Worship: Be Awestruck
John 4:20-24
On July 30, 1945, the battle cruiser USS Indianapolis was returning from a top secret, high speed mission delivering enriched uranium to allied forces in the Pacific. It did not make it home. A Japanese torpedo hit the cruiser on its way back. It sank in minutes. In only 12 minutes, 300 of the 1,200 men on board died. Nine hundred went into the water, enduring four days and five nights without food, without water, and under the blazing sun of the Pacific. Of the 900 men that went into the water, only 316 survived the lack of water and the sharks. One of those who survived was the chief medical officer, who recorded his own experience. He wrote:
There was nothing I could do, nothing I could do but give advice, bury the dead at sea, save the lifejackets, and try to keep the men from drinking the water. When the hot sun came out, and we were in this crystal clear ocean, we were so thirsty. You couldn’t believe it wasn’t good enough to drink. I had a hard time convincing the men they shouldn’t drink. The real young ones…you take away their hope, you take away their water and food, they would drink the salt water and they would go fast. I can remember striking the ones who were drinking the salt water to try to stop them. They would get dehydrated, then become maniacal. There were mass hallucinations. I was amazed how everyone would see the same thing. One man would see something, and then everyone else would see it. Even I fought the hallucinations off and on. Something always brought me back.[i]
In desperation, the excruciatingly thirsty men drank salt water, hoping to quench their thirst. It did just the opposite. It dehydrated them more. And they died. Most of us have never been THAT thirsty. Oh, we’ve all been thirsty. Outside on a hot day working or playing … after vigorous exercise … when you first wake up in the morning. If I’m really thirsty while I’m sleeping, I’ll often dream about being thirsty, and drinking cup after cup of water, all to no avail. My thirst persists. Why? Because dreamed water doesn’t quench real thirst.
As we start the new year, I want to take three weeks to remind us of the things that define us as a church here at Christ Church. They’re our DNA as a church. Can you name them? Worship. Word. Witness. Right? And all of those things oriented toward Christ, for whom this church is named. It’s important to revisit those things that are important on a regular basis, so that we remember who we are and what we are about. So each week for the next three weeks we’re going to take one of those words and unpack it again. This week, we’re talking about worship.
In John 4, Jesus travels from Judea to Galilee through Samaria. The route he chose was the most direct route, but almost no one took it. Why? Because it went through Samaria. Samaritans didn’t like Jews. And Jews didn’t like Samaritans. Things didn’t usually turn physical between the two … they had a live and let live but avoid at all costs kind of thing going. Each viewed the other as less than and not really God’s people. They were fairly closely related – the Samaritans were descended from the norther ten tribes of Israel that went into exile first. They wound up intermarrying with other peoples in exile and thus were viewed as half-breeds. No longer descendants of Abraham.
Jews traveling between Galilee in the north and Judea to the south typically crossed the Jordan River, traveled south around Galilee, and then crossed back over the river and went on to Jerusalem. One just didn’t go through Samaria. But Jesus did. It made his disciples very uncomfortable. The Samaritans would have been uncomfortable too. But that’s what Jesus does sometimes. He makes us uncomfortable. Turn with me to John 4:20-24.
While traveling through Samaria, he came to a town called Sychar. The Bible tells us that Jesus was weary from his journey, so he sat down beside a well, called Jacob’s well. Many of the significant events that happened in the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob happened in what had become the region of Samaria. Jacob’s well was a well dug by Jacob and his family. A woman approaches, and Jesus asks her to draw some water for him, and they have a kind of back and forth. Not really an argument, but she is definitely guarded.
She asks him why he, a Jew, is asking for help from a Samaritan woman, and he replies, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (Jn. 4:10). She asks some questions for clarification, and he goes on to say, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (Jn. 4:13-14). And she asks for that water.
He was, of course, referring to himself. He was talking to her in a way that was designed to draw her out, to get her talking, asking, wondering. And he was telling her that he satisfies the human spirit, quenches our very real spiritual thirst, in a way that surpasses the quenching effect of a cold glass of water on a hot summer’s day. He was pointing her beyond any physical thirst to the deeper spiritual need, the spiritual thirst, that we all have. And he was saying, “I am the one who quenches THAT thirst.”
But when she asks him for that water, he begins to draw her attention to areas of her life that were broken, dirty, and filled with sin. You see, that is where our spiritual thirst is rooted. It’s rooted in our brokenness, in our sinfulness. Yes, we are created in the image of God and have value and worth. But we are also marked by brokenness and sin, and Jesus wants to take care of that for us, and in the process, deal with a thirst that is deeper than any physical thirst we’ve ever experienced.
We all live for something. But Jesus says that if that thing is not him, it will fail you. It will enslave you …. Nobody put this better than the American writer and intellectual David Foster Wallace. Wallace was at the top of his profession. He was an award-winning, best-selling novelist who committed suicide in 2008. But before his death he gave a famous commencement address in which he said this to the graduating class:
Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism …. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And … pretty much anything you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things – if they are where you tap real meaning in life – then you will never have enough …. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you …. Worship power – you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart – you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.[ii]
What was he saying? That we all have a deep, unquenchable, spiritual thirst. And the things we drink to try to quench it … they all fail us. Jesus will not fail to quench the thirst. Jesus will not fail you.
Well, this woman gets pretty uncomfortable with Jesus’ knowledge of her and her life, but she doesn’t just run. Something about him keeps drawing her close, keeps her close to him, engaged with him. But she tries to focus the his searing gaze and knowledge of her on something else, anything else, so she asks him a question about … worship. In counseling and therapy, we call that the defense mechanism of resistance. It happens when the client wants to talk about anything other than what they really need to talk about.
But Jesus deals with it brilliantly. He engages her question about worship without ever getting off track. You see, worship is the outcome of having your spiritual thirst quenched. Look at V. 20.
The Jews worshipped at the temple in Jerusalem, the city of David, at the temple built by Solomon. The Samaritans worshipped at another temple that they had built on Mt. Gerizim in Samaria. And she was right, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – the fathers of all of Israelite descent – Jew and Samaritan alike, HAD in fact worshipped there. Both Abraham and Jacob had built altars there. And Mt. Gerizim was the place where the people of Israel were blessed as they entered the Promised Land. So, in an attempt to distract Jesus from his focus on her, she asks him, “Which is right?”
Look at his reply in V. 21. Let me clarify something here. When Jesus started his reply with the word, “Woman,” we might read that as disrespectful or condescending, because in our culture, it pretty much is. If Becky asks me a question and my answer starts with, “Woman …”, I’m going to get smacked and I’ll probably be sleeping with my Quarter Horse Tuff out in the barn that night. Maybe the next night too.
In that culture, though, it was the respectful way to address someone. It communicated respect and affection. Standing face to face with Jesus, she feels what we all feel when we encounter Jesus. Shame. That’s why she’s employing one of the oldest defense mechanisms in the book. That’s why she’s trying to redirect him a little bit. And how does Jesus respond to her in her shame? By using a conversational convention that conveyed respect. He pulls her out of her shame. He wants to deal with her sin and brokenness, but he doesn’t use shame as a tool to do that.
And then he points out that the question she asks, which gets at the root of most of the division between Jews and Samaritans – each of which viewed the other as unclean – is really the wrong question. The time was coming when neither location would be used for worship. Actually, Jesus didn’t say the time is coming, or even the day is coming, he said the hour is coming. In other words, it’s close. But when they argued over whether you could or should worship in Jerusalem or on Mt. Gerizim, they were all missing the point. Look at Vv. 22-24.
Worship wasn’t about location. It wasn’t about Jerusalem or Gerizim. They were looking at the wrong things, worried about the wrong things. Now, the Samaritans viewed only the first five books of the Old Testament – the Law of Moses or just the Law – as scripture. But the Jews also viewed the prophets and the wisdom books, including the Psalms, as Scripture, as we do. That’s why Jesus points out to this woman that the Samaritan belief system is incomplete. “YOU worship what you do not know; WE worship what we know” (V. 22). Of course, Jesus was plenty critical of Jewish belief too. He corrects and challenges all of us.
But the Jews, they should have known better than to argue about insignificant things like location and form. Because God, through the Old Testament prophet Micah, had told them (and this is written in the first person, in the voice of a Jewish person authentically wondering: “With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:6-8).
Worship is about one thing – the heart. The heart of the worshipper beating in time and in tune with the heart of God. Some people, when they think about worship, wonder about a God who needs to be told how great he is all the time. Real worship, authentic worship, has nothing to do with location, or whether it happens in an auditorium or a more traditional sanctuary, or the kind of music that is played, or how long it lasts. It has nothing to do with whether your emotions were activated or what emotions were activated – in other words, how you FELT. Real worship isn’t about having a beautiful sanctuary with beautiful decorations. Real worship happens when the heart of the worshipper beats in time with the heart of God.
And real worship is worship that is offered in spirit and in truth. “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” What does that mean? Both concepts are dealt with in other parts of the Bible. So lets look at each one in turn. How do we worship God “in spirit?”
God IS spirit, not bound by time and place in a body, as we are. That’s what makes Jesus’ coming such a miracle. He is God, who is spirit, IN time and space. He is God WITH us. In Romans 12:1, St. Paul talks about worshipping God “in spirit.” “I appeal to you therefore, brothers (and sisters … the Greek word that has typically been translated in the masculine actually refers to both genders) by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” We worship God “in spirit” to the extent that our whole selves, every part of our lives, are lived for the glory of God.
We worship God “in spirit” when we recognize that Jesus will not become another part to your life. When this unnamed Samaritan woman asked Jesus about worship, she was in a sense saying, “We Samaritans have our own way of doing things.” We do it our way. But Jesus will not allow himself to be invalidated by human culture, history, or traditions. He will not allow himself to become one more thing in your life. A part of your life.
He insists on becoming your life, the hub around which everything else rotates – your family and your friends, your work and your play and your home, your finances and your possessions. We worship God “in spirit” when we put Jesus in the driver’s seat of our lives, not the back seat or the trunk or on the luggage rack. We worship God “in spirit when we recognize that when we begin to follow Jesus, our lives are now set apart, that’s what holy means, for his glory.
“God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” Jesus, in John 14:6 says “I AM … the truth.” We worship God “in truth” when our worship is focused on Christ. Real worship isn’t so much focused on me and my need and what I get out of it as it is Christ and what he has done for me. For us. We also worship God “in truth” when we are truly ourselves in worship. This woman wanted to hide behind a theological question. And it wasn’t an insignificant question. Jesus responded to the question. But he did so in a way that refused to allow her to hide behind it. He wanted her to drink from the living water that only he can provide. He wanted to quench her spiritual thirst.
When we worship God “in spirit and in truth,” we worship him with complete sincerity and in complete reality. No hiding. No ulterior motives. Just a heart in tune with the heart of God.
And that kind of worship springs from a heart filled with joy. We don’t worship God because God is a divine narcissist who insists that we tell him how great he is over and over and over again. If that’s the kind of God we worship, leave now. But that isn’t the kind of God we have and worship. When you read a great book, you tell everyone how great it is, don’t you. You want them to read it too. When you discover a great restaurant, you tell all of your friends about it, right? Because you want them to experience the great food too. We worship God because our spiritual thirst has been quenched by living water, and we want others to experience that too.
We worship God because he is God. In Revelation 5, Jesus is called the “Lion of the tribe of Judah.” In Isaiah 6, God is described as being attended by dragon-like angels. A lion attended by dragons. That’s some vision of God. But that’s the vision of God the Bible provides. We worship God because he is worthy of worship, and because of the joy that we experience as our deep thirst is quenched once and for all.
I’d like to close by reading a section of a book called The Silver Chair. It’s one of the seven books in the Chronicles of Narnia series written by Christian scholar, author, and apologist C.S. Lewis. This section describes an interaction between a girl named Jill and Aslan, the great lion who represents Christ throughout the series.
“If I run away, it’ll be after me in a moment,” thought Jill. “And if I go on, I shall run straight into its mouth.” Anyway, she couldn’t have moved if she had tried, and she couldn’t take her eyes off it. How long this lasted, she could not be sure; it seemed like hours. And the thirst became so bad that she almost felt she would not mind being eaten by the Lion if only she could be sure of getting a mouthful of water first. . . .
“Are you not thirsty?” said the Lion.
“I’m dying of thirst,” said Jill.
“Then drink,” said the Lion.
“May I, would you mind going away while I do?” said Jill.
The Lion answered this only by a look and a very low growl. And as Jill gazed at its motionless bulk, she realized that she might as well have asked the whole mountain to move aside for her convenience. The delicious rippling noise of the stream was driving her nearly frantic.
“Will you promise not to do anything to me, if I do come?” said Jill.
“I make no promise,” said the Lion.
Jill was so thirsty now that, without noticing it, she had come a step nearer. “Do you eat girls?” she said.
“I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms,” said the Lion. It didn’t say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it.
“I daren’t come and drink,” said Jill.
“Then you will die of thirst,” said the Lion.
“Oh dear!” said Jill, coming another step nearer. “I suppose I must go and look for another stream then.”
“There is no other stream,” said the Lion. It never occurred to Jill to disbelieve the Lion, no one who had seen his stern face could do that, and her mind suddenly made itself up.
It was the worst thing she had ever had to do, but she went straight to the stream, knelt down, and began scooping up water in her hand. It was the coldest, most refreshing water she had ever tasted. You didn’t need to drink much of it, for it quenched your thirst at once. Before she tasted it she had been intending to make a dash away from the Lion the moment she had finished. Now, she realized that this would be on the whole the most dangerous thing of all.[iii]
When we worship the Lion of the tribe of Judah, when we worship the only source of living water, the only one who quenches our spiritual thirst, we come “in spirit and in truth,” offering our whole selves in worship of the one who gave himself for us. Let us pray.
[i] Bryan Chapell from the sermon “Killing the Red Lizard,” Preaching Today Audio Issue # 265
[ii] Adapted from Timothy Keller, The Insider and the Outcast (Dutton Adult, 2013); original source: David Foster Wallace, “David Foster Wallace on Life and Work,” The Wall Street Journal (9-19-08)
[iii] C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (Collier Books), pp.16-18