Author: Charlotte Vaughan Coyle

Jerry and I were reading to our second graders one time and they were excited to tell us about the newest word they had learned: “genre.”

These are such smart, clever children!

Back when you and I were in the second grade, even if we didn’t know the term “genre,” we still knew there were different categories of the things we were reading.

We knew the difference between comic books and history books and biographies; we learned how fiction, non-fiction and science fiction works.

The ability to discern between different genres still comes in handy for adults. For example, we know how important it is to notice the difference between objective news reporting and commentary or opinions; between science and poetry; between history with documentable facts and the stories that interpret and make meaning of facts.

This is not to say that some genres are better than others; that some categories are necessarily “truer” than others.

But it is to say that finding meaning and discerning what is “true” requires understanding a big picture, not just one small piece of reality.

Look at our music, for example. We wouldn’t say that only classical music is “right;” or country or rock or bluegrass. We see all those different genres of music as rich and interesting and beneficial as we seek to experience life more fully.

All this variety makes us better and bigger as we share life together with all our different tastes and preferences.

In much the same way, we appreciate the numerous genres of Scripture.

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love;

according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions…

Create in me a clean heart, O God,

and put a new and right spirit within me.

O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise….

The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;

a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise…

(adapted from Psalm 51)

The church’s traditional understanding is that King David wrote this song of yearning and remorse after his great sin against Bathsheba and her husband Uriah.

If you’ve been reading 2 Samuel this past week, you’ve remembered this sad, sad tale of David’s fall and the consequent undoing of his family.

“What goes around, comes around,” our mothers used to say and certainly that is the tale told here.

It was in the spring of the year, when kings go off to war, that David stayed in Jerusalem.

It was in the cool of the evening when David paced on his high patio and looked down into his neighbors’ garden that he spied a beautiful woman at her bath.

It was in a moment of passion, made toxic by power and privilege that David sent for the woman and had his way with her.

It was in thoughtless carelessness that he discarded the woman he had abused; David sent her home and forgot about her.

As we read the stories of David this week, we come across this little story in 2 Samuel 7. Once you start unpacking it, it’s surprising how many layers there are.

David lives in a “house of cedar” (a palace) and proposes to build for YHWH a “house” (a temple).

Temple building is one of the things kings do; yes, surely to honor God but also – maybe – to try to control God, to use God in order to legitimate the king’s power.

And then Nathan the prophet receives – and delivers to the king – an oracle from the Lord of hosts.

Thus says the Lord:

I have not asked for a house. I do not want a temple.

I am God on the move.

Years ago as my husband was traveling in Turkey, the bus stopped near a little village off the beaten track.

There was a small lake, clear and clean, with a stony bottom. And there was a shrine, marking the place as special, maybe even sacred in a long ago day.

Locals think the shrine might have been built by the Hittite people; old, very, very old.

But the shrine is not what impressed Jerry. Rather it’s the natural spring that feeds the lake; the spring of water the shrine designates and celebrates as special, life-giving; maybe even sacred.

Water may well have been flowing from this little spring for more than 4,000 years. Think of it – before Jesus, before King David, maybe even before Abraham – ever fresh, ever flowing water, giving life to a parched land and a thirsty people.

In the Gospel according to John, we see images of water woven throughout.

Here is Jesus at the annual Festival of Booths that included rituals of water: religious rites invoking God’s blessing of water for the fall harvest. Here is Jesus crying out:

Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink for out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.

John 7:38

Here is Jesus with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well:

Those who drink of the water that I give them will never be thirsty. The water I give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.

John 4:13-14

John’s Gospel overflows with symbols and images and signs that point beyond themselves to something beyond our human ability to speak or to know.

I really like the Samaritan woman in John 4.  I wish I knew her name.

I like her spunk and her spirit. I like her questions. I like the way she stays engaged, letting the conversation always go deeper and wider. I like her courage.

I say “courage” because it was not at all proper for a woman to speak to a strange man in a public place. It was not typical for a Samaritan and a Jew to engage in a social relationship. And it took courage for her to go tell the people in her village about this man she had met; it was risky for a woman with a tarnished reputation to bear witness to the Christ.

What would people think?!

In John and in Acts there are two stories we are pondering this week: the woman of Samaria and the man Paul from Tarsus.

Two stories of people who moved from disbelief and cynicism to faith and trust; two stories of people who turned from resisting to following; two stories of people who – because of their passion for the Christ – found the courage to let their lives be radically reoriented and re-shaped by the Christ.

There are countless stories of faith like this.

Again and again, across the ages, around the world, untold courageous people like these have let themselves be changed: their beliefs, their values, their priorities, their behaviors, their assumptions, their lives.

People who encounter the living Christ ARE changed.

Here’s another story of another courageous woman. I found her in her wonderful book called The Weight of Mercy: Deb Richardson-Moore.