Water-Cooler Evangelism
John 4 (Selected Verses)
Sheila C. GustafsonPastor, First Presbyterian Church,Santa Fe, New Mexico
Saturday, November 11, 2006
Sheila Gustafson is pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Santa Fe, NM and a founding Director of the Covenant Network. She is a noted preacher; her sermons have been published in Renewing the Vision and Preach for Peace. Dr. Gustafson graduated from United Theological Seminary, was ordained in 1977, and has served churches in Minnesota and Wisconsin.I stand in this pulpit today as one of the 4,000 plus spiritual daughters of Margaret Towner on behalf of whose ordination to the ministry of word and sacrament someone spoke out over 50 years ago; and I wear this stole (which I just retrieved from the Shower of Stoles display) as part of my commitment to continue to speak out on behalf of voices still silenced by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) – voices faithful, and gifted, and called to the ordained ministries of the church. It comes as a gift to be asked to consider the concept of call at just about the time I am beginning to try to discern how one goes about creatively and hopefully winding down a three-decade, intensely active, professional ministry. I don’t expect to retire this year, or maybe even next-- but, with a significant birthday coming up this month and several long term and consuming projects having recently reached fruition, I suddenly discover that I do have to ask myself if it makes sense to sign up for the long term purchase plan for the several volume, to be serially published New Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible. By the time the last volume is delivered, shelf space for books might well have emerged as a serious problem. The issue of call, having been more or less settled for me for years in its Calvinist four-fold sense, is re-surfacing in my life in a new way. I find myself increasingly wondering if call is a matter of matching the gifts one brings to ministry with the needs of the church, as I had been taught long ago or, more profoundly, a matter of identifying how our own lacks and limitations, our own longings and seekings might evoke the grace of God in the world.As a fairly faithful follower of the preaching lectionary, I am one who has come to recognize that, every three years, a particular text re-exegetes me. I listen for the word which will speak to a congregation on any given Sunday, and it speaks, when it speaks, invariably through our collective context, and through the individual and corporate experiences we bring to the moment of worship. It has taken me approximately ten times preaching on John 4 – along with the discrediting by eminent feminist scholars of 200 centuries of interpretation which created for the Samaritan woman a seamy sexual history-- to come to the realization that she is the woman in the scriptures with whom I most identify. What I offer to you this morning then, is less a sermon than a testimony.Her story, most scholars agree, is a theological construction by the Fourth Evangelist, designed to encounter a set of traditional religious values and sanctions with a new and world changing ethic of eschatological inclusion. The characters, the story line, the geography, even the props (who has what, who lacks what, who abandons what) are brilliantly employed to challenge the religious status quo and to thrust the implications of radical gospel insight into the consciousness and behaviors of faith communities both inside and outside of the story.I recognize myself, and my kind, in the woman who carried her water jar to the well at midday to draw water for the use of her household. She was doing the traditional work which, even today, centuries later, falls to women around the world – traveling, sometimes, miles to carry back, often on their heads, the water without which life cannot be sustained. As a young mother of three babies in 12 months, I carried a lot of water myself for a time – albeit much more conveniently with hot and cold faucets and modern appliances – and I consider the role to be a noble and necessary one. But inside that female head which had been historically valued as a platform for heavy burdens, the author of the Gospel of John placed questions of truth and meaning which were anything but traditional. What Samaritan woman of the first century had been encouraged to think about, never mind to raise to the level of conversation, theological questions? And how many women in the centuries since – up to and through the 1960's (when I did much of my own water carrying) have been taken seriously as theological inquirers?The dialogue of John 4, one of the longest in the Gospel, is opened by Jesus’ presentation to the Samaritan woman of his own need. He is thirsty and lacks the necessary equipment to draw from the well the water which would alleviate his physical discomfort. Jesus asks for a drink, a fairly straightforward request for simple hospitality, if the impossibly complex social and religious dynamics of an encounter between a Jewish teacher and a Samaritan woman can be overlooked.I find no evidence in the text that Jesus ever received the drink that he had asked for. Instead, it is the deep thirst of the Samaritan woman which is surfaced by the ensuing verbal exchange: the thirst for – at first, perhaps – only a serious conversation; for the experience of having her questions heard as legitimate and appropriate, and having them answered thoughtfully. But, as the conversation continues, Jesus, stunningly, offers to her a complete reversal of the request for hospitality with which the conversation began: he offers her a hospitality of mind and soul, of connection, of unconditional regard, of personal presence, of meaningful discussion, and of metaphorical insight into another dimension of being – a dimension which he pays her the supreme compliment of expecting her to apprehend!Before I became a part of the early wave of Presbyterian women’s ordination as a second career minister, I had been that woman, thirsting for something I could not have named, filled with questions for which I had no answers, longing for serious theological dialogue and a discipline which would give me the tools to think, and the vocabulary to articulate, and the structure to reason so that I too might come, in spirit and in truth, to worship, not what I did not know, but what I might apprehend as the mystery of God. And, though it took me a long time to be able to identify and verbalize this, I also wanted to integrate those new learnings into the person I already was: a woman, a nurturer of relationships, a maker of connections, a proud member of the tribe of those who carry water to minister to the thirst of the world. It was important to me not to have to reject those parts of myself in order to be allowed to pursue new levels of understanding.Entering seminary in the early 1970's, in only the third M.Div. class which had admitted women in that institution, I was immediately identified by one of my fellow students as “a suburban housewife who had taken a Bible study class and thought she wanted to be a minister.” Which was true – although a trivializing way of putting it. A few months later, after my photograph appeared in a seminary interpretation display, another classmate dubbed me “the Homecoming Queen”-- which was not intended to be a compliment. It would have helped me then to recognize such remarks as analogous to the unspoken astonishment of Jesus’ disciples when they returned to where they had left their Teacher and found Jesus speaking with a woman. They, at least, had the courtesy to keep their opinions to themselves, although it was clearly out of respect for Jesus that they did so, and not out of respect for his conversation partner. Fortunately, I also found in that seminary classmates and professors who were willing to engage me in serious dialogue, to share with me in the process of constructing a cohesive theology, and to teach me to speak in –as well as to listen to – holy conversation. The shaping of a ministry for which there were at the time few blueprints has been a thirty-year challenge. I have had wonderful peers, some of whom you have heard from as part of this and other Covenant Network Conferences – great friends and sisters in ministry whom I admire and respect and love. But I have had few women clergy role models. Most of my professional role models have been men. They have been fine men, excellent ministers, leaders in their communities and their denominations – and they have, in mutual learning over the years, discovered with me how to be colleagues together across gender lines, despite social conditioning which gave us few examples of such partnerships.Like the woman at the well, my motivation for ministry, for testimony, for proclamation, is and always has been the sheer joy and excitement of sharing what I have received: the good news of the Gospel; the living water; the offer of unconditional regard; hospitality on the part of the Christ who knows everything I have ever done and invites relationship anyway – relationship and a safe space to ask my questions and seek my answers. I consider the best possible outcome of pastoral encounter to be the empowering of men, women, and children to get excited about seeking their own relationship with Jesus Christ. To be allowed to have those conversations, and to resource those explorations, and to witness the blossoming of faith, is the greatest satisfaction of my ministry.My role models have taught me over the years that to be in a position to have those conversations, I had to become competent in the tasks of ministry. Competency is the best defense against gender bias, and the best protection against the charges leveled at women in non-traditional professions – charges of being irrational, too emotional, and not tough enough to withstand the stresses and strains of parish ministry. So I worked to learn to be competent, and to be professional, and I took on difficult projects and, working with dedicated congregations, I got many of them accomplished. And experience helped me to become more competent in some areas, and I learned how–with many props and supports–to preach and to prepare worship, and to plan capital campaigns, and to introduce new ideas slowly and carefully into the lives of congregations. And, though I had always understood that my call originated in my vulnerabilities, and not in my strengths, those learned skills got me through a number of stressful and challenging times.Over the last several years – along with many other projects of First Presbyterian Church in Santa Fe – we have built a new building; and have, at the same time, developed a partnership relationship with a small congregation in Sagua La Grande, Cuba. As we have done our capital campaign we have included funding for mission projects, including for assistance with the restoration of a colonial era hacienda in Sagua and its conversion into a church. On three occasions mission teams from our congregation visited to carry funds, to help with the project, and to report back to our church on progress. Consumed with the building efforts at home, I followed with great interest the work in Sagua, and promised to travel to Cuba with a team from Santa Fe for the dedication. As it happened, the two projects had much in common. We shared similar challenges in restoring old buildings in historic neighborhoods, and struggles with permits and scarcities.We dedicated the building in Santa Fe in April; and a week ago we dedicated the building in Cuba. It is an elegant and simple church, built around a courtyard in old Carribean style with thirty-foot ceilings, tall glass-less windows covered with wooden shutters, and protected by restored antique iron grilles. The dedication happened on the last night of a ten-day trip to visit the Presbyterian Churches of Cuba. I know that some of you have relationships on that island and with the re-vitalizing Reformed Church of Cuba, and you know both the incredible hardship of life under embargo, as well as the equally incredible generosity of the Cuban people.Three of us stayed in Sagua for three and a half days, guests in the small apartment of the Pastor, sharing space and resources with her family of four. My bed was in the living room where, from 6:30 a.m. through the day, church members came over to cook, to print one page at a time on an ancient printer the 300 bulletins they would need for the dedication service on Friday night, to visit with the Americanos, to look after the baby, to plan for the dinner they intended to feed Presbyterians from all over the Island. The crowd of us overwhelmed the single toilet, the electricity, the fragile water system. Every day was in the high 90's with 110% humidity, and every evening there was an event at the new church –even on the night the electricity was shut off across the city and everyone came with their battery powered emergency lights. Every day the Cubans used their ration coupons to feed us their allowances of rice and black beans, and scarce, costly meat or fish. And we spent the equivalent of the cost of a family banquet to buy expensive bottled water to keep from getting sick.No one had a car; we walked everywhere or – once, when we visited the mission across the river – we rode in a horse drawn wagon. I can’t begin to discuss the politics of living among a people who have been economically punished for over 40 years for having a government our country doesn’t like, but I can tell you how quickly, under those deprivations and difficulties, any sense of competence or professionalism I might have had – long ago in a land far away – fell apart. With limited language in Spanish even my simplest communications had to be translated and, in punishing heat and humidity, that last defense of the unprepared – looking professional – became a ludicrous goal. Every stitch of clothing I put on was soaked with sweat in five minutes; my hair never dried completely in the entire ten days we were in Cuba. The sermon I had prepared and brought with me was too long and complex for translation, and whole pages had to be thrown overboard in the preaching of it.One evening the Pastor of the Sagua congregation asked me to lead a service for wholeness and healing for the church members who showed up faithfully every night we were there. She had heard from our visiting mission teams that we had initiated such services in Santa Fe; so in a desperate mixture of Spanish and English, the two of us tried to plan. The sticking point seemed to be the anointing with oil and the blessing for healing, which she wanted me to understand would be radical departures for Cuban Christians who were still operating on the basis of 1950's Presbyterian liturgy. I remembered how carefully we had introduced the concepts to our own congregation with explanations of the ancient tradition and lots of permission to choose not to participate if it did not seem comfortable. I could not imagine how, without language, we could expect these lovely people to understand, never mind accept, the ritual we were proposing to them.We began with prayer, and we sang, and we stood in a circle and passed a candle from person to person as each prayed for intercession. And then it was time for the anointing, which the Pastor had asked me to do on the premise that it would be more difficult for the congregation to refuse, coming from a visitor and a guest in their midst. A member of our Santa Fe mission team explained in Spanish that our signal for inviting anointing and blessing was a raised hand and I glanced with trepidation around the circle where I saw that about half of those assembled had indicated their willingness to be touched and blessed. As I worked my way around from raised hand to raised hand making the sign of the cross on foreheads and speaking the simple words, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in English, “I anoint you for healing in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen,” I was overwhelmed by the trust and the faith I saw in the eyes of these former strangers. Any barriers that had existed – of language or culture, or race or gender, or even of half a century of Presbyterian practice – fell away. The living Christ was present among us, in Spirit and in truth. I could only, like the Samaritan woman say, “Come and see” – and they, like the citizens of her village, respond, “we have seen for ourselves.”When the circle had been completed and I prepared to move back to the front of the church, I glanced up – and the hands of the other half of the people were raised.Two nights later, the whole of Presbyterian Cuba gathered in the new sanctuary of the Sagua La Grande Church – packed in, standing room only. The great shutters were thrown open to the street, and the singing, and the drumming, and the praying, and the preaching spilled out over the crowds of children gathered at the windows, peering through the grills. During the offering, the mission team from Santa Fe carried down the aisle and placed on the communion table replicas of our own communion ware – cup and pitcher and patten that had been smuggled in as heavy as lead under the suspicious gaze of Cuban customs officials. Then, the service ended, we jumped onto our bus and rode through the night to Havana to catch our early morning flight home.The very next morning, back in Santa Fe, I walked into our sanctuary where our own communion ware stood on the table in preparation for the celebration of All Saints Day worship – and I burst into tears. (Women are just too emotional to be ministers!)I am thinking again about the concept of call, about the giftness of it, about the un-earnedness of it, about the grace of it – and about the incomprehensibility of thinking that we have any control over it – that the church can control it– or that we could think it depends on our qualifications, or our competence, or our gender, or our sexual orientation, or on anything at all that we can, or cannot, do anything about. The Fourth Evangelist told a story about an encounter which took place in the midst of a woman’s ordinary day, among her routine responsibilities, when a man asked for a simple drink of cold water – and offered to satisfy the thirst of the whole world. Thanks be to God.
Amen.
