The Passions of the Soul | Lust

So our teaching scripture this morning comes from John chapter

John 4 · chapter mention

4, beginning in verse 7 all the way through to verse 30.

The scriptures say this, A Samaritan woman came to draw

water and Jesus said to her, give me a drink.

His disciples had gone to the city to buy food, and the

Samaritan woman said to him, How is it that you, a Jew, ask a

drink of me, a woman of Samaria? Jews do not share things in

common with Samaritans. And Jesus answered her, If you

knew the gift of God and who it is as asking you, give me a

drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you

living water. The woman said to him, Sir, you

have no bucket, and the well is deep, where do you get that

living water? Are you greater than our

ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his

flocks drank from it? And Jesus said to her, Everyone

who drinks of this water will be thirsty again.

But those who drink of the water that I will give them will never

be thirsty. The water that I will give will

become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.

And the woman said to him, Sir, give me this water, so that I

may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.

And Jesus said to her, Go call your husband and come back.

And the woman answered him, I have no husband.

And Jesus said to her, You are right and saying, I have no

husband, for you have had five husbands, and the one you have

now is not your husband. What you have said is true.

The woman said to him, Sir, I see that you're a prophet.

Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain.

But you say that the place where people must worship is in

Jerusalem. And Jesus said to her, Woman,

believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father

neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.

You worship what you do not know.

We worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews, but

the hour is coming and is now here, when the true worshippers

will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father

seeks such as these to worship Him.

God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in

spirit and truth. The woman said to him, I know

that Messiah is coming. He was called the Christ, and

when He comes, He will proclaim all things to us.

And Jesus said to her, I am he the one who is speaking to you,

Jesus. Then just then his disciples

came, and they were astonished that he was speaking with a

woman. But no, no one said, what do you

want or why are you speaking with her?

And then the woman left her water jar and went back to the

city. She said to the people, come and

see a man who told me everything I have ever done.

He cannot be the Messiah, can he?

They left the city and were on their way to him.

This is the word of the Lord Good.

Morning. When you preach at 37 weeks,

they get you a stool. I have a strong disposition

toward media that makes me feel good.

I'll take a happy go lucky musical over a sad and dramatic

play any day if I can avoid it. I will never watch a war movie

because my tolerance for violence is extremely low.

There's enough real tragedy and horror in the world that I just

have no desire to imbibe an entertainment, however formative

and well done, that draws me toward fictional disaster.

I feel it's so real sometimes that I accidentally start

praying for fictional characters and their circumstances.

To put it plainly, I just get carried away.

Perhaps no more than in a romance, though I can tell the

difference between the masterful poetic elegance and a tender

romance or a sophisticated and uplifting drama, which I do

enjoy. I can also go for the cheese in

an OG Hallmark movie. I have a remarkable ability to

suspend reality while the president's daughter sneaks away

from her staff, only to fall for the undercover secret servant

agent who's actually being paid to protect her while she ditches

her protection. I have opinions about fictional

love triangles, whether we're talking Gilmore Girls, Dean and

Jess, Twilight, Edward and Jacob, PETA and GAIL of The

Hunger Games, or this past summer, latest embodiment of the

trope, Conrad and Jeremiah Fisher of the summer I turned

pretty. These observations of my own

preferences are not value statements, like whatever kind

of movies you want to like. But there is a way in which the

romance stories I'm talking about, deep and serious,

realistic and hopeful or dumb and cheesy, touch on and craft

our imaginations. They form the vocabulary and

expectations we have for romantic experiences, and not

all but many of them draw our attention in circling tightly

around a couple as if nothing else exists.

Desire gets cast as all consuming, even redemptive, but

only for the two people at the center.

And even then we usually only glimpse it through one person's

eyes, leaving the rest of the perspectives to the shadows.

There's something dangerous about that.

And the problem isn't desire itself or its intensity.

We are in a series on the passions, a term rooted in the

ancient church's vocabulary used by people of prayer and

contemplative completion to describe the inner movements

that can cloud discernment and pull us from the freedom of life

in Christ rather than toward it. The ways, desires, thoughts, and

ideas can pull us into the world in a way that's detached.

When we speak of understanding the passions, we seek to

understand how and why these movements occur, what is at

their root. Last week Jared introduced us to

the passions, and today we'll take a closer look at one in

particular. Not that heavy, a bit abstract

of a concept for US 21st century Western people.

Lust. The conventional Bible passages

that we might spend our time with today include what is

perhaps the most famous power trip and dalliance of the Old

Testament, David and Bathsheba. The tale of a lustful king who

uses his power and position to impregnate a married woman who,

at least to the according to the written story we have in

Scripture, had very limited agency within power dynamics

entirely tilted in the King's favor, and in an effort to cover

up his indiscretions, David had the woman's honorable husband

murdered at war. Of course, there's also the

Pauline letters in the New Testaments where on more than

one occasion Paul critically calls out sexual indiscretion.

Sometimes this happens through a kind of general instruction, but

then in places like First Corinthians 5 he gets very

explicit and he rebukes the church for tolerating incest.

And then there is Jesus himself in the Sermon on the Mount who

declares if your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out

and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one

part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into

hell. And if your right hand causes

you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.

This is a particularly direct moment for Jesus.

All great passages, worthy of study and with the help of the

Spirit, are due contemplative consideration.

And that's not where we're going to go today.

I'd like to call our attention to a passage often given little

consideration in relation to the topic of lust.

And if I'm being honest, the little bit of attention that it

sometimes does get is a bit off base.

But if we can hold back a little in our initial suppositions, I

think it's worth turning to today.

I say this because today's primary passage, alongside a few

others that we'll look at along the way, challenges us to

consider the shape of the passions hold on us and the ways

that it is made visible not just in a singular relationship, but

in the wider pattern of our lives.

It is my hope that with this wider angle view, we may move

beyond the two-dimensional image of lust in 50 Shades of Grey, a

raunchy teenage comedy in the fear based, behavior focused

purity culture of the late 90s and early 2000s.

And instead we would come to see the passion of lust for what it

is in its fullness and the ways in which it takes hold in our

lives. And that in that we would also

receive the gentle embracing invitation of the Spirit for

true healing. And that we would be met with

the love of God as Jesus met the woman at the well.

In John chapter 4, Jesus is leaving Judea and traveling back

John 4 · chapter mention

to Galilee, and to do so he travels through Samaria.

The text actually says that he had to go through Samaria, which

is something of a statement because the norm would have been

for Jewish people to entirely avoid Samaria.

The people shared a long history of animosity towards one

another. Despite some shared history

traveling through the region, Jesus came to a Samaritan city

called Sicar near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to

his son Joseph, men whom both the Samaritans and Jewish

communities called an ancestor. And it is there that he needs

the Samaritan woman. Beginning in verse 7A, Samaritan

woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, give me a

drink. His disciples had gone to the

city to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to him,

How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?

Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.

Jesus answered her, If you knew the gift of God and who it is

that is saying to you, give me a drink, you would have asked him,

and he would have given you living water.

The woodwind said to him, Sir, you have no bucket and the well

is deep, where do you get that living water?

Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the

well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?

Jesus said to her, Everyone who drinks of this water will be

thirsty again, but those who drink of the water I will give

them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will

become to them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.

The woman said to him, Sir, give me this water so that I may

never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.

They are gathered at Jacob's Well.

For a man and a woman to meet in that place would have carried a

certain weight to an ancient reader.

Just by setting assumptions would form, much like the ones

my friends used to make spotting first dates at MA Moon's Falafel

in New Haven. Cheap, tasty and crowded with

students and young professionals, it was

practically shorthand for casual Internet date.

Now certainly not every two person meet up there was a first

date, but for a people observer to figure that the meetups they

observed around them was that was was never a bad 1st guest.

By contrast, when Tom was proposed to me in January 2018,

we went to the Restaurant Barcelona, a fancy tapas place

in town that seated guests very close together.

We are right next to a couple who were clearly on a first

date, and while we celebrated our engagement, they awkwardly

Shank fish shrank back into their uncomfortable date.

The difference was obvious. Mamoons equals first date.

Barcelona equals engagement celebration, and our close

proximity to the other couple somehow somewhat comically,

exacerbated this point. Place carries meaning, and it

shapes the story before a word is ever spoken.

And that's why Jesus is meeting with the Samaritan woman at the

well is so striking. It's a confounding scene

throughout Scripture. Wells are often places where men

would meet their future wives. Jacob met Rachel at the well.

Moses met Zipporah at the well. Isaac's marriage to Rebecca

begins with a servant finding her at the well.

A well was a betrothal sight. Against that backdrop, Jesus

meeting a Samaritan woman at the well is evocative.

If a waiter at Barcelona had been only half paying attention,

he might have already put in the order for the comped celebratory

dessert. But here's the thing.

As true as it is that's evoked betrothal imagery, it's also

true that that's not what's going on in the story.

The whole encounter is full of striking contradictions.

Jesus shares in a one-on-one private conversation with a

woman whose socio cultural identity is widely perceived as

at odds with his own. Apart from any of the baggage

that may or may not be associated with this woman and

her five previous husbands, which we'll get to in a minute,

it may be helpful to know that the Jews perceived Samaritan

women to be perpetually impure and and that and that not just

in the encounter, Jesus would have incurred defilement.

The Bible scholar Jonathan Borgel explains that Samaritan

women were perceived in a perpetual state of

uncleanliness, making them, the men around them and all their

possessions impure. And so in this image, there is a

disruptive picture which Jesus engages by saying to her, go

call your husband and come back. The woman answered him, I have

no husband. Jesus said to her, you're right

in saying, I have no husband, for you have had five husbands,

and the one you have now is not your husband.

What you said is true. The woman said to him, Sir, I

see that you are a prophet. Now, a lot of hay has been made

out of this portion of the passage, and it's worth

lingering for a moment to consider what's being said,

what's being implied, and indeed what may be improperly overlaid

on this text. After speaking with the woman

about living water and eternal life, Jesus instructs the woman

to fetch her husband's. In some ways, this kind of makes

sense because they were at the well.

The woman reveals that she has no husband.

Jesus affirms that's true and basically reads the woman's mail

back to her. You've had five husbands, and

now you're with a man who's not your husband.

She's astonished by the knowledge.

It's here in the text that we start to get something of a

grounded picture of who this woman might be.

Certainly 5 husbands does not suggest an easy life, though.

We don't know the story here. We don't know what loss and

grief she may have experienced in death.

We don't know the ways in which she may have experienced

abandonment. We don't know what role she

played in beginning and ending each of her five marriages,

though we do know that the Samaritan people embraced

embraced the Torah and its laws. And that means that she was not

the power broker in any of her marriages that may have ended in

divorce, as women would not have had that right.

One can't help but wonder about what socio economic factors may

have been at play in this woman's life, how she navigated

the instability implied by 5 marriages, what choice she may

or may not have had in them if her life was affected by

poverty, something like alcohol abuse, we don't know.

But 5 marriages suggests some kind of instability and

vulnerability. And there are a lot of

questions, not too many concrete answers.

In some readings of this text, the woman is quickly and

dismissively looked at with disdain, an archetype in

contrast to Jesus himself. And there certainly is something

extraordinary in Jesus lingering in conversation with this woman.

There certainly is contrast. But that contrast isn't like

that of the late Maggie Smith as a Dowager Countess in Downton

Abbey, responding with pitiful and compassion to Ethel, the

housemaid who conceived a child outside of marriage and took to

sex work on the streets to survive, to secure basic

sustenance for her and her child.

No, the extraordinary part is that Jesus is in Samaria in the

1st place, and that he sits at the well with a Samaritan woman

and not a woman of standing or honor, Not the equivalent of the

mayor's wife, respected by her community through her proximity

to power. She is instead a woman whose

life bears the marks of instability and loss, and who

has survived that. Perhaps her own consuming lust

shaped parts of her stories, though what seems very likely,

based on the fact that she lived in 1st century Samaria and had

been married five times, is that she was not the primary author

of lust, but its object. In lust there is pleasure

detached from compassion and sexual desire directed in

opposition to people and relationships.

These definitions from the Catholic ethicist Jason King

create the framework wherein it is possible to conceive of a

particular 3 dimensional forms of lust that animate our psyche

and redirect our will, turning us from what we say we love and

cherish and toward a consuming, covetous captivity to the self.

A handful of weeks back I preached on Exodus 20 where God

gives the Israelites 10 commandments to the Israelites.

God declares you shall not covet your neighbor's house.

You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, male or female,

slave, ox, donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

And I talked about how coveting isn't simply envy.

It involves an attitude of wanting, but also the action of

taking that it is a propulsive relationship, wanting to

seizing, desiring to acquiring. It lets loose with the Bible,

Scholar Walter Brueggemann calls the unrestrained, addictive

pursuit of commodities which, set in motion, blurs our vision

like a mirror and a funhouse, eventually making our neighbors

imperceptible to us in the goods, in our hands, larger than

life. Lust is a particular form of

coveting. Augustine, the North African

Bishop, writing in the Forming shadow of the Fall of Rome,

described it as a lust to dominate.

Lust shows itself in personal relationships when the focus

bends back toward the self, even when both parties consent to

their mutual undoing. And lust shows itself on the

scale of nations and empires, where myths of greatness and

destiny become masks for what King calls the raw drive for

control. In both cases, in the bedroom

and in the empire, desire becomes covetous, care and

hospitality are cut off, acquisition is set into motion,

and people are diminished, reduced, and coerced.

We know this lust to dominate when we see it in relationships.

It looks like a partner who treats intimacy as conquest,

where the other becomes a trophy rather than a person.

It looks like situations of manipulation where love is

twisted into leverage. Sometimes it even looks like two

people caught in what they both call love but is really mutual

self destruction. Passion detached for compassion

and desire cut off from care. Every fall, R as gather the new

students on their floor at college campuses across the

country and instill in their freshman the gospel of

enthusiastic consent. And that's something.

College campuses are sites of sexual harassment and assault.

May every action to stymie and stop that violence prosper.

And hear me when I say that mutual consent can still be

destructive, still be covetous, still set us on the cycle of

desiring and acquiring for our own benefit and casual disregard

for our neighbors. The affected individuals are not

only the participants involved in the hookup in question, their

relationship with friends, family and people around them

are affected as self focus. Indulgence shapes and reshapes

their lives. Because how we're formed in one

discreet part of our lives never stays just in that corner.

And we know this lust to dominate when we look at

empires. Rome called it peace, but it was

really the crushing of nations under military power.

Modern societies may call IT security, prosperity, even

freedom, but often it is simply domination by another name.

Whole peoples treated as expendable land and resources

consumed without limit. Myths of greatness are spun to

disguise the reality of self indulgence.

If you need a way to bring the empire as less metaphor closer

to home, consider how it might show up on a Tuesday at work.

An office is full of competent, gifted employees whose

dedication drives the company's success.

But a manager pits them against one another to test loyalty and

push productivity, and the response is ruthless.

Relationships become tinged with jealousy, alliances form and

fracture, and competition is baptized as a healthy American

spirit. Yet underneath the surface is

the lust to dominate, Co workers reduced to obstacles, clients

and vendors treated as a means to an ends.

The mirror torrents inward, and people are formed against

relationships rather than for them.

Lust is multidimensional, it's reformational, and it leads to

cut off. There are two New Testament

couples who illustrate this point brilliantly, and they are

in many ways the opposite of one another.

Consider the couple of Acts chapter 5, Ananias and Sapphira.

Acts 5 · chapter mention

But a man named Ananias with the consent of his wife Sapphira

sold a piece of property with his wife's knowledge.

He kept back some of the proceeds and brought only a part

and laid it at the apostles feet.

Ananias, Peter asked, Why has Satan filled your heart to lie

to the Holy Spirit and keep back part of the proceeds of the land

while it remains unsold? Did it not remain your own after

is it was sold? Were the proceeds not at your

disposal? How is it that you have

contrived this deed in your heart?

You did not lie to us, but to God.

Now when Ananias heard these words, he fell down and died,

and great fear seized all who heard it.

The young men came and wrapped up his body and then carried him

out and buried him. After an interval of about 3

hours, his wife came in. Not not knowing what had

happened, Peter said to her, Tell me whether you and your

husband sold the land for such and such a price.

And she said, yes, that was the price.

Then Peter said to her, How is it that you have agreed together

to put the Spirit of the Lord to the test?

Look, the feet of those who have buried your husband are at the

door, and they will carry you out.

Immediately she fell down at his feet and died.

When the young men came in, they found her dead, so they carried

her out and buried her beside her husband, and a great fear

seized the whole church and all who heard these things.

This is a devastating story. Amidst the new life and what is

being formed as the Church moving in the power of the Holy

Spirit shortly after Pentecost, we are met with death.

The married couple, Inanias and Sapphira, conspired to withhold

a portion of their wealth and when confronted, they lied about

it publicly. This is the square privileging

of their own lives and livelihoods above that of their

community. The theologian Willie Jennings

point out that they have turned inward as though they, the

couple are the hosting side of their own discipleship, claiming

sovereignty over life together with the Church.

And in this we glimpse the hiring picture of what Jason

King calls the dissipating form of lust, here extended from the

realm of private desire into shared life of the community.

Desire collapses inwards, Pleasure loses depth as those

whom Ananias and Sapphira are called to commune with as

neighbors and friends become obstacles to their own

accumulation of wealth. Instead of deepening in love and

relationship, Inanias and Sapphira experience what King

describes as the thinning out of joy that comes when connection

is neglected and the good of another is no longer grasped.

Their story shows us not less thrill but its erosion, how it

Withers community, leaving not abundance but absence.

Consider how this story contrasts with what Willie

Jennings calls a new kind of couple, Priscilla and Aquila.

This refugee pair from Rome took up their mallets and owls as

talent makers alongside the Apostle Paul, joining him in

what Acts 18 calls the way of God.

When Paul moved on, they became teachers to Apollos, the

Alexandrian eloquent Zelius, but also in need of guidance.

Priscilla and Aquila took him aside and explain the way of God

to him more accurately and later commended him to other

disciples. Where Ananias and Sapphira

turned inward, Priscilla and Aquila opened outward.

Their shared discipleship was not a possession to protect, but

a gift to give, multiplying life in the church.

In their story, we see no dominating lust, no dissipating

lust. Instead, there is forward moving

discipleship rooted in mutual love and care, lived out amid

real vulnerability. These were refugees and by

vocational pastors who had endured persecution and threats

of violence. And yet, as Jennings notes, they

are not consumed with self preservation but live a shared

life that yields to the Spirit. Jason King also names a third

kind of lust, truncating Lust, which cuts life off from broader

relationship. Think of the couple who dates

and loses touch with all of their friends.

Now that can play out as a light comedy and a 20 minute sitcom,

but it can also devastate real lives.

I once sat with a young person who had just discovered that one

of her parents maintained a secret family elsewhere, and

that revelation shattered their sense of trust and belonging.

And this young person was a casualty of truncating lust,

where another's desire narrowed the horizon and cut off

obligation and care beyond the relationship that is right in

front of them. Priscilla and Aquila embody the

opposite of this too. Their life together was not cut

short but extended outward, not closed in and on itself, but

open to Paul Apollo's, to the church.

Where lust narrows, severs, and collapses relationships, their

shared discipleship widened, multiplied, and bore life.

And so it is with this picture in mind that I want to take us

back to our primary text for today, the Samaritan woman at

the well with Jesus. She's a figure whose story

carries many unknowns, but also clear signs of hardship and

loss, and the very strong suggestion that her life was, in

the eyes of some, reduced to an object of lust.

Now, the kind of lust that touched her life may have been

dominating, dissipating, or truncating some mix of all

three. As the wife of five husbands who

is currently with a man who is not her husband, she was almost

certainly affected by lust in its sexual sense, but also in

its wider disfiguring forms, where someone else's covetous

behavior left her isolated and cut off.

She was alone at the well at midday, after all.

And she says to Jesus, our ancestors worshiped on this

mountain, But you say that the place where people must worship

is in Jerusalem. Jesus said to her, Woman,

believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the

Father, neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.

You worship what you do not know.

We worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews, but

the hour is coming and is now here, where the true worshippers

will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father

seeks such as those to worship him.

God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in

spirit and truth. The woman said to him, I know

the Messiah is coming, who is called the Christ.

When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.

And Jesus said to her, I am he the one who is speaking to you.

Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was

speaking with a woman. But no one said, what do you

want or why are you speaking with her?

Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city.

She said to the people, Come and see a man who told me everything

I have ever done. He cannot be the Messiah, can

he? They left the city and went on

their way to him. The disciples are shocked to

find Jesus not only talking with a woman, but to this woman and

in this place, a meeting no one would have imagined.

The disciples return at the conclusion of what would become

the longest recorded dialogue that Jesus shares with anyone in

the Bible. Think about that.

This theologically dense conversation is not with Peter,

James, or John. It's not a conversation that

Jesus shared with all twelve of his disciples.

It's not even a public conversation that Jesus has with

someone in a crowd while he's teaching.

Jesus tells this woman directly that he is the Messiah, the one

whom they, the Samaritans, have been waiting for.

And at this revelation, the woman leaves behind her water

jar and goes back to the city. She seeks out the people in the

city and declares. Come and see the man who has

told me everything I have ever done.

That's not what a person crushed by the weight of stigma or shame

shouts. And while we don't know how the

woman related to her relational history or circumstances prior

to her conversation with Jesus, the one can certainly imagine

some challenging baggage and emotional weight.

We do know that she left a one-on-one theological

conversation with a Jewish rabbi at a well without shame, fear or

suspicion. His knowledge of her and her

life is comforting to her, and she discloses his knowledge to

her to her Samaritan people in the city who come out to see the

man that they have been led to believe is the Messiah.

Revelation serves as invitation. The woman who had been reduced

to an object of lust is now received, named, and embraced by

Jesus. Where lust isolates, cuts off,

and collapses relationships inward, Jesus opens outward

toward community. She who once came alone at

midday now runs back to the city carrying the good news.

This is the opposite of what lust does.

Lust to sorts desire into covetousness.

Jesus restores desire by directing it toward life, with

God, and with others. The very place where she had

been diminished becomes the place where her voice is lifted

up. There's healing in this move,

and there's also an invitation to bring before God the places

where our desires have been twisted, where we recognize in

ourselves the ways our own covetous desires have narrowed,

distorted, and harmed others, and where we have been cut off

as the object of lust. Wherever shame has marked us,

wherever isolation has closed us off, the Spirit meets us not

with condemnation, but with healing love that restores us to

one another and helps us see rightly.

This morning, Jared concluded our time of silence with a

liturgy that we are holding with us for the duration of this

series. As we prepare to move toward

ministry time, I'd like to invite you to return to that

liturgy with me. I'd like to invite you actually

to stand and invite you to read with me.

I am infinitely loved by God, and God's infinite love is in

the process of healing everything in me that clings to

false things. The invitation of God to me is

to allow God to be the divine Physician.

The medicine of God is God's own love poured out into my heart

through the Holy Spirit. Amen.