Lay down your burdens

Ancient hands broke the ground, Bronze Age shovels and Bronze Trowels and Bronze Age digging tools cut through the earth.

Bronzed skin under sunny Middle Eastern skies worked the shovels and trowels and digging tools going deeper and deeper into the earth, the sun would soon reach its peak and it would be time to rest soon.

A lunch of flat bread with dates and olives spent under a nearby tree.

Where that tree exactly was, where the ground that was broken is not exactly known.

It could have been in Tel Belata, a present day archeological site on what is thought to be the historical city of Shechem in the occupied territory of the West Bank.

Some things are lost to time though, just as the sweat caused from digging the well fell to the earth and dissipated long ago leaving no trace but a wondering, the true location of Jacob’s Well has not been found.

Its significance remains.

It was the place where, after all, Jacob met his future wife Rachel.

And Jacob fell in love with Rachel at that well immediately and at first sight.

At the well, the story of Jacob and Leah and Rachel and Laban proceeded to commence.

The well was at a crossroads, a place to gather, to water oneself and one’s sheep.

Where neighbors would meet and, in the words of Paul Simon, leave dangling conversations and superficial sighs about the borders of their lives.

The history of this place is real and it is palpable and the stones share the secrets of the ancients whispered in the cracks and eroded grooves of a well-loved and well-watered well in the Middle Eastern desert.

Lives pass by and so do centuries.

Women gather on their way to the well together.

They share stories, stories about their lives and their children and their husbands.

There is laughter and lifting buckets full of water, there are tears dropping into the darkness of a deep well replenishing the salty earth.

This is a place of stories and gathering.

This is a place of history and long memories.

A place where conversations start in wondering tones, “Do you remember?” and “Remember when…”

The well is a destination, a place to carry on the drudgery of a hard life defined by the hard manual labor of lifting and hoisting and carrying.

It is visited in the cool air of a barely morning day, sunlight returned but only just, the heat will arrive shortly.

It is the place arrived at and then quickly left for there are still things to be done, fires to be tended, food to be prepared.

Conversation amongst friends, neighbors in the early daylight of another day in Samaria.

We are now in Jesus’ time.

The centuries since Jacob have passed, the buildings in the distance look different, perhaps there are even more of them than on the day Jacob met Rachel and fell so deeply in love with her that he would wait seven years just to have the chance to be with her forever and forever.

Those were seven long years for Jacob, years serving Laban, years he was forced to marry another, yet those years are but a speck, a pebble long broken way from the well’s wall and dropped into the seeming teeming abyss.

A falling stone once caused a ripple that has long since faded into the now smooth glassy surface of well-water at rest.

Centuries past.

The day now hot, the women carrying water long since gone, the water in the depths below him now smooth, a man sits on the wall where Jacob once watered his sheep.

A woman approaches alone.

She sees a man near the well.

This is different. 

He is Jewish,

That is very different,  at least in these parts,.

She is wary.

She is weary.

She arrives around noon the sun is about to hit its apex, the heat will only get hotter before it peeks in a few hours or so.

The man, Jesus, asks for water.

She is now leery along with wary and weary.

She wonders why he asks, he is of a different tribe, they do not get a long.

Why are you asking me for water?

If you knew who I was, you would ask me for water.

But you do not have a bucket.

My water is different, it is the living water, those that drink it shall never be thirsty.

She thought about this water, this living water that meant she would never be thirsty and being from the desert she knew thirst.

And she knew he wasn’t just talking about water.

This was different.

She asked for the water.

He looked at her as only he could, past her eyes but not through her, deeply into her very being.

He looked at her with love, not with Jacob’s passionate love, but the love of someone who knew her, cared for deeply, totally.

She knew she was loved.

If you want this water, go get your husband.

And he knew all things and everything.

About her.  About her past.

And maybe even, maybe, who she would turn out to be.

He knew.

Sir you know I have no husband.

She was getting nervous.

Why bring up her past?

Why bring up that pain?

Sir, I can see you are a prophet, but you and I are so different.

We worship here and your people are called to worship in Jerusalem.

Yes, and yet the time is coming when we will all worship God in spirit and in truth.

That is what God wants.

I understand, the woman replied.

I also know the Christ is coming and he will bring about that change.

And Jesus told her he was the Messiah.

He told this woman who was married five times and was shunned by her community to such an extent that she walked alone to the well in the heat of noonday while others walked together in the cool desert morning air.

Who knows why she was shunned, perhaps because the man she lived with was not her husband.

Perhaps she just liked being alone.

Who knows.

I only know I am not the one to judge.

His friends arrived, his disciples, they were astonished he was talking to this woman, but they said nothing about that.

And the woman took her exit, leaving behind her water jug, she left and began to evangelize.

She evangelized because she felt seen, because she realized she would never thirst again, because the good news was presented to her and she felt called to share this water that needed no jug in which to be carried.

It was her time to share the harvest sown by the love of a man who was also the Messiah.

And this woman was listened to.

This woman who walked alone to the well in the desert heat, was listened to by a community that was previously skeptical of her.

He told me everything I’ve ever done, she said, and they believed her.

And more and more believed as they were introduced to the word of God by the Word himself.

There is so much to this story.

The history.

The provenance.

A Jewish man speaking to a Samaritan woman.

That Samaritan woman becoming an evangelist.

The turned hearts and minds of a community.

And the fact that community invited Jesus in.

No individual thing in this story stands alone.

Without history, there is no present.

Without sharing the word of God, there is no conversion.

That we reap what we have sown is kind of a cliché, yes, but there is truth there.

Because I ask you to think about all that we are doing here at St. Luke’s.

I ask you think about our ministries here and the updates we are making to the building and pledging and annual meetings and pancakes and think some more.

Meditate on thoughts of God and service and ministry.

Maybe even walk with those thoughts.

Walk until you reach some place to rest.

Lay down your burdens, place your water jug upon the wall of some well.

And then try to truly understand that you are loved.

You are fully loved by a man who was sent to us for God so loved the world he sent his only son.

That son sees you.

He does not see just your faults or your tiredness, he knows you beyond weariness.

He knows you.

He sees past that which might be bothering you but he does not see through you.

And then the second invitation is this, leave your burdens where they are and share that love.

Share that love that transcends all understanding.

Bring that love to the crossroads where there is a well and sitting near that well if the reason for that love.

There sits the savior of the world.

There you are loved.

There, here, everywhere, you are loved.

Amen.