[Sermon composed for the Sunday broadcast at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Phoenix AZ (https://www.stmarysphoenix.org/online) for Sunday, January 16, 2021, the Second Sunday after Epiphany.]
✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Some of you may have read the readings ahead of time and noticed that we diverged from what is in the lectionary. That is because instead of Mass or Benediction we are observing the Daily Office. The Offices, Sundays included, use a different lectionary than the Mass, so one may be excused a moment’s confusion.
If you did read from the Eucharistic lectionary, you may have noted that the readings for Mass had a recurrent theme of calling or vocation. We also can see that in our third reading[1] this morning for the Office. So many of us are familiar with the story of the Samaritan Woman, but how many of us think of it as a story about a call or vocation?
When we think of call or vocation, we often think of what we do for the Kingdom of God AFTER we have been admitted. We are baptized, confirmed, and integrated into the community in one way, shape, or form, then we sit back waiting for some sort of call to ministry. For many of us we think of only a few people getting a call to Holy Orders as a priest or deacon, or to the Religious Life as a vowed brother or sister in community…or for some souls BOTH. More recently we have expanded the understanding to include any sort of ministry: service to the homeless, service to the addicted, advocacy for the immigrant, ministry to the LGBTQ+ community, working for a food bank, performing visitation to the sick, teaching Sunday School, leading a Bible study, or supporting the Church’s infrastructure so these ministries are not over-exposed to the weather.
The Samaritan Woman however shows us a different type of call, one more fundamental and which impacts the core of one’s being. This is the call to become a member of the Holy Church, a follower of Jesus, a child of the Most High. We do not think a lot about this because many of us came from stable communities where people were born into families of faith and were therefore raised and moulded in the traditions of the Church and led into the fellowship of the saints. People were baptized early…VERY early…taught throughout childhood, confirmed in adolescence, and (in theory) becoming solid members of the Body of Christ in their thinking, habits, and practices. Going out and calling people outside the Body of Christ did not figure much in our thinking, unless we were part of a tradition that actively sought out those outside the Tradition or not solidly in the Tradition (you know, those who checked all the boxes on the to-do list but really did not buy into the programme).
Let us turn back to the story to see what is going on here. The story does not pick up with Our Lord meeting the woman or talking with her. That is already done, and she heard the call, she responded to the call, and she has taken off to let all her friends and neighbours in the village know that a call is out there. We open with Jesus’ disciples wondering what happened while they were away. Something obviously happened. They had gone to buy food and now that they had returned, He was not eating any of it. In fact, at their urging to eat He tells them He already had food enough. They wonder if someone had been sneaking Him food on the sly.
Justifiably, the disciples are puzzled. They had been sent to buy food because there wasn’t any food. The Lord was right where they left Him. Sensing their confusion, something to which He was accustomed by this point, Our Lord tells them that the food of which He spoke was not what they thought.
I think St. John Chrysostom puts it rather well:
“He calls the salvation of men and women his food, showing His great desire that we should be saved. His desire for our salvation is as great as our desire for food. And see how often He does not express Himself directly, but figuratively. This necessarily makes it difficult for His hearers to comprehend His meaning, but it also gives greater importance to that meaning once it is understood.”[2]
While Jesus is telling His disciples this, a whole mob of Samaritans approach. Normally, for a Jew, this might be a cause of some anxiety, but Jesus finds this a cause of great joy. These were people who for one reason or another, “were ready to receive the Word.”[3] These were men and women who had been prepared, who were seeking, and very ready to follow the Lord. However, they would have stayed in stasis, been tied to one spot, bound by inertia, until someone issued the call. That call came from St. Photini, the name Ancient tradition calls the Woman at the Well, the “Enlightened One”, because she was suffused with the light of Christ and became an evangelist even before Our Lord’s Passion and Resurrection. Tradition tells us that she did not rest on her laurels in her village, but continued through her life proclaiming, “Could this one be the Messiah?”[4]
My brothers and sisters, too often we hide our Light under a bushel. We have this great hope, this wonderful news, and there are people out there who are willing to hear it. I will not deceive you, there are also those out there who are not ready, who are not seeking, or who are actively hostile to the Good News of the Kingdom of God, ground not ready for the seed to be sown. I do not often quote Origen (usually because his work is difficult to understand and needs exposition as well), but about this passage he makes a good point. He tells us, “Consider the possibility that those who ‘sow’ are Moses and the prophets, since they wrote ‘for our admonition on whom the ends of the world have come,’ and proclaimed the sojourn of Christ.”[5] Like St. Photini, we should be making the call, but we also need to consider preparing the ground and sowing the seed, so the call does not fall on deaf ears.
How do we prepare the ground? How do we sow the seed?
We have made much over the past few years about living the life of the Gospel, of caring for the poor, the orphaned, the widowed, the marginalized, the disadvantaged. Eventually, if we hold to that, someone has got to ask, “Why?” We need to be ready to explain ourselves, not with some airy philosophical position but with a real, visceral reason. In other words, why did we ourselves become or remain followers of Jesus Christ? After all, we would otherwise have simply assumed the ethics and not darkened the door of a church or joined an online fellowship. In our baptism we made the decision to follow Our Lord and have reaffirmed that commitment multiple times afterward. Like St. Photini, once the ground is prepared, we need to be able to say, “Come and see.”[6]
Maybe we are afraid we will mess it up, that we will not be able to answer all the questions. We need not fear: our liturgies are full to bursting with information. At every service we sing or recite the Psalms, those ancient prayers and hymns that tell out to God our deepest joys and fears and rages. We read from the Law and the Prophets, who point the way to the Lord. We read from the Epistles, which explain about Our Lord and our life in Him. We read from the Gospels themselves which tell of the work and person of Jesus the Christ. We have the hymns, antiphons, and prayers that are our heartfelt responses to this rich treasure before us. We need not fear: we are part of a larger fellowship who can help us with the burden and show the curious just who this Jesus is. With all that, we can lead someone who is curious to the point where they too can decide to join us to be united in the mystical fellowship of Holy Mother Church. After all, “Beautiful are the feet of them that brings good news.”[7] Will we, like St. Photini, share our joy and our hope?
✠Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Saviour save us.
Holy St. Photini, pray for us.
