I.Finding Winnie is a children’s book that tells the true story of the bear that inspired, as the subtitle says, “the world’s most famous bear.” It recounts the story of Harry Colebourn, en route to tend the horses of World War 1 in 1914, who decided instead to follow his heart and rescue an orphaned baby bear he found at the train station. He named her Winnie, short for his hometown, Winnipeg, and took the bear with him off to war. Together, they have adventures that carry them all around the world, eventually winding up at the London Zoo, where Winnie meets a new friend, a boy named Christopher Robin.
As the book begins, we see Harry Colebourn’s real-life great- granddaughter, Lindsay, with her son Cole tucked in her lap, eager to hear this tale. She tells the story, but when the story draws to a close, Cole asks, “Is that the end?”
“That’s the end of Harry and Winnie’s story,” Lindsay responds.
“But I don’t want it to be over!,” Cole cries.
Wisely, Lindsay says, “sometimes, you have to let one story end before the next one can begin.”
“Well how do you know when that will happen?,” he asks.
“You don’t,” his mother says, “which is why you should always carry on.”1
II.The great preacher, Fred Craddock, once said: “To be Christian is to be enrolled in a story, and anybody who can’t remember any farther back than his or her birth is an orphan.”2 We are enrolled in a story, friends! A collection of them, actually, captured right here in a handful of books that tell the story of God and the story of us. Our story is one of ancestors and descendants, one we receive from those who have come before, one we shepherd in our season, and one we pass along to the next. Here in our church, we promise our youngest, littlest ones and their families that, together as their preachers and teachers, their friends and mentors, we will sing for them the songs of faith and teach them the stories of Jesus so that in their own time, they can choose to make these stories their own. The stories we tell about Jesus enroll us in the larger story of God, one that comforts and challenges, locates and dislocates, provokes and surprises, a story that grounds and lifts us time and time again. “I am a Christian,” Rachel Held Evans says, “because the story of Jesus is still the story I’m willing to risk being wrong about.”3
We’re a storied people, we followers of Jesus, and this is our story. But what is your story? Think about that with me. What is your story? Perhaps you pull to mind one from your family, like the one I’ve told you before from my family, of my grandmother’s great-grandmother, who, as legend has it, died at the age of 107 while plowing her field! The story, of course, is that the Shannon women are nothing if not hearty and will outlive the men! Perhaps you’re thinking of a story you tell yourself: “I’ll never be a runner,” or “I’ll always be late.” Perhaps it’s a story your friends tell each other: “we’re the kind of people who go to football games together,” or “we’re the kind of people who cheer against Duke in the Duke/Carolina game,” or “we’re the kind of friends who have a fun group text.” Perhaps you imagine a cultural story that we tell ourselves as Americans, or Southerners, or North Carolinians.
What of the stories that are told about us without our consent, or the stories we can’t seem to shake, or the stories that we just keep living in even though we wish we weren’t? What of the stories that displace us from who and whose we are? What of the stories that dislocate our sense of being known and loved all the same?
III.This season of Lent, we’re centering these stories of people and places in the life of Jesus, stories that speak of displacement – perhaps from communities, from belief, from themselves – and how God was and is made known to them and to us, even – especially! – if we’re far from home.
You might remember that last week, we heard the story of Nicodemus. And today, one chapter later in the Gospel of John, we hear the story of the Samaritan woman. From character, to setting, to plot, to conflict, do you notice how these two encounters with Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman couldn’t be more different? Nicodemus is a man, and she is a woman. Nicodemus is named by the writer, and she is not. Nicodemus is a respected leader among his community, and she is a Samaritan unknown to the Jews. Nicodemus slips away to find Jesus by night, and Jesus meets this well-woman at high noon. Nicodemus and Jesus talk within the confines of the holy city of Jerusalem, and the Samaritan woman encounters Jesus in the heart of Samaria, far from communities of Jewish people, practice, and power. Nicodemus and Jesus have a brief exchange, yet Jesus’s exchange with the Samaritan woman by the well is the longest recorded conversation he has with anyone – longer than conversations with disciples, critics, or family members! And though we don’t know what Nicodemus does with that encouragement from Jesus to be born from above, the well woman becomes the first to whom Jesus reveals his identity, and then she’s the first believer to become an evangelist and tell her whole city of Jesus, of which scripture records that many came to know Jesus because of her preaching.4
It’s a compelling story of contrasts, these two, but both share the theme of displacement: his, by way of the doubts that wake him up at night and disturb his sense of place, and hers, by way of the inherited story she carries. It was prescribed for her from the start, that story: a Samaritan, a woman, one whose economic stability came from men who showed up and left, one right after the next. Hers was a story of the Other, the outcast, the stranger. Hers was a story of boundaries: boundaries that kept other people away, boundaries that kept her alone. Hers was a story of thirst.
IV.She carried that story around like the empty jar in her hands on the day that changed everything. But her jar wasn’t empty, nor are ours! Filled with the shame of the past, of empty promises and broken relationships and regret that just won’t subside. Filled with all we tell ourselves about who we are, and who we must be, and all we do to maintain it. Filled with too much booze, or food, or pills, or debt, or exercise, or sex, or followers, or appointments, or opinions, or hours spent numbing or overworking or hiding or running away. Filled with nostalgia, anger, fear, or grief. Filled with the story of who we’ve known ourselves to be: the cynic, the optimist, the sickly, the victim, the abuser, the perfectionist, the failure, the elder brother, the prodigal, the one who never is settled or satisfied.
We lug these stories and commitments around, desperate for relief but unable to even imagine setting them down. Our thirst rages as we wonder: who even would I be if not but who I’ve been? I don’t like this story that I keep living in, but at least I know it. At least it’s familiar! I know who other people think I am in it. I know who I am in it. Never mind that we’re starved of belonging, parched of hope, and displaced from home.
It was writer John Donne who told the story of some Spanish sailors that took place during the time of great voyages across the world. These sailors are on a huge vessel, right at the mouth of the Amazon River. They’ve been gone from home for some time, and are weary from the journey. And now they are dying of thirst. But what they don’t know is that they’re floating in fresh water. Of this human tendency for the equivalent of floating in undrinkable salt water, Donne speaks of this “parable of exhaustion and the inexhaustible life.”5 For when we’re living inside a story that dehydrates us, we’re like those sailors dying of thirst, because hope is just out of view.
And then we meet Jesus by the well.
For when we meet him by that well, he tells us that the story we’ve been carrying no longer defines or limits us. For there’s a truer story at hand!
“She came carrying more than a water jug in the stark light of a noon sun,” Nadia Bolz Weber says, “she came carrying the past as a shackle and the future as the key. She knew the future was the time in which the messiah would come and make everything right, a time some time out there when the Christ will be revealed. And Jesus says to her, “I am he.” Jesus speaks to her the truth of who she is by speaking to her the truth of who God is.”6 Jesus knows it all, and loves her anyway. Jesus knows it all, and loves us anyway.
Her thirst began to ease, her hope began to swell, and leaving her jar behind, she took off running back to town to share this good news. That old vessel was cast aside under the weight of all that had filled it. Her new story now couldn’t be held in old wineskins. This living water, this Messiah who knew her and loved her and set her free, was bubbling over like the wellspring of life. It was as if a dam had burst, a river had flooded, the tidal wave of love she experienced from Jesus spilled over. “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!”
V.I’ve told you before many times about one of my favorite leaders and writers, Father Gregory Boyle, who runs a ministry called Homeboy Industries in L. A., transforming the lives of former gang members with hope and second chances. Father Greg tells the story of Bandit, “well named by his homies,” he noted, as someone well-placed in illegal matters. He stole cars and sold crack, spent lots of time locked up and never did like to ask for help. But fifteen years prior, his resistance to help broke. Bandit sat in Father Greg’s office and said, “I’m tired of being tired.” So Father Greg took him to the hiring folks at Homeboy, who found for him a job at a warehouse.
Cut to fifteen years later, Bandit calls Father Greg near closing time on Friday. They hadn’t talked in a while, you see. “No news is usually good news with homies,” Father Greg says. Bandit runs the warehouse now, married with three kids. But breathlessly, that day, he says to Father Greg, “G, ya gotta bless my daughter.”
“Is she ok?,” Father Greg asks. “I mean, is she sick or in the hospital?”
“No no!,” Bandit replied, “on Sunday, she’s goin’ to Humboldt College! Imagine, my oldest, my Carolina, goin’ to college. But she’s a little chaparrita, and I’m scared for her. So do ya think you could give her a little send-off bendicion?”
Father Greg describes the blessing they shared, when they gathered that next day. Carolina in the middle, their hands placed on her shoulders or grasping her hands, and together they pray and sniffle through it.
“I’m not entirely sure why we’re all crying,” Father Greg writes, “except, I suppose, for the fact that Bandit and his wife don’t know anybody who’s gone to college – except, I guess, me. Certainly no one in either one of their families. So we end the prayer, and we laugh at how mushy we all just got. Wiping our tears I turn to Carolina and ask, “so what are you going to study at Humboldt?”
Without missing a beat, Carolina responds: “forensic psychology.”
“Whoa, forensic psychology?”
“Yeah,” Bandit chimes in, “she wants to study the criminal mind.”
Silence, while Carolina turns slowly to Bandit, holds up one hand, and points to her dad so he won’t notice. Everyone howls, to which Bandit says, “yeah, I’m gonna be her first subject!”
As everyone heads for the cars, Bandit hangs back. “Can I tell you something, dog,” Father Greg says to him. “I give you credit for the man you’ve chosen to become. I’m proud of you.”
“Sabes que?” he says, eyes watering. “I’m proud of myself. All my life, people called me a lowlife, a bueno para nada. I guess I showed ‘em.”
“I guess he did,” Father Greg wrote. “And the soul feels its worth.”7
VI.Friends, my prayer for you this day, this season, this life, is that you remember the story God tells of you, the story Jesus knows and loves, the story that places you, the story that calls you back to who and whose you are. You don’t need to lug around that empty jar anymore. That’s the truth, and it sets you free! Water of the wellspring of life! So carry on!
I end with these words of blessing from Jan Richardson:
If you stand at the edge of this blessing
and call down into it,
you will hear your words return to you.
If you lean in and listen close,
you will hear this blessing give the story of your life back to you.
Quiet your voice.
Quiet your judgment.
Quiet the way you always tell your story to yourself.
Quiet all these and you will hear the whole of it and the hollows of it:
the spaces in the telling,
the gaps where you hesitate to go.
Sit at the rim of this blessing.
Press your ear to its lip, its sides, its curves
that were carved out long ago by those whose thirst drove them deep,
those who dug into the layers with only their hands and hope.
Rest yourself beside this blessing
and you will begin to hear the sound of water entering the gaps.
Still yourself and you will feel it rising up within you,
filling every emptiness, springing forth anew.8
Amen!