Breaking Boundaries

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

One of the defining features of our time is how easily we can live inside carefully constructed worlds. Algorithms feed us the news we already agree with. Social media connects us mostly to people who share our outlook. Before long, we find ourselves in something like a cultural fishbowl, surrounded by voices that reinforce what we already believe and rarely challenged by views that differ from our own.

But those divisions didn’t start with technology. Long before algorithms existed, we were already learning where the lines were. Many of those boundaries were absorbed early in life, sometimes spoken out loud by family or friends, sometimes simply implied. The wrong neighborhood. The wrong color. The wrong gender. The wrong sexual orientation. The wrong side of the political aisle. The wrong table in the cafeteria. The wrong kind of reputation that marks someone as an undesirable kind of person. Over time we internalize these social constructs and believe that our cultural survival depends on recognizing the boundaries and staying on the right side of them. And then we encounter Jesus, who seems never to have gotten that memo. In today’s Gospel, he tramples one of the deepest dividing lines in his world and sits down beside a Samaritan well to speak with a Samaritan woman.

The truth is, of course, that Jesus understood those rules perfectly well. He simply refused to be governed by them, because he knew something that the boundary-keepers of his day did not. He knew that all of us, no matter how righteous we appear on the outside, fall short of the glory of God. He knew that all of us are broken in ways we would rather not admit, and that all of us are in deep need of God’s love and forgiveness. And because that is true of everyone, no one gets to stand outside the circle of his concern. That is exactly what the woman at the well discovers this morning. Let’s take a closer look at her story.

To begin with, you have to understand that Jacob’s well, located near the city of Sychar, was the equivalent of an ancient crossroads, a busy, public place where travelers stopped to water their animals, where all kinds of people passed through. Women living nearby would come to draw water for their families at the well, but they always came in groups. There was safety in numbers. Modesty demanded that a woman never travel alone. A woman who came by herself was either an outcast who had no choice, or someone who didn’t much care what people thought. Either way, this Samaritan woman was someplace she was not supposed to be.

Jesus, too, was someplace he was not supposed to be. Jews despised Samaritans, and any self-respecting rabbi would have taken a different road entirely to avoid setting foot on Samaritan soil. Jesus and his disciples were on the wrong side of the tracks, resting in a place that respectable people simply did not go.

So, picture the scene. An observant Jew sitting alone beside a Samaritan well, in the middle of the day, in a city he should have avoided entirely – waiting, it seems, for exactly the person who was least expected to show up. You see, Jesus doesn’t care about social propriety. He doesn’t care that this encounter could ruin his standing among the religious establishment. He doesn’t care that speaking publicly to any woman – let alone this one – would label him ritually unclean or get him run out of the rabbi business altogether. No, it is just the opposite. Jesus seeks this encounter. He wants to cross the boundaries that aren’t supposed to be crossed, because he knows that on the other side of those boundaries there is a person in need, a person hungry for God’s love.

Jesus opens by asking her for a drink of water. Immediately, she understands the transgression. His kind does not speak to her kind. The fact that he is doing so can only mean he wants something from her, and she thinks she has a pretty good idea what that is. By this point in her life, this woman knows how people use each other. She is used to being seen as an object, not a person. No man at a well like this strikes up a conversation unless he is after something. And yet, in this strange encounter, she meets something she did not expect: a man who wants nothing from her and seeks to give her everything. This man does not look at her as an outcast, or an unclean person, or a sexual object to be used. He looks at her as a child of God. He touches her life precisely where she is most ashamed — the five failed marriages, the succession of disappointments, the thirst that no relationship has ever really quenched, and he does not flinch. He does not ridicule her or turn away. He offers her something different. Living water. The real thing.

Anne Lamott, in her book Traveling Mercies, tells the story of a fellow church member who adopted her son through an organization called ASK — Adopt Special Kids. Part of the adoption process involved going through a questionnaire, checking yes or no to one’s willingness to adopt children born addicted, or terminally ill, or with physical or mental disabilities. Lamott’s pastor reflected on that process and said that God is like that kind of adoptive parent. Sure, God says, I’ll take the kids who are addicted, or terminal. I’ll take the ones with disabilities. I’ll take the selfish ones, the liars and the cheats, the troublemakers and the unattractive ones. In love, I choose them. I will be a parent to them all. That is the good news Jesus reveals to us today. No one gets left out. The water of life is offered to all, no matter how broken or lost – and if Lent has anything to teach us, it’s the fact that all of us, in one way or another, are broken and lost. Christ comes to bring us all home, in spite of ourselves.

Two things I want you to carry with you this morning. The first is this: Jesus teaches us today what it means to love our neighbor. And it turns out that loving our neighbor is harder than it sounds – because it means loving the neighbor we didn’t choose, the one who makes us uncomfortable, the one our world has told us is beyond the pale. Jesus doesn’t just tell us to love people who are like us, or to be kind to those with whom we already share something in common. He shows us, by the way he lives, that every boundary we erect to keep certain people out, every wall of class or race or religion or reputation, is a boundary he is prepared to cross. Not reluctantly. Not as an act of charity. But eagerly, because he knows that on the other side of that boundary there is a human being made in God’s image, waiting to be seen.

This is not easy. In this town that is addicted to the allure of power, it requires us to examine honestly the invisible rules we follow about who deserves our time and attention, who is worth the risk, whose story we are willing to hear. But Jesus is clear: the love of God does not respect the boundaries we draw. And if we are serious about following him, neither can we.

Every now and then, even in the middle of the world’s deepest conflicts, you catch a glimpse of what that looks like. I have been thinking this week about two men – one Israeli, one Palestinian. The Israeli man is named Maoz (Mowze) Inon. His parents were killed during the Hamas attacks on October 7. The Palestinian man is Aziz Abu Sarah (Sah-rah), a peace activist whose brother died years ago in an Israeli prison. By every measure, these two men stand on opposite sides of one of the deepest wounds in the modern world. And yet in the days after the October 7th attack, Aziz reached out to Maoz to express his sorrow. What followed was not anger, not accusation, but conversation. Instead of allowing their grief to deepen the divide between them, the two men have chosen to stand together and speak publicly about reconciliation and the possibility of peace. As Maoz is reported to have said, “I don’t want to make my parents victims of terror. I want to make them victims of peace.” In a world that constantly tells us the lines are permanent and the divisions are inevitable; these two men have decided that this boundary does not get the final word.

The second thing I want you to take with you this morning is perhaps more personal. The living Christ wants nothing more than to reach you. The same Jesus who crossed every social and religious barrier to care for this woman at that well, in the heat of the day, in the middle of nowhere, in the depths of her shame – is still crossing barriers to find us. He wants to touch that place in your heart that you keep hidden, the thing you are most ashamed of, the wound you have stopped believing anyone could heal. He wants to reach you where you feel most guilty and grant you forgiveness. He wants to meet you in your deepest thirst and offer you something that will finally satisfy.

The woman at the well came looking for water. She left having found something she hadn’t dared to hope for. So, hear this, and remember it: the Gospel of Jesus lives and moves and has its being independent of human righteousness. Samaritans, saints, sinners, skeptics – they’re all included. The love of God is as unmotivated and undeserved as the sunrise, and it goes out to everyone. That’s the crazy and marvelous thing Jesus came to tell us. That’s the good news we can rely on. Amen.