Don’t Leave Empty - Ecumenical Service for Healing and Wholeness
Author: Pastor Carolyn Hetrick
October 15, 2025
I’ve always wondered what really brought the woman to the
well at noon? We don’t actually know. What if she is just weary and coming to
the well at all today has taken everything? What if she has come to the well a
second time, because the water she had before spilled? Now she is beating herself
up on the inside? She has had to navigate six marriages, perhaps having been married
young to an older man who died and then the law passed her on to his brothers.
Who wouldn’t be depressed or even traumatized to have so little agency in one’s
own life? What if she carries the weight of losing a pregnancy? In a world
where being childless might be believed to be a curse, how would that feel? Day
in and day out. Being full of woundedness and maybe regrets.
Maybe she carries an emptiness that cannot be filled no
matter how many times she comes to the well. In our time so many people find
loneliness to be an aching chasm, yet we dare not speak of it for fear of
scaring off the very human connections we long for. How automatically do we
hide our needs, our weaknesses, and our vulnerabilities, as if what’s most
human, real, and authentic about us must be walled off for the sake of
impressing?
The author Frank Bruni, writing about losing sight in one
eye, noting that unless it is patently physically obvious, we have no idea what
other people are going through. He muses that if only we wore signs listing our
hidden troubles, then we might have more grace with each other. Each of us
carries our struggles and unfulfilled hopes and maybe on our worst days, we are
like the woman coming to a well, who have come to expect little. Maybe our
faith feels shrunken. Maybe we endure times where we do what we have to do, hoping
no one wants to have a conversation for fear we will crumble. Our aching is not
just physical.
But when the woman sees the rabbi Jesus, there is one
more pain. Centuries of people from Judea have walled Samaritans out of their
society with laws and mistreatment. Maybe she resents what has been taken from
her people or wonders what he might do if given the chance. The long unhealed
history of insults, maybe even violence, is in the background. Maybe her
initial give and take is trying to be strong while afraid. We live in a time
when so many of us feel the weight and pain of the disintegration of relationships
over ideas. We too are increasingly walled off.
Wherever we feel the heat and depleted places, Jesus has
joined us, thirsty and tired. It’s disarming that Jesus tells the woman he’s
thirsty. He chooses to be vulnerable to open the door to healing wounds no one
can see. As part of his catechetical
series for the Holy Year 2025, themed "Jesus Christ, our hope," the
late Pope Francis reflected on Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman at the
well. For her the encounter is quite unexpected. But Jesus chose this- Jesus
chose to pass through Samaria and stop at that very place and time, waiting for
her.
When Jesus asks for a drink, it echoes "a cry --
silent at times -- that meets us every day and asks us to take care of someone
else's thirst…How many say 'give me a drink' to us -- in our family, at work,
in other places we find ourselves,…They thirst for closeness, for attention,
for a listening ear" and for the Word of God. So do we.
That is why we are here.
This place is intended to be an oasis where we can drink.
‘Give me a drink' is a cry heard in our society, where the frenetic pace, the
rush to consume, and especially a culture of indifference, generate dry
(spaces) and interior emptiness."[1]
Yet, "Give me a drink" – in Jesus’ hands- reveals
a divine desire to begin a relationship and offer the "living water"
of grace.
Jesus' knowledge of a difficult life is not a source of
judgment, but a starting point for healing. Jesus comes along and sees the
woman. He sees the whole of her. The past. The present. The future. Who she has been. What she yearns for. How she hurts. All that she might become. And he names it all.[2] For her and for us.
But he names it all without shaming, castigating, or
condemning her. That’s the spin we put on this story. He makes her feel not judged but loved. Not
exposed but shielded. Not diminished but
restored. He doesn’t shy away from the
painful, ugly, broken stuff. Instead, he
allows the truth of who she is to come to the surface.
He doesn’t discourage her questions, instead they become
the vehicle for her to be restored. She is no longer only who the world allows
her to be.
Despite whatever else will still be a struggle, she
becomes a good news teller, invited to read her own story, personally and
communally, in a new light. Her healing continued as she spoke and was heard and
drew others to Jesus.
Jesus meets us this night in all our weary, wounded and
empty places. Tonight, we have written on papers unfilled hopes and longings
and placed them at this font of water. It’s
our well as we remember that wells and water are a symbol of new life.
Though the papers seem light, what they represent is
heavy. "Even if our stories seem heavy, complicated, perhaps even ruined,
we always have the chance to surrender them to God and begin our journey again.
"God is mercy and always awaits us."
To claim God’s good news, much less proclaim it to
others, we must first lay the weight of our own story at the feet of the Lord,
surrendering to him the weight of it. What is on these papers and what we still
have in our hearts and minds and souls, Jesus knows and is here, here for us to
offer healing, mercy, dignity and community.
Imagine Jesus saying to you, “I see you for who you are,
and I love you. Now see who I am. The
one in whom you can find freedom, love, healing, and transformation. Spirit and Truth. Eternal life. Living Water. Take this in and
let it fill you.” Let it flow over you.
Upon realizing who Jesus is, the woman left behind her
water jar -- a symbol, Francis wrote, of her past burdens. "Her past is no
longer a weight.” She leaves the jar,
but she does not leave the well empty. This is my prayer for each of us. That
in some way we do not leave empty. Beloveds, let us soak up the gospel and join
our hearts in prayer: Jesus, thank you for meeting us here. Thank you for the
gift of being understood, welcomed, forgiven and made whole. Empty us of what
has filled us that weighs us down. Fill
us with your grace and love in our wounded, weary and depleted spaces. Open us
to all the ways we can know your healing and mercy and bear it for others, so
that truly living flows, like water beyond tears, into new life. AMEN.
[1] Pope Francis, https://www.usccb.org/news/2023/help-those-who-are-thirsty-closeness-attention-gospel-pope-says
[2] https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2561-the-woman-at-the-well-2; by debie thomas
Copyright Rev. Carolyn K. Hetrick, 2025 All rights
reserved. May not be reproduced in whole or in part without written
permission.
Sermon Text: John 4:4-29 (paraphrase)
(Jesus) had to go through Samaria. 5 So
he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob
had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was
there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was
about noon. 7 A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and
Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 9 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.) 10 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.” 11 The woman
said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get
that living water? 12 Are you greater than our
ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well and with his sons and his flocks drank
from it?” 13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who
drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 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.” 15 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.”
16 Jesus
said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” 17 The
woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in
saying, ‘I have no husband,’ 18 for you have had
five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said
is true!” 19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I see
that you are a prophet… I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called
Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” 26 Jesus
said to her, “I am he,[i] the
one who is speaking to you.”
28 Then
the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the
people, 29 “Come and see a man who told me
everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?”
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