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Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, “Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John” — although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized — he left Judea and started back to Galilee. But he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.

On this first Sunday in Lent, we will soon come once again to the table of our Lord to begin our Lenten journey with the sacred meal: bread for the wilderness, as it is often called, and wine for the journey. We also have the privilege today of commissioning new trustees and ordaining and installing new deacons and elders. So I don’t have much time for preaching today — about the amount of time you have to wave at a fast-moving commuter train that isn’t stopping at your station. But in the few minutes I have I can at least introduce what I’m going to be preaching about during Lent.

This series actually began last week on Ash Wednesday, a series I’m calling Christ Encounters. As I said on Wednesday, I believe that Jesus Christ encounters us all the time on our life journeys. We may not always see or know or understand them, but we are encountered by Christ because God loves us. I hope these sermons help us be more alert to all the times and places Jesus meets us.

In John 4 we find the amazing story of Jesus encountering a Samaritan woman by Jacob’s well and this chapter will be the lens for most of these Lenten sermons. We haven’t even met this woman yet — we will next week — but today’s text introduces the story. Jesus is in Samaria — as we’ll see, not a place Jews liked to be. He’s tired from his journey and stops at the well to rest.[1] One thing the text doesn’t tell us but readers in John’s day would have known is that the road from Jerusalem forks at Jacob’s well.[2] At the well, you have to decide which way to go. Oh, and it’s noon, a highly unlikely time to be drawing water. A fork in the road and high noon. This is a decisive moment — as my title says, a “timely encounter” — and I suggest that all Christ’s encounters with us are timely, however unlikely they may seem to us.

As we will begin to see next week, in Christ’s timely encounter with the Samaritan woman he doesn’t do anything. That’s quite remarkable. He does not heal her from any disease or raise her child from the dead or dazzle her by turning water into wine — to mention some other encounters with Christ. No, with the Samaritan woman he just talks. Just words, but words that changed her life.[3]

I read a story about a young woman who after graduating from college entered pharmacy school. From time to time she came home to visit and worshiped with her parents in her home church. One Sunday evening after one of these visits, the minister received a phone call from this young woman’s father. The father, somewhat upset, reported that his daughter had just called with the news that she had suddenly decided to drop out of pharmacy school. When the minister asked what precipitated such a rash decision, the father confessed he had no idea but he asked the minister to call his daughter and “talk some sense into her.”

When the minister did call the young woman he expressed shock that she had decided to forfeit all her hard work and she should think long and hard before throwing it all away. “How in the world did you come to this decision?” he asked her.

“It was your sermon yesterday that started me thinking,” she replied. She went on to describe the theme of the sermon, that God calls everyone to ministry, that God has some service for every Christian to do. She said she realized that pharmacy school was for her just selfish. She wanted to make a lot of money, not serve God. Then she had recalled a wonderful summer working at a church camp teaching reading to children of migrant workers. She really felt she was serving God then so she had decided to dedicate her life to working with underprivileged children.

There was a long silence on the minister’s end of the line. “Now look,” he finally said, “I was just preaching.”[4]

Ah. Just preaching. Just words. But sometimes, by the grace of God, words are just the timely encounter we need to hear God speaking to us. I hope the minister called the father back and said his daughter was listening to the Lord. Most of all, I hope that you and I can listen for the word of the Lord.

In a few moments we’re going to ordain and install and commission some women and men who heard the Lord’s word to them to serve. They probably didn’t even think about it in those terms when someone from the nominating committee called. But as I said, we often don’t see, know, or understand Christ’s encounters. But they are constant and they are all timely. So let’s all be on the alert for God’s word to us.

[1] Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Gospel According to St. John, vol. 1, trans. Kevin Smyth (New York: Crossroad, 1990) 424. “The well of Jacob, which is still to be seen today in the same place where it was shown to earlier pilgrims, is undoubtedly genuine, though it is not mentioned in the O.T. It is a fine installation, with a cylindrical shaft seven feet in diameter and 106 fee deep driven into the rock and fresh subsoil water at the bottom (like Isaac’s well in Gen. 26.19), ringed by a wall on top. There are two holes through which a bucket can be lowered (v. 11) and the water lies near the bottom of the shaft.”

[2] Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, trans. G. R. Beasley-Murray (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971) 177.

[3] Thomas G. Long, Whispering the Lyrics: Sermons for Lent and Easter (Lima, Ohio: CSS Publishing Co., 1995) 28-29.

[4] Long, 33-34.