"The water that I will give will become in them a spring 
     of water gushing up to eternal life."

In Nicholas Evans' popular novel The Horse Whisperer Annie Graves 
travels across a continent with her daughter Grace and Grace's severely 
traumatized horse Pilgrim in a desperate attempt to convince a Montana 
rancher named Tom Booker to help them; for a friend has told her that 
Booker is one of that elite group of people with the ability to heal 
injured horses.

     They could see into the creature's soul and soothe the 
     wounds they found there. Often they were seen as witches 
     and perhaps they were. Some wrought their magic with the 
     bleached bones of toads, plucked from moonlit streams. 
     Others, it was said, could with but a glance root the 
     hooves of a working team to the earth they plowed.... For 
     secrets uttered softly into pricked and troubled ears, 
     these men were known as Whisperers.

In addition to the challenge of calming Pilgrim, who has been 
severely injured in a gruesome riding accident, Booker soon discovers 
that he has two human souls to heal as well. Grace has blocked out all 
memory of the terrible accident in which her dearest friend was killed 
and she herself has lost a leg. Crippled for life, she turns her fear 
and anger inward, blocking anyone's attempt to help her get on with 
life.

Her mother, Annie, a high-rolling advertizing executive, has 
alienated herself from both her husband and daughter for years and is 
suddenly forced to come face to face with what she has sacrificed 
because of her career. Grace's physical and emotional injury following 
the accident is but a shadow of Annie's inner alienation from herself. 
Annie has lost the ability both to give and receive human affection.

It is a story about a woman in search of healing for a wounded animal 
and her daughter who ends up finding herself healed in ways she was 
neither looking for nor expecting.

                               +

This week's gospel story does something that few other gospel 
passages do: it tells us how wounds and divisions, especially ones that 
are longstanding, get healed. Jesus is a healer in this week's story 
but in ways that are not obvious at first glance.

On one level, of course, Jesus heals someone in a way she is not 
expecting. It's the story about a Samaritan woman who comes to a well 
to get water. She is minding her own business, doing the
laborious work that women did in those days. She knows her place, is 
suspicious of the obviously Jewish man who is perched on the well as 
she approaches it in the heat of the day; and she is understandably 
taken aback when he not only speaks to her but asks for her help.

     Jesus said to her, "Give me a drink."

She is a Samaritan. He is a Jew. She is a woman. He is a man. It is a 
highly public place. Jesus, as usual, is "inviting trouble" in his 
typical unconventional attitude and behaviour. He should not be 
speaking to a woman in the first place, let alone a member of a tribe 
of Israel long-despised by the Jewish people. It is all disorienting, 
dislodging, confusing and wonderful - right from the start. People we 
think we have all figured out don't act that way; and things we never 
expect to happen do. When you are dealing with Jesus, says John, expect 
the unexpected.

It is hard to tell what is going on in the conversation between Jesus 
and this woman, with every word giving you the feeling that it might 
mean something more than it seems. But something happens in the 
encounter. When it starts out, they are perfect strangers. When it ends 
up, the woman is so excited that she wants everyone to know about the 
man whom she has just met.

     Then the woman left her water jar and went back to 
     the city. She said to the people, "Come and see a 
     man who told me everything I have ever done! He 
     cannot be the Messiah, can he?"

She leaves behind what brought her to this moment in the first place 
because she finds something for which she did not realize she was 
searching - someone who meets her at a level of her being that no one 
else has before. And, once she has been met, she feels found. Or, is it 
that she has found part of herself that has gone missing?

The clue is in what happens next; because, by the end of the passage, 
it is not just a woman who is excited about Jesus but a whole town full 
of Samaritans.

     So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to 
     stay with them; and he stayed there two days. And many 
     more believed because of his word.  They said to the 
     woman, "It is no longer because of what you said that 
     we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we 
     know that this is truly the Savior of the world."

A whole town full of people have found themselves.  Found that they 
"belong" after all. Found that, in spite of a centuries' old hatred 
between two peoples, what matters is that their worth before God is 
incontrovertible.

And all because of a conversation that got started at a well and a 
man who actually saw people and who helped them see themselves.

In this week's gospel Jesus puts people in touch with the experience 
of a love that embraces them at a level deeper than thought and action. 
When that happens, they find something that was broken inside them 
coming alive again, something that was lost in them suddenly found. And 
when that is our experience the exterior dimensions of our lives get 
changed too.  The need for all the old suspicions, all the old rivalries
and all the old fears just doesn't seem to matter anymore.  People have 
come into "their souls" again, which is a place where not only each one 
of us individually but all of us collectively need to be.

                               +
                               
Because "soul" gets lost; or, put more succinctly, we "lose soul" 
both individually and communally. 

Anthropologists have long described a condition called "loss of 
soul".  It is the experience in which a person is "out" of himself, 
unable to "find" either the outer connections that keep him in 
communion with others or the inner ones that keep him rooted in 
himself.  A person who loses her soul is unable to take her place in 
society, to engage in its rituals, to feel one with its traditions. 
They are dead to her; and she to them.  Until a person "regains" his 
soul he is not really and wholly human - which is why, when this 
happened to primitive people, it was said a person was possessed or 
bewitched or ill - because, without his soul, a person had lost touch 
with all that energized him and humanized him.  People who lost their 
souls often died because of it both inwardly and outwardly because to 
be cut off from that central experience of being "one" with oneself was 
a "terminal" disease. The worst loneliness of all.

     One day in Burgholzli, the famous institute in Zurich 
     where the words "schizophrenia" and "complex" were born, 
     I watched a woman being interviewed.  She sat in a 
     wheelchair because she was elderly and feeble.  She said
     that she was dead for she had lost her heart.  The 
     psychiatrist asked her to place her hand over her breast 
     to feel her heart beating: it must still be there if she 
	could feel its beat.  "That," she said, "is not my real 
    heart."  She and the psychiatrist looked at each other. 
    There was nothing more to say. Like the primitive who has 
    lost his soul, she had lost the loving courageous 
    connection to life - and that is the real heart, not the 
    ticker which can as well pulsate isolated in a glass 
    bottle. - James Hillman, Insearch: Psychology and Religion

Like the family in The Horse Whisperer, the Samaritan woman in this 
week's gospel, the primitive and the woman in that hospital, we can and 
do lose our souls.  We lose them whenever we no longer see the 
connection between who we are and the love that longs only to enfold us 
in its embrace.  Jesus, both in his message and his intimate encounters 
with others, helped people re-establish that deep connection with 
themselves where both God and healing are found.  He consistently cut 
through the clear and common sense regulations that people established 
in order to determine who was worthy and unworthy.  By bluntly declaring 
to the woman at the well that she was worthy to receive the life he 
came to give he was also declaring that all were worthy to stoop and 
drink of that life-giving stream.
  
And you, my friend, may not have come to this particular "well" today 
looking for anything more than the ordinary drink you expected to find; 
but, if you are not careful, He who knows the hidden mysteries and 
labyrinthine ways of the heart may just ask you for a drink.  If He 
does, give Him what He asks.  Give whatever it is you have to give - to 
bring up, to haul up, if necessary out of the deepest depths of your 
soul, including those darkest places you have hidden even from 
yourself.  For, in giving Him that, which is all He asks, you will feel 
coming to life in you a gladness you never thought possible and the joy 
of knowing a love that flows freely to all who simply want to receive 
it.  For the One who meets us here and everywhere we care to find Him is 
the One who simply wants to give us from that life-giving stream.

                               +

Exodus 17:1-7 - The people of Israel are on the move and once again 
there are problems.  Caught between the promise of a land of their own 
and the fulfillment of that promise, they lose heart and faith, proving 
that "wilderness" is as much a state of mind as anything else.  They put 
Moses' feet to the fire once again for convincing them to leave Egypt 
in the first place.  When God finally shows up in the story, the people 
interestingly discover what they need right underneath them.

1.	 What does the story say about "where" God sometimes leads us?
2.	 When has God's leading led you into places that were dangerously 
"dry"?
3.	 Where and how did you "find" what you needed to continue the 
journey?


Romans 5:1-11 - In a text in keeping with the Lenten theme, Paul 
acknowledges what we all know and experience: suffering is part and 
parcel not only of the human condition but of what it means to be a 
Christian.  At one level the text is coldly realistic.  At a deeper 
level, Paul attempts to strengthen his readers by pointing out how 
suffering "endured in faith" strengthens us and gives us a peace that 
comes from an intimate knowledge of God's love.

1.	 In what ways is Paul asking us to do more than "keep a stiff 
upper lip"?
2.	 How has suffering transformed you into something different and 
better?
3.	 What broken pieces of your life in particular has Christ 
"reconciled"?


John 4:5-42 - From what we know of Jesus the ancient schism between 
Israel and Samaria would have struck his Jewish heart as all wrong.  
In this week's passage, John provides us with a remarkable story of 
healing that starts out as a personal encounter and ends up as a 
communal event.  Jesus is presented as a reconciler of ancient enemies 
and all because of what happens in an encounter at a well.

1. 	In your own words, what do you think happened between Jesus and 
the woman?
2.	 Why is this so important about how long-standing feuds get 
healed?
3.	 In what ways does your ministry reflect this kind of healing 
initiative?


FOR FURTHER REFLECTION - "So the problem of finding the soul again 
burns as perhaps no other issue.  The location of God, the meaning of 
love, the role of the pastoral counsellor in the community, and all the 
rest are derivative issues.  He who has lost his soul will be finding 
God anywhere, up above and down below, in here and out there; he will 
cling to every straw of love blown past his doorway as he stands 
waiting for a sign." - James Hillman

1.	 How true is this a reflection of the dilemma facing many people 
today? 
2.	 In what ways does your church assist people in finding their 
souls?


A PRAYER FOR THE SAINTS - Intrusive Savior, visit us this day not 
merely in the mind's knowing and the heart's feeling but in our soul's 
own sense that somehow we are "meant", that that love You are is 
calling us, choosing us, embracing us and filling us with a peace we 
cannot find on our own and can only possess both with You and with one 
another. Amen.


HYMN:  I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say  (Voices United 626)

copyright - Barry Robinson 2002, 2005
            page by Rev. Richard J. Fairchild 2005
            please acknowledge the appropriate author if citing these sermons.