SERMONS
“Spirit and Truth”, notes from a sermon preached by Karen Gronback Johnson at the Old Stone Church on February 24, 2008.
Scripture Lesson: John 4:5-42
In today’s story, Jesus is traveling from Judea in the south, to Galilee in the north. The most direct route took him through the towns of Samaria. The Samaritans and Jews had no liking for one another, and would have had little to do with one another. Also, men did not have extended conversations with women not of their own family, and it was against social custom for a Jewish religious leader to speak with a woman in public, so one can see that this exchange would have been extraordinary for the times.
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In today’s story, the woman at the well says that Jesus told her everything she ever did. Personally, I would be skeptical of her enthusiasm. I watched a TV show recently, in which a “psychic” gave readings to three different people: a younger woman, a middle-aged woman, and a young man. She worked from a script, and asked them exactly the same questions, and told them exactly the same things about themselves. All three of them, when interviewed after their session, said that they felt this psychic was right on the money, had them figured out to a tee, told them things about themselves that perhaps their closest friends did not know.
Were these people really so gullible? I think that all of us, deep down, wish for someone to know us thoroughly. They very much wanted to believe that this person had special gifts.
Perhaps Jesus has done this bit of “psychic reading” for this woman, so that she will trust him. Perhaps he understood her to be the kind of person who would tell everyone she met about their encounter. Perhaps it is because of her that he was granted access to the Samaritans, who would have been so biased against him as a Jew. Part of the reason for this is because the Samaritans believed that God designated Mount Gerizim as the place for worship, rather than Jerusalem, and they had once had a temple there. The woman raises this difference between them, but Jesus dismisses it, telling her that the time is coming when true worshipers will worship God in spirit and in truth.
What does this mean? Of course we worship God in spirit and in truth. But do we? Like Pilate, I find myself wondering what is truth, because I know that what is true for me may not be true for you.
In the other gospels, Mark, Mathew and Luke, Jesus is silent before his accusers. But in John, Jesus has a conversation with Pilate. From John 18:37-38:
Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate asked him, “What is truth?”
For me, this is one of the most chilling parts of the passion story. It is the point where I know that Jesus is not going to get away with a slap on the wrist (or a flogging.) Jesus makes an invitation to Pilate; every one who belongs to the truth listens to my voice. In other words, if Pilate wants to be a part of the truth, or considers himself to be one who seeks out the truth, then he should listen to Jesus. But when Pilate says, “What is truth?” the game is up.
What is truth? In these days of mass media, there would seem to be no short supply of conflicting messages. The truth varies according to who is telling the story. Public broadcasting tells a liberal story; Fox networks tell a more conservative one. Oh the story may be the same, but the spin that is put on it is highly suggestive.
For instance, if I say, “Mr. Brown left my office and walked down the stairs,” you get one picture. Note how the picture changes, by my changing just one word. “Mr. Brown left my office and stomped down the stairs,” or, “Mr. Brown left my office and fled down the stairs,” or, “Mr. Brown left my office and crept down the stairs.” Or the ever popular, “Mr. Brown left my office and crashed down the stairs.” The truth is that Mr. Brown was in my office and left, via the stairway. The spin that I put on it is likely to produce all sorts of conjecture and/or assumptions about what Mr. Brown was doing in my office or the conversation that we had.
We can be led to believe in something as truth, because we trust the source of the information. We may trust ABC because of Peter Jennings’ legacy, hopefully continued by Charlie Gibson, or we may trust Fox’s Bill O’Neill, or PBS’s Jim Lehrer, or any number of TV news anchors who catch our fancy. It is no accident that what we count as truth depends on who delivers the message.
The great philosopher Immanuel Kant thought that one must always tell the truth, no matter what; that if your best friend was hiding in your closet, and enemy soldiers came to your door and asked where your friend was, you would be honor bound to tell them the truth and reveal your friend. But Nazi protestor and Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer preached that truth was relational; because the person hiding was your friend, you owed that person your loyalty, and would be honor bound to conceal him.
If we consider what Bonhoeffer says about truth being relational, and if we consider the way that we believe what we hear because of the trust we have in the source, we have a clue. We who call ourselves Christians share a common truth; that is, we believe in Jesus Christ as the One who can give us salvation. We may not agree on exactly how this takes place; there are many theologies of salvation. But for us, Jesus Christ is the path we take to God, because of the relationships we have with the rest of Christ’s faithful believers, and the relationship we have with Christ, himself. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” and because we try to follow that way, and because we want to know that life, we can trust in his truth.
We can forget about what we know, and what we believe to be true about our world, and get down to our bare bones selves, as children of God, and consider who we are, how we care for God’s world, and how we behave toward others. Because that is what Jesus was interested in with the woman at the well, and that is what concerns him about us. Therefore, when we worship in truth, we bring before God the absolute truth of ourselves. And when we worship in spirit, we invite the Holy Spirit to take hold of that absolute truth of ourselves, and open it up for transformation in Christ Jesus, that our lives might be spirit led.
“But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.”
Amen.
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