Finding Common Ground
Have you ever been beyond thirsty—and got dehydrated? Chapped lips, light-headed, delirious? I wonder if Jesus was getting to that point. Jesus, we are told goes out of his way to cross the border into Samaria. It’s a long hike, in arid conditions. He meets a woman at a well and asks her for water.
At its heart, our gospel story of Jesus and the woman at the well is a story of two people who couldn’t be more different from each other forging a relationship that overcomes differences of gender, religion, country, class, and social standing. In other words, all the things. As the text indicates, Jews and Samaritans were hostile toward each other.
They come together at Jacob’s well. Not any old well, the well mentioned in the Old Testament where their common ancestor Jacob drew water. Despite their differences, they come together where they have something in common and have their conversation. It kind of makes me think we could learn from that.
What if Muslims, Christians, and Jews could start with the common ground of remembering that we share in Jacob’s grandfather, Abraham, the founding ancestor of all three religions? If we did, maybe we could talk more and bomb each other less!
Meeting at Noon
John mentions almost in passing that it was noon when the woman arrived at the well. Noon is when no one else comes. It’s the hour for people who want to avoid whispers.
Jesus is always drawn to the outsiders that everyone else has quietly agreed to reject.
Now — here’s something worth knowing. Scholars like Sandra Schneiders have pointed out that the woman’s five husbands may be less about personal scandal than about Samaritan history: when Assyria conquered Samaria, they resettled the land with people from five foreign nations, each bringing their own gods. Some readers hear in those five husbands an echo of five foreign gods — a whole people spiritually displaced, longing for something true. If that reading holds even partly, Jesus isn’t sitting with a woman who has a reputation. He’s sitting with someone who represents a people who have been far from home for a very long time.
Either way, he doesn’t condemn her. He offers her water.
They go back and forth. The conversation deepens. And what Jesus says he can offer isn’t water for the bucket — it’s something for whatever it is inside us that keeps running dry.
That’s where I want to stay for a few minutes. Spiritual dehydration.
Spiritual Dehydration
When the body loses too much water, strange things happen. Muscles cramp. Thinking goes fuzzy. The whole system starts to misfire.
Spiritual dehydration works the same way, just slower and quieter. I know what mine looks like. When I’ve been running too hard and haven’t stopped to drink in anything good — haven’t prayed, haven’t rested, haven’t sat still long enough to let grace catch up with me — I get short with people I love. I assume the worst about strangers. I lose the thread of what I actually believe about the world. I become, as a friend once kindly put it, “a little much.” It’s not how I want to be. And I’d guess some of you know exactly what I mean.
With everything pressing in right now — the daily news cycle that seems designed to exhaust us, the ambient anxiety that has become the water we swim in — the question isn’t whether spiritual dehydration is happening. The question is how bad we let it get before we do something about it.
What Comes Out When the Sponge Is Squeezed
Think of it this way: a sponge holds what it absorbs. Soak it in something foul and it doesn’t matter how good your intentions are — when someone squeezes it, that’s what comes out. When life squeezes us with grief, financial pressure, fear, and exhaustion, what comes out of us?
Walk down the beverage aisle at Ralphs sometime. Hundreds of drinks promising energy, vitality, happiness. Most of them don’t deliver. And most of the things we reach for to quench spiritual thirst are like drinking ocean water — it seems like it should work, it’s wet, but it only leaves you more parched. Gossip. Outrage. The endless scroll. You can’t earn enough, accumulate enough, or win enough arguments to satisfy what your spirit is actually thirsty for. It just leaves you wanting more.
So what are you drinking into your spirit?
The Living Water
When Jesus looks at the Samaritan woman, he sees past whatever story the village has written about her. He sees a beloved person, spiritually displaced, genuinely thirsty. And he offers her something that doesn’t run out.
I want to remind you today that that water is real.
There is water that bad news, war, corruption, and cruelty cannot poison.
There is water that shame cannot silence.
There is water that people with bad intentions cannot touch.
There is water that says:
you are more than your worst moment.
You are more than your latest mistake.
You are more than the label someone else tried to stick on you.
There is water that wells up in you,
that steadies you,
that gentles you,
that strengthens you.
Drink from that water.
Drink until the bitterness loosens its grip.
Drink until the fear begins to fade.
Drink until hope starts rising again.
Drink so that when life squeezes you,
what comes out is mercy.
What comes out is courage.
What comes out is hope and love.
That’s what this gathering is for. We come here, to this well, the way she came to Jacob’s well. Not because we have it together. Because we’re thirsty. And something in us knows there has to be a better source than the ones we’ve been trying.
Drink until, like the Samaritan woman, you can leave your jar behind. She went back into the city — the same city that had whispered about her — and told everyone she met what had happened. She couldn’t stop talking about it. And the text says: they came. They came to the well.
Others will notice when you’ve been drinking from the right source. They’ll see something in you that they want for themselves.
They’ll say, “I’ll have what she’s having.”
And they will come to the well.
We worship, pray, learn, sit still, and show up for each other because this is where the spring is. Come and drink. Amen.