Messy Ministry
August 28, 2022
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
John 4:27-45
27 Just then his disciples came back. They marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you seek?” or, “Why are you talking with her?” 28 So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, 29 “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” 30 They went out of the town and were coming to him.
31 Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” 32 But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” 33 So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?”34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work. 35 Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest. 36 Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together.37 For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ 38 I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”
39 Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony, “He told me all that I ever did.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. 41 And many more believed because of his word. 42 They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world.”
43 After the two days he departed for Galilee. 44 (For Jesus himself had testified that a prophet has no honor in his own hometown.) 45 So when he came to Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him, having seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the feast. For they too had gone to the feast.
The author of the book of John tells us his purpose for his book: “these [stories] are written,” he tells us, “so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (20:31). John wrote what he wrote so that we would become mature believers in Jesus and that in believing, we would find life—the truest, fullest, deepest life, the kind of life that is truly life. That’s his purpose.
Sometimes, though, you might feel that the life Jesus wants to give you doesn’t feel like the kind of life we want to have. That’s how, at first, the twelve followers of Jesus felt in this story about a woman at the well. But then something changed. Let’s pray, and we’ll hear more about what changed for them and what must change for us. “Dear Heavenly Father . . .”
Introduction
Last week I told our staff and the team that debriefs sermons each week something about the upcoming sermon, this sermon. I told them I don’t want to make this passage merely about our church, about us, in one very specific area. I told them that I did not want to take the iconic story of the woman at the well, in all of its glory and grandeur and God-exalting purposes, and reduce the sum force of the passage down to the fact that on Sunday mornings we need more people to volunteer in the toddler rooms. I don’t want to make the sum import of this passage to our lives as merely signing up for once-a-month nursery duty. But I will tell you it’s been on my mind a lot.
Yet I don’t want to presume that the number of people who serve our church and the number of services we have and the number of people who attend, is as interesting to you as those numbers are to me. But would you humor me for a moment?
Each week children’s ministry has opportunities for thirty people to share the love of Jesus Christ with others who need care and support and to serve in an environment that is safe and relatively easy and often quite fun. That same sentence could also be worded that we need a bunch of people to pull nursery duty where they might have to hold a baby who cries in their arms and some weeks even spits up on their shirt. That’s also true. There are different ways to phrase the same opportunity.
But since we’re talking about numbers, I’ll also say we have six or so people serving on the music team each week. Three people running the audio/visual system. Five or more people leading English as Second language class. Several adult and youth Sunday school teachers. One person drives the van to bring people to church. Across the three services, we have a dozen volunteers greeting people. A few people make coffee and snacks, a few people count the offering, and one person does security. Three people read the sermon passage during the service, one person leads the pastoral prayer, and if you want to count the one person preaching, it means that, in total, our church has seventy-eight opportunities to serve each Sunday. This means that across each month, we have 312 opportunities to serve, with 120 of them in children’s ministry.
Again, since we are talking about numbers, you may be wondering about attendance. We have just over 200 members. And each week we probably have 300 adults in the sanctuary. And across the whole of a month, we probably have a total of 450 or so different people who attended at least one Sunday a month. So, again, 300 openings to serve and roughly 450 people who have some sort of regular connection to our church.
Thank you for humoring me. (Once upon a time, I was an engineer, and I did open Microsoft Excel this week to add that all up.)
As said, I’m unwilling to take the sum total of the iconic story of the woman at the well, in all of its glory and grandeur and God-exalting purposes, and reduce the passage to the fact that on Sunday mornings we need more people to volunteer in the toddler rooms. I don’t want to do that. But neither do I think they are totally unrelated.
How do you think I would feel if in a moment we found gifted, trained, mature believers for all of those serving roles? Great, right? But what if most of them were pulled from other good churches, like Brookfield Bible and Pastor Jon Shiery, who’s doing wonderful ministry just a five-minute walk from here? Are we good with that? I mean, our church got blessed. I mean, I feel the need to fill these roles, especially as we are now T-minus seventeen months away from launching a new church in the city, a church in which, Lord willing, dozens of you will go to.
Speaking of the church plant, how will we measure the success of that new church? What if that church in the city, say five years from now, has 120 people volunteering in children’s ministry? Is that a success? Perhaps. But what if those people came from other good churches and those other churches now struggled? Would that be a success?
Some pastors might say, if not publicly but privately, Who cares about those other churches? Jesus, cares. And we care. Or at least I should say that when I’m thinking rightly about Jesus, when I’m thinking maturely about Jesus and his church and the kingdom of God, then I care not only about the health of our church but all churches. When I’m thinking maturely, that’s what I’m thinking about. But I’m not always thinking rightly. And neither are you. Neither—to come back to our passage—were the disciples. Sinful, immature hearts often what God’s blessings to come only to them and the people we love. And yet, God wants more for us than this. To use the words from our passage, Jesus is the Savior of the whole world, not merely of any one people or church.
If you weren’t here last week, we looked at the first part of John 4, and read that Jesus “had to” travel through, not around, a region of Israel pious Jews hated to visit. They hated the people from Samaria because many years before they were part of a civil war with Israel and eventually established their own place of idolatry and were faithless to the Lord. And here comes Jesus, through this hated region—a region many Jews would avoid—and he sits with a woman from a hated people at the hottest part of the day. He gives her what he calls “living water.” And he tells her that he is the long-awaited Messiah. And if you look at v. 28, we that she’s so excited about this Messiah-news, she leaves her water jar and tells everyone in town, saying, “Could this be the Messiah?” Even though she’s been what we would call a disciple, a follower of Jesus, for like five minutes, she’s already mature enough to know that she needs to share Jesus with everyone she can. That’s not, however, the first impulse of the actual twelve disciples. And that’s actually how I want to frame our study of the passage. God wants us to see in this passage two things: first, the immature reflections of a disciple, and then the mature reflections of a disciple.
A disciple’s immature reflections
So, right there on the page we can see the immature reflections of the twelve disciples. That’s what I mean by their immature reaction; I mean to talk about how these followers of Jesus experienced the event in real-time. And it’s not so great.
They want ministry to be tidy rather than messy. Look at vv. 3–4, 7–9, then v. 27.
3 he left Judea and departed again for Galilee. 4 And he had to pass through Samaria. . . . 7 A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8 (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.). . . . 27 Just then his disciples came back. They marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said [to her], “What do you seek?” or [to him], “Why are you talking with her?”
Can you tell how the disciples feel? What? Are we going through Samaria? And stopping here? they think. Well, fine. We’ll go into town to get food. Wait—what? Are you talking with a woman? From here?
My family and I lived in a very large city for the first six years of our marriage, and most of our friends and co-workers felt we lived in a very bad part of this huge city. The elementary school just down the road was unaccredited, and our area had lots of other aspects of “big-city problems.” We tended to like living there. Loved it, actually. Which is to say I was used to living in rougher spots. However, I remember on a trip to visit extended family, I made what turned out to be a poor choice for a stop at a gas station in the south part of another, even larger city—you can hate me for this if you want—but I’m just being honest. I thought, We’ve gotta go—now! Maybe you’ve felt that way before. Maybe you’ve felt that way in a church.
I think this is something of how the disciples felt in Samaria. And this is interesting because disciples often boast of their desire to go anywhere with Jesus. In another place in the gospels, Peter once told Jesus that he was willing to be with Jesus even if it meant death (Matt. 26:35). In another place several disciples imply that they are willing to drink the cup of suffering that Jesus is willing to drink (Mark 10:35). But in each case, they really don’t mean what they say. You see that here, as well. Immature disciples want to follow Jesus, only as long as it doesn’t involve going through Samaria.
You can probably relate. Sure, you want to follow Jesus and have life in him, but you want to have it on your terms, ministry that’s really clean and tidy.
You can also see their immaturity in their large focus on their own comfort. Jesus is willing to sacrifice his own food and eating so that he can do ministry to a woman desperately thirsty for living water. And speaking of spiritual, living water, you can also see their immaturity in the way they confuse spiritual metaphors, merely drawing strength from their own resources. Look with me at vv. 31–34.
31 Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” 32 But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” 33 So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?” 34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.
They all needed food, so they go into town to buy some, even though they’d rather not have been there. And when they bring Jesus food, he says he’s already eaten, by which he means doing his Father’s will. Meeting the spiritual needs of others was like food to him. This annoyed the disciples. Why did we go all the way into town if someone was gonna just give Jesus a sandwich? In their immaturity, they don’t understand the spiritual metaphor. Just like Nicodemus in chapter 3 with not understanding the new-birth and the woman at the well at first not understanding living-water.
Immature followers of Jesus draw strength primarily from their own resources. And that leaves us tried. Maybe that’s the reason you’re tried right now. Yes, you have so many challenges around you, and, yes, the challenges are big—but have you considered whether you’re trying to solve everything in your own strength? Maybe God has all the chaos around you as an invitation to eat food you don’t know about.
By the grace of God and by the patience of God and by the saving work of Jesus Christ, these disciples do not stay immature disciples. How do we know? Just as their immaturity is on the page, so is their maturity. I’ll explain.
A disciple’s mature reflections
The disciples don’t look so great here in this story, do they? They come across, well, in the word I’ve been using, immature. We read about a sinful Samaritan woman, and all of those words would have been like nails on the chalkboard to these men: sinful and Samaritan and woman. And yet, she’s more mature in Christ than they are? And these people from the town? They see more of who Jesus truly is than the disciples do. The disciples, in their immaturity see their Jesus as “their Jesus,” meaning the leader of their tribe and their people. Their hearts what God’s blessings to come only to them and the people they love, forget how much it hurts the churches across the street in Samaria.
And all of that changed. How do we know? It’s on the page. Think about it. How do we have this story? The men who first experienced the story of the woman at the well were not the men who would have written the story of the woman at the well. Not yet anyway. John the author lived with Jesus for three years, seeing Jesus serve and love, seeing him die and seeing him rise again. Then he saw the birth of the early church, which was at first was centered around Jewish people but then quickly expanded out and out and out through very messy ministry, from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria and to the ends of the earth (cf. Acts 1:8). What I’m trying to say is that the disciples who wrote the story of their own immaturity must have become mature in Christ. The man who wrote this story must have really been changed by the Messiah.
Instead of following Jesus in a way that is clean and tidy, a mature disciple is up for messy ministry. Instead of focusing on his comfort and well-being and what he wants, he is focused on Jesus. In v. 36 we read Jesus tell the disciples, “I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”
They didn’t know what that would mean or where that would take them, but now, writing from the vantage point of fifty years later, they do. In fact, John the author will spend the end of his life exiled in prison on a small island for the sake of Jesus. You get the sense that the spiritual metaphor that confused them—the one about “food” viewed as the doing of the will of the Father—you get the sense that at the end of John’s life, his testimony is that he was carried along in God’s strength, not his own strength. You get the sense that mature disciples no longer believe that Jesus was just for them, but that he is “the Savior of the world.” Jesus is not a tribal deity, merely blessing one group of people. He’s the Savior of the world. That’s an important line in our story, if not the most important line in the story. Look with me at 39–42.
39 Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me all that I ever did.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. 41 And many more believed because of his word. 42 They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world.”
If you had asked an immature disciple who Jesus was, they might have said he’s the savior of Israel. But here, after just two days with Jesus, these sinful nobodies from a hated region see Jesus for how he really is: the Savior of the world. And years later, the mature disciples wrote it that way because they knew it was true, not caring how bad it made them look. Because they knew it made Jesus look even better.
Conclusion
Maybe you’re here, and you don’t know Jesus all that well, but you read a passage like this about his love and compassion, and like these people in the town, you’d like to get to know him better. All you have to do is ask. Behold the patience of Jesus with people. He’s traveling up north, and these Samaritan people merely ask him to stay, and guess what he does? He stays two more days. He talks with them. We don’t have all the details from this visit, but if this visit was like other visits we read about in the Gospels, he likely healed their sicknesses and maybe their marriages and told them about sin and salvation. Maybe if you spent more time with Jesus, you’d also conclude that he is the Savior of the world. But you should ask him to show himself to you. He would love to do so. That’s why he came.
Years ago another pastor at our church named Jason and I probably wanted ministry to be more “tidy” than we even realized. That’s not what we said in sermons and leader meetings, though. We’d use the language of trying to go after what we called “messy ministry.” We wanted to be pastors who led a church into messy situations where Jesus would shine. That sounds great, doesn’t it? Except, what we really meant was that we’d do ministry among upper-middle-class people who looked like us—it’s just that they were probably more secular or progressive, less conservative. In other words, we’d do ministry among those more progressive on social issues, and that would be our “messy ministry.” And it would have been for the church, though it wasn’t too messy for us because talking about the Bible in those contexts didn’t stretch us all that much.
But as the years went on, we’d often joke about how we got messy ministry. We had people come over those next few years who challenged us in ways we never expected. We had one member, years ago, go to jail for doing awful things. We got messy ministry, and I’m not sure we wanted it when we did.
You can probably relate. Sure, you want to follow Jesus and have life in him, but you want to have it on your terms.
And yet, I go back to the purpose statement of John’s gospel. The author of the book of John tells us his purpose for his book: “these [stories] are written,” he tells us, “so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (20:31). John wrote what he wrote so that we would believe certain truths about Jesus and that in believing, we would find life—the truest, fullest, deepest life, the kind of life that is truly life. That’s John’s purpose for you. Maybe that involves serving in the nursery. Or maybe it involves some other kind of messy ministry. But following Jesus through the mess of life, is the life that is truly life.
And if Jesus is the Savior of the world, not only can he deal with the mess out there, but he can also deal with the mess that that’s in here, in our hearts and in our church. And that is good news.
Let’s pray . . .
