God hears in the wilderness

SCRIPTURE: Psalm 86:1-10; Genesis 21:8-21; Matthew 10:24-39

Happy Fathers’ Day.

I’m sorry, fathers, but you know how it is. Mothers get all the love in Mothers’ Day sermons; fathers usually get the lectures.

Mothers are told how wonderful they are, and the sermons are addressed to everyone else, telling them how to love their mothers and be like their mothers. Fathers, however, get told how they could be, and how they should be, better fathers. I’m not saying we don’t need it, I’m just sayin’.

Part of the problem is that so much is expected of fathers. I’m not suggesting for a moment that mothers have it easy — I wouldn’t dare! But fathers are expected to stand tall, win their battles, and provide food for their families. Of course, it’s our own fault. It’s a man’s world, and we have made it that way. We actually like being in charge and telling others what to do. But it comes with a price, and the price, I would suggest, is loneliness and even fear — especially fear of failure.

Emotions
I envy Jen and her friends. They share from the heart the most trivial and the most intense. It doesn’t matter if it makes them laugh or cry, that’s ok.

We men get emotional, too, of course. Just watch us at a sporting event when our team is about to win or is beaten by a foul.  We’ll laugh and even cry on each other’s shoulders. But, apart from that, we’re very careful about which emotions we stir up. Sadly, it’s most often the destructive emotions like frustration and anger we feel more comfortable with.

But if the world tells you as you are growing up that men don’t cry, then the positive, caring emotions become a bit suspect. And our heroes don’t help either.

Heroes
Heroes like Louis L’Amour’s cowboys I grew up with and Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne are big, strong and confident men, able to look after themselves and fix things.

And then there are others like The Famous Five and Harry Potter who are very different types of hero. They are the nerds, if you like, who make good in spite of the physical odds against them. Clever, courageous and very brave.

But the message is the same: you have to win. Whether you outbox him or outfox him, you have to win your battles or, somehow, you’re not quite the man you ought to be.

Biblical heroes
Biblical heroes are very different. For a book full of heroes of the faith, the Bible is remarkably frank about their weaknesses and failures. And their failure is often tragic. When they try to take charge, they mess up badly. But when they admit their utter dependence on God, winning happens. Although, ‘winning’ might not always be quite what was expected.

Perhaps God is telling us that life is not about winning, about being successful, it’s about relationships. Fatherhood is not about providing for a family or leading a family; it’s about being a family.

When we focus on winning, on achieving our goals, then relationships suffer, and people are left behind. It’s been there from the very beginning, in Abraham and Sarah, this first family in the faith. Our story of Hagar and Ishmael was one of the lowest moments in Abraham and Sarah’s life together.

But let’s start with our Matthew passage.

Matthew 10
In Matthew 10, Jesus prepares his disciples for the mission field, and he tells them (and us) what following him will involve. And it’s not for the fainthearted.

Jesus says that people will swear at us — and they’ll mean it. Then, as if to comfort us, Jesus says, ‘But don’t worry about them. What can they do to you? They can only kill you.’
‘Oh! I wasn’t planning on getting killed.’
‘But if you want to follow me,’ Jesus goes on, ‘you must lay down your life and take up your cross.’
And the cross is not just a heavy burden or a shiny pendant, it’s an instrument of torturous death. Taking up our cross means preparing to die.

So, living a Jesus life doesn’t mean a nice comfortable seat in church and a friendly Bible study. Far from it. Jesus tells us that he has not come to bring peace, but a sword. Families and friendships will be torn apart. Your enemy isn’t the devil, he tells us; your enemy will be among your family and friends. And we know that we find the enemy all too often inside ourselves.

‘This isn’t what I signed up for’
What happened?

What about all the ‘peace and goodwill’ the angels sang about at Christmas?
What about the warm fuzzy feelings the Magi experienced when they gathered around the baby?
What about the love poured out on the cross and Jesus dying in our place?
What about the power of the Holy Spirit, of the fruit of love, joy and peace?
Where is the Good News in all of this?

John van der Laar wrote about this passage, and he said, ‘this isn’t what I signed up for’. [‘I Didn’t Sign Up For This’, Sacredise]

A two-a-penny sparrow

But that’s not all Jesus says in Matthew 10. He also tells us that not even a two-a-penny sparrow is out of God’s sight and care. And he even knows how many hairs are left on your head. And, what’s more, ‘if you tell the world you belong to me,’ Jesus says. ‘I will do the same for you before my Father in heaven.’

‘This one belongs to me,’ he’ll say. ‘That one is mine.’

No matter what happens, all hell might be breaking loose around us, but we are claimed by God. Our relationship with God is secure.

In the middle of the darkness
Life is not easy, for anyone. That’s not the promise.

The world thinks that peace and joy are found in easy living, a world cruise or winning the lotto. And, while those would be nice, much more meaningful peace and joy are to be found not by running away but in the middle of the darkness and pain and suffering.

There are very many of you listening to this message who could tell us how you have found God to be most real and closest to you, when the darkness was the greatest, the pain the hardest to bear, the mountain impossible to climb.

It’s not that God wants these things for us, but they are part of life, and it is in the middle of our messy lives that God connects with us and we find our peace, and true success. And it is in the middle of our messy lives that God’s heroes are made. Not by escaping the pain, but by consistently choosing, in every situation, to be better than normal.

Genesis 21
And that brings us back to our Abraham story.

Sarah and Abraham were never perfect examples of faith and saintliness. But God chose this broken, struggling couple and enabled them to become better than normal in critical moments of their lives because their greatest desire was to walk with God.

But they sure got it wrong at times. And Genesis 21 is perhaps the darkest chapter in Sarah and Abraham’s life. God promised them so much, but like us, they took matters into their own hands and hurt themselves and others in the process.

Abraham and Hagar
Among other things, they decided to help God with his plan to give Abraham an heir. After all, time’s marching on. Abe is already nearly 90. So, they agree that he should sleep with Sarah’s maid Hagar and get his heir that way. And so, Ishmael was born.

Well, when Sarah finally had her own son, Isaac, the true heir, all the bitterness and jealousy of the past ten years or so began to emerge and be dumped on Hagar and her son, Ishmael.

Hagar and Ishmael thrown out
Finally, Sarah succeeds in having Hagar and Ishmael thrown out. But don’t blame Sarah. Abraham was no saint in this matter, and if we read their story, Sarah’s life had been miserable. Be that as it may, Hagar is out in the wilderness with just enough food and water to take them out of sight but not enough to survive.

And when it was all gone, Hagar left Ishmael under a bush because she couldn’t bear to watch him die.

But God…
And then it happened. One of those, ‘But God,’ moments we come across so often in the Bible. They were dying; this was the end; they couldn’t take any more. Friends, how many of you have been there, or are there now? Who do you know in the same boat?

Hagar and Ishmael were finished, BUT… God heard the boy crying.

Of course he did! Ismael was named for this moment. Ishmael means God hears. And God heard.

As one writer put it:

• God hears, even when we are alone in the wilderness
• God hears, even when we don’t know what to say to God
• God hears, even when the tension of living remains unresolved
• God hears

(Dawn Chesser, ‘Preaching Notes’, General Board of Discipleship)

God opened her eyes
And God provides. Not that God brought a banquet, or even a tea trolley. ‘God (simply) opened her eyes.’ (v 19) Hagar was able to see what was hidden by her pain and her tears. She could see the well, and as she drank, she began to see the way forward.

But here’s the thing, they never left the wilderness. Terrible though it may seem, God didn’t rescue them from the wilderness. He helped them find a way to live in the wilderness, to live through the rejection and hate, to survive and prosper. Not what the world calls prospering. Not the ‘happy ever after’ that Hollywood pretends is our right. But peace and the presence of God and a promise still being fulfilled in Ishmael’s descendants today.

There are people around us, like Hagar, desperate to find a well that will see them through, that will sustain them, that will give them hope. There are people in our church communities; people in our neighbourhood; people at work and in our families. They are within touching distance of us, a phone call away.

Called to be a well
Our job isn’t to tell people where they are going wrong:
‘Well, you know, Hagar, if you hadn’t been so rude to Sarah, you wouldn’t be here today.’

No, our job isn’t to tell people where they are going wrong or even to tell them what to do. We are here to help them find a well. To be a well for people around us. To support, to sustain, to share the hope we have in Jesus.

Jesus warns us that the journey will be tough and thankless. It’s not that we are trying to die, though that might happen. We are not looking for abuse, though that might come our way. Because our hope is not that all will be bright and sunny.  But that God hears.

God hears
And so, our task begins when, like Hagar, we cry out to God. Because God hears you and me and the people around us as we cry to him in our own pain and for the pain of others. And we discover that his presence is worth far more than worldly wealth and peace.

Friends, cry out to God in your pain, in your fear, through your tears, and discover that God hears.

Cry out to God for those whose lives and livelihood have been devastated by the Covid-19 pandemic, so that they might discover that God hears.

Cry out to God for those who have been crushed by racism and neglect, who have been humiliated or ignored for too long. Cry to God for the women and children, victims of violence. Cry out to God, so that they, too, might discover the God who hears.

But friends, cry out to God, also, so that our ears might be unblocked, and we might become the well that people around us need, reminding us all that he who loves the sparrow loves us even more, and he invites us into relationship with him and with each other.

Amen

Let us pray…
(Link to the prayer here)

 

God hears and hearing God: A prayer for 21 June 2020

 

Let us pray

Lord our creator God,
You allow us to call you Father, our parent.
We also claim the title ourselves,
Yet we fall far short of the ideal and practice of parenthood.

Forgive us for our failures,
Forgive us fathers, especially, for the ways in which we have given fatherhood a bad name;
For our abuse of power and our fear of love;
For our criticism, our negativity, our controlling ways.
Forgive us when we have destroyed or contributed to the destruction of a family.

You are the God who hears,
and we live in a world desperate to be heard.
There are cries for lives and for livelihoods lost,
for the violence that has erupted in our homes and across the globe.
There are cries of pain and anguish and fear.

Our loving Father,
As you hear us, your people,
So, help us hear the cries of those around us.
Help us to be wells filled with your compassion, bringing grace and mercy and hope.

In the name of Jesus, who taught us to pray together:

Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be your name
Your kingdom come, your will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
And forgive us our trespasses
As we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil
For yours is the kingdom, the power and the glory
For ever and ever.

Amen

This prayer follows the sermon for this Sunday, which can be found here

Being sheep in a Covid-19 world – A sermon for 3 May 2020

This sermon can also be found an the following video link:
Being sheep in a Covid-19 world – A sermon for 3 May

SCRIPTURE:  Psalm 23; Acts 2:42-47; 1 Peter 2:19-25; John 10:1-10

Lockdown
Five weeks of Covid-19 lockdown!

How has it been for you?

I remember, just before we went into lockdown for the initial three weeks, thinking, that’s a long time. What will we do for three weeks? And now five weeks have passed and (in South Africa) some of the doors are beginning to open.

How has it been for you?

People have spoken about the opportunity to reflect, to realign, to reorganise (or, for some of us, just to organise).
Many years ago, I was in hospital for four or five weeks with bilharzia. And I kept hearing about people who had been in similar or worse situations, and how they had used the time for deep reflection and prayer and had grown spiritually.

I felt so guilty. I didn’t want to reflect on anything other than how nauseous and miserable I felt. I didn’t feel the least bit spiritual.

How has the lockdown been for you?

For most of us, it’s about the money. Where will this month’s pay come from? Will my business survive? Will I still have a job?
Then there is the virus itself. Will we survive? Will our family survive? Will those in essential services be able to cope?

Relationships are especially difficult. Our lives are often so busy that we usually don’t spend much time together. Suddenly we are locked down, and we only have each other for company. And it’s not like when we are on holiday and all relaxed. There are all these new fears and worries that create tension or add to tensions that are already there.

The early church
In the middle of all this, we read about the early church in Acts 2.42–47.

Remember the disciples, too, had been locked down. As far as we know, they had been self-isolating in the Jerusalem upper room for the last 50 days. They had just started to emerge. There were a few jaunts here and there — to Galilee, for example, where Jesus met them for breakfast. But, in Jerusalem, we are told, they were behind locked doors for fear of the Jews.

Then, at Pentecost, they emerged like butterflies out of their cocoons. And what we read in Acts 2, sounds so idyllic:

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
Everyone was filled with awe ….
All the believers were together ….
They gave to anyone who had need.
They met together in the temple.
They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts,
… enjoying the favour of all the people.
And (every day) the Lord added to their number ….

How does our lockdown compare with any of that?

Close? Not very? Way off?

As our lockdown has dragged on, people have begun to show more and more frustration and anger on social media. We are used to being in control. We like to decide what to do and how to run our lives.

We like to choose what we buy, when we buy and where we buy. We want to visit friends and neighbours. We want to take a meal to a someone who is sick.

We don’t want to drive down the road and worry about how many roadblocks there will be and whether we’ll be sent back (or worse, put in jail). We don’t like being told what to do.

Jesus as shepherd
But, in John 10, Jesus portrays himself as a shepherd. In verse 11, just following the passage we read, Jesus says, ‘I am the good shepherd’.

Now, the idea of Jesus as shepherd is a wonderful image of love, care and hope. But the problem with the image is that if Jesus is the shepherd, we are the sheep. And, although we think of lambs in warm and fuzzy terms, there are very few images of sheep that are flattering:

• Bumbling, ignorant, trusting;
• Vulnerable, docile, dependent;
• Bred for human use and consumption.

Even in our well-loved Psalm 23, the Psalmist is utterly dependent on God, the Shepherd.

And Peter tells us in our 1 Peter 2 passage that, when Jesus took our place on the cross, he ‘did not retaliate’. ‘Instead he entrusted himself to [depended on] him who judges justly.’

The Church in Acts
But in Acts 2 (in fact, in the whole of Acts) the disciples are nothing like sheep. Have they been set free? Does that mean we grow out of being sheep?

No, it’s because they saw themselves as sheep, utterly dependent on God, that they were able to do extraordinary things.

We often hear people talking about recreating the New Testament church. We try to reinvent the church on the basis of what the early church did. But the key to the early church is not what they did, but their dependence on God, which is summed up in the opening verse of our Acts passage:

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. (Acts 2:42)

Trying to recreate the NT church by copying their actions is the wrong approach. We are not called to do what they did, but to be as they were — utterly dependent on God.

What does that mean for us as we struggle to be the church and to live as Christians in a struggling world? I suggest we are given three invitations.

KNOW THE SHEPHERD
Our first invitation is to know the shepherd.

Knowing the shepherd is a critical step in our journey. It is almost impossible to trust someone you don’t know.

Jesus tells us in John 10 that the shepherd knows his sheep, he loves his sheep, he cares for his sheep, he calls them by name. It isn’t just a job for him, as it might be for a day labourer who is just helping out. For the shepherd, it’s a labour of love.

And so, these new disciples ‘devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.’ — activities that would enable them to get to know the Shepherd and experience his love for themselves.

Friends, you and I are loved.

Sink back into that love as you would into a soft pillow. Enjoy that love as you have enjoyed this respite from the relentless rush of everyday life.

Keep coming back to this. Pray often. Read the stories of Jesus in the Gospels. Talk to other Christians who have journeyed with this Shepherd and have known his love. Begin to discover that love for yourself. Grow in his love and get to know him better.

Relationships, not activities
Too often, we want to run on ahead and do things, and live a ‘proper’ Christian life. But our Christian faith is routed in a relationship rather than in activities. Being a Christian is about knowing that we are deeply loved. Knowing that Jesus poured out his love for us on the cross, and that God, in his mercy and grace, has opened the doors of the kingdom to you and to me.

That’s not the end of the journey, of course. As we experience this undeserved, extravagant love of God, we can’t help ourselves. It’s as Jesus described in the parables of the ‘Hidden treasure’ and the ‘Pearl of great price’, because we’ve discovered this treasure, we want to give everything of ourselves to the one who loves us. We want to live that Christian life.

TRUST THE SHEPHERD
And so, the second invitation is to trust the shepherd. Know the shepherd so that we can trust the shepherd.

As we experience God’s love for us, we begin to trust him more. And we trust him not only with our lives, but with our way of life as well, which may be much more difficult.

Jesus said, ‘If you want to follow me, take up your cross daily and follow me.’

Jesus wasn’t suggesting martyrdom. He didn’t say, ‘Die for me.’
He said die to yourself. Put yourself — your dreams, your plans, your desires, your rights — put it all on the cross every day and live for me.

Friends this is really difficult. As we have seen in this Covid-19 lockdown, we don’t like being dependent; we don’t like following other people’s rules.

But, when our legs, for example, aren’t able to do what they are supposed to do, we have to accept the fact that we need help, otherwise we are immobile. But when we learn to depend on our crutches, we are free to move around.

FDR
Franklin D Roosevelt served as Governor of New York for four years from 1928, and then as President of the United States for an unprecedented 12 years to the end of WW2. And all of this from his wheelchair. He had contracted a paralytic illness, at the age of 39, seven years before he became New York Governor.

He didn’t say, ‘This wheelchair is just a crutch. I don’t need this; I’m better than this. I’m going to stand up and run the country on my own two feet.’

That would have been foolish. He knew and accepted his dependence. He trusted those around him to do for him what he couldn’t do for himself, and that freed him to get on with what he could do — running the country and fighting a war.

As we get to know the Shepherd and begin to trust the Shepherd, we discover our true freedom. We are able to rise above our limitations, becoming far more than we could if we only trusted in ourselves.

And we are not alone in this. Jesus, the good shepherd, has walked this road before us, and he travels with us.

In our 1 Peter passage, Peter describes how, Jesus, who knew no sin, took on the role of sinner; in humility and in utter dependence on God, he took the insults hurled at him and allowed people to think he deserved them. Then Jesus took on the consequences of sin and died on the cross. And Peter says, ‘He entrusted himself to him who judges justly.’

This is our shepherd who leads us.

OBEY THE SHEPHERD
So, we are invited to know the shepherd.
We are invited to trust the shepherd.
And our third invitation as sheep in God’s pasture is to obey the shepherd.

Peter says in 1 Peter 2:25, ‘You were like sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.’

We don’t stop being sheep, but instead of following our own way, we follow and obey the shepherd.

When we think about obedience we usually think about lists of rules and regulations. And the nice thing about a list of rules is that they are relatively easy to follow.

Of course, some lists are longer and more complicated than others. We thought the regulations for the Covid-19 lockdown were onerous. Now we know they were child’s play compared with the regulations for getting unlocked.

For Moses and the Israelites, things were a bit easier, it seems. There were only ten Commandments. Jesus made it even simpler for us to understand. He summarised it all into three commands:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.
Love your neighbour as you love yourself.
Love one another as I have loved you.

Friends, it is ALL about love, which makes it easy to remember and even to understand. But love is much more demanding and much more costly than the longest list of regulations you will ever find.

Love never asks the question, ‘Have I done enough?’
Love never says, ‘I’ve ticked all the boxes. I’ve done what you asked me to do.’

Love asks, ‘How can I express my love to God, today?’
Love asks, ‘What can I do to demonstrate God’s love to this neighbour today, to my Christian sister or brother in this situation?”

Love doesn’t ask, ‘What should I do?’ as if there were a to-do list for every situation.
Love rather asks, as Phillip Yancy suggested, ‘What would love look like in this situation?’
‘What can I do differently, that would show more of God’s love to you?’

Friends, the lockdown is over; the invitations are out:
We are invited to get to know the shepherd who loves us
We are invited to trust the shepherd we can depend on
And we are invited to obey the shepherd and join him on a journey of love.

Will you come?

Let us pray …
Link to the prayer here

 

The Great Shepherd and Covid-19: A prayer for 3 May 2020

Let us pray

Great Shepherd, you invite us to know you, to trust you and to obey you.

But, Lord, we confess that we don’t like being sheep.
We don’t like waiting for others to tell us what we are allowed to do.

We confess that we have been irritated by this lockdown.
We are also afraid of this virus, Lord.
We are afraid for our lives and for those of our loved ones.
We are afraid for our jobs and our livelihoods.
We are afraid that there may not be a place for us in the post-lockdown world.

Lord, we confess that we have sometimes let loose our fears and frustration on our families.
We have forgotten that they are experiencing the same fears and uncertainties.
Instead of comforting them, we have added to their burdens.
Yet you do not come as judge, but as shepherd, to love, to heal and to transform.

You invite us to know you and to be transformed by your love.
To marvel at its length, to wonder at its breadth, to be awed by its heights and inspired by its depth.
And to realise that we have experienced only a fraction of the glory you still want to reveal to us.

You invite us to trust you
To trust the one who knows better than anyone just what we are made of and what we are made for.
You invite us to trust you on our journey.
A journey that may involve green pastures but that, just as often, takes us through the darkest valleys.

Great Shepherd, you invite us to obey you,
not by following rules and regulations,
but by learning to love as we have been loved,
by learning to bring love into every relationship, every situation, every day.

Great Shepherd, as we have been loved,
so teach us to love you, to love our neighbours and to love one another.

In your precious name we pray,

Amen.

This prayer follows a sermon for this Sunday, which can be found here

 

Rebecca: A Prayer from the Well

Lord Jesus,
You choose a donkey rather than a proud camel.
You meet us at the well, rather than the synagogue.
We expect to find you in this place, on a Sunday morning,
But you are waiting for us in the supermarket, in the playground, in the taxi, every day of the week.

You invite us to go with you,
as the Samaritan woman invited her village,
as Abraham’s servant invited Rebecca.

Forgive us, Lord,
for we allow the call of the world to drown out your invitation,
the brightness of our toys to dull our sight,
and there is no room for you in the busyness of our lives.

The fear of missing out is so strong, we dare not stop and listen.
If we go with you, what will happen to our friends, our future our fortune.
If we don’t Like and Post and Update and Share, we’ll be left behind.
No-one will Like us.
We will be unfriended and alone in the cyber world we call our home –
where we count Friends and Likes and Shares to determine our worth.

Yet, Lord, you offer to fill the much deeper emptiness within:
our longing for value, for meaning, for purpose;
our cry for healing, forgiveness and love.

But the noise of the world drowns out our cries.
Our busyness fills the empty spaces for a while,
allowing us to make believe that all is well.
But ‘make believe’ doesn’t see us through the night.
Virtual friends don’t embrace us and walk the darkness with us.

Still, Lord, we are afraid to commit.
Our virtual world allows us to flit here and there,
to ignore the uncomfortable, scorn the ugly and laugh at the foolish.
We choose our own way, our own friends our own family.
It’s hard for us to go with you, to commit to your journey, to become your family.

Help us to hear your voice, Lord Jesus, and respond to your call.
Free us from the demands of the world and the demands of our dreams.
Open our hearts to your love,
Open our ears to the cry of our neighbours
And our arms to embrace them.

Drive us into the highways and byways,
The corridors and shopping aisles,
The boardrooms and playrooms.
Give us courage to declare our love for you
And to issue the invitation with boldness:
‘Come see a man ….’

Amen

[A prayer used in conjunction with the story-sermon Rebecca: The Other Woman at the Well]

Rebecca: The Other Woman at the Well

This is a story based on John 4:1–30 (the woman at the well) and Genesis 24:34–58 (Rebecca, a wife for Isaac). 

These readings present us with two women (a few thousand years apart). They were very different from each other, but each of them went to fetch water from the well outside her village, and each met a stranger there who transformed her life.

And as I sat with the two of them and contemplated this intersection of their lives, the Samaritan woman, the one Jesus met by the well in Samaria, began to tell me her story, and I want to share it with you today. Listen to what she has to say.

My favourite character in the Bible has always been Rebecca. Probably because I was named after her, but I loved her story growing up. We lived in a small village in Samaria. We didn’t have much, and it was always my job to fetch water for the family. We girls from the village would gather round the well and chat for a bit while drawing up the water and filling our jars. It was hard work but we had such fun.

And, of course, I would dream about Rebecca, my namesake.

In my dream, I would come down to the well, and there would be a handsome stranger on a white camel. And he’d ask me for some water. And, of course, I’d say yes and offer to water his camels, too.

Then he’d put a gold ring in my nose and gold bracelets on my arms. He’d ask my father for my hand in marriage and Father would ask me, as Rebecca’s family did, ‘Will you go with this man.’

And I’d say, ‘Yes, yes! A thousand times, yes!’

But, not so he could hear. I wouldn’t want him to think I was desperate. Then he’d whisk me away to his desert kingdom, and I’d become his princess.

But, of course, that never happened. It was just a dream. Instead of a stranger on a white camel, all I got at the well was Sam and his smelly goats and Thomas’s grumpy camels pushing in.

And then, I guess, I grew up. The dreams became a distant memory, and I married Andrew. He didn’t have a white camel or shower me with treasures, but he did have a heart of gold, and I suppose that’s as much as a girl could wish for. And he reminded me of Abraham’s son, Isaac, Rebecca’s husband. Isaac, the gentle.

Like my Andrew, Isaac was quieter and more gentle than the other patriarchs – Abraham, his father, and Jacob, his son. Isaac always seemed to let others do things for him. He never seemed to do anything for himself. Even the business of finding a wife was something his father didn’t trust Isaac to do; instead, Abraham sent his servant off to his family up north.

Of course, you can’t blame Isaac. He was bullied and laughed at as a child by his half-brother, Ishmael. And then that terrible, terrible day.

He went on an adventure with his father, Abraham. They were going to make a sacrifice to God together. What child wouldn’t have been excited about that? But, suddenly his father is tying him up and putting him on top of the altar. He is going to be the sacrifice. How do you cope with that? I’m not surprised that he was an emotional wreck and couldn’t make up his own mind about anything. No wonder his father had to send off in search of a wife for him.

And, yes, Rebecca also seems to have manipulated him a bit, and his kids did their own thing. Even his servants weren’t able to stand up for him. Every time they dug a well for him, the servants of the Philistine king, Abimelech, would chase them away. Instead of standing up for themselves, they’d just go and dig another well somewhere else.

That was my Andrew, too. Never standing up for himself; always giving others the right of way. Ah, well. He died far too young. I miss him still.

It was all downhill for me after that. Andrew’s family threw me out of the house, and I had nowhere to go. I drifted back to the village I’d grown up in. I had no family left, and not many options. When Samuel asked me to marry him, I thought of the question they asked Rebecca so long ago: Will you go with this man?

I guess I didn’t have much choice, so I agreed, but he wasn’t like my Andrew. He was coarse and brutal. There was no sorrow when he died a few years later.

And then there was … well, suffice to say, there were five husbands altogether, each about as bad as the other. When the fifth one wanted to move to Sidon, well, I told him I wasn’t going anywhere.

Then I hooked up with Thomas, who was pretty much as lost as I was. Neither of us wanted to get married. Didn’t seem much point.

Of course, that put the uptight noses out of joint. But where were they when I was being brutalised?

So, I didn’t make it to the society weddings and wasn’t welcome around the synagogue. Even the well was a lonely place. I started going in the middle of the day to avoid the constant jibes and sneers of the prim and proper types. It was a lonely few years. But it was all I had.

And then ….
Well, what can I say?
One day, it happened.
My dream came true.

No, it wasn’t a man on a white camel.
But it was a man, and it was at the well.

I’d come to collect water as usual, and there he was, sitting there with a lost look in his eye; sad, perhaps, burdened. He was some sort of Rabbi, but he seemed to be on his own.

He asked me for a drink of water.

Well I got such a shock. Not because of my dream (although I did have a little chuckle to myself). But he was a Jew, and me? Well, I’m a Samaritan and a woman.

Jewish men don’t talk to strange women, even for a drink of water. And for a Jew to talk to a Samaritan woman? Well, that never happens.

And, anyway, he would have known there was something odd about me, fetching water in the heat of the day.

But there he was, against all that was holy, asking me for a drink of water.

I mean, Jews won’t even use our utensils! So, what was he going to drink my water with?

So, I said to him, ‘You’re a Jew. What are you doing asking me for water?’

Then he said the strangest thing. He spoke about God’s gift, and he said if I only knew him, I could ask him for life-giving water.

Oh, oh, I thought. There goes my dream. I’ve got a crazy here.

I should have walked away then. But something kept me. So, I told him that without a bucket he’d have trouble getting any sort of water. Or did he think he was better than our ancestor Jacob who dug the well thousands of years ago?
Sheez, these Jews!

But he wasn’t put off at all. ‘Whoever drinks this water will be thirsty again,’ he said. ‘But anyone who drinks my water will never be thirsty again. It will be a spring within you, welling up to eternal life.’

Well, I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I said, ‘Please, give me that water. Then I’ll never be thirsty, and I’ll never have to come to this hateful well again!’

Then he told me to call my husband.

Ah, here comes the sales pitch, I thought. He’d be in trouble if he tried to negotiate with a woman, so now he needs my husband.

‘I haven’t got one,’ I told him.

What he said next, shook me rigid. ‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘You’ve had five husbands, and the man you are with now isn’t your husband.’

This was getting personal, so I tried to steer the conversation into a religious debate. These Jews are always so self-righteous about their religion, I knew I’d trip him up.

But, somehow, we weren’t taking about religion. We were talking about God and having a personal relationship with him – being in touch with God instead of doing religious things.

It was exhilarating, but also frightening, as all the old rooms and hidden places of my life seemed to be exposed. But it wasn’t like he was pointing fingers. More like just opening them up and healing them with a gentle touch.

Then we spoke about the Messiah, and I said I longed for him to come, because, surely, the Messiah was the one who would explain all this to us and make it real?

Then he looked at me. And in a calm and gentle voice, he said, ‘I am he.’

Just like that.
And, suddenly, I knew.

If anyone had said to me then, ‘Will you go with this man?’ I would have jumped up and cried, ‘Yes, yes! A thousand times, yes!’ Camel or no camel.

Suddenly, his disciples were with him – they’d been buying bread or something. They didn’t say anything about him talking with a woman.

But I knew what I had to do. I left my jar and ran to the village. I called all the people, who’d ignored me (or worse) most of my life.

‘Come see a man,’ I said. ‘Out by the well. He seems to know everything about us. He told me all I have ever done. Could he be the Messiah?’

I must have sounded crazy. I don’t know why they didn’t laugh at me. But they came anyway. And they warmed to him, as I had. They even asked him to stay, which he did for a couple of days – and healing happened.

The village folk began to see in him what I had seen, and they believed as I had done.

I realised, later, that my dream had, indeed, come true.
No, no white camels, and none to ask me, ‘Will you go with this man?’
But it was my own voice calling in the same way: ‘Come see a man ….’

And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.
Whenever I see someone in distress, someone in pain, someone lost or left out as I was, I tell them about Jesus. And I invite them to come to him.

So, I ask you, as they asked the other Rebecca, will you go with this man? Will you walk with Jesus?

Will you open your heart to him, as I did, and let him see the dark places, the scary places, the sad places of your life?

Will you let him bring healing and hope to your broken world? Because that’s what he did for me and my village, just as he did for my name’s sake so long ago, the other woman at the well.

Thank you for listening to my story.

[See also: Rebecca: A Prayer from the Well]