"Well Well Well" with Dr. Joel Gregory

19:21 it's so good to be here with you faculty students friends during this chapel hour could we pray a moment lord we pray now that the incarnate word, whose witness we have in this written word, might become for us the living word in ways more personal than we can imagine. Speak to our needy hearts. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

20:03 Well, well, well. Some of you may wonder what it is that we baby boomers did that left you with the world you have right now. I think I have a clue about it. Back in another era in the torrid Texas temperatures, children could play a mile away from home all day long and nobody worried about where they were. It's hard to imagine that kind of world today. My friends and I would play cowboys and Native Americans for hours and hours, shooting at one another with cap guns. Does anybody know what a cap gun is? All right, thank you. I didn't know. We didn't want to go in at noon when we were dehydrated and cotton-mouthed with thirst because our moms might make us stay, so we would invade someone's backyard where a 100-foot-long rubber hose had been sizzling in that summer sun and we would gulp some very high...

21:06 I can taste it right now. That rancid water, superheated. I don't know what it did to us. I'm sure somewhere, a research university is doing a study on the longitudinal study of the toxological effects of water drunk from a water rubber hose in 1957. Our worries about water now are different from those days, not all that long ago. You go into even a middle brow restaurant, they'll want to know do you want tap water or do you want bottled water. And a snooty waiter will look at you as if you're declassé if you don't say bottled water. And then you can either get domestic or international water. You can get still water or sparkling water. and it's more complicated than that. You can get it from an artesian source or water that's been boiled somewhere. It comes out of the ground with bubbles in it or they're forced into it. It's got a different kind of water problem now. In Samaria that wasn't the problem. In that land where near the Dead Sea there's two inches of rainfall every year compared say to 36 inches on the average here in Waco. Water, where it was, how to get it, how to carry it, how to get more of it, framed all of life. A gallon of water weighs 8.3 pounds. We've seen pretty Sunday school pictures of this lady with a little picture on her shoulder.

22:51 That beautifies what was really not an easy thing at all. I don't know how you'd know how much water they used in Samaria. 1936 in the hill country of Texas, not two hours south of here, there was no electricity while people in Austin and Waco had electric pumps and refrigerators and irons. there was no electric lines for thousands of farms in the valleys and the hills near Austin. And there, after a farmer went to work, his wife had to walk, according to a 1936 federal survey, an average of 230 feet to a 50-foot well. And the average farm person used 40 gallons of water a day. do the math it wasn't carrying a little bit that's why women in the hill country were stooped shouldered by 35 years of age and looked older than they were if it was 40 gallons a day that's more than 320 gallons for one person to cook and wash and clean and scrub I don't know how much water this took but this was not an easy thing for this lady at the Well, it wasn't a casual trip for her.

24:17 there's a prelude to our passage the beginning of this we read that Jesus left the temple in Jerusalem and Judea it's really a strong and unusual word it's the only time the word appears in John's gospel it's a word that was used for sending away sin it's really a word that suggests that he left them to their own fate. He handed their future to them and went to Galilee. You know, sometimes in our self-concern, our biggest concern is the drama of whether or not I accepted Jesus. The bigger grace is that he accepted me.

25:05 And the bigger horror is, if he ever said to me what he said to Jerusalem, I'll leave you to your own fate. Someone said that the best thing we can pray to God is thy will be done, but the worst thing he can say to you is your will be done. And in John's gospel, he'd pop in and out of Jerusalem, but he did leave them to their fate and went to Galilee, but that's just the front porch of this. What I'd like you to take away from this today is that God offers to you. A gift of life that is exclusively internal rather than external. And that is something permanent rather than temporary. Well, well, well. This is a historic well that becomes a mystical, metaphorical well that I hope in some degree could be a personal well.

26:04 it was a historic well I mean if they'd had a GPS you could have found Shechem or Sychar it's called Nablus today you could have found it there some Brit in the 19th century measured it and said it was a hundred feet deep it was really there and in a famous statement in John's gospel Jesus must go there that's that little word that indicates as you know a divine necessity he was always looking at some clock whose hands we can't see and the calendar the pages of which is invisible to us and he must go there it's interesting if you ever even listened in Sunday school unless you were worrying about what time the cowboy kickoff was. You remember that he could have gone east up the other side of Jordan and back in.

27:02 He said it'd be like going to Austin from here by going to Marlin down to Bastrop and into East Austin instead of taking I-35. There was about him this enormous sensitivity, not just when to go and where to go, but why to go. If you think about it, if he'd not been obedient to whatever that impulse was and had been there an hour early or an hour later, he might not have met this woman. And this dialogue might not have happened. He was able to hear the father's must. And so you find him at this well. It's well with a history. It's well with a history. It's on that piece of land that Jacob gave to Joseph. Now, we're not exactly sure where that is in the Old Testament, but they were 2,000 years closer to that than we were, even though it was 1,800 years on the other side of the Advent.

28:01 This had a history. Just to say the word Jacob is to think about Wells. After he'd scammed his brother Esau, he had to go, Genesis said, to the land of the people of the East. And there he met Rachel. And they became literally kissing cousins. the shepherdess that brought her sheep there he didn't even go to match.com Genesis says he just kissed her at the well but inside that moment of Rachel and then Leah inside that moment at that well were those names that stand for all time of the children of Israel and it happened at a well Joseph ran into something like a well or was thrown into it it was a pit cistern it must have been used to collect water because Genesis said there was no water in it and his destiny was there when when Jesus sat down on the curbside of that well in Samaria well well that was all behind him but he was also the embodiment of all of that Abraham and his faith and his folly and Isaac and his retreats giving up land that had been hard one and Jacob and the scam artist and the opportunist and Joseph with his ups and his down.

29:21 It was like an inverted pyramid with the point of it sitting on that curbside of that well that day, the key to all of that. You see, that's what Jesus can do. He can get his arms around the horrible and the holy, the garbage and the good in the lives of all of us. And because of his presence, give it ultimate meaning. All that led up to that was sitting on that well side that day. Helmut Telick is a preacher who shouldn't be forgotten. I guess as a homiletician, I'm sensitive to the fact that preachers get forgotten pretty quickly. Me, he's one of the best Lutheran preachers since Luther. There at Hamburg preaching, 4,000 people showed up as a church one day, and the Allies had bombed it, and he stood there in that bombed-out church and spoke these words based on the Lord's Prayer.

30:29 In those ruins, he says, not everything comes from God's hands, but everything has to pass through his hands. and Jesus sits on that well side with all that history behind him and he comes beside us with all of our history and says not all of it came from my hands but it all has to pass through my hands and I can make it have a significance you never knew about well give me a drink in the Greek New Testament it's three words I think they're monosyllables even given the conventions of language that must have sounded blunt to that lady give me drink you know you know you studied it i'm just going to rehearse it fred craddock said 90 percent of sermons ought to have the ring of the familiar so here's some familiar the three things about this lady she was a lady she was a samaritan and she had a history when that word hung, give me drink.

31:31 Must have hung in that hot air like a pistol shot. She was a woman. Ladies, I can't help the misogynistic, patriarchal aspects of scripture. They're just there. He wouldn't normally have talked to her. There's a clever website right now that shows that's going on. I don't know if you're familiar with it. It's called Jew in the City. It's by an attractive young Jewish lady in New York. She has a board of Manhattan business people on her board. And it's obviously a knockoff of a famous television show, Jew in the City. And what she does is defend orthodoxy. But she still has some problems with it. She talks about those rabbis who, with their distinctive hats, even when they see a maid on the sidewalk in Manhattan, will doff their hat and cover their eyes even today. Maris Friedman, a famous rabbi, orthodox, says that if a man isn't a woman today, a man and a woman are in a room with a closed door, He can only be of their first degree kin, your wife, your sister, or your daughter.

32:32 Well, if you read that back into this story and forward into now, it was unusual. And yet this same Jesus made Mary and Martha disciples, and there were women with him who supported his ministry. Couldn't forget how unconventional this was. She was a Samaritan. You remember that. the Assyrians had a resettlement program of idolaters and they adopted Yahweh and put him alongside their idols and that didn't sit well. Then when the Jews came back from Iraq to rebuild the temple, the Samaritans offered to help and they said no thank you. By this time, this was like a family fight when nobody can remember who hit who first.

33:16 They had no fight like a family fight. You ever notice they're the bitterest fights of all? Seven siblings Gather burying their farm Mother, a frail little woman Who'd raised them in the depression Youngest son in the bunch Gets up right after the funeral dinner And says, well, mama said We could have her china There with his eighth wife They headed toward the china cabinet And his two older brothers Barred their way And there was a family fight Nothing's as bitter as family fights. Some of us lived through about a 40-year-long family fight among Baptists. Somewhere along the way, we lost exactly what happened, who hit who, and are still trying. It was like that with the Samaritans. A family fight.

34:11 And yet, look what Jesus did. Before this chapter is over, he and 12 Jews stayed with those Samaritans two days and I like to think years before Simon Peter crossed that threshold into Cornelius house he stepped over a threshold and had a dinner with a Samaritan well the other thing about this lady she's really I think she's been beat up too much in scripture married five times living with someone who wasn't her husband sounds like she's trying to be Elizabeth Taylor or Larry King with their aid, but let's set that aside a moment. Because this historic well suddenly becomes in Jesus' hands a mystical, metaphorical well. And it's transformed in the same way that he could tell some fishermen, call me and I'll make you fish for people.

35:14 In the same way he could take bread and say this is my body. He took this moment and took it from the lower, lesser, lighter to the higher, holier, and heavier. And I know in Johannine studies, that's part of John's hermeneut. Incidentally, I do believe this really happened. Everybody from Bishop Westcott to Raymond Brown to Craig Keener says this has eyewitness details. that says somebody was there looking at this. But Jesus lifts it up to another level. He said, if you had known the gift of God. All of a sudden, this is a mystical metaphorical well. It's the only place this word gift occurs. The gospel is interesting.

36:07 We think it's all the only time. Gift, it means something abundance. You read it in Acts, the gift of the Holy Spirit. You read it in Romans. But this is the only time this word appears. The gift. He lifts this water into something else. You know, when I was a pastor at every size of Texas Baptist Church, there was all the way from a church over here close to campus and a slum all the way to big churches. Back in that day we trained people in evangelism. They were just part of Texas Baptist life. I taught them the Roman road, the four spiritual laws. I taught them peace with God. I taught them evangelism explosion. And I know today those seem like canned programs. And in a sense they were but I did notice this people always gave me canned answers oh I keep the ten commandments I pay my bills I'm as good as anybody on the block I know they were canned somebody came to D.L. Moody one time said I don't like the way you do evangelism and Moody said well I like the way I do it better than the way you don't but Jesus didn't give canned answers he had this ability to take the moment, fish and fill up boats of fish, be fishers of men, bread, and here he sees this moment of water and he used it to take it to a higher, holier, heavier discussion.

37:35 You can do that if you listen. Now I had a preacher friend that had an aptitude to do this. He was sitting on an airplane next to a lady He was upset. You fly around and preach a lot. Sometimes you have to tell people you're a preacher. They ask you what they do. I found out they either talk your arm off or completely shut up. A while back ago, a man was drinking his cocktail. He said, what do you do? I said, I'm a Baptist minister. He actually said it on the floor.

38:06 I said, I don't care. This lady was weeping, and this preacher said, well, what's wrong? I'm a minister. She said, well, I've lost my parakeet. Seemed like the only thing she valued in her life, sun rose and set on it, was a parakeet. It was her companion. She was upset. My friend listened to all that. And you'd have to know him. I couldn't do this, but he did it. He said, I've never had a parakeet, but I have a paraclete. and he wasn't trying to be cute and he used that to speak to a word that changed her life. Now that may be ham-fisted and awkward but you've got the idea. If you listen to people there's somewhere to get from the lower lesser lighter to the higher holy and heavy but she'd have none of that so she takes the conversation back down the ladder and says you don't have a bucket and if you checked ancestry.com are you greater than Jacob and he met her no he just listened to that you don't have a bucket go back to the first chapter of John without him was not anything made that was made she didn't see what's written over the giant pillars of our science building in all him in him all things consists you don't have a bucket this is son of man son of God the eternal logos Isaiah said in his father's hand in his hand that anthropomorphism he holds the seas of the earth and the nations for him are like a drop in a bucket you don't have a bucket are you greater than our father Abraham?

40:04 Well, if she'd have flipped, well, she didn't have the gospel. If she looked at chapter eight, she'd hear him say, before Abraham, I am. But he didn't use that case of mistaken identity to end it. In fact, he brought it back from the lower lesson and back up to the higher, holier, heavy. If you come to this well, and drink you will come again this is the pith and the marrow in the heart of this passage if you come to this well you will drink again this slips the bonds of this passage and it becomes a figure of the life of everyone who honestly reads this and looks at ourselves go back to the same wheels. Now, we like to think down about that.

40:59 We do. Well, you know. Here's the person that sneaks at midnight and looks at soft porn and that becomes hard porn and then it becomes something unspeakable. Here's somebody hiding out over here under a bridge on Fifth Street smoking a joint, but they don't know that's just an introductory drug to harder stuff. And we like to look down at that. You know what? We hardly ever look up at it and recognize that aesthetic pursuits have exactly the same outcome. Soren Kierkegaard in an odd little piece called Recollection, it's hard to know what it is, winds up about a young man who goes back to Berlin where he'd been involved in some kind of love, goes back to a hotel hoping that he's going to have the same experience again, and the hotel disappoints him.

41:54 It's not the same. He goes to a coffee shop down the street. It was the best coffee he ever remembered and if he could just get another cup of that coffee, it doesn't taste as good. And then he goes home and his servant has rearranged the furniture in his house. Nothing is the same. Well, you don't like Kierkegaard? What about Bill Murray? Don't hear them in the same sentence often, do you?

42:20 1993. Groundhog Day. Some of us watch it so much we've memorized it. He goes back and relives the same day. Remember what happens if he tries to tweak it, it messes up something else. Oh I know, I know when he finally spends the night with a female member of his crew, everything's better the next day. That to me is a silly ending to that movie. It really doesn't solve the problem. You You touch it everywhere. Macbeth, tomorrow and tomorrow

42:57 and tomorrow creeps in the petty pace. Or even T.S. Eliot, that poet of modernity, describes that modern, back when we used the word modern, that modern man, J. Alfred Prufrock, who's overeducated, underemployed, neurotic, anxious, And finally recognize he's really not first class at anything and he says, morning, evening, afternoons that measure out life in coffee spoons. it's easy for us to talk about the down and out that go back to the same well it's a little harder up and out particularly if it's an aesthetic pursuit i go to the kembel art museum with a nice modest collection but somebody said you need to go to the metropolitan new york city going to see the real thing he takes a whole day oh you need to go to the louvre you can spend a week there oh you need to go to the ephesia in florence that's where you'll see the real stuff and it still doesn't fill the emptiness inside.

44:02 I don't care if it's going to an opera here at Baylor and somebody says, you need to hear the Houston or Dallas company. Oh, no, the real stuff's at the Lincoln Center. You need to go hear the Met. No, no, you need to go to La Scala. And you can chase the aesthetic and it leaves you empty. just one more winery up Napa Valley they've got the best stuff even though there's 400 it reminds me of the story of a depressed man in London in the early days of psychiatry who went to a man who had been trained by Sigmund Freud and he was so depressed the psychiatrist didn't know what to tell him the story is he said look Grimaldi the clown is in London go see him he makes everybody laugh and the man said I am Grimaldi . thank God Jesus doesn't leave us there there's a better turn in this the highest the holiest the heaviest in these words our fountain out here we mentioned them the water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life well well well Could it become our will?

45:20 He says, I give them. That's hard for type A overachievers to hear because we want to do something to get it. And there's not a thing you can do to get it. You can't work it up. You can't even get it up by imitating being sweet.

45:43 It's a gift. and you have to move into the first beatitude, blessed are the impoverished, the bankrupt in spirit. You got to go stand by that guy out on Franklin by the chicken finger place who holds up a sign and begs you for a buck spiritually. Say, Lord, give it to me.

46:08 Then Jesus says he gives it in abundance. abundance. It means literally wave after wave. The Lord who does things like that who doesn't just fill up one boat but two, feeds 5,000 and there's 12 basketfuls left over, who meets a man full of a legion full of devils and doesn't just make him a little better but makes him clothed in his right mind and he wants to join the mission board. he gives it in abundance. May we never become cynics who do not believe that or that it's some kind of illusion that chapel speakers talk about. That's the problem. It's the amen and the oh me of doing what we do.

46:58 When I was a little boy that used to be in Fort Worth, Texas a thing that was then called the stock show and rodeo it was actually a holiday. They let us out of elementary school to go all day and we'd spend all of our dimes with the barkers on the midway trying to throw a ball and hit stuff. And then when we were broke, we'd go in the exhibition hall. We're out of money. I remember seeing a faucet hanging by a wire. It was a faucet, like one outside your house, hanging by a wire. And water was coming out of it. Well, you can imagine a bunch of fourth grade boys looking at that. We looked down on it. We looked up at it. We went round and round at this miracle faucet. how could water come out when it wasn't plumbed into anything? I'm kind of slow. It was years later. I hate to say windy, years later. But I figured out it was a clear glass pipette vacuuming water up into it so that water would cascade down around that.

48:00 It looked like it was perpetual and it was just an illusion. Well, well, well. This is no...