Storytelling has bound together families and cultures for thousands of years and still does. For in hearing the stories of others, we in fact become the stories we're told. These stories play a critical role in determining who we become in our families, as well as the spiritual people we can imagine ourselves to be.  Stories help shape who we are.  And the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman has power to shape us....The story of this woman at the well provides a striking contrast to last Sunday's Gospel that found Jesus speaking to Nicodemus, in the secret dark of the night.  Nicodemus had a privileged place as a male member of the Jewish religious establishment.  This morning Jesus speaks with a female member of the outsider community of Samaritans. 

This is a rich and complex Gospel we are given for our consideration today. We have this wonderful account of Nicodemus coming to Jesus to ask him some questions. We have this very convoluted conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus that develops into a monologue by Jesus that has all to do with being born completely and radically new, being born a second time, being born from above, all of which Nicodemus does not get, and if our society's usage of this phrase "born again" is any indication, the majority of Christianity does not get it either.

Episcopalians aren’t big on sin. I don’t mean we aren’t good at it, erring and straying like lost sheep…I mean we don’t put sin at the center of the way we pray or at the center of what we believe! We do make liturgical and pastoral decisions that reserve the center of our Episcopal identity for God’s love, mercy and compassion—the image in which we’ve been made. For The Episcopal Church, faith means learning to trust completely that deep down, at the heart of things, God’s way of loving us is unconquerable and indelible. Our Lenten theme of repentance is about turning again and again back toward God’s love, knowing God never turns away from us.

Last week the theme of the lessons was "Come and see" -- the potential disciples, in the story in John's Gospel, said to Jesus, "Rabbi, where are you staying," and Jesus said, "Come and see".... Today's reading from Matthew's gospel is also about being called - and in fact the whole structure of the Bible really depends on these hundreds and hundreds of stories in which people are called by God in one way or another. Today the theme is follow me. Jesus encounters Peter and Andrew fishing by the Sea of Galilee and says that to them -- follow me - and then he calls James and John -- and "immediately," we are told, they just get up from what they're doing and follow.