Our scripture reading today is John chapter 4, verses 4 through
10. Now he, that is Jesus, had to go
through Samaria. So he came to a town in Samaria
called Sykar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his
son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, and
Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well.
It was about noon when a Samaritan woman came to draw
water. Jesus said to her, Will you give
me a drink? His disciples had gone into town
to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to her,
said to him, You're a Jew and I'm a Samaritan woman.
How can you ask me for a drink? For Jews do not associate with
Samaritans. 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. May the Lord add His blessing to
the reading and the hearing of His word.
Question for today. I just take a moment.
I think if you ponder hard, you can guess the question for the
day. Yes.
What is this feeling? What is this?
We're talking about feelings today.
The song What is this feeling is what Elena and Emma are going to
be singing soon. And it's a good question to ask.
Feelings are important, feelings are significant.
There's there's kind of an old school of thought, particularly
for men, that we should repress and deny our feelings and just,
you know, go through life with no emotions at all.
Bad plan. God gave us emotions and to
pretend that they're not important and they don't matter
and that they should be suppressed is a recipe for
disaster. They find their ways out one way
or another. We can, we can either express
them in ways that are healthy and productive or in ways that
are destructive, but they always find their ways out.
But asking what is this feeling? What is it that I'm feeling is
an imortant thing to ask? And also asking ourselves, why
am I feeling this way? Because as as important as
feelings and emotions are, it's just as important that we don't
put too much weight on them or ask them to do things they
weren't designed to do. Our feelings, our emotions, were
given to us by God as incredible measures of what is going on
inside of us. They are lousy as a tool for
determining external reality. For example, friend of mine from
back in the days when I lived in Tiff, and I'm going to call him
Bob. Bob is not his real name.
Since I'm messing up names today, should be easy for me to
call him by the wrong name. Bob is about 6 foot 7 and the
high end of 6 foot 7 and he's broad shouldered and he's lean
and he's muscular. He's not there, probably.
I mean not. I'm not sure you had an ounce of
body fat on him when I knew him, but not as skinny dude, not
super bulky, fit and strong. A white dude covered in tattoos
and and Bob used to say to me, Scott, I don't understand.
People see me in town and they act like they're scared of me.
Little old ladies will cross the street to avoid walking past me.
So Scott, just the other day I was waiting at a crosswalk,
waiting for the light to change so I could cross this direction.
A woman came up the other direction and, and, and she saw
me and she looked at me and she rolled her window up like she
was afraid of me. Now there's two parts of this.
One of the things I wanted to say to Bob but I didn't say to
Bob was of course you're scary looking.
He was scary looking. He really, really was.
It was not surprising that people reacted to him that way.
But here's the thing. Bob was one of the gentlest
people I have ever met, full of kindness and compassion not only
to those he knew, but to those he didn't know.
Now, Bob could be. I'm sure I never saw him this
way, but I I'm betting that if you threatened his wife and his
kids, you would meet a side of Bob that was neither gentle nor
compassionate. But I never saw that part of
Bob. And, and most of us will react
strongly to protect those that we love.
But the fear that those folks felt when they saw Bob, while
perfectly understandable, their fear was a horrible measure of
their external reality. They were never in any danger
from Bob, ever. Wouldn't harm a family.
Feelings, when we use them for
what they were intended and designed for, to help us
understand what's going on inside of us, rather than using
them to tell us what's going on outside of us.
Feelings are very, very helpful, very, very useful.
Part of growing up and maturing is learning to distinguish those
things. Now back to Wicked.
Elphaba and Glenda grew up separately.
They didn't know each other growing up, but when they got to
college they were assigned to live together as roommates.
Two more different roommates would have been difficult to
find. Although my initial freshman
year roommate was just about as far apart as Glenda and Alpha
were, They got together and they had very strong emotional
reactions to each other. And that's what the song, what
is a feeling? That's what that song is about.
South Elena and Emma are going to come up and sing.
At this point in the sermon, we listened to Emma Taylor and
Elena Buckley singing What is this feeling from the movie
Wicked? Emma and Elena did a great job
with it, but due to technical limitations I was not able to
get a good recording of them singing.
You can find the Ariana Grande Cynthia Revo version on YouTube
and all major music platforms though, and I hope you'll listen
to it. It's a fun song about two young
women who, upon first impressions, loathed each other.
Now back to the sermon. Great job, ladies.
Loathing. Unadulterated loathing.
That's what Glenda and Alphabet felt for each other when they
first met, and they were convinced it would last forever.
They were convinced that that initial feeling, that initial
reaction told them everything they needed to know about the
other person. And they couldn't have been more
wrong. Now Glenda had the the second
problem was that she had a lot of support.
The crowd was behind her. They all said, hey, you, you
should loathe elf about for sure.
We loathe her too. She's terrible.
She's awful. This is only evidence of a
simple truth that is profoundly impactful in our world, that
that focus groups and the crowd also get it wrong when they use
their emotions to measure external reality.
Their emotions told them what was going on them.
They each reacted strongly to someone who looked, dressed,
thought, acted significantly different than they did.
But they took that to mean that the problem was with the other
person, that there was something wrong with them, that they
deserved to be loathed. They used their emotions to
measure external reality rather than internal reality, and it
created problems. On the other hand, I left my
clicker someplace. It's it's probably in the back
somewhere. Where is it?
Did I leave it in the Pew? I did with my coffee cup.
OK, thank you. The simple fact is that Alphaba
and Galinda though, they worked through those initial feelings
and they became close friends. And in so doing it, they give us
an example of God's way of relating to people and the way
they did that and the way they got past those emotions.
They got past those feelings and they saw the other person as
they really were, and they came to love one another as fast and
close friends and ways that changed their lives
significantly for the good, for the good.
God's way of relating to people is very different than the way
that Glenda and Alpha were doing it initially, very different
than the way that the woman at the well did when she approached
Jesus or when Jesus approached her.
God's way of relating is to not use emotions to define external
reality, but instead to look deeply at the other person to
get to know their heart, who they really are.
That's God's way of relating to people.
Think about David when David was first chosen.
There's a new David movie out. Has anyone seen the David movie
yet? I'm hearing good things about
it. I haven't seen it, so I don't
know if it's it's good or not, but I'm hearing it's a it's a
good retelling of the story of David and his and his young
life. But David when he was young and
Samuel, Saul was king. Saul had screwed up.
God said we're going to have a new king and he sent Samuel to
David's family and all of David's older brothers came out.
David wasn't even called. He wasn't even, he said one of
your sons is going to be king. And, and, and Jesse didn't even,
didn't even put David on the list.
He brought out all of his other sons and they were older, they
were taller, they were stronger. And, and, and God had this to
say. The Lord does not look at the
things people look at. People look at the outward
appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.
Those outward appearances can provoke emotional responses,
very strong emotional responses, sometimes very negative
emotional responses, sometimes very positive emotional
responses. But neither the positive nor the
negative are good indicators of the reality of the one or of the
group that we're encountering that we're seeing.
And this is what God is telling us through the prophet Samuel,
that God looks at people's hearts.
And this isn't some sort of romantic, you know, fiction kind
of thing. That's not, it's not looking at
their heart in a, in a fluttery sort of, you know, ROM com way.
This is, this is looking at the heart and the way that the
ancients understood the heart. And when they used that term,
they weren't talking about emotions, at least not just
about emotions. The heart was the seat of
emotions, but it was also the seat of intellect.
It was the seat of reason. It was the person's character.
It was who they were on the inside, who they were when the
lights were off, who they were when nobody was watching.
The reality of who that person is.
God says that's what I look at, not of these external things
that provoke emotional responses in One Direction or another.
I look at a person's heart. I look at a person's heart.
King Saul failed at this over and over and over again.
When King Saul and his armies were confronted with the
Philistine armies and their champion, Goliath, they were all
afraid of Goliath. They didn't want to fight
Goliath. They looked at Goliath and they
were afraid. When David came up and said,
I'll fight him, they looked at David and they laughed.
They held him in contempt and disdain.
Here's this little farm kid, this shepherd boy, this scrawny
little run. How can he face a professional
soldier 10 feet tall? Their feelings said there's
nothing in David. We'll let him out.
We'll send him out, we'll let him try.
But this isn't going to work out good.
And then it worked out great. And David killed Goliath at the
part They don't put in the Sunday school lessons.
Is he? He cut Goliath's head off with
Goliath's sword and carried Goliath severed head around him
the whole day. I bet that's not in the New Kids
movie about David. But David defeated Goliath.
And then David continued to prove himself not only as an
able soldier but as a skilled leader, and he began to get more
praise than Saul the king did. And then Saul's emotions told
him David is not someone to be held in contempt.
David is someone to be feared as a threat.
And his emotional response to David was to fear him and see
him as a threat and to try to eliminate him, to assassinate
him, have him killed. He tried to kill David.
He threw a spear at him himself and sent his military to get him
because he was afraid of him, because he saw him as a threat.
What Saul was never able to do was to get past his emotional
response and see David's heart, the heart of someone who would
not betray his king. That even though God had told
him he would be the next king, he was not about to kill the
current king to take his place. He was going to trust in God to
work things out. But Saul never got there.
Saul never did the hard work of examining what his emotions
really meant. That he was insecure, that he
was anxious, that he was fearful, his internal reality.
Instead, he put it all on David. David is a threat.
I should be afraid of him. God's God invites us.
God calls us. I debate on whether to put it up
there. I put God calls us to relate to
other people. God's way.
It's really stronger than that. The other word I was going to
use was God demands us to relate to God's to other people God's
way. But but I don't know that felt a
little too strong, but it's somewhere in there call demand.
This is not this is not just something God would like us to
do. God says if you're going to be
my follower, this is how to do it relate to people my way.
He gives us that example in Jesus with the the the Samaritan
woman Jesus traveling through Samaria.
He stops at a well, it's noon, hottest part of the day, and he
sends his disciples on into town to buy some food, go get some
lunch or dinner, whatever. And he's there and it's just him
and the woman, and she's there to draw water.
And she's come in the middle of the day whenever all of the
other women in the village you were drawing water come early in
the morning while it's still cool.
But she doesn't want to deal with all the gossip and all of
the hating and all of the backbiting that's going to
happen in the snark. And there's this stain she'll
get from the rest of the town because of their perceptions of
her. So she comes at noon, and
there's Jesus. And Jesus speaks to her and asks
her to draw water for him. And her first response is almost
certainly an emotional response. And it's ick.
Oh, this Jewish man is talking to me.
First of all, Jews don't talk to Samaritans.
Samaritans don't talk to Jews. It's gross.
They're gross. Oh, and second, men don't speak
to unrelated women in public. This is also gross.
It's also, it's also it. And how does Jesus respond?
Jesus responds just the way we've been talking about.
Jesus answered her. If you knew the gift of God, and
if you knew who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have
asked him and he would have given you living water.
Jesus is saying look past the surface, get past your, your
visceral initial emotional responses to my Jewishness and
my maleness and see my heart, and then you will be asking me
for living water. See the heart.
And that's how Jesus responded to her.
And she was out there at noon in the heat of the day all by
herself to avoid the others because of her past and her life
and, and the contempt and the anger and the animosity and the
resentment and the judgment and all of these negative emotional
responses she was used to getting from the community and
she expected to get from Jesus. But Jesus saw her heart and knew
who she was and reached out to her and spoke to her and treated
her like the child of God in person of worth that she was,
and invited her to look at others that way.
First Him. But then it naturally spread to
others. And then this woman who'd been
avoiding the community ran back to tell everyone about Jesus so
they could know him too. Seeing past the surface, working
through the emotions and seeing people for who they really are.
This was this is not Jesus has an advantage.
He's God in the flesh. You and I are not.
And and so Jesus can do this instantly.
He can look at you. He can look at me, look at
anyone else and immediately know our hearts for us.
That doesn't work that way for us.
It requires work. It requires effort.
It requires seeing our emotional responses, recognizing what
those emotional responses are and labeling Him as such, and
then setting them aside long enough to be able to see that
other person's heart so that we can see them rather than our own
feelings. His disciples who were with him
for years struggled with this. We don't know for sure the
timeline because this story's in John and the next door I'm going
to talk about is in Luke. But if it it probably happened
afterwards, after, after Jesus's encounter with the woman at the
well, which Jesus, you know, later explained to the disciples
what was going on, that another time they're passing through
Samaria and they want to stop at a village.
And the village says, oh, no, Jewish people, you don't get to
come here. We don't like you.
Yuck. And his disciples have an
emotional response. Jesus, shall we call down fire
from heaven to kill them? All escalated quickly.
Jesus said no, actually, we don't know what Jesus said.
I suspect it's unprintable. This I suspect because all we're
told is Jesus rebuked them. We got none of the text.
I'm thinking it was a pretty strong rebuke.
And God's like, OK, we're going to leave the exact words out,
but Jesus rebuked them and they just went to a different
village. They were still acting out of
emotion. These people, we don't like
them. They're icky, they're yucky, and
they've insulted our leader. Now we're going to pray that God
will kill them, right? Just no, no.
Get past your emotions. Recognize them, see them for
what they are. You feel threatened by them, you
feel anger at them, you feel superior to them.
And so when they insult you, you feel it particularly
significantly. All these emotions said a lot of
things about what was going on inside the disciples.
It said nothing at all about the Samaritans they wanted to kill.
And Jesus came to die for those Samaritans, not to kill them.
And he was looking for a relationship with them, not to
destroy them. And that's how he invites us to
live and to treat other people. That when we encounter others,
whether it's an individual or it's a group, and whether the
whatever the differences are, whether it's differences in
gender, whether it's differences in politics, difference race,
different language, different ethnicity, different tradition,
different morality, whatever the differences are.
That we recognize that our emotional responses to those
differences tell us nothing about them.
Lots about us. And we examine those.
We look at him, we see what's really going on inside of us.
One of the things that happens if I'm walking down the street
and I see someone and I say, you know, that person looks a little
scary to me, I think I'll cross and go on the other side.
At the very least, that tells me that I don't trust God quite
enough to keep me safe from that person, even if they are a
threat at the very least. And those are the questions we
ask, what does this emotion say about me and my faith and my
relationship with God and how much I trust God?
What does it say there? And once we work through that,
then we have an open door to be able to begin doing the hard
work of seeing that other person's heart or that other
group's heart and responding to them accordingly.
This is the work Jesus calls us to do.
The good news is, is Jesus is very good at this work.
And this is the kind of thing because Jesus has called us to
do it and asked us to do it. Something we can depend on.
When we ask God for help doing that, we can depend on getting
that help and being able to see people as they are and love them
as they are and respond to them in that way, just like Jesus in
Jesus name, Amen. Amen.