This week we continue the series of
messages titled I Love the Church
Because… This week’s message
is I Love the Church Because…I Can Be
Real.
I am often fascinated by commercials, or as the
broadcasting medium calls them, “messages.” In our day and age commercials – especially television
commercials – specialize in absurdity.
Next time you are watching TV, take note of how many commercials have
completely absurd premises, presumably to gain our attention in our loud,
media-saturated world. Take note
also of how easy it is to remember the premise of the commercial but not the
product. In fact, most of the
commercial’s time is often devoted to the setup rather than to the product
itself. I don’t watch much TV, but
I do pay attention to many of the commercials, more as a way of understanding
what they say about us as a society.
I was fascinated by one that aired recently, showing a man in an
operating room, doing surgery on himself.
At the bottom of the screen was this disclaimer – this is fake. Do not
attempt. Perhaps it’s more of
a reflection on our litigious society than it is on our collective IQ, but I
found that rather amazing. It’s
not as though I would do a preventative appendectomy on myself that afternoon! It’s an odd time in which we live when
we must require labels to tell us what is real and what is fake. We have commercials that distort what
is real and what is fake, we have national discussions and debates about fake
news. Thank goodness we have Facebook
to help us sort it all out, such as the post I saw that had a picture of
Abraham Lincoln and a quote from him that reminds us, don’t believe everything you read on the internet (I saw it on
Facebook, so it must be true!)
Our Scripture passage if from the 4th
chapter of John’s gospel, a familiar passage where we read of the story of the
conversation Jesus has with a Samaritan woman. Follow along with me as I read.
John 4:4-18 –
4 Now he had to go through Samaria.
5 So he came to a town in Samaria called
Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph.
6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired
as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.
7 When a Samaritan woman came to draw
water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?”
8 (His disciples had gone into the town to
buy food.)
9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “You
are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For
Jews do not associate with Samaritans.
10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the
gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him
and he would have given you living water.”
11 “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing
to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water?
12 Are you greater than our father Jacob,
who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his
livestock?”
13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks
this water will be thirsty again,
14 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.”
15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me
this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw
water.”
16 He told her, “Go, call your husband and
come back.”
17 “I have no husband,” she replied. Jesus said to her, “You are right when
you say you have no husband.
18 The fact is, you have had five husbands,
and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite
true.”
This morning I have only two points to share
with you, the first of which is –
1. We Must Allow Others to be Real.
Here
is how one person expressed it, and I love this – FCC does an outstanding job of fostering a spirit of community among a
very diverse group. One personal
example: I am a fairly progressive
Democrat and one of my favorite friends is a fairly right wing Republican. In the context of the church, we are
brothers. That is a great
testimony of two people allowing each other to be real.
I will admit up front that I
understand there is some irony in the title of this week’s message, as you
might be scratching your head and asking I
Can Be Real? At church? Really? Isn’t
church, at least sometimes, the practice of presenting an image that is
anything but real? Isn’t it an all
too common practice to come to church, putting our best foot forward and
crafting an image of having it all together, when we are anything but together? If I were to be totally honest today, I
would have to say that I was not totally honest with each person who asked me
how I am doing today. Each time I
was asked how I am doing today I answered I’m
great! But if I were to be
real, I would say I am really tired, have a terrible headache, and am very stressed. It is a sad reality that we so often
feel compelled, even in church, to present an image of having everything
perfectly together and that we are always doing great.
Even though this is how we generally present ourselves, it is not
how it should be. I think we all
recognize that church, especially, is one place where we should able to be who
we are, warts and all. The
difficulty is, we don’t know what to do with the struggles and the problems of
others. When those struggles and problems are openly shared, we feel
uncomfortable, not knowing how to respond or how to offer help. It doesn’t help that we live in a
culture that practices the art of presenting an image of health, wholeness, and
having it all together. For all of
the professed openness of our culture, and in spite of having a “put it all out
there” ethos, we still don’t know how to either present the full reality of our
lives or how to handle the reality that is the lives of others. All of us have done our share of
shaking our heads at the personal information people will present on social
media, and I have become convinced people share so much online because we have
lost the ability to openly share on a personal level.
Today’s Scripture text tells us of
the conversation Jesus had with the Samaritan woman at the well. I selected this passage because Jesus
points out that she has been married five times and was, at the time of their
conversation, living with someone who was not her husband. Many people read this passage and shake
their head at this woman – my goodness,
they think, married five times and now
living with a man to whom she is not married. What kind of a woman is this? She is not very moral!
She is not a paragon of virtue!
Tsk, tsk, shame, shame.
Now, it is important to point out that Jesus was not speaking in
judgment of the woman. Many people
assume, when reading this passage, that the woman was 5-times divorced and
after five divorces is living with a man, perhaps deciding that marriage wasn’t
for her after five divorces. But
here’s something to consider – in that day and time, women did not have the
power to seek a divorce. Even if
she were 5-times divorced, it would not have been at her instigation. And, we must remember, she might have
been 5-times widowed, and we also can’t assume that the man with whom she was
living was a cohabitating relationship.
The woman’s situation might actually reflect a very difficult stretch of
life in which she lost husband after husband and eventually had to move in with
a friend – or a relative – because she was unable to support herself. The point
being, we don’t know her circumstances and thus should not stand in judgment of
her. Because of the difficulty of
her situation, she seemed to be avoiding speaking of it with Jesus, while he
wanted to bring her circumstance into the open in order to bring healing and
wholeness to her life. I can’t
imagine that Jesus was speaking judgmentally to her. I believe he was speaking more in the spirit of you know what; you can speak freely to
me. I am not here to judge
you. I am sitting here talking to
you, when it is evident that many people in this town don’t want much to do
with you. They have taught you to
be ashamed and to avoid being open and honest about your circumstances, but you
can be real with me! You can be
who you are!
2. We Must Give Ourselves Permission to Be Real.
I taught a class at Highlands Latin
School in Louisville for five years, and I had two students – a brother and
sister – whose family was selected to participate in a network reality
show. You might remember the show;
it was called Wife Swap. The premise of the show was to take two
wives/mothers from very different contexts and have them swap families for a
period of time. In this case, my
students – who live in a rural, farm setting – received a woman into their home
who was from a very urban setting and was nothing at all like their
mother. It was fascinating to hear
them talk of the manner in which the program was filmed. Everything that seemed spontaneous was
not at all spontaneous. Most
scenes were the product of take after take after take. The conflict was scripted and the drama
was created. Everything about the
show was very carefully crafted, as the producers created situations and scenes
that were about as far from the truth – and reality – as was possible. The “reality” of the show was this – it
was not at all reality. How much
more ironic can you get than to be told you cannot be who you are but must
present a false image? What an
irony it is that a “reality” show had absolutely no reality involved! True reality, as we know, is far
different. True reality is
beautiful, ugly, easy, and hard.
And that’s okay. All of us
live lives that are a mixture of beautiful and ugly, easy and hard, and we do
not need to be ashamed of our struggles and our stumbles.
So why is it that we are so afraid to be real? Mostly, I think it is the fear of rejection. How many of you have this feeling that
people might find out who you really are and reject you? We put our best face forward because we
are afraid that if people know the “real” us they will reject us. It becomes, then, exhausting to keep up
the façade that we so carefully erect.
The lesson of the woman at the well is that Jesus invites us to be real. Too often, we are drinking water that
leaves us thirsty, when Jesus offers the water that quenches that thirst, and
does not leave us thirsty. The
living water of Jesus is an invitation to be real and to know that Jesus
accepts us for who we are.
When I was in the band Exit Up we
were invited to be part of a small movie.
It was not only a small movie, called Jackson’s Run, and it was a small
part as well. We were filmed for a
concert scene and I believe that in the final version we got about 10 or 15
seconds of screen time, but it was an experience that we enjoyed and it was
exciting, especially attending the premier. The premier was held at the Palace Theater in
Louisville. All of those who were
involved in the movie met at the Seelbach Hotel in Louisville, where a line of
limos waited to take us to the Palace.
When we arrived at the Palace there was a red carpet that we walked,
stopping in front of a backdrop of the movie so that people could take our
picture. I have to admit, it was
an experience that swept us up and made us feel a bit like celebrities. After the end of the movie, however, we
came crashing back to earth very quickly.
We parked our cars blocks away, near the Seelbach, and there were no
limos to take us back to our cars.
In fact, it was pouring rain outside when we left the Palace and we had
to walk a number of blocks through the rain, getting soaking wet, before we got
back to our cars. In spite of the
rain, we were able to laugh about our circumstances, as we noted wow, that was fast. So much for celebrity, red carpets, and
limos. Here we are now, slogging
through the rain and getting splashed by cars that are passing by. As much as we enjoyed the excitement of
the premier, the experience afterwards reflected reality much more
accurately. Riding in a limo and
walking a red carpet had nothing to do with reality, but trudging through the
rain did, because much of life is composed of struggle, and dealing with the
various storms of life that come our way.
The woman who spoke with Jesus at the well had experienced a lot of
storms in her life, and perhaps it was the pain and scars from those storms
that caused her to want to hide the reality of her life. Jesus, however, invited her to open up
her life, admit her realities, and to accept what he had to offer.
Let’s stop exhausting ourselves trying to present a “reality” to
others that is not true. Let’s not
put forward a façade that our lives our perfect, when they are not. Accept the living water that Jesus
offers, living water that satisfies!
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