2026-03-08 Ex 17 01-07 and Jn 04 05-29
"Strangers in a Strange Land"
Trinity Presbyterian Church (USA)
I've been warned about this sermon.
More than one person has said,
Look.
We lost an hour of sleep.
We've been working at the Rummage Sale all weekend.
Those Lenten scriptures are way too long, poor Bob.
Keep it short. Or at least keep it lively.
What you think I am, The News?
That'll wake you up. Get those juices flowing.
Does anybody else take a deep breath before turning on the news?
We're like, "What's it gonna be… NOW?"
It's hard not to feel like the whole world's on an onside kick.
Where are we bouncing now?
We're straying into a LOT of uncharted wilderness.
Strangers in a really, really strange land.
The Bible knows this feeling of being lost.
And it calls it, "The Wilderness."
The Wilderness is where both Moses and Jesus are, in today's scripture.
The Bible makes it clear.
Like it or not, all of us – are going to spend some time in The Wilderness.
Wandering.
Lost.
Exhausted.
The Wilderness makes us see our home, makes us see our homeland, makes us see our world – makes us see everything – from a sacred distance.
It makes us see it all with a different perspective.
Perspective is a gift from God.
Perspective is when the living water starts flowing – even from the rocks.
--
Without Wilderness, there would be no Bible.
"I have been a stranger in a strange land" (Ex 2:2).
"My father was a wandering Aramean" (Deut 26:5).
God's people are "strangers and foreigners on earth." (Heb 11:13)
We're all refugees. All immigrants. All wanderers.
Thirsting for home.
–
A couple of weeks ago, Dr. Wooten invited me on a trip to another world.
Same galaxy, thank goodness.
I'm proudly "Milky Way First."
I had to drive for minutes – to an empty lot past the airport.
This was back during the week of Florida Winter.
It was Wilderness cold.
40 degrees.
38 with the brutal wind chill.
So we all piled into Wayne's Toyota Sundowner sedan with the heater running.
He put his Bluetooth-controlled "smart" telescope on the roof of another car, and used his iPad to navigate from the comfort of his warm terrestrial auto-mobile.
He aimed the telescope on M42.
You know – M42.
Known to its friends as, the Orion Nebula.
The middle point of light in Orion's belt.
1,344 light-years from Earth.
Up close, the Orion Nebula is an unspeakably beautiful glowing cloud in the heavens.
It's a solar nursery, open 24/7, from which – as we speak – infant stars are being born.
It's creation.
It's divine.
The hand of God at work.
Now, of course, Wayne didn't literally take us to M42.
Some of us had to be at work the next day.
But even from a distance, going on a trek to stars or nebulae helps you catch just a glimpse of how infinitely vast this creation is.
And it also makes you consider the other view: how infinitesimally small you and I are.
Like all good trips into The Wilderness, the sojourn through space gave me the gift of perspective.
Holy perspective.
And then, if that wasn't enough perspective, this happened.
--
Squeezed into the car with us were the Rabbi of B'nai Israel Synagogue and his wife.
Of course they would be.
You never know who's in the car with Wayne.
B'nai Israel is a Conservative Jewish congregation on 9th Avenue.
Identifying me by my markings as another religious bird, the Rabbi and his wife invited me for Friday Sabbath-eve services and dinner.
I'd been to services at a synagogue before, but it had always been kind of a field trip.
This time, I'd be an invited guest, to another place I'd never been.
So, you could say: Wilderness.
Rabbi Josh is a gracious host and very wise.
His wife Sheila just happens to be a professional chef.
Wise rabbi – trained chef – welcoming the stranger – homemade bread and sweet wine – they sound like Jesus's kinda people to me.
As the congregation and I got to know each other over dinner, I like to think we broke through some stereotypes.
They joked that Christians think all Jews are Jerry Seinfeld.
I hope I at least partially disproved the idea that all Presbyterians are straight-laced, sour faced Calvinists, deathly afraid that somebody somewhere is having fun.
I learned that they're Conservative Jewish, not Orthodox.
They learned that I'm PCUSA, not PCA (and I might have heard someone say, "Uh-oh").
I think we both re-learned that Christians and Jews find out about each other mainly from Google and what we see on the news.
When we turn our internal telescopes around and zoom in on the people, not the labels, everybody's a snowflake, and not in the Fox News way.
We're all different.
All unique.
We all know we're going to melt someday.
And someday, all our ashes will turn back to ashes, and our dust will return to the stars.
That's perspective.
That's knowing who you are, where you are, and where we're heading.
But I wouldn't have seen this particular view, if I never ventured out – into The Wilderness.
–
The Israelites were refugees.
Wandering through the wilderness.
Across a desert.
For FORTY YEARS.
Forty years.
Can you imagine? I get grumpy when the stoplight at 12th Avenue makes me wait 40 seconds.
Not that Pensacolans believe in stoplights.
It's hard to tell who's a believer and who's not — stop-light years away.
I have Tennessee license plates, so I'm practically begging people to honk at me.
"Foreigner! Go back where you came from!"
Don't you hate it when people make judgments about you based on who you are?
What you look like?
How old you are?
Where you're from?
Where you go to church?
Or synagogue?
Or mosque?
Or coffee shop?
People need to get out more.
Really.
I mean that.
Moses got out.
He found out wandering can be a good thing.
Especially if you're escaping a Pharaoh.
A long trip can give you time to find yourself.
You might even find God.
Or, you might find the people behind you just start honking.
The Israelites were broken down in the middle of nowhere.
They were all up in Moses's face.
Testing and quarreling.
Massah and Meribah, y'all.
"Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?"
"Is God even with us?
"Or not?"
The Israelites were were trying to find a new home in a cruel, dry land.
Land that was saying in every way it could, "We don't want you."
"Go back where you came from."
They just wanted to go home.
Someplace that wasn't so vast, so empty.
So hateful.
So foreign.
But every place is foreign until you get to know it.
--
A few hundred years after Moses, Jesus turns up in Samaria.
Samaria's it's own kind of wilderness.
To say, as John 4:9 does, parenthetically, that "Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans"
is a bit like saying Republicans and Democrats sit on different sides of the aisle.
In first century Jewish eyes, Samaria was a cesspool of unwashed masses.
Inbred, outbred, no breeding at all.
Two rules about Samaria.
Don't drink the water.
And don't get too close to the women.
You don't know where either one's been.
Jesus finds the water.
Not a rock, but a well.
And Jesus is thirsty.
The Bible tells us it was a hot day and he was tired.
Kinda grumpy too.
Jesus tells the Samaritan woman, "Fetch me some water."
To come into contact with an unclean Samaritan – ESPECIALLY an unclean WOMAN Samaritan – was just plain yucky.
Maybe not technically illegal, but come on.
I mean, everybody on Jesus's side of the border knew how those women were.
Five husbands and a live-in boyfriend? Ew.
The Gospel According to John was written for a second century Jewish-Christian audience.
So, for this Samaritan woman to announce, "Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!" --
It's not so much clairvoyance as bias confirmation.
"Yeah, Jezebel, we see you."
Side note: Notice how it's never the five men and boyfriend who get shamed for treating the woman like dusty dirt.
Same as it ever was.
Now.
Jesus may have gone on a journey to a different country with the aim of gaining perspective.
Maybe.
What we know for sure was that HE, Jesus -- gave the Samaritan Woman -- a COMPLETELY new perspective.
Jesus changes the way we see things. As in, "Born anew."
Verse 28 says,
"Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city."
That's huge.
Think how upset people get when they lose their Stanley mugs.
Unlike us, she didn't have a cabinet full.
Probably one water jar to her name.
It was her life.
Literally.
So for her to leave it means more than carelessness.
It's a change of heart.
And then, the even BIGGER news.
In verse 39: "Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman's testimony."
Well looky there – an unclean foreigner -- with an unclean history – becomes the first "girl" preacher -- converting half her hometown.
You tell me that's not a cosmic shift in perspective.
And then look even closer.
There was a miracle.
But who performed the miracle? Not Jesus.
The Samaritan woman performs the miracle.
She's the one who leaves her old jar and runs back home to share the new jar, the jar of "Living Water."
SHE'S the one who goes and changes her whole town's perspective.
Praise the Lord, but praise this woman, too.
It's like Jesus promised in John 14:12: "Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these….
"
Perspective changes everything.
New perspective, new vision, new life – all a gift from God.
--
We are living in very strange times.
We are in a Wilderness of politics, economics, wealth,
Artificial Intelligence, media conglomerates, billionaires,
trillionaires (a word, by the way, that my spell-checker didn't even know).
You can add to the list with all the things you don't understand, or that you're afraid of, or that you physically hate and hate to see.
You could describe it with language you can't say in church.
Whatever else it is, it's definitely a Wilderness.
It may take us 40 years to get through it.
I just hope someday it all stabilizes enough for us to have perspective that doesn't wobble out of sight.
But what scripture tells us, again and again, is that there will be miracles of new life, new birth.
We see the new birth in the star nurseries.
The signs of heaven are all around us.
We just have to focus.
--
Focus.
Something else I learned with Wayne and his magic telescope.
When it's trained on something far away, it has to take many, many pictures.
And then, the software merges them together.
It takes time to process.
It's like cooking a soup.
All the ingredients, all the parts, have to simmer together for a result to show.
I think that's the way perspective develops over time, as we start to emerge from our own Wilderness.
It takes time to find the Promised Land.
And even more time to move into it.
In the immortal words of Rev. Dr. King, "I might not get there with you…."
Not even Moses got there.
But we believe Jesus is in that Promised Land.
And we believe that someday, we'll get there with him.
And on that day, we won't be strangers in a strange land anymore.
We'll be home.
[eos]
