When we were children, my younger sister, Judy, and I would take long walks in the woods, often following meandering creek-beds, filling our pockets up with treasures from the earth.  During some of these walks I'd invent different worlds for us to travel in, inviting imaginary companions to play along with us. Some of these friends required a new accent and vocabulary, like the character who lived behind an abandoned shed, who would only come out if we roared like lions-and I would shout, "Here he comes", which was our signal to run as fast as we could back the way we came. Fortunately other also surrounded us, less scary stories in our lives...our family story and having been raised up in The Episcopal Church the Christian story, as well.

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. 

The story itself gives us clues to this shift in context, for in his story Nicodemus has a name, but in her story the woman goes unnamed.  We never know who she is, only what she is-a foreign woman. It's a scandal for this conversation to even take place for Jewish teachers like Jesus were not supposed to speak in public with women - not to mention a Jew drinking water from an impure Samaritan vessel.

The best stories in our lives give up their treasures with a bit of digging -let's see what else is here?  For one thing, the Samaritan woman is alone-atypical in her culture, where women traveled together, both for the sake of propriety and especially to the center of town to collect water for their homes, water that's heavy to carry.  Notice, too, that rather than coming early in the cool of day to get ready for the usual long morning of cooking for a family, the Samaritan woman is at the well at the height of the sun-the hottest time of day.  Obviously she was not cooking for a large, extended family.

In fact she's a woman surviving a triple-outcast life.  Outcast because she's a woman, outcast because she's a Samaritan who are looked down on and despised by the Jews, and then cast out by her own outcast community.  It's this that Jesus notices when he reminds her of her status not as a women heading her household, but someone who for reasons we're never told has not been able to settle with any one man, losing status with each new man who has taken her in.  As a result, in terms of her social-capital, she's the lowest of the low.