Harbor Church - Mid City

Keeping the Spirit of Christmas Alive—Through Giving

John 4: 1-30, 39-42 (Mid-City), Dec. 13, 2009

We’re in a series on Keeping the Spirit of Christmas Alive. To me, there is nothing better than Christmas, and every since I was a kid I have always had this desire to keep Christmas around. And that is really the goal of this series—how do we capture the magic, the wonder, the spirit of Christmas and keep it with us year round. If you are an Ebeneezer Scrooge type, then you are admittedly not going to like this series.

Last week we looked at the role that family plays during the holidays. This week we’re going to look at giving. Like it or not, giving is bound up with the holiday season. So, this morning we’re going to take a little time and think about giving at Christmas. Now most of you didn’t think the story of the woman at the well was an advent story, did you, but I beg to differ. See it is a text about giving and if you want to keep the Spirit of Christmas alive, then you must understand giving.

So, let’s think about giving through the lens of this story of the woman at the well. And we’re going to do so by thinking through 2 different questions: (1) Who are you giving to at Christmas? (2) What are you giving them?

(1) Who are you giving to at Christmas? Typically, the answer is family. Sometimes you’ll extend the circle out a bit and give to close friends. But if we really want to keep the Spirit of Christmas around, then I think we’re going to have to broaden the circle out.

See Jesus is broadening the circle of giving in our story. First of all, he is giving to a woman. See, Men didn’t talk to women in a patriarchal culture b/c women were considered to be beneath them. Even the disciples are shocked and you see this in v27, “Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want?” Or “Why are you talking with her?”

The disciples are thinking (they think to themselves), “There he goes again, wasting time talking to a woman.” And not just any woman. This is the town whore. V17 She had been married 5 times and was now shacking up with a some random man she wasn’t married to. People—this is Mayberry. It isn’t New York. Sex in the City lifestyles weren’t fashionable. Everybody in town knows this is the local whore. Men didn’t talk to her—they just used her. Not Jesus.

She was an outcast even among the Samaritan women. Notice that v6 says Jesus sat down by the well in the 6^th hour. This means it was noon, during the heat of the day and here you have one woman at the well all alone. See women always came to get water in the morning when it was cool. It was an arduous task where they had to collect enough water for the entire family to bathe, eat, drink, etc and involved multiple trips with heavy loads. So they never went at noon, and they never went alone. It was too difficult for any one woman to do alone. Yet, here she is in the middle of the day, alone. Why? B/c is tired of the jokes, tired of being ridiculed—it is easier just to go it alone rather than endure the constant emotional abuse she took from other women.

But here is another reason this conversation between Jesus and her is so remarkable. She is a Samaritan and Jesus is a Jew. These two groups of people don’t get along. Think Hatfields & McCoys or think Al Qaueda & President Bush. Not good friends. Why do they hate each other so much?

Because the Jews considered the Samaritans as sell-outs. When the Assyrians invaded Israel and captured Samaria, the Jews who remained in that area intermarried with the Assyrians. Not only did they intermarry with the Assyrians, but they also adopted their religious practices and gods. So, in the Jews mind, they were sell-outs who were racially unpure, culturally unpure, religiously unpure. In fact, Jewish people considered them so unpure that they passed legislation that prohibited Jews from using drinking or eating utensils that Samaritans used.

So you can understand her shock, in v9 where she says, “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).

And yet Jesus smashes through the racial, cultural, social, and gender barriers and says, “Let’s talk.” Friends, the little baby born in a manger came to shatter these barriers. He came to do what he says in v10—to give the gift of God to those who that society has declared unwanted. If you want to keep the Spirit of Christmas—the Spirit of this little baby—the Holy Spirit alive, then this is where you will find yourself throughout the upcoming year. With the ones that our society has tossed away.

If you don’t know where to start, then come talk to me or Chris Brewster or Kathy Pham or the Zellers. First thing we’ll encourage you to do is to do it in community. Get in a community group and start giving gifts to the marginalized in our community. Go it alone and you’ll burn out. Second, you may want to get involved in one of our mentoring programs, either with a teen in the church or here at Hoover or you may want to get involved with our Lifeskills and Tutoring Class for refugees. So, if you want to keep the Spirit of Christmas alive in your heart past Dec. 25^th, then start doing what he did, that is giving gifts to most alienated and voiceless people in our city.

While the voiceless and alienated group certainly gets a special emphasis in Jesus’ ministry and should in ours if we are his followers, there is another significant lesson in this story about who we give to and it is this: Jesus came to give gifts to people regardless of race, class, gender, or status. Why? B/c every human needed the gift he was giving—rich & poor, male U female, Jew & Gentile.

Think about this from another angle, because this is critical. See Jesus would not do what everyone else around him did—that is, they pointed and said, “She is the problem in our city. If we could just get rid of whores like her, then this would be a good city to live in.” See he wouldn’t say, like the Jews, the problem is in the Samaritans. Pharisees said the problem is the sinners and tax collectors. Romans said the problem was the Jews or Greeks or barbarians. Jesus said the problem is the human heart. He put it this way in Rms. 3:23, all men have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory, not one particular sub-set of mankind

It you get this, then you will do as Jesus does and simply refuse to villainize anyone or any group. If you are a democrat, you won’t villainize the Republicans and if you are a Republican, you won’t villainize the Democrats. If you are a homosexual, you won’t villainize the heterosexuals, and if you are a heterosexual, you can’t villainize the homosexuals. If you are conservative, you won’t villainize the liberals, and if you are a liberal, you can’t villainize the conservatives. Why? B/c the problem of evil isn’t isolated to a particular sub-set of the human race. You know it has infected the whole of the human race, including you.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn came to understand the importance of this reality—that evil really is in every human heart, not in just some identifiable people. Solzhenitsyn served in the Soviet Army and was highly decorated. Then he began to doubt the moral underpinnings of the regime and He was imprisoned in Russia for writing derogatory remarks about the Stalinist regime and he served in a labor camp for 11 years where he was beaten, interrogated, and nearly killed. During his imprisonment, Dr. Boris Kornfeld treated him inside the camp. Dr. Kornfeld and he became friends and Dr. Kornfeld confided in him one night that he had just become a Christian. The next morning Solzhenitsyn woke up and his friend had been beaten to death with a mallet. Listen to his reflections, “I lay there a long time in that recovery room from which Kornfeld had gone forth to his death, and all alone during sleepless nights I pondered with astonishment my own life and the turns it had taken. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.

Solzhenitsyn realized that the regime he was under had been feeding him lies. They were telling him that evil was found in those who opposed the Soviets and Stalinism. But when Solzhenitsyn saw such evil perpetrated against innocent people like Kornfeld he knew that evil wasn’t limited to a nation or political party or class of people—it was found in every human heart, in Russians, Germans, Americans and beyond. And he famously wrote that he line between good and evil runs right through the human heart.

Jesus knew this and so he wouldn’t say, “She is the problem,” and he gave gifts to this woman and, ultimately, to every race, class, gender and culture because they all needed what he had to offer. So should we if we are to keep the Spirit of Christmas alive. We give special emphasis to giving gifts to the voiceless, but then we indiscriminately give gifts to all. Now, that gets us to our 2nd question, which is what should we give people….

(2) What are you giving them? It is one thing to know who you should be giving to, but you also need to know what you are going to get for them. Every year I find myself struggling at the Holidays to think of what to get for people. Well, Jesus gives you the answer for what you should be giving to people if you want to keep the Spirit of Christmas alive: living water.

Look at his exchange with the woman in v10, “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.”

“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep.” Jesus just mentions living water and she doesn’t really no what to say and so she says fills the air with the obvious, but then she takes an risk and inquires about what he just said. In v11, “Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?”

V13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life. See here Jesus says, “Your thirsty for water that you have to come draw from this well; I can give you a spring in your heart that will eternally bubble up and quench the thirst of your soul.

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.” Jesus keeps pointing her back to the gift of living, spiritual water and she wants physical water. She isn’t getting it.

Jesus shows her what her heart, not her mouth, is thirsting after in v16. v16 “He told her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have said is quite true.”

Jesus hasn’t switched subjects. Some people think he has, but you’ll miss the meaning if you read it this way. He is still talking about the living water, but what he is doing is revealing her need for the living water. He is helping her see that she has been thirsting after men. That men have been the center of her life. If she could only get the right man, then this deep thirst, this deep unsettledness would be gone. And Jesus says— it isn’t working, is it. You are still thirsty, but I can quench that thirst. I am the living water.

Listen, my friends, now we can define sin. Sin is thirsting after anything in life more than Jesus. To do so violates the 1st commandment. If you thirst after a woman or a man, or after success, or approval, or security, or a career—all really good things, but if you thirst for them more than Jesus, then you are in sin and those things will ruin your life just like they did for this woman.

This has 2 really significant implications for us in San Diego. One is for followers of Jesus and the other is for those of you who are not yet followers of Jesus. First, let me address those of you who are followers of Jesus. See the only way this text is going to really penetrate your heart and get down in there and warm your heart up in such a way that changes you is if you realize that this isn’t simply a motivational text to encourage you to be like Jesus and get involved with messy people. Oh, it is that, and I certainly used it that way earlier, but it is more.

See it isn’t until you realize that you are the woman at the well that your heart will be affected. You’re the whore who lusts after everything but Jesus. The whole book of Hosea says this. Read it. It is an allegory about an adulterous wife whose heart is eventually won over by her husband who redeems her. Hosea isn’t the only one who says this—virtually all the prophets do. Listen to Ezekiel 16:9-10, 15, “I clothed you with an embroidered dress and put leather sandals on you. I dressed you in fine linen and covered you with costly garments….You trusted in your beauty and used your fame to become a prostitute.” The Lord says, “The gifts I gave you—of beauty and intellect and money—you trusted in those gifts and you became a prostitute. You made all these other things your lover rather than me. See, for those of you who are followers of Jesus, you know that you’re the adulterous woman at the well. Now, I’ll come back to why that is so significant and, ultimately, heart-warming in a moment.

But for those of you who are here that are not followers of Jesus you probably wouldn’t agree with me that you are an adulterer or prostitute. It takes a little while to understand this. But here is one thing I want you to see. Like the woman at the well, you have faith in something. Many times people say to me, “I am just not a person of faith. Maybe someday.” Not true. You are a person of faith right now. All of us are. Think about the woman. She had faith in men to quench her thirst. You too have put your faith in certain people or things? Some of you have put your faith in your spouse. Your trusting this person to provide the life you want. Others have put your faith in your job to give you the life you want. Becoming a follower of Jesus involves 2 things and you see both of them in our text.

Look at V28 “Then, leaving her water jar (so the very thing she came to do is now no longer important after meeting Jesus) the woman went back to the town and said to the people, “Come, see the man who told me everything I ever did.” She drops her water pale, and sprints into town and tells all the people who have been hate her anyway, “Hey, I met a man who told me how jacked up I am. Every bit. Didn’t leave out a detail. He knew how I had been having sex with you Ricky and you Sam and that I was hoping that you Adam would make me whole.” See in this act you see the 2 things that are involved in becoming a follower of Jesus: repentance & faith. She repents b/c she now is willing to tell everyone and anyone how jacked up she is. And when the gospel gets a hold of you, that is what you start to do. You no longer have to hide anymore.

Faith: But you also see her new faith. She isn’t trusting in men anymore. She has transferred her faith to, as v26 says, Messiah, who has given her living water. Finally, she has met a man quenched her thirst so deeply that she could go to all of these false wells that she had been trying to drink from and say, “I am no longer trusting in you. I am transferring it to Messiah.” And so v39-42 all these people hear this gospel and see this gospel change in her and they trust Jesus too.

See, my friends, the message of Christmas is that God has a deep and relentless love for prostitutes like you and me. Prostitutes Who come to Him having drunk from false wells and trusted in everything but Him. But God so loved prostitutes, that He sent His Son to live and die on their behalf. The good news of the gospel is in v34 of ch 4 (which we couldn’t print b/c the text was getting so long), Jesus says, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.” Jesus says, “I eat and drink the living water of my Father. He always put His trust in His daddy. And then on the cross he cries out in agony as the one he has always trusted isn’t there and he says, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.” But do you know what the rest of Ps. 22 says. 22:14ff, “I am poured out like water…my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death.” All his life, Jesus Christ thirsted after the father and the Father gladly gave him springs of living water. Until that Friday, when Messiah identified himself with prostitutes and adulterers like you and me, and the well ran dry. But then 3 days later, like a geyser erupting just on time, streams of living water came bursting forth out of the glorious victory of Christ. Drink from this fount, and you will never thirst.

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