Shiloh Lutheran Church, State College
12th Sunday After Pentecost, 2014
I brought along today a print of Rembrandt’s painting, “The Return of the Prodigal Son” (if you’re reading this sermon and aren’t familiar with the painting, this link will lead to a picture of it: http://www.rembrandtpainting.net/rembrandt's_prodigal_son.html). In this painting, the prodigal son is kneeling before his aged father. His clothes are ragged and his shoes are worn out. A few years earlier he had left home in great confidence, with abundant resources to live the kind of life he wanted to live. But then things had fallen apart. His money had run out and he had ended up feeding pigs, barely making enough money to survive. And then he had decided to return. In that faraway place, in the depths of despair, he had remembered his father. Henri Nouwen says “The younger son’s return takes place in the very moment that he reclaims his sonship, even though he has lost all the dignity that belongs to it.... Once he had come again in touch with the truth of his sonship, he could hear – although faintly – the voice calling him the Beloved and feel – although distantly – the touch of blessing. This awareness of and confidence in his father’s love, misty as it may have been, gave him the strength to claim for himself his sonship, even though that claim could not be based on any merit” (The Return of the Prodigal Son, p. 49). He has nothing to offer; there’s no reason why his father should be proud of him. He doesn’t even claim any rights as a son; he returns with a prepared speech, asking to be treated as a hired hand.
He’s wasted his life and all his resources, but he has come to his senses and returned, with empty hands, to his father. When I look at that painting, I see a man who has come to the end of himself. He’s like the tax collector in the temple who won’t even lift his eyes to heaven but beats his breast and cries out, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” But the wonderful thing is that his father is leaning over, embracing him. His father is welcoming him home in love. He ignores the son’s request, “treat me as one of your hired servants,” and restores him as one of the family. It’s a powerful painting; I often look at it and think of the wonder of being welcomed by God the Father into His presence.
In chapter 4 of John’s gospel, we see God welcoming a prodigal daughter and turning her into a worshiper. He is seeking true worshipers. His purpose in restoring us and giving us new life is to turn us into people who worship Him in spirit and in truth. There’s an especially strong connection between evangelism and worship in this passage; in fact, Jesus’ conversation with the woman at the well is often used as a model for evangelism. It’s one of the best examples we have for making connections, in conversation, between physical and spiritual realities. And, central to this whole discussion is Jesus’ statement that the Father is seeking worshipers. God’s purpose in giving us new life is not just to give us a ticket to heaven, but to turn us into people who worship Him in spirit and in truth. That’s what we were created for originally. God, in calling us to Himself, wants to restore us as worshipers; He wants to enable us to do what we were created to do.
The first thing to observe in this passage is that to be worshipers our lives need to be going in the right direction. Notice how often the Samaritan woman misunderstands what Jesus is saying. He offers her living water, and she thinks He’s offering her running water and wonders where on earth He’s going to get it. He goes a step further and says: “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.” How does she respond to that? She says, “give me some of that water, so I won’t have to walk all the way to this well every day.” She thinks He’s talking about magical water that will keep her from having to drink any more. It will save her the trouble of walking to the well, so she wants it. Then Jesus confronts her with the truth about her life, because she’s not going to see anything clearly as long as she continues in the direction she’s going. Sin blinds us to spiritual realities. So Jesus brings her face to face with her sin.
Her life is a mess. She’s had five husbands and is now living with a man who is not her husband. The reason she comes to the well alone, during the middle of the day, is probably related to her lifestyle. The other women of the town would have come out to the well in a group, in the early evening. But they wouldn’t want her to be with them. She’s an outcaste, the kind of person no one wants to associate with. Her own people don’t want anything to do with her.
There’s a story about a similar woman in John 8. In that story, the Pharisees and teachers of the law bring to Jesus a woman caught in adultery. Their purpose is to trap Him, to force Him into a position where He either undermines the authority of the Law, by showing compassion, or contradicts His own teaching, by ordering them to deal with her harshly. But He doesn’t do either. He begins writing in the dirt, and as they continue to press Him He responds: “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” And one by one, they all drift away. Then He speaks to the woman: “Has no one condemned you?” She answers, “no, no one has.” And He responds: “Then neither do I condemn you.... Go now and leave your life of sin.” He doesn’t condemn her, but neither does He say “everything is fine, be forgiven and if at some point you want me to be the Lord of your life, you can repent of your sin.” He calls her to repentance: “go now and leave your life of sin” is a call to repentance, a call to turn around and go in the other direction. He grants her forgiveness, and He tells her to leave her life of sin. But He doesn’t berate her or rub her nose in it. She’s already been humiliated; she already knows her guilt. It’s the same with the Samaritan woman. He confronts her with the truth, but He doesn’t berate her. She needs to see the truth or she’ll never become a true worshiper. But, having seen the truth, she can repent and begin a new life. She doesn’t need to wallow in it. She’s received mercy and grace and is now headed in the right direction.
The second thing to observe in this passage is that to be worshipers we need to know the truth about who God is. What we believe about God will affect our worship of Him. The Samaritans were a mixed race. When the Assyrians deported the ten northern tribes of Israel, they brought other people in to care for the land. These people mixed with the Israelites who had been left behind, and they also mixed the worship of Israel with their own religious practices. They worshiped the God of Israel and they also worshiped idols. I’ve heard that Christianity in Haiti is often mixed with voodoo. In North American Evangelicalism, the Christian gospel is often mixed with the worship of self, the idea that God’s highest priority is to make me feel good. The Samaritans were doing something similar. They claimed to worship the God of Israel, but their understanding of Him was corrupt and distorted. That’s why Jesus says: “You Samaritans worship what you do not know,” or, as it reads in The Message: “You worship guessing in the dark.”
What is the point of Jesus’ words, that “true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth”? The woman had raised a question about the proper place for worship. The Samaritans said Mt. Gerazim was the right place, and the Jews said the right place was Jerusalem. Where is the proper place for worship? I don’t think she’s raising this question as a smokescreen, to avoid having to face the truth about her life. When she sees that Jesus is, at the very least, a prophet, she raises this question which has been bothering her. Jesus responds that God is Spirit. He’s not confined to one place, so we can worship Him anywhere.
If God is only to be worshiped in Jerusalem, the Samaritans are in trouble, because they wouldn’t be accepted in Jerusalem. It’s doubtful that they’d be allowed to even enter the temple area. Jesus is saying that God is not confined to one place. He’s not more available in Jerusalem than He is on Mt. Gerazim. As the psalmist says: “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast” (Psalm 139:7-10). Since God is like that, we can worship Him wherever we are. God is Spirit.
But we also need to worship Him “in truth.” The Samaritans were groping in the dark, because they didn’t know the truth about God. The woman says to Jesus, at one point in the conversation, “When the Messiah comes, he will explain everything to us.” She’s floundering in the dark, but she wants to know the truth, and Jesus responds to her: “I who speak to you am he.” Jesus is the truth. She doesn’t need, any longer, to grope in the dark, wondering what God is like. She’s met, face to face, the One who is the “radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Hebrews 1:3). It doesn’t matter where we are when we turn to God in worship, but it does matter that we know who He is. If our conception of God is false, we’re not worshiping Him; we’re worshiping an idol. We need to know the truth about God, and we need to know Him. We know the truth about God by looking at Jesus, who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Jesus says, later on in this gospel, “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
The third thing to observe in this passage is that witness grows out of true worship. I often think we’ve been too influenced by American salesmanship in this area of witnessing. We don’t feel like we’ve been faithful witnesses unless we’ve closed the deal and led the person to a commitment. I’ve often heard preachers ask “how many souls have you led to Christ”? How many sales have you made for the gospel? They don’t ask “in what ways are you acting as a witness to others?” They want to know how many times you’ve succeeded in closing the deal. We become so intimidated by that kind of thing that it actually hinders us from acting as witnesses.
Notice what happens in this story. The Samaritan woman has a conversation with Jesus, and in the course of the conversation she finds herself confronted with the reality of her sin and face-to-face with the One they’ve been waiting for. The whole direction of her life is changed. She accepts His words, “I who speak to you am he,” so she runs off to the town and begins telling people what she knows: “Come see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?” She’s speaking the truth, bearing witness to what she knows. It’s not her job to close the deal. The people come out to see what she’s talking about, and as a result many of them are converted and they also become worshipers, the kind of worshipers the Father is seeking. Jesus tells the disciples, later in the passage, that they are reaping the benefits of others’ labor. These others labored, acting as witnesses, but they didn’t see the fruit of their labor.
We get things backwards when we begin following the techniques of the world in this area. A few years ago I read an interview with an American pastor. One of the questions was, “what is the highest priority for the Church today?” He answered that the highest priority is evangelism; he said we’ll have plenty of time for worship and for growing in the knowledge of God once we get to heaven. Right now, we need to give ourselves primarily to winning others to Christ. I hear this sort of thing all the time, but it’s simply wrong. We don’t have the right to pick and choose in this way. These things are not in competition. Listen to A.W. Tozer: “By direct teaching, by story, by example, by psychological pressure we force our new converts to ‘go to work for the Lord.’ Ignoring the fact that God has redeemed them to make worshipers out of them, we thrust them out into ‘service,’ quite as if the Lord were recruiting laborers for a project instead of seeking to restore moral beings to a condition where they can glorify God and enjoy him forever.... What we are overlooking is that no one can be a worker who is not first a worshiper. Labor that does not spring out of worship is futile and can only be wood, hay and stubble in the day that shall try every man’s works” (Born After Midnight, p. 125).
Jesus didn’t pressure the Samaritan woman to bring people back to Him. He wasn’t recruiting her for a job. When she saw the truth about Him, she became a worshiper, and the natural result was that she began to be a witness. Her witness grew naturally out of a genuine encounter with Jesus Christ. Those who worship God in spirit and in truth become witnesses. They don’t necessarily become soul winners, because that term has taken on too many associations from the world of sales and marketing. They become people who bear witness, in both their lives and their words, to the reality of God’s redeeming and transforming presence.
We need to remind ourselves that God is seeking people who will worship Him in spirit and in truth, people who will put Him at the center of their lives and offer worship from the depths of their being. This involves, 1) repenting of our sinful, self-centered way of life and ordering our lives in ways that are pleasing to Him, because we can’t be true worshipers if our lives are going in the wrong direction; 2) cultivating a relationship with God through His Word, because we need to know the truth about God in order to worship Him, and we need to know Him in a growing relationship, and not just as an object of study. We need to be asking ourselves: “is God a priority in my life? If so, how does this show itself in my commitment to worship?” God, in calling us to Himself, is inviting us to become worshipers. If worship is a low priority, it’s because God is not at the center of our lives.
When the prodigal son returned, the father welcomed him and restored him to a position of sonship. When the Samaritan woman recognized Jesus as the Christ, she was invited into God’s family to become a worshiper in spirit and in truth. Worship is not something we do on Sunday morning as long as there’s nothing more urgent for us to do. It’s not the sort of thing we do once or twice a month, depending on how we feel. Worship is absolutely central to our lives in Christ. It’s the very thing God has redeemed us for. When we turn to God in repentance, He says to us, “You are forgiven .... Go now and leave your life of sin.” He bends over and embraces us as a loving Father, and then He calls us to act like members of His family.
