Sermon 3-27-11

"I Am Who I Am"
John 4:5-42

What if someone asked you, “Tell me about your God?”  How would you describe God?  What adjectives would you use?  God is good or God is great or God is loving?  You would be right of course, but is that all that God is?  Is there any positive term you can think of that is who God is but is at the same time not inadequate to completely describe who God is.  Human language fails us when we try to describe God.

Now you may have the same problem describing your children.  They have so many wonderful qualities that you can’t list them all.  So you call them by their names and their names evoke all those qualities.  Can we do this with God?   Yes, we can, but not by using the word ‘God,’ because ‘God’ is not God’s name.  “God” is just a descriptor for a divine being.  What then is God’s actual name?  Sue just read it to you from Exodus, I am who I am.

The name that God is given in the Old Testament, some 6,800 times is Jehovah or Yahweh.  The English translation of the Hebrew letters Yod, He, Vav and He is “I Am That I Am” or “He Who Exists” or “He Who Is” or the “Self-Existent One.”  The four letters are called the tetragrammaton.  Here is one representation of the name of God in Hebrew from an 1868 stained glass window in Iowa. 

Here is your odd fact for the day.  The reason why we don’t know whether God’s name is Yahweh or Jehovah is that in written Hebrew there are no vowels, so there are a couple of ways to fill in the blanks between the consonants.  Moses knew God’s real name, but we don’t, because for a period of several hundred years the name of God was thought to be too sacred to utter and the true Hebrew pronunciation was lost.

“I Am Who I Am” is a great name for God as well as a famous line for the cartoon character Popeye.  “I Yam Who I Yam” he would say.  I Am Who I Am reflects the fullness of God’s nature, but it is also a name that wipes out all human attempts to describe the dimensions of God.  Fortunately for us, Jesus devoted his ministry to illuminating those dimensions for us. 

Sometimes Jesus’ contemporaries were surprised by what he told them or what he did.  Our reading from the fourth chapter of John contains some of those surprises.

John 4, verses 5-9 

So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.
Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink’.
(His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.)
The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)

It is not surprising that Jesus was tired and thirsty after walking for hours on the dusty road in the midday heat.  What is surprising is that he asks for water from a Samaritan woman.  Even she is surprised.  Rabbis did not speak to strange women in public.  Samaritans and Jews did not get along because Samaritans had defiled themselves by intermarrying with their Assyrian conquerors.  And they worshipped at the ‘wrong’ temple, one on Mt. Gerizim well outside of Jerusalem. 

From this interchange we learn that God does not respect boundaries of religion, ethnicity, class or gender.  God speaks to everyone.  This Samaritan woman doesn’t even merit a name in John’s story, but God spoke to her.  And God initiates the conversation.  And he is giving her, that is us, the chance to recognize the face and presence of God in a stranger.

Jesus powerful presence may be a clue to our difficulty in describing God.  Maybe God is more of an experience than an idea.

Let’s read on in John.  Verses 10-15

Jesus answered her, ‘If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink”, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.’
The woman said to him, ‘Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?
Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?’
Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’
The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.’

Again the woman is surprised.  There was a legend that for Jacob, the grandson of Abraham after whom the well was named, the water in the well rose to the top and no bucket was necessary to drink from it.  Is this strange rabbi as powerful as Jacob, she wonders?  From where does he get the authority to tell her about the gifts of God?

Then Jesus reveals what this talk about the water is really about.  Life giving water is an analogy for life itself.  The Samaritan woman picks up on this immediately.  She is evidently tired of coming to the well to draw water every day.  And because of her low status in the town, she has to wait until the heat of midday, after the ‘better’ women have drawn their water, to come for hers.

When she says, “Sir, give me this water,” I can’t tell whether this is a conversion on her part or just a desperate desire to get away from her hard life.  Or perhaps some of both.   How many of us don’t turn to God until we are desperate?

Verses 16-26

Jesus said to her, ‘Go, call your husband, and come back.’
The woman answered him, ‘I have no husband.’ Jesus said to her, ‘You are right in saying, “I have no husband”;
for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!’
The woman said to him, ‘Sir, I see that you are a prophet.
Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you* say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.’
Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.
You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.
But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.’
The woman said to him, ‘I know that Messiah is coming’ (who is called Christ). ‘When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.’
Jesus said to her, ‘I am he, the one who is speaking to you.’ 

“Go, call your husband and come back.”  Jesus seems to playing with her here and also in his remark about her five husbands.  He knows she isn’t married and he knows she would have had no control over her marital status anyway.  What Jesus is doing is establishing his credentials as a prophet.  And again the woman picks right up on this saying “Sir, I see that you are a prophet.”

Once his credentials are established, Jesus goes on to point out the error of her ways.  Samaritans need to accept the whole of the Old Testament.  They need to be faithful in worship.  God spoke, she listened.  “I get it,” the woman says, “When the Messiah comes we’ll get our final directions.”

And now the real shocker, Jesus reveals to her that he is the Messiah.  “I am he,” he says echoing the words in Exodus, “I am who I am.”  Imagine the Messiah revealing himself right there in her work place, and introducing himself by name.  If God walked past us in the supermarket, would we recognize him?  The problem with God is not that He's so far away that we can't see Him. Rather, He is so close that we overlook Him.  Like a distant relative, we know his name but don’t think about him much. 

Verses 27-30

Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, ‘What do you want?’ or, ‘Why are you speaking with her?’
Then the woman left her water-jar and went back to the city. She said to the people,
‘Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?’
They left the city and were on their way to him.

Now the disciples are the surprised ones.  What is Jesus up to with this woman?  Why is Jesus having a heart to heart with her and not with us.  We have questions too.  Do you ever wonder how some people seem so lucky in everything they do, but not you?  “Here we are,” you say, “we come to church regularly.  We buy the lottery tickets.  Where is our $300 million?”

Unlike the disciples, the Samaritan woman got it, the truth resonated in her.  Forgetting her water jar, she ran back to town and began spreading the word about Jesus.  “Come and see,” she said, this guy loves everyone, even me.  “Come and see.”   She was, in effect, doing the disciples’ job.  She had been converted from an ‘outsider’ to an ‘insider.’
Verses 31-38

Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, ‘Rabbi, eat something.’
But he said to them, ‘I have food to eat that you do not know about.’
So the disciples said to one another, ‘Surely no one has brought him something to eat?’
Jesus said to them, ‘My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.
Do you not say, “Four months more, then comes the harvest”? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting.
The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together.
For here the saying holds true, “One sows and another reaps.”
I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.’

There is a time to sow and a time to reap Ecclesiastes says, but Jesus puts a surprising twist on it. When it comes to witness, the time is now. While Jesus was tender with the woman, now he becomes tough on the disciples.  Following the example of the Samaritan woman, the disciples need to get out there in the mission fields and say, “Come and see.”  Like the Samaritan woman, the disciples represent us.  Jesus is telling us to get out there and get moving.  He knows there are always souls ready for living waters.
Apparently the Samaritan woman was successful in her witness, for in verses 39-42 we read:

Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, ‘He told me everything I have ever done.’
So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there for two days.
And many more believed because of his word.
They said to the woman, ‘It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.’

Notice the surprising rapidity of the woman’s transformation.  And that in turn led to the transformation of others.  Could that happen to us if we joyfully put out the word about Christ?  Are we the tools for the transformation of others?  Does transformation start right here?  Aren’t we drinking of the living waters every day?

The Samaritan woman was an outsider whose conversion to an insider began when God came into her presence.  Much earlier Moses had experienced God’s presence even learning God’s name.  After their encounters, the Samaritan woman told her people, “Come and see;”  Moses told his people, “Follow me.”

We know God’s name, Yahweh.  His name is also Jesus.  We can keep God’s name in our minds.  “I am” is present tense.  Jesus is present today.  We can call on Jesus at any time.  As in this story from John, Jesus’ responses may surprise us, but God is here.  The dimensions of God will unfold as God’s presence is revealed in our lives.

So when someone asks, “Tell me about your God.” Consider a response based not on words, but on presence.  Try saying, “I reside in God and God resides in me.”  “I reside in God and God resides in me.” In that powerful presence, all the potential of our lives is wrapped into the name of God, I Am Who I Am.

Amen.