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In 2017, I visited Jacob's Well. We stood in a circle and read today’s Gospel text. John tells us what happened when the women encountered Jesus. But, as I worked with the text this week, I wondered what the story might sound like if it was told by the woman, rather than a narrator. So imagine, for a moment, that she is the one telling the story. As you listen, notice the conversation is like a chess match—each question invites the conversation to deepen. I did not go to the well that day looking for God. I went because the jar was empty. You know how life is. Morning comes, the sun climbs higher than you expect, and before long the ordinary tasks are piling up: Bread to bake; Water to draw. Work that does not ask what kind of person you are—it simply asks to be done. So I took my jar and walked the familiar road to Jacob’s well. It was the middle of the day. No shade, no breeze. I preferred it that way. If you go early in the morning, everyone is there. The conversations begin before the bucket even touches the water. People talk about crops, about marriages, about children. And sometimes about other people’s lives. My life has been the subject of those conversations. So, I go at noon. Alone. But that day there was a man sitting beside the well. At first, I thought he must be a traveler resting his feet. The dust on his robe said he had come a long way. But when I looked more closely, I saw something else. He was a Judean. Now you have to understand something about that. Judeans and Samaritans do not usually share wells, cups, or conversations. We have our mountain, they have their temple, and between those two places lies a long history of arguments. So I lowered my eyes and went about my work. If I kept quiet, perhaps he would too. But then he spoke. “Give me a drink.” I looked up. Surely, I had misunderstood. “You are a Judean,” I said, “and I am a woman of Samaria. How is it that you ask me for a drink?” He did not apologize. He did not withdraw the request. Instead, he said something even more strange. “If you knew the gift of God,” he said, “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.” Now I have drawn water from that well since I was a kid. My parents did. My grandparents did. The well is deep, and the water is good, but no one draws it without a rope and a jar. I looked at his empty hands. “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get this living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well?” He did not laugh at my question. “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again. But those who drink the water I give will never thirst. The water I give will become a spring inside you, giving eternal life.” A spring inside me? That was a bold claim. And if it was true, it would change everything. “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” Then he did something unexpected. He said, “Go call your husband.” Now that is the moment when most people begin telling my story as if it were only about my past. I answered him honestly. “I have no husband.” And he looked at me—not the way people in town look when they think they already know who you are. He looked at me as if he could see the whole of my life at once. “You are right,” he said. “You have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.” He said it plainly. No accusation. Just truth. This man knew my story. All of it. And yet he was still speaking to me. “Sir, I see that you are a prophet.” And if he was a prophet, then there was a question I had always wondered about: “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain,” I said, “But you Judeans say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” I still don’t fully understand his answer. But I remember the way he said it—as if the world we thought we understood was already passing away: “The hour is coming,” he said, “when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. The true worshipers will worship in spirit and truth.” Not here. Not there. Something larger. I thought of the promise our people had always carried. “I know that Messiah is coming,” I told him. “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” And then he said it. “I am he.” Right there beside the well….in the middle of my ordinary day. In that moment the world shifted. The God our ancestors argued about on mountains and in temples was not far away at all. He was sitting beside me, asking for a drink. About that time his disciples came back from town. They looked surprised to see him talking to me, though none of them said a word. But by then I had forgotten why I came. Somewhere beside the well my jar was still sitting on the ground. Because suddenly the water I came for no longer seemed like the most important thing in the world. I ran back to town….to the same people who gossiped about me. “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! Can he be the Messiah?” They came. Many believed because of my testimony. But later they said something even better. “It is no longer because of your testimony that we believe,” they told me. “Now we have heard for ourselves.” And that is how encounter works. You come to the well carrying whatever jar life has given you—your history, your reputation, the ordinary work of your days, the burdens that seem overwhelming… And Christ meets you there. He speaks your truth. He offers living water. And before you know it, the jar that once defined your life is sitting forgotten beside the well. Because the water you were looking for is no longer something you carry in your hands. It has become a spring within you. God is alive. God is among us. God is here. God is now. Come and see.

The Feast of the Transfiguration is August 6th of each year. The Transfiguration is also celebrated each year on the Last Sunday After the Epiphany as the culmination of a series of events in which Jesus is manifested as the Anointed One, the Messiah, the Son of God. And that is fitting, for it is indeed an epiphany, a manifestation or showing forth of God in Christ. It is, perhaps, the most vivid such manifestation in the Gospels, at least prior to the Resurrection. Indeed, it seems to be a prefiguration, or a foretaste, of the resurrection appearances, and even a foretaste of the more direct vision of God that we hope to enjoy for all eternity when, as St. Paul tells us, we shall see him not as through a glass, darkly, but face to face. It must have been quite an experience for Peter, James, and John; one that they would never forget. In fact, Peter refers to it in the passage we read in today's Epistle. Very likely it's a story Peter often told to the early Christians. It was really something to see Jesus talking with those long-dead heroes of the faith, Moses and Elijah. Did you ever stop to wonder how they knew it was Moses and Elijah? How could they have known, except that God must have inspired them with this knowledge. But then, seeing Moses and Elijah wouldn't have been half as awesome as seeing the transfigured Jesus Christ – someone they knew well, with whom they had traveled and shared meals and conversed day after day. No wonder we are told that Peter didn't know what he was saying! And then a cloud came and overshadowed them, and they heard the voice of God: “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” Well! There couldn't have been a clearer manifestation, a clearer statement from God of just who Jesus was. “This is my Son, the Beloved.” Just in case they hadn't understood this before, God makes it perfectly clear. Let's focus now on what God said next: “Listen to him!” Our NRSV translation has an exclamation point after that sentence – as well it should. These three words could form the basis for numerous sermons and countless meditations. Listen to him. We can't go wrong if we just listen to Jesus. We would do well to make these words our focus: “Listen to him!” How do we do that? Does Jesus still speak to us? When and where does Jesus speak to us? There are probably a lot of answers to that question, but here are just a few. Jesus speaks to us in the words of Holy Scripture, and especially in the words of the four Gospels, which tell us about his life and teachings. Spending a little time each day with our Bibles – reading, praying, and thinking about what Jesus is saying to us in these words – will certainly contribute a great deal toward our ability to “listen to him,” to hear his voice. We are fortunate to belong to a Christian tradition that encourages us to search the Scriptures for meaning and that embraces the possibility that there may be many different meanings for a passage from the Bible. We should take advantage of that freedom and open ourselves to the possibility of transfiguration. Jesus also speaks to us through other people. Our Christian friends have much to say that can inspire us. That’s why we study in groups and worship in groups and often carry out our ministries in groups. Jesus also calls to us through people who are in need. He said, “Whatever you do for the least of these my brothers and sisters, you do unto me.” He also says whatever we don’t do for them, we don’t do for him. We can help in many ways but God sends people into our lives each day. The child in the detention center, the woman who was abused as a child, the veteran struggling with PTSD, those who rely on 4Saints & Friends Food Pantry, families whose hearts are made glad by Laundry Love, those suffering from leprosy who are cared for and fed because of Hopewallah. The “least of these” might be one who says, “I was down in the dumps and you smiled at me?” I had the privilege of serving as Interim Rector at St. John’s Church in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. St. John’s Church owns about an acre of land in Grand Teton National Park and on it sits The Chapel of the Transfiguration. Gay was commissioned to write an icon to be displayed on the wall of the chapel. She had several patterns she was considering. I took the examples with me to the weekday Eucharist on day and asked Lou, one of our regular attendees at that service, which one she liked best. She looked at them and pointed to one with some enthusiasm. “That one!” she said. “What is it about that one?” I asked. She said, “In that one, Jesus and the disciples are not only ascending the mountain, they are also coming down.” I told Gay and that is the pattern she used. You see, Lou’s husband was a mountain climber. He ascended Mt. Everist with Jim Whitaker. But he didn’t come down. He lost his life there. For Lou, it was very personal and very important to remember that Jesus, Peter, James, and John came down, came back, continued on their journey. Jesus spoke to Gay and me through Lou! And here's one more way that we might hear Jesus speaking to us: in the silence. Do you remember the story of Elijah waiting for God in the cave? “Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake was a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.” What kind of a sound does sheer silence make? I think we all remember an earlier translation that said: “a still small voice.” We know what that sounds like, don't we? And perhaps it is the same thing, because it is all too easy to drown out that still small voice with wind and earthquake and fire and the like. Maybe we need to tune out and turn off before we can begin to listen. Turn off the TV for a while, sign off on the Internet, and, most of all, tune out the internal noise that is the hardest of all to still. To put it bluntly, we need to shut up once in a while, even in our prayers. The kind of prayer where we talk to God and tell him about our life and how it is going and the things we are worried about and so forth, is good, but there comes a time when we need to stop even doing that, and just listen. Is it possible to sit still and listen for five minutes? Then do that. Then maybe you can go for10 or 15 or even 20 minutes. If the internal noise starts up again, bring yourself back to the silence with some small word like “Listen” or just “Jesus.” What sound will you hear in the silence? When our ears are opened to listen for the divine voice, what we hear may be an epiphany we ne.  The Holy Spirit is actively at work in the world, our SaviorJesus Christ is with us every moment, until the end of the ages, just as he promised he would be. We must simply take the time to listen, and to look for the one who is the light of the world, the one whose light we shall one day see face to face. As St. Peter tells us in today's reading: “You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” Amen 1