evangelism

What the Samaritan Woman Can Teach Us

 It’s hard for me to imagine how this woman must have felt at finding a strange man sitting by the well, a man who upon speaking to her turned out to be a Jew. Her surprise at the situation notwithstanding, the woman did converse with Jesus, though initially that didn’t go terribly well. As in conversations Jesus had with Nicodemus, a well-educated Pharisee and member of the Sanhedrin, to those he had with his disciples who traveled with him and on some levels knew him well, what Jesus said to the woman and what she heard were definitely not the same thing.

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The Importance of Sharing Our Faith

For the past several weeks we have been hearing stories about Jesus as an adult, his baptism, the beginning of his ministry, and the calling of his disciples. But our Gospel today takes us back to Christmas. It takes us back to his infancy when he was just forty days old. In some traditions, today is the end of Christmas. They have been singing Christmas carols, and have kept their decorations up until today because, as you heard at the end of the Gospel reading, today is the day Mary and Joseph went to the temple and then returned to Nazareth. This whole time they have been in Bethlehem, and some traditions celebrate that. It is not our tradition here because we have put that all aside after the Epiphany and have focused instead on the early years of Jesus’s ministry. But today we go back to his infancy. It might help us, as we hear the story, to get back into the Christmas mindset when we hear how Jesus was taken to the temple by his parents and is presented. We hear all the interesting details about that: they did what was customary under the law and offered a sacrifice of two turtledoves or two pigeons. This is an interesting detail, because it means they didn’t have quite enough money to get the lamb, but could only afford the bird offering.