Untying the Knots
3) I Ain’t Nobody’s Nothin

Exodus 17:1-7; John 4:5-42

February 24, 2008, Third Sunday in Lent

Jackie S. wrote in the September issue of Sun Magazine to the theme of Rivals:

When my older daughter was five, I gave birth to her baby sister. She’s never forgiven me, or her sister. I can still hear her wailing when she discovered the little one had taken her Barbie and chewed the feet off.

Now my daughters are in their thirties and have become best friends. It does my heart good to no longer hear crying and complaints from one or the other about how they’ve been treated unfairly.

Recently my older daughter was working many hours of overtime; I went and cleaned her house for her as a treat. I came across her old, beloved doll and brought it home to wash it and iron its clothes. The next day my younger daughter called me, crying: her sister had accused her of stealing the doll. I told her what had happened and assured I would clear up the confusion. Immediately after we hung up, the phone rang again. It was my older daughter telling me that her doll had been stolen. After I’d explained and hung up once more, I sighed and laughed, thinking how childish they still were, fighting over dolls at their age.

Then the phone rang again. It was my sister, excitedly telling me that her husband had just bought her a new Cadillac. I hated her for a whole week.

We hate to lose – we hate to experience the loss of things, people, or ideas. Today, as I continue my series on Untying the Knots I want us to consider how we react to loss and losing. We’ve already talked about being vulnerable and holding certitude loosely and gently. I’ve talked a lot over the years about our needing to remember that we are human, and even to celebrate our humanity, but this series takes a look at how our humanity can get in the way of the good part of our being human.

For a number of reasons, in our first-world society there is a strong sense of entitlement. We are entitled to things; we are entitled to successful lives. I would even say that this sense of entitlement has invaded our religion in the sense that if we go to church and say that we believe, we think that it entitles us to a good life.

When I’m driving in the car I generally have my radio tuned to WFAN. It’s a sports radio station. On Sunday mornings when I am driving to church I generally listen to Rick Wolff on a one hour program entitled The Sports Edge. Rick played minor league sports and has several degrees in psychology. His program focuses on contemporary issues that confront the parents of athletes of all ages, from kids who are just starting out in sports, to experienced athletes on the high school varsity level and beyond. I heartily recommend this program to parents of children and youth involved in sports. Often the talk on the program is about parents and coaches pushing the youth to win, and how they denigrate anyone who gets in the way, including referees, and other coaches as well as other parents. In many sports programs our youth are being taught that winning is the only thing. Our society is a competitive society and more and more often we are finding that people believe that they cannot, they must not lose. This is true not only in competitive sports, but also in the workplace, even with our health – we find it difficult to accept losses, to be less than perfect, (i.e., the loss of a limb, or aging). We hate to lose anything, or in anything. However, loss is a fact of life. We lose things all the time, and I’m not just talking about brain cells as we grow older. We lose people, we lose abilities, we lose competitions, and we lose records we may have set. We cannot go through life without losing things.

In our gospel passage from John today we hear of the conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. This is a story of loss and grief. Let me share with you some thoughts concerning this passage from the Rev. John Claypool, an Episcopal minister and professor of homiletics, or preaching.

I used to think that her problem was one of moral laxity because later it comes out she had been married five times and was now living with a man who wasn't even her husband. Then someone pointed out to me that no woman in that culture could have ever gotten a divorce. If this woman had had five husbands and now had none, it meant that either five husbands had died or five men had married her and then abandoned her in divorce. This person said her problem was grief, not guilt. To that lonely, abandoned person, Jesus began to show an affection that let her know, perhaps for the first time, that she mattered in this world. He talked to her; He asked her to give him a drink. He gave her every kind of affirmation and it transformed that woman. She raced back into the village and said, "There is a man out there at the well that listened to my every word, that seemed to care about my very being."

In Exodus we hear a sense of loss and grief on the part or Moses and the people. Moses feels abandoned by the people. He feels that God has given him an impossible job. He feels that he cannot trust, or have faith in the people. After all that God has done for them, they still grumble and reject Moses’ leadership and God’s benevolence. The people feel lost in the wilderness; they’ve lost faith in Moses, they are hungry and they grieve for their old homes in Egypt. There they at least knew what was expected of them, and where their food and water would come from. Out here in the wilderness they could not trust themselves because everything was new, and they had to trust Moses who seemed to be leading them to hunger and thirst and even possible death. They were also being told to trust in a God whom only Moses could see or talk to.

Living with loss is hard; it is lonely. We try everything in our power not to feel that sense of grief. We’ve even prettied death up so it looks like the person is just sleeping, and we really haven’t lost them. People spend lots of money and effort to slow down the effects of aging so they don’t have to deal with the impending loss of their own life. Claypool tells a story that catches all of the feelings of loss.

Leslie Weatherhead was an air raid warden during the terrible days of the London blitz back in the early 1940's. When the all-clear sounded, it was his job to go and to survey the damage. One night there had been a particularly heavy bombing. When he went back to the surface, all he could see was smoldering ruins. As he walked, he suddenly heard the sound of a child's voice crying. He went around some ruins and there to his amazement, he saw an eight-year-old boy sitting and sobbing on what had been a building. Somehow the child had gotten lost trying to get to the air raid shelter and had managed to survive by staying on the surface. Weatherhead went up to the little lad and said, "Where do you live, son? Where is home?"

The child pointed to a street where there was nothing left but rubble.

He said, "Where are your parents, your mother and father?"

The little boy said, "My father is in the navy. He is overseas. My mother was killed two nights ago."

He said, "Where are the rest of your family, uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters?"

The child shook his head and said, "They are all gone. They have all been killed."

At that point, Leslie Weatherhead stooped over and got eye level to the little fellow and said, "Tell me, son, tell me, who are you?"

With that the little boy began to cry even more compulsively and then he said through his tears, "Mister, I ain't nobody's nothin'. I ain't nobody's nothin'."

But as God in Exodus, and Jesus in John point out we are somebody’s something. Jesus helped the woman at the well to believe that in spite of the losses in her life she was still cared for; she still had a life to live. God lets the Israelites know that God does still hear their cries as God did when they were freed from Pharaoh. If we can accept grief and go through it then we become stronger for it. Through the process of expressing their loss the Israelites learned that they could trust God to care for them; they became stronger as a people.

When we go through grief and accept it we find that we do come out on the other side as stronger people. We can trust that we will not be utterly destroyed. We treat life and living more gently and lovingly. We are more willing to help others live through the experiences of their grief. On the opposite end, when we are afraid of the loss of life and living; we are more brittle, prone to breaking, feeling utterly destroyed. We fight so hard that when the loss happens we fall apart, we descend into a dark night of the soul and wonder if we will ever come out. We also tend to doubt our faith, or at least faith in a God who promised to be with us.

This does not mean that we will not grieve, or feel sadness when we experience loss. We will know however that we can come out on the other side. Think about the woman at the well. She probably lived her live with a deep sense of rejection and sadness. I would suggest that she was probably severely depressed. Listen again to her words that she shouts when she goes back to town.

⁹“Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?”

Those do not sound like the words of a depressed woman – she has life, she has hope. There is a ring of exuberant wonder to her words.

The little boy felt like he was nobody’s nothin’, because all of the people he knew were lost to him. But we can imagine that Weatherhead worked to help that boy realize that in spite of his loss he was still somebody’s something. Loss is hard, but we have to gracefully expect it and live with it, and in doing so we can find new life and new hope. We can be happy for the other person when they get the new Cadillac.

You are somebody’s something! And that can make all the difference.

Amen

© 2008 Rev. Dr. Thomas T. Peters