The Work that Feeds

John 4

Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, “Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John” ²—although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized— ³he left Judea and started back to Galilee.

⁴But he had to go through Samaria. ⁵So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. ⁶Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. ⁷A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” ⁸(His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) ⁹The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) ¹⁰Jesus answered her, “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.” ¹¹The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? ¹²Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” ¹³Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, ¹⁴but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” ¹⁵The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” ¹⁶Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” ¹⁷The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; ¹⁸for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” ¹⁹The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. ²⁰Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” ²¹Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. ²²You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. ²³But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. ²⁴God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” ²⁵The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” ²⁶Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

²⁷Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” ²⁸Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, ²⁹“Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” ³⁰They left the city and were on their way to him. ³¹Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” ³²But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” ³³So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” ³⁴Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. ³⁵Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. ³⁶The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. ³⁷For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ ³⁸I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.” ³⁹Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” ⁴⁰So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. ⁴¹And many more believed because of his word. ⁴²They 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.”

Jesus’ disciples were disgusted when they came back from the village of Sychar.  No self-respecting Jew wanted to have to have anything to do with those dirty Samaritans, let alone have to haggle for food and water.  The disciples had tried to spare Jesus’ dignity by leaving him at a well outside of town when no one was likely to come by, but they returned to find a suspicious-looking woman there talking with him.  What was Jesus doing?  Did he always have to embarrass them this way?  That Samaritan woman was so dirty, she’d better not have touched him!  Yet out of respect for their teacher, none of the disciples spoke up to ask her, “What do you want?” or to ask Jesus, “Why are you speaking with her?”  When she left, she left behind a water pot none of them would have touched, even if they were dying of thirst.  Carefully, they laid out their food, and it was only hunger that allowed them to overcome a lingering queasiness about where it came from.  Suddenly, someone saw that Jesus wasn’t eating.  “Rabbi, eat something,” they urged, wanting to care for this teacher they loved and half-afraid that someone else – maybe that Samaritan woman! – had beat them to it.   What he said next confirmed their worst fears: “I have food to eat that you do not know about.”  It worried and upset the disciples so much, Jesus decided to explain.  “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.”  Not sure they actually understood that, he tried again, this time referring to a recent conversation.  “Weren’t you just saying you look forward to the harvest time when we’ll get to glean edges and corners of any grainfield we pass for all the food we need?  Well… that’s where I am right now.  Right now I’m doing the real harvest work that feeds me as I go along, and you can too.” 

This is the word that comes to us today, to all who call themselves Jesus’ disciples, Jesus’ students.  Right now we can be doing the real harvest work that feeds us as we go along.  We can be like harvesters who graze as we go.  And yet, to be honest, this analogy confuses us: what is it that’s like harvesting?  What is the real harvest work that feeds us?  The answer is right there in front of us: it’s what Jesus was doing with the woman at the well when the disciples returned.  The real harvest work is reaching across whatever separates us as human beings; it is bridging whatever prejudices divide us from one another in order to touch a life and to be touched in return.  Any act of caring and being cared for in community is like harvesting by hand, we both work and feed ourselves at the same time.  An example of this from five years ago is a trucker who decided to help other drivers remember 9/11.

Trucker helps drivers remember 9/11: John Holmgren’s 18-wheeler serves as rolling memorial

By Bob Faw Correspondent for NBC News at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6876211/

updated 5/31/2005 5:12:50 PM ET

MADISON, Ala. — On the straight-aways and backroads of America, at loading docks and shopping malls, 39-year-old Minnesotan John Holmgren isn’t just driving a truck. He’s driving home a message.

“It seemed to me like people were forgetting 9/11,” he says.

So he dipped into his own pocket to decorate his 18-wheeler: With a hand-painted fireman and his ash-covered face; with Old Glory, cascading; and with 3,168 names of people who perished on 9/11.

It’s a rolling memorial that makes people stop, stare and whip out their cameras.

“Unbelievable,” says admirer Terry Tate. “It puts chill bumps all over me, just thinking about it.”

Some stand, quietly, while others — like Vivien Pesante and her three children — weep.

“Daddy’s friend died at the towers, yes,” she tells her kids. “So yeah, it is very personal.”

 It’s personal too, for truckers who salute Holmgren on the road.

“I’d like to compliment you on your truck. Does look good,” says one man to Holmgren over the CB radio.

Although some reactions can pose a hazard.

“I know people are lots of times pulling up next to me and looking. I have to watch that they’re OK and they’re paying attention so they don’t have an accident!” says Holmgren.

When he does stop, they sometimes buy miniatures and they always say thank you.

Holmgren got the idea listening to Darryl Worley sing his country hit, “Have You Forgotten?” He’s turned that message into a crusade.

“It’s just my way of respecting the families, and it turned out to be so much more,” says Holmgren.

It’s a way for all of us to remember and respect, always.

© 2010 msnbc.com 

It’s also how one person chose to reach across whatever separates and divides us as Americans in order to touch people’s lives and to be touched in return.  It’s John Holmgren’s way of doing the work that feeds us. 

Here’s another from three years ago.  It’s an excerpt from Samuel Freedman’s article for the New York Times, dated October 6, 2007. 

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark.

Just before the school year started in August 1971, Bill Feldman steered his Volvo amid the pickup trucks and horse trailers of small-town Arkansas, bound for his first job as a math professor. He was coming to the Bible Belt as a Jew reared in a Boston suburb, a scholar educated in Canada and Europe. To ease the culture shock, an uncle had given him three jars of kosher pickles for the trip.

The same month, 19-year-old Fadil Bayyari boarded the first plane of his life, carrying falafel from his mother for the journey from Tulkarem in the West Bank to Roosevelt University in Chicago. He handed a taxi driver at O’Hare the college’s address and was relieved of a month’s spending money when the cabby took the naïve newcomer downtown more or less by way of Indiana.

All these decades later, destiny or providence or something has delivered Mr. Feldman and Mr. Bayyari to the same acre of land at the bottom of one of Fayetteville’s many hills. There Mr. Bayyari, now a general contractor, will build the first permanent temple for the Reform Jewish congregation in Fayetteville, of which Mr. Feldman is president. And Mr. Bayyari, a Palestinian-American Muslim, is doing the job at no charge. Without his sacrifice, the congregation probably could not afford the project at all.

“To me, it’s a place of worship,” said Mr. Bayyari, 55. “In my mind and in my religion, I believe in Judaism as part of Islam. We believe in Abraham. We believe in Moses. In the Koran, there’s lots of talk about Isaac and Joseph. I am always fascinated by this, and I always feel I have a relationship with this faith. And knowing what’s happened in the Middle East, what better way to build bridges?”

For Mr. Feldman, the bond with Mr. Bayyari felt especially resonant during Rosh Hashana. One of the Torah readings told of God’s protection of Hagar and Ishmael in the desert, after Sarah had banished them as rivals for Abraham’s love. Muslims, of course, trace their lineage back through Ishmael.

“The humanity of it is thrilling,” Mr. Feldman, 62, said of Mr. Bayyari’s gesture. “We’re thinking not only of our temple but of continuing the relationships with Muslims. We hope to accomplish an understanding. We hope to ultimately bring peace.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/06/us/06religion.html   E-mail: sgfreedman@nytimes.com

Finally, from a blog written last month, we have an example of a woman doing the work that feeds her even though it makes her feel wounded at times.  An excerpt from Not My Ground Zero by Nikki Stern posted on her website 1 Woman’ s Vu  on August 19, 2010:

In the autumn and winter months following my husband’s death on 9/11, my strength came from the architects and designers with whom I’d been associated for several years. I was at the time public relations director of a large architecture and interior design firm in New York. I loved the job. Working with architects and designers taught me to visualize; I, in turn, helped them express the intent and the context of their projects through words. It was a good match.

So when I had the opportunity to work with architects, designers, planners and a variety of civic activists, I jumped at the chance. I’d seen the devastation first-hand; stood by the crumbling steps that were all that remained of the World Financial Center; gazed upon the sculptured ruins of my husband’s building glowing gold and grey in the filtered sunlight. I’d seen the hell that had crushed my open-minded, optimistic mate and sent his ashes to the four winds. Now I wanted to be a part of a new and better vision, one that would embrace memory, yes, but also vision. Where before there were ungainly monuments to finance, there might be a university or an educational facility, perhaps some sort of journalistic enterprise,  a cultural center, even a museum of tolerance and understanding—because to understand was not to accept terrorism but to seek its opposite. All of this might be encased in a beautifully landscaped environment with buildings of inspired architecture. The signage—I was a big fan of signage—would be how we would tell people that they were entering “sacred” ground; made so not by the deaths at the site but by the lives that would be remembered.

Throughout the fall of 2001, even as I worked as a families’ representative in my home state of New Jersey, I stayed part-time in the city to facilitate a series of public meetings where devastated New Yorkers talked about their dreams of an inspiring skyline. In December I huddled in unheated raw space at the South Street Seaport adjacent to ground zero with members of the Regional Plan Association to come up with ideas that would be complimentary to those suggested by Mayor Bloomberg. No, I didn’t live in New York City (although I worked there), but I felt passionately that the best possible direction for us to move forward, to prove we as Americans were not about to give in to the hatred that perpetrated the act, nor the grief it sought to instill, was to make the place where my husband died something truly special.

These, then, are three examples of doing the work that feeds us, three examples of reaching across our pride and prejudice to make the world more whole.  Let us, as students of one we call the Christ, commit ourselves anew to that work.  Let us commit ourselves anew to overcoming everything that stands in the way of realizing community which is that common unity we always already share with all people everywhere.  Amen.

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