June 1 & 2, 2002
John 4:1-18
“Nitty Gritty …Meet Who I Was!”
Prairie View A & M University, located in Bryn, Texas, was founded in 1876 as a technical school for blacks in the then segregated Texas education system. It is the second oldest institution of higher learning in the state of Texas. In the fall of 1989 the, the university opened it’s doors for it’s 113th incoming freshman class. Now I am not sure whether the number 113 is supposed to be as unlucky as the number 13 but what began that year will probably be unmatched in NCAA history. When the Prairie View Panthers took the field that year in football they began a nine-year slide into infamy. Over the course of those nine years, Prairie View lost a total of 80 football games in a row. They were outscored in those years by a total of 2300 points. No one expected such a losing streak to occur. In fact, during those nine years, they went thru four different coaches trying to find a winning formula. The losing streak ended, mercifully on September 26, 1998 when the Panthers defeated Langston Oklahoma by a score of fourteen to twelve. (14- 12) Prairie View went onto a stellar one and ten season in 1989. (1-10)
It is interesting to note that the Prairie View A & M University website has an article on their web page headlined thus, “Coach Dorsey works to bring Prairie View Football back to respectability.” The article was published at the close of this past year’s football season in which Prairie View finished the season with a near perfect one and ten record. The article notes that Prairie View did beat it’s first conference rival since, you guessed it 1989 the year the streak started. The beat Alcorn State in early October by the welcome and historic score of fourteen to twelve. (14-12)
Or how about the pitcher who became known baseball trivia fans as the “man who was born to lose.” His name was Hugh Mulcahy, who hurled (no pun intended) for the hopeless Philadelphia Phillies more than fifty years ago. The 6’ 2” right-hander’s name appeared as losing pitcher 76 times from 1937-1940. Mulcahy disliked the nickname losing pitcher so badly that he actually quit baseball after the 1940 season to join the army. In October of the following year, Mulcahy was transferred to a little known but strategic army base in a far-flung island chain where he witnessed what has been described as the greatest loss in U.S. military history. This guy just couldn’t get away from a loss. You may have guessed the location of his duty station and military the loss, the station was Oahu, Hawaii and the loss was…Pearl Harbor.
The central character of our scripture passage today had a pretty good losing streak of her own going. As we read in our scripture passage today from the fourth chapter of John, the Samaritan woman gives new meaning to the term Nitty Gritty. Talk about a loser. When it comes to immorality this woman is a pro. When she bumps into the Son of God, her losing streak might suggest that she is as far from God as any person could be. But, if you read the balance of this story you will notice that this woman understood religion very well. She is astute in matters of religion, Messiahs, prophets. She probably knew men very well and when Jesus speaks to her, and she knew he wasn’t supposed to, she responds the way any worldly savvy woman does with what looks like a pick-up line to her. Listen to verses ten and eleven again.
10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” 11 “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep.”
“How about a drink gorgeous? My you have pretty eyes.” “Yeah and they can see the line of bovine scatology that you are about to toss my way.”
I am sure that she had been a tackling dummy for many religious persons of her day. Who she was, was so large in her eyes and her Nitty Gritty loomed so big that she probably had concluded that her life was scarred beyond hope. Her bad choices had made her unredeemable, unsalvageable, maybe even unteachable. After all, she had looked for love in all the wrong places, looked for love in too many faces. She had had five husbands and was living with a sixth man. Here she is though, about to be introduced to a seventh and seven is the perfect number in theology. She had fumbled around a lifetime looking for the perfect man, what she really had been fumbling around for was God and here the seventh man, a perfect man, stands before her…Jesus, the Son of God. Her losing streak is about to end. Friends, yours can too.
When Jesus speaks to the woman at the well, she hears a pick-up line. That is because she knows that when “Who I Was” meets most persons, religious or otherwise, “Who I Was” is who we are and we get what most people who know who we were, give out. Jesus doesn’t LECTURE, CONDEMN or HUMILIATE. Jesus respects her. Jesus doesn’t see what everyone else sees. He didn’t see who she was…Jesus saw what she could become. Really, he saw what she wanted to become. Jesus sees her present desire which makes her past irrelevant.
Jesus would have the woman at the well to know that you are never Unsalvageable, Unteachable and never Unreedemable. You don’t suppose, do you, the same could be true for you and me? Our mistakes, our strings of failures, our losing streaks and whatever everyone else labels as unredeemable may actually be redeemable? You don’t suppose that the mess of our lives can be a place where we meet Jesus? Do You? Jesus would have each of us know that we are never Unsalvagable, unteachable and never unredeemable.
Folks, who I was and who you were is most often a reflection of our longings. Have a bunch of failed relationships? Your longing is to be loved. Do you have some mental instability in you past? Your longings are to be whole. Do you have a series of failures in your professional life? Your longing is to be a success. In each and every long however, our search for meaning, love, happiness or whatever is often a search for God in disguise. When the bottom falls out of our lives, when we come to a dead end, when there is no place to go, we often get in touch with our longings for God.
We are told that we are to get the first things first. You don’t put a roof together then jack it up and run walls, foundations and footers underneath. You put the stuff in the ground first and then you build it out to the top. You don’t get a diploma and then go to school. You don’t get a gold watch, a pension and then go to work. You must put first things first. If you are in a horrible losing streak or in a pattern of loss or failure, then do first things first. See you as God sees you in completeness, whole and when you have a good picture of what the finished product should look like well then start building. You don’t go to an architect after the work is completed. You do first things first. God goes straight to your longings finds them and in the process, finds you.
How does that happen today? It is very simple really. Start where the Samaritan woman started. After the conversation with Jesus, the woman at the well is about to begin a whole new way of life. But, she hasn’t begun yet. And, none of the facts of her life have changed. She is still living with a man who is not her husband. She still has been divorced five times. Her reputation is still a mess. Her Nitty is still Nitty and her gritty is still gritty. Who she was is, for the most part, still who she is. But, she isn’t going to stay that way. She runs out and tells her neighbors a few and seemingly insignificant words, but her saying them at al is significant. In effect she says, “I know you know who I am, but I just met someone who liberated me from my past, from my reputation, and I am no longer the person you think I am. I am no longer a hostage to my bad choices. I am free.” Still, nothing has changed. But, everything has changed. Her neighbors hear it in her voice and see it in her face. Her words are all they needed to race to the man she describes.
The implications for us are overwhelming. Thos of us who want to move on from out past, those who have come to the end of our rope. We can start with our unchanged life. We don’t have to get it all together, we don’t have to wait till our circumstances change or wait to become mature. We don’t have to move to a new town or convince others that we are serious. You might not even have to have a completely changed attitude. Just give him you unchanged life and begin. Take the first bumbling, stumbling, teetering steps toward new life. Just like any toddler, you will fall and you will fall often. But, listen to me, listen good, get back up. Even if you are not very good at it. Do it any way. I love to snow ski. It is the sport I love even more than golf. I guess the thing I like about both of these sports is that in order to do them you have to fail a lot before you get good. And, regardless of how good you get at skiing, you’ll fall a lot when you ski and the only way to get back to the safety of the lodge is to get back up and ski again. And, regardless of how good you get in golf, you are still gonna shank a ball in the woods or dump one in the water hazard. But, thankfully they have these little zippered bags on the side of each golf bags where you keep extra balls. And the only way to finish a round of golf and get back to the safety of the clubhouse is to get another one out keep going. Even if you’re not good at this redeemed life and even if the facts of your life haven’t changed, yet! Keep going, because they will. Because you need to know this, you are caught in a conspiracy of GRACE and God loves Your yesterdays, today’s and tomorrows, because he loves you. And you are in a conspiracy of grace, who you was doesn’t have to be who you are. The losing streak can end right here, right now.
