March 8, 2026
/I want us to begin with a small additional word of scripture. Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John—although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who were baptizing—he left Judea and started back to Galilee, but he had to go through Samaria.
I mentioned before that in some significant ways I was shaped and formed by my grandparents' generation, that "Greatest Generation." And so I carry with me some anachronisms that seem so outmoded and outdated these days. One of which is my well-worn and trusty Rand McNally Atlas, which is always in the backseat of my car. I am still captured and captivated when I open it up by the myriad byways and passages that we have throughout this country—the latticework of interstates and highways and places and opportunities we have to expediently get from point A to point B. It took decades and decades of work to figure all of that out.
That is something that we miss in our reading from the Gospel today: the "out-of-wayness" factor of what is happening here. The passages I began with this morning are the first four verses of Chapter 4. Our lectionary reading today only picks up in Chapter 5, but it is notable in verse 4 where it says, "but he had to go through Samaria," which is exactly the wrong-headed way to think about things.
The geography of the Holy Land is such that the passage between Galilee and Jerusalem was the rocky hilltop region of Samaria that made no sense to go through. If any of you have ever lived in mountainous terrain—if you ever go out to the western part of Maryland or in West Virginia—you always want to travel the valleys, the easy smooth ways. You don't go up and down the ridgelines. That is what this passage through Samaria was. Not only was it geographically difficult, it was also treacherous. This is the same passageway that the man is set upon in the parable of the Good Samaritan when he gets robbed and beaten. It was dangerous. It was fraught.
But Jesus had to take the harder way. There was something about that harder way that was at the heart of what he was doing in this moment. Now, I have many times in the past in my years of ministry preached precisely on that point: that we are called to take the harder way; that we are called to go to those who are on the margins and the fringes and the out-of-the-way places like the Samaritans.
But this year, this Sunday, this season of Lent in which we are shaping and forming ourselves anew, I want to invite us to consider our identification with or connection to this woman of Samaria. Who were the Samaritans? As a reminder, they were the remnant of the people of Israel who were left during the Babylonian Exile. In that period of exile, when they remained in the Holy Land, they ended up intermarrying with the Assyrians.
In the larger scope of Jewish identity and life, they were seen as compromised. They had married outside of the covenant. They had corrupted themselves. Their practices had gone sideways and gotten askew. They also had reoriented themselves around a separate mountain—not the mount in Jerusalem where the Temple of Solomon (or the Second Temple by this period) existed—but instead Mount Gerizim in Samaria, where they believed was really the true indwelling place of God. So, they were seen at the very least to be schismatic, wayward in their thinking, and not truly accurate and right. At worst, they were complete heretics, far beyond the pale of acceptability.
I want to invite us this morning to consider our own location as Western Christians, but especially as Christians in the United States. The Eastern Orthodox scholar David Bentley Hart has suggested that we, as American Christians, are at the very least schismatic, if not openly heretical. He fleshes this out in some meaningful ways. One of the things he points out—and I think this is actually very true—is that we as Americans very often, if not almost always, default to transactional ways of living.
We see each other for the value we can get out of each other. We objectify each other. We put each other into these commodified boxes in which all we see is the benefit that we get from one another. It takes us a lot of work and a lot of effort to break down that transactional way of existing to see the humanity and the goodness in each other—to really and truly orient ourselves around relationship and the fullness of relationship.
So when Jesus comes to us today and offers the transforming good news of the Gospel, it is to a people wayward and broken. We are very much the woman of Samaria, the people of Samaria. We have a practice and a faith, but it is a faith that is so very often compromised and not complete in its fullness. But Jesus offers us the truth of the way out: that the time will come in which we will worship in spirit and truth. The brokenness of our faith experience today is not the end of the story. There is a transformation that we can receive—a new life, a reinvigorated life in the spirit and truth of God's coming among us.
What can that look like? What does this renewal of faith mean for us today? I want to offer one suggestion out of the wellspring of the work that we've been doing during the Rector's Forum on contemplative spirituality. There is a place within that tradition that helps to disorient us from our defaults and gets us outside of the routines and rhythms that keep us at arm's length from the transformation that Christ is actually offering us.
One of those gifts that contemplative spirituality offers is the gift of orientation around mantras—orientations around phrases and concepts of prayer that can deeply embed within us. This is not some mystical, otherworldly concept coming from a different faith tradition, but something deeply rooted in our own history and our own Christian walk. In 1 Corinthians Chapter 16, as St. Paul is saying his final adieus, he quotes Aramaic in the Greek. We miss this in our English translations, but in verse 22, he uses the phrase Maranatha, which translates either as the petition "Lord, come" or the proclamation "The Lord is coming."
Scholars almost universally agree that the quotation of the Aramaic here was a liturgical phrase used in worship in the first century. It was very likely a repetitive proclamation used by the first Christians to proclaim what they desired of Christ or to proclaim the arrival of Christ within their midst. Since the 1970s, at least in the United States, that phrase has taken on a contemplative spiritual gift. You can find a number of recordings of Maranatha being used in this rhythmic, prayerful way to break us out of our routines and reorient us to this phrase that can transform our lives: "Lord, come."
There was someone in our Christian tradition who helped really shape and form this anew in the 20th century: Father John Main. He was a Benedictine monk born in England in 1926. Early on in his life, he had a sense of call to some form of ordered life, but he became disillusioned and ended up leaving that process. He trained in law and entered the British Civil Service. As a young adult, he was posted to what is today Malaysia.
In Kuala Lumpur, he encountered Hinduism for the first time. He became enamored with the spiritual gift that he saw in Hinduism: the encouragement towards meditation and prayer. There was a guru he connected with, and in a movement of the Holy Spirit, this guru said, "Take of this meditation what is generative for you, but do it out of your own Christian faith. Find a mantra, find a phrase that roots you in the practice, but out of your Christian faith." The guru had encountered the Eastern Orthodox "Jesus Prayer"—Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner—and offered that to John Main.
That encounter reoriented his Christian life. He returned to England, became a Benedictine monk, and began offering this gift of contemplative spirituality rooted in mantra saying. He has a connection here locally as well; in the 1970s, he came to be the headmaster of St. Anselm's Abbey School in D.C. Over the ten or so years that he was there, he began a deep study of the early Desert Fathers—the monastics of the first centuries who removed themselves to desert spaces—and he discovered in them this same gift of orientation around prayerfulness and the gift of rooting yourself in phraseology.
John Main began to share that with the whole world. Up until that point, much of the contemplative prayer tradition had been seen as isolated to those who could dedicate their lives to a monastic vocation. He said, "No, anyone can do this. Laypeople can do this. You can have a family, you can have a job, but you can find and carve out a space in your life for this kind of work."
I have been really captured by that sensibility over the last several months because I think it is precisely that kind of way of practicing our faith that can disorient us from the traps that we fall into as Americans—these ways of bifurcating the world into "us and them" or "me and you," and the ways in which we so often see things transactionally. By embracing these contemplative practices, we find ourselves disoriented. I encouraged folks last week to spend a few minutes in silent prayer, and we talked about the difficulty so many of us have in simply sitting and being in silence. We are surrounded by a world of noise, a cacophony of distractions. But by embracing this opportunity to step outside of that noise and seek the solitude of silence, we find this invitation that Christ is offering to be a people of the Spirit and of truth.
Father John Main never said that there was one answer to that contemplative edge. He said, "Find those mantras in your own life." For him, it was the Jesus Prayer. For others, it may be the saying, "Lord, open my lips and my mouth shall proclaim your praise," or the Aramaic that St. Paul offers us: Maranatha. Whatever it is, may we find a place of reorientation in it.
In this moment of chaotic uncertainty in the world around us, and this experience that we have as Americans in this current time—a time of deep uncertainty, cynicism, and unknowing—I want to offer one more phrase that I think is especially prescient. In Mark Chapter 9, we have the story of a desperate man with an ailing child. As he encounters Jesus, he pleads, "Lord, I believe; help me in my unbelief."
I think this is a time in which unbelief runs rampant. When we see the many ways in which Christianity continues to be corrupted for ends and means that seem so antithetical to the Gospel, it can be easy to want to dispense with it all, to become nihilistic, cynical, and distrustful. We should be honest about those emotions and that place of deep ambiguity. Yearly assessments show we are growing significantly in the number of people who identify as agnostic or deeply uncertain—the "nones," as they call them. Many of us have moments in our life where we feel that, maybe even now.
But we have an invitation to believe even in our disbelief. May we receive that and embrace it. May we say, "Lord, we believe, even in our unbelief." In responding to Jesus' invitation, even in the difficulty of that rocky road that we walk, may we encounter the spirit of truth—the spirit of God's transforming love in the world around us. May we be people of that spirit of truth. May we be people who believe even in the midst of unbelief.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.