This sermon was originally preached at Church of the Good Shepherd in Augusta, GA on March 8, 2026. The occasion was two-fold: the Third Sunday in Lent and my 10th sobriety birthday. The lections were Exodus 17:1-7; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42; Psalm 95.
10 years ago, I attended my first meeting in the basement of a little house in Kansas. The house was actually named Little House and they had multiple meetings a day there for people who had similar needs.
Considering that Kansas is part of the Great Plains, this was quite literally our own Little House on the Prairie.
The meetings at Little House were not intended for the people who had their lives put together, for those who were Instagram picture perfect, or for those who were presently “winning life.” This was a place for the down and out, the little and lowly, the tired and the weary, the desperate and the needy. It was, in short, a place for those who had hit or were drawing close to some form of rock bottom.
I remember it like it was yesterday.
I had been taken to this meeting by someone from church who had been attending meetings like this one for 35 years. He believed it might be a place where I could find peace and wholeness. Descending the stairs into a basement full of strangers who all know why you are there was a unique experience.
After introducing myself as a first timer, those gathered began sharing their experience, strength, and hope. All of their stories were uniquely different yet profoundly similar. People whose lives had gone off kilter and who desperately needed hope.
The second to last man to share, looked at me earnestly and said:
You never have to feel this way again if you don’t want to.
There it was. Understanding, acknowledgement, the feeling of being seen. An instant community with people who get it and with whom there is a shared language, a shared experience, and a shared love.
While I’m describing my first AA meeting – my last drink was 10 years ago today actually – I could just as easily be describing the church.
The church isn’t a country club for the rich;
Nor is it a medspa resort for the healthy.
It is a hospital for the sinsick;
A refuge for the weather-worn-and-weary,
A lifeboat for the least, the last, the lonely, the lost, the little, and the left out,
A place of praise, prayer, power, and proclamation for people seeking after God’s own heart.
The passages this morning are overflowing with water. When I preached on them three years ago, I did so after two events. First, one of our Luther-palians had pronounced during our men’s bible study that water is life. Second, I stumbled across a Buy-One-Get-One deal in Publix one day for water bottles by the company Eternal. Apparently Eternal – or living water – was now BOGO.
All jokes and jest aside, I want to give you the answer up front this morning: Jesus is life.
He is the one who said:
I am the living water;
I am the bread of life;
I am resurrection and the life;
I am the way, the truth, and the life;
I have come that they might have life and have it abundantly.
John says he is the life of the world.
In John 4, we discover the power of his love and grace in a very raw and real sense. Our primary text is the story of the woman at the well.
Jesus is on the road again.
We have to read this story in contrast with our passage from last week with Nicodemus coming to Jesus in darkness.
If Nicodemus was a named and respected insider, a Pharisee of Pharisees, the Samaritan woman is an unnamed disrespected outsider, an outcast of outcasts.
The jarring juxtaposition between the two is part of John’s narrative brilliance.
Verse 5 says they entered a Samaritan city, but verse 4 tells us that Jesus “had to go through Samaria.”
The Jews viewed the Samaritans as unclean, half-breeds who worshiped God on the wrong mountain. For centuries, foreign nations with false gods had intermarried with God’s people in that region. Israel’s religious writings labeled Samaria’s capital as “a city of fools” and would not identify Samaria as a nation.
No love was lost between Jews and Samaritans.
Their divide exceeded their geography.
And yet both groups would trace their history back to Jacob.
The Samaritans trace their history back to Jacob, the grandson of Abraham, the son of the Son of Promise, the one whose name was changed to “Israel” meaning one who wrestles with God.
We find out in verse 6 that Jesus was hanging out at Jacob’s Well on the plot of land given to Joseph by his father, Jacob. This intentional reference to Jacob is our invitation to consider God’s mighty, water-related acts on behalf of his people Israel:
God parted the Red Sea and the Jordan River to give his people passage;
God spoke over Jesus during his baptism;
Jesus spoke to Nicodemus about being born of water and Spirit;
But chiefly we remember Exodus 17 when God pours forth water from the rock in Meribah because Israel was quarreling and grumbling and ready to stone Moses. They said to Moses, “Give us water to drink.” Moses cannot do it, but God could and he did.
Back to John, Jesus was alone, it was high noon, and he was tired from the journey. He is thirsty and he is hungry. The disciples have gone into town to get some food. About this time, a Samaritan woman came to the well to draw water.
Being Jews, Jesus and the disciples shouldn’t be stopping or shopping in Samaria. Considered unclean by the Jews, any amount of fraternizing could leave Jesus ritually defiled. The uncleanliness of the situation is only compounded by the woman’s presence.
Now, it would be at this point in the sermon that the preacher would normally claim the Samaritan woman was fast, loose, licentious, and living a life of sexual promiscuity…only the text doesn’t say any of that!
Her presence at the well at noon is indicative of being an outcast, yes, but we are not given the opportunity by the text to fill in the blank with any degrading or derogatory sexual label.
That Jesus is in unclean Samaria with an unclean Samaritan woman approaching and he doesn’t move is shocking. He has every earthly reason to avoid her, to flee, to keep his distance, to tell her to go away, and yet he remains fully present. He says, “Give me a drink.”
This statement should catch us off guard.
It certainly caught the Samaritan woman off guard.
It definitely caught the disciples off guard who stumble across this meet cute at the end of the passage.
They can’t even verbalize their questions, such is their shock.
Jews didn’t talk to Samaritans, they didn’t take things from Samaritans, and they certainly didn’t drink from unclean Samaritan vessels. By requesting water, Jesus offers the woman hope. He’s already turning the scene on its head rather than maintaining the status quo.
He is offering her hospitality and allowing her to be hospitable to him. The thirsty Messiah asks for a drink, the Living Water requests water from an enemy outsider.
The conversation shifts in verse 10 as Jesus and the woman discuss the meaning of living water and whether or not the water from a well as ancient and reputable as Jacob’s can quench thirst. The woman asks Jesus, Where do you get that living water? And before Jesus can answer she asks a follow up, Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob? The Samaritan woman understands that she and Jesus have an ancestor in common.
Is Jesus greater than their ancestor Jacob? YES HE IS!
Jesus is greater than David, greater than Elijah, greater than Moses, greater than Isaac, and greater even than Abraham.
When Jesus finally answers, he makes the distinction between the water from the well and living water. Well water will not satisfy, but living water will gush up to eternal life. The woman understandably wants some of that water. Living water and eternal life! Buy-one-get-one without traveling to Samaria’s Publix.
In verse 16, Jesus tells her to go back and get her husband. And here we shift again. The woman tells Jesus that she has no husband. This is the place where male commentators and preachers make assuming comments about her purity, or lack thereof. Jesus isn’t put off by her marital status and neither should we. She could have lost her husbands to death by famine, illness, or war; perhaps her husbands were brothers and married her successively in keeping with Levitical law. The fact that she has had 5 husbands is not in and of itself a sin, it is just that: a fact.
She, like us all, brings her sins and her baggage to the table—and she, like us all, finds acceptance, forgiveness, and love in Jesus.
Jesus knew her, her story mattered, she was seen and known and that she wasn’t cast out because of it. Despite being an outsider, despite being an unclean foreigner, despite being estranged from the people of Israel, and despite the fact that she was a woman, Jesus engages with her. The counter-cultural, upside down, topsy-turvy, radically reversed nature of this passage is overwhelmingly beautiful.
Friends, the beauty of the gospel is that you are not expected to get your act together before coming to Christ.
You are not the sum total of sins nor are defined misdeeds.
When the Father looks at you, he doesn’t see sin, he sees a daughter or son.
You are loved more than you’ll ever know…
And you cannot, cannot, cannot out sin God’s grace.
Jesus invites you to come to him, just as you are, and to find grace there.
Some of you believe the lie that you are not worthy of God’s love, that you need to clean yourself up and get your life together before God can truly love you.
Friends, we cannot clean ourselves; we cannot cover our own sins; we cannot fix our sin-sick souls and wayward hearts apart from the grace of God.
This unnamed, Samaritan woman engages with Jesus more competently, confidently, and completely than Nicodemus the Pharisee. She has questions; she has answers; she is doing theology! She verbally wrestles with God in Christ just as her ancient ancestor, Jacob, wrestled with God all those years ago.
In verse 20, Jesus points to the blessed day when Jew and Samaritan will worship God, together, no longer estranged, no longer bitter enemies, no longer clean and unclean.
The woman voices her hope in verse 25: Messiah is coming. The Samaritans hoped for the Messiah just as the Jews did and she knows he is coming. Jesus’ reply is essential: I am he. This is the first time in the Gospel that Jesus announces he is the Messiah and it is the only time in John that he announces it to another person. Conventional wisdom would have suggested that the pronouncement be made to Nicodemus, the religious insider, but instead it goes to an unnamed Samaritan woman, the unclean outsider. The Good News is just that Good!!
The disciples show up agog and aghast, but the woman runs back to her village. She leaves her water jar – she no longer needs it because she now has found the Living Water – to go and tell her neighbors about Jesus, the one who knew her, the one who told her everything she’d ever done, the Messiah. She’d had a God-sighting, she had been transformed through an encounter with Jesus, and she told everyone she knew about it.
While Jesus is talking to the disciples about reaping and sowing, she is talking to the Samaritans about the Messiah-in-their-midst and some of them believe! Some of them want to see it with their own eyes. This unnamed woman joins John the Baptizer as an effective evangelist.
This story invites several responses from us:
- To accept the Living Water
- To be transformed by the Living Water
- To be filled with the Living Water
- To share the Living Water
Jesus offers himself, the true Living Water, to all who believe in his name. Have you accepted the Living Water? If you have not yet accepted the water which he offers, I implore you to do so this morning. It won’t do you any good to hold onto the cup without drinking it; no osmosis here. This is more than believing he was a good guy or had some good ideas; this is about believing with your heart and confessing with your lips that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead.
An encounter with the living water will transform you. The woman at the well was transformed from outcast into evangelist, outsider into insider, estranged into beloved. We now know her as St. Photini, an incredible missionary and evangelist according to church history.
Jesus said that we will be filled with the living water, that eternal life will gush forth in us. This water will leave us fully satisfied, satiated, and quenched. But we are creatures who get parched very easily and we need a steady diet of living water. From what pools are you drinking? Too many of us drink from the pools of popularity, the pursuit of wealth and happiness, alcohol, sex, grumbling, or narcissism. To all who are thirsty: Jesus offers himself, he invites us to be satisfied in him. He will not run dry.
Let me say that again in case you didn’t hear me: he will not run dry.
When I decided to go to AA, Rebecca began looking for meetings online. All of the meetings said “Closed.” She panicked. How can these places be closed when there are people needing help?!
We didn’t know it then, but a closed meeting is only meant for those who have a desire to stop drinking. Anyone can attend an open meeting.
I wonder, though, if the church too often feels “closed” rather than “open.” We are called to become a place of transformation, a place where the Living Water never runs dry, a place where people encounter God and then tell everyone they know about it.
The woman came to the well that day carrying a water jar. We all come carrying something. Shame, regret, grief, addiction, loneliness, fear. We come thirsty.
But the good news of the gospel is that Jesus meets us there.
At the well.
In the wilderness.
In the basement of a little house on a Wednesday night.
Wherever thirsty people gather, the Living Water is not far away.
Make no mistake, this isn’t a sermon about AA or sobriety. It’s a sermon about the transforming love of Jesus Christ. He is the Living Water. He is the life. And he wants you to have life, abundant life, in him. Amen.
Porter C. Taylor 