink of water?).  But the story says she left her water pot at the well.  She has been filled.  She has no need for the well water.  She’s been filled with the “living water” Jesus had to give her--a living water he says will literally last her “forever.”  She accepted what he was offering her.  What she thought were her needs are no longer needed.  And she is filled and empowered simply by their conversation.  So much so, that she goes to have a similar conversation with her village about how she’s been filled by the self-revealing Messiah.

Oh that others will go away from us, and our conversations with them, just as filled.