Hi there! Once a month or so, I offer a sermon as a piece of writing — because, y’all, this is yet another form of writing. This particular sermon was given on March 12, 2023 at St. Paul’s Episcopal in San Rafael, California. Enjoy!
A piece of paper used to hang on our kitchen wall: HALT, it said in big, Sharpie-drawn letters. Although HALT means to stop or cease, it also comes in handy as a four-letter acronym: Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired.
HALT became the question we began to ask when our feelings became big and explosive – when behavior seemingly erupted out of nowhere.
As the story often goes, one of my children would bound into the kitchen, tears dripping down his face. “Someone … touched … my, my, my dinosaur!!!!!”
Now, touching one’s dinosaur is generally considered an okay thing to do, but when it’s your special dinosaur and the perpetrator doesn’t have permission and you’re also super, super hungry but haven’t quite yet realized it, that’s another story.
“Okay, honey,” I’d say. “Take a deep breath. Breathe…” Together we’d breathe in and out, his and my hand pressed upon his little chest. He’d calm after a few minutes and that’s when I’d prompt him: Do you feel Hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired?
Hungry was usually the culprit, so we’d fix it with a banana or a spoon full of peanut butter, an applesauce packet or a special 3 o’clock quesadilla. Sometimes Angry, Lonely, or Tired were behind the tears, so we’d fix those instead. I’d ask questions, he’d give answers. I’d provide another human’s touch or interaction, he’d relish in the company.
At some point, probably in a move, the HALT sign made its way to the recycle bin: it was just scrawled on a piece of recycled paper, after all. But its meaning has stayed with my family long after the fact; for my husband and I, it’s like those four words live buried within us. If we’re lucky and in our right minds when it comes to parenting, we’ll remember its meaning when emotions get big nowadays. We’ll remember that there’s often something behind the something; we’ll extend empathy because we know that the behavior is not merely defiance, but something else that cannot always be first named.
I couldn’t held but remember the HALT sign – and its many interactions over the years – when I read this week’s gospel passage.
In John 4, Jesus and his disciples are journeying through Samaria. The disciples leave to find some food, but Jesus stays behind: it’s the middle of the day and there he sits, idly waiting by a well. We read those details, and it’s kind of like, no big deal, Jesus was thirsty, he needed something to drink.
But as it goes, there’s often something more to the story. Jesus goes at an unpopular time of day: normally, the women went to draw water from the wells in the early dawn, before it got too hot. But Jesus purposefully goes to the well, this well, at the hottest time of the day; Jesus purposefully goes to the well because he knows she is going to be there.
He doesn’t have a bucket, but she does. She comes alone, perhaps because she didn’t have a whole lot to talk and gossip about when the other women were going to the well. She comes alone, perhaps because she was the one the other women talked about gossiped when they were at the well.
When Jesus gets there, he says four words: “Give me a drink.” He asks her for something only she can give. When he does this, he pushes through barriers of gender and ethnicity, because in those days, a man did not ask a woman for a drink of water unless he also wanted her for sex. Additionally, Jews did not ask Samaritans for help, because they believed them ethnic half-breeds, worshipers of a false God.
Through this singular exchange, Jesus pushes past barriers. He begins to see past her behavior – the kind of behavior we might want to react against, two thousand years later – and sees something behind the something.
The woman begins to ask him questions, questions about religion and about the magical elixir of living water he mentions. To this, he replies, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” When she begs for a drink of this water, because who wouldn’t want a drink of this water, he asks her to go get her husband.
This, of course, is a reply many conservative theologians often point to as proof of her sin. This is a reply I pointed to for a long time, because I didn’t realize there might be another way of looking at the story. Look! She slept around. Look! She really, really needed Jesus because she was a sexually immoral woman. The account often stops there, her past behavior suddenly the focal point, the most important part of the story: her sin and her wrongdoings become the worst part of all, the part most in need of redemption and saving.
It's like they forget to look at the something behind the something: they forget to HALT, forgetting about the other side of the story. In second-century Judaism, a woman had no rights in marriage. If she was barren, her husband could divorce her. If he didn’t like the way she pounded the wheat and barley, he could discard her. If he believed she’d gotten ugly, he could throw her to the side.
She, after all, had no rights, for she was merely a woman. “Blessed art thou, O God” Jewish men used to pray, “for not making me a Gentile, a slave, or a woman.”
In truth, the reader doesn’t know why she’s been with a handful of men in her lifetime because that’s not the point of the story.
Instead, the point lies in the response of the one who calls himself the Living Water – in the way God treats everyone with dignity. Jesus comes to the woman with a need only she is equipped to meet. She alone can draw water from the well. She alone can give him something to drink. When she does this, their exchange becomes mutual. He doesn’t hold power over her, nor does she have to change or conform to his social perspective.
Instead, and as I write about in my book,1 through their interaction, the woman no longer feels shame but empowerment. Because Jesus honors the particularities of her identity, including her ethnicity, her religion, her gender, and the stories of her past, she is changed – and she can’t help but introduce an entire community to him.2
As one friend said of this passage, when Jesus meets the woman at the well, theirs is a holy connection. Theirs begats vulnerability. Theirs proves true the need for us humans to see and be seen in return.3
An invitation exists for all of us, whether in the middle of Lent or halfway through the month of August: make mutual our interactions with one another, our neighbors and our church community, our families and our coworkers. Honor the particularities that make our beautiful, messy human selves terribly, wildly, and gloriously holy in return. Look beyond the behavior and the ugliness on the outside to see what’s really going on the inside.
HALT, one might say, doing as Jesus did while generously applauding the human being on the other side of it all.
Much of this retelling is from my book, The Color of Life. Pick up an autographed copy today!
And much of this insight came from a conversation with an old friend, Teylar, who learned much of this interpretation from none other than Dr. Brenda Salter McNeil.
And finally, this insight came from Rev. Jes Last, just last week!