John 4:5-42
Lent 3 / Year A
One of my all-time favorite
movies is Smoke, a 1995 film about Auggie
Wren who manages a cigar store on a street corner in Brooklyn. Every morning at exactly eight o’clock he
takes a Polaroid picture of the store across the street. Auggie has over 4,000 consecutive daily
photographs of his corner all labeled by date and mounted in albums. He calls this project his ‘life’s work.’
One day Auggie shows
the photos to Paul, an author who has been mired in the throes of writer’s
block since the untimely death of his wife.
Paul doesn’t know what to say about the photos, but admits he has never
seen anything like them. Rapidly
flipping from page to page, he observes with some amazement each picture is the
same. Auggie watches him, and then
replies, “You’ll never get it if you
don’t slow down.” Even though all
the pictures are of the same spot, Auggie points out each one is unique. The differences are in the details: in the
way people’s clothes change according to the weather, in the way the light hits
the street, in how some days the corner is almost empty, and how other times it
is filled with people, bikes, cars, and trucks. “It
is just one little part of the world,” Auggie says, “but things take place here
too just like everywhere else.”
The Roman Catholic
educator Regina Cole suggests spirituality is an “awareness of the ‘more than meets the eye’ in our daily life.” By this I think she means life is a sacred
adventure. Every day we encounter signs
pointing to the active presence of God in the world around us. If she is right, and I suspect she is, then
Auggie is a model of a person who is spiritually alive. He has found uniqueness, humanity, and the
fingerprint of God’s Spirit in something so ordinary it escapes everyone else’s
notice.
Today’s readings from
the Old Testament and the Gospel of John describe very ordinary events –
trudging through the wilderness and going to outskirts of town to draw water
from a well. I must admit a twinge of
sympathy for the people of Israel. If I was
part of their band and I had been marching through the desert and I was hungry
and thirsty and tired, I would be complaining right along with the best of
them. I think their shortcomings begin
with reducing the ordinariness of the day to the mere pursuit of
provisions. They do not look for the
hand of God at work in the world around them and thus they do not detect how God
is, in fact, providing daily food and drink.
And through this providing, God is reaching out to be in relationship
with them.
If you have ever
worked all day to prepare a special dinner, taking great care to set the table,
arrange a centerpiece, creatively present the food, etc, and then had your
family rush in and attack the meal rather than dine together, then you can
imagine how God feels. All God has
created and provided, and the intimacy of the relationship God seeks to
establish through it, is met with the response, “We don’t have any water!”
It is not a helpful model of the spiritual life.
Like Auggie, the
Samaritan woman at the well provides us with a very different example. Yes, she sets herself to a very ordinary
task, but she is open to it being more than a daily chore. She encounters God in the person of Jesus and
while he remains somewhat elusive to her, she senses there is something more
about him than meets the eye. She
pursues him through conversation and at some point rushes off to tell others
about him. She has not formed a concrete
doctrinal statement about the nature of God.
She does not sell her possessions and join a convent. Heck, she doesn’t even commit to turn away
from her risqué lifestyle. But she does
sense she has encountered God.
You can almost
imagine how the conversation is going to go back in village. In the eyes of the townsfolk I’ll bet she is
the least likely person in the community to find God and the old well is one of
the least likely places for it happen.
She is nobody special and the well is just too commonplace.
The Christian
journalist Malcolm Muggeridge writes that, “Every happening great and small is a parable whereby God speaks to us,
and the art of life is to get the message.” Auggie’s photos and the Samaritan woman’s
encounter testify to the truth of his words.
Life is sacred and yet our temptation is to reduce it to secular; to hold
God is engaged in an hour of prayer on Sunday morning, but is not found when
you are stuck in traffic or doing homework or while taking out the trash. The temptation is to reduce life to a series
of tasks – religion being the task of this hour. New life comes when we realize in every
moment God is reaching out to us to be in relationship with us. And life is all about getting the message.
So, back to Smoke
and Paul with his writer’s block. He
slows down his scanning and begins to take his time. Without warning he gasps aloud. His wife appears in one of the pictures. Suddenly he realizes how an ordinary moment
in an ordinary day at an ordinary place is a sacramental moment. There is more – a lot more – than meets the
eye going on around us!
