Wednesday in the Third Week

Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 95:6-11; John 4:5-26(27-38)39-42

Here we see transformation at work.  Jesus comes to town and transforms not only one woman’s life, but a whole community.

This woman is an outcast.  She gets the worst the community can give, the lowest place.  She alone must come to the well during the hottest part of the day.  And, in God’s upside-down world, that means that she is the one Jesus comes for.

Their conversation is obscure, like so many in John’s Gospel.  The woman doesn’t understand what Jesus is saying, exactly, but she gets that he is promising big things.  But when he tells her plainly, “I am the one coming into the world,” she gets on board.  She goes back to the village and tells her tale, and somehow people who have shunned her listen to her and invite Jesus into their lives.

The point is not that Jesus gathers outcasts and sinners, though that’s important.

The point is not that Jesus crosses boundaries of ethnicity and religion to save people, though that’s important too.

The point is that an encounter with Jesus has the potential to transform individuals, and through them whole communities.  

This woman didn’t just have a “conversion experience.”  She didn’t just “accept Jesus as Savior and Lord.”  She was so transformed that she became someone who must be listened to.  Jesus invited her into community, into the family of disciples, and this changes her so dramatically that others notice.  She became an evangelist.  And by noticing the difference and listening to her a whole village, a whole community, changes.  

This is happening around us, all over the world.  In the U.S., we have the blessed example of the Magdalene Community and Thistle Farms.  Founded in 1997 by Becca Stevens, an Episcopal priest on Vanderbilt's campus, Magdalene is a residential program for women who have survived lives of prostitution, trafficking, addiction and life on the streets. Thistle Farms is their social enterprise, producing bath products.  More importantly, they produce changed lives.  Their testimony is their lives.

Have you ever seen someone transform from outcast to leader?  

It may, after all, not be the outcast who changes first.  She became a leader when Jesus reached out to her and welcomed her into the human family.  

Where is someone waiting for you to welcome them, to be the connection that lets them share their gifts and their love?

Maybe, just maybe, your transformation is what is needed for theirs to emerge.