Dr. Ron Sumners
December 28, 2003
I had driven by the place many times. I passed it on the way to visit the small community Hospital in Tryon, North Carolina. I occasionally told myself that someday I needed to stop there and look.
One day “someday” came. I had time that day and was a bit in a contemplative mood. So, I stopped. The place was Polk County Cemetery.
As I parked, a darkened sky threatened rain. A lonely path invited me to walk through tombstones. The oak trees arched above me, providing a ceiling for the tombs. The tombstones were weathered and chipped and they spoke of the past.
Ruth Tacey is buried there. Born in the days of Napoleon, 1807. She died over a century ago-1877. I wondered what she looked like. Was she a mother and a grandmother? Did she laugh easily?
I stood on the same spot where a mother wept on a cold day some eight decades past. The tombstone read simply, “Baby Bolt”-Born and died December 10, 1910.
Eighteen year old Harry Ferguson was laid to rest in 1883 under these words, “Sleep sweetly tired, young pilgrim.” I wondered what wearied him so.
Then I saw it. It was chiseled into a tombstone on the northern end of the cemetery. The stone marked the destination of the body of Grace Llewellen Smith. No date of birth is listed, no date of death. Just the names of her two husbands, and this epitaph:
“Sleeps, but rests not.
Loved, but was loved not.
Tried to please, but pleased not.
Died as she lived - alone.”
I felt a chill of sadness. I wondered about Grace Llewellen Smith. I wondered about her life. I wondered if she had written the words, or just lived them. I wondered if she deserved the pain. I wondered if she was bitter or beaten by life. I wondered if she was plain. I wondered if she was pretty. I wondered why some lives are so fruitful while others are so futile.
I caught myself wondering, “Mrs. Smith, what broke your heart?” I read the words again, “loved, but was loved not...” Long nights. Empty beds. Silence. No response to messages left. No return to letters written. No love exchanged for love given. “Tried to please, but pleased not...” I could hear the hatchet of disappointment. “Died as she lived, alone.”
How many Grace Llewellen Smiths are there? How many people will die in the loneliness in which they are living? The homeless in Atlanta, the happy-hour hopper in L.A., a bag lady in Miami, the preacher in Nashville are all like Grace Llewellen Smith. They are people who doubt whether the world needs them. Any person who is convinced that no one really cares, any person who has been given a ring but never a heart; criticism but never a hand, a bed but never a rest, these are victims of futility. And unless someone intervenes, unless something happens, the epitaph of Grace Smith will be theirs.
I want to tell you about another tombstone. But this tombstone doesn’t mark the death of a person; it marks a birth.
Her eyes squint against the noonday sun. Her shoulders stoop under the weight of the water jar. Her feet trudge, stirring dust on the path. She keeps her eyes down, so she can dodge the stares of the others.
She is a Samaritan; she knows the sting of racism. She is a woman; she’s bumped her head on the ceiling of sexism. She’s been married to five men. Five different marriages. Five different beds. Five different reflections. She knows the sound of slamming doors.
She knows what it means to love and receive no love in return. Her current mate will not even give her his name. He only gives her a place to sleep. If there is a Grace Llewellen Smith in the New Testament, it is this woman. The epitaph of insignificance could have been hers. And it would have been except for an encounter with a stranger.
On this particular day, she came to the well at noon. Why hadn’t she gone in the early morning with the other women? Maybe she had. Maybe she just needed an extra draw of water on a hot day. Or maybe not. Maybe it was the other women she was avoiding. A walk in the hot sun was a small price to pay in order to escape their sharp tongues.
“Here she comes.”
“Have you heard? She’s got a new man?”
“They say she’s had five husbands.”
“Shhh. There she is.”
So, she came to the well at noon. She expected silence. She expected solitude. Instead, she found one who knew her better than she knew herself.
He was seated on the ground: legs outstretched, hands folded. She stopped and looked at him. She looked around. No one was near. She looked back at him. He was obviously Jewish. What was he doing here? His eyes opened and hers ducked in embarrassment. She went quickly about her task.
Sensing her discomfort, Jesus asked her for water. But she was too streetwise to think that all he wanted was a drink. “Since when does a Jew ask a Samaritan girl for water?” She wanted to know what he really had in mind. Her intuition was partly correct. He was interested in more than water. He was interested in her heart.
They talked. She could not remember the last time a man had spoken to her with respect. He told her about a spring of water that would quench, not the thirst of the throat, but of the soul.
That intrigued her. “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”
“Go, call your husband and come back,” he said. Her heart must have sunk. Here was a Jew who didn’t care if she was a Samaritan. Here was a man who didn’t look down on her as a woman.
Here was the closet thing to gentleness she’d ever seen. And now he was talking to her about....that! Anything but that. Maybe she wanted to change the subject. Perhaps she wanted to leave, but she stayed. And she told the truth.
“I have no husband,” she said. Kindness has a way of inviting honesty.
You probably know the rest of the story. I wish you didn’t. I wish you were hearing it for the first time. For if you were, you’d be wide-eyed as you waited to see what Jesus would do next. Why? Because you’ve wanted to do the same thing! You’ve wanted to take off the mask. You’ve wanted to stop pretending. You’ve wondered what God would do if you opened your cobweb-covered door of secret sin.
This woman wondered what Jesus would do. She must have wondered if the kindness would cease when the truth was revealed. “He will be angry. He will leave. He will think I’m worthless.”
If you’ve had the same anxieties, then get out your mental pencil because you’ll want to underline Jesus’ answer. He said, “You’re right. You have had five husbands and the man you are with now won’t even give you a name.”
No criticism? No anger? No what-kind-of-mess-have-you-made-of-your-life lectures?
No. It wasn’t perfection that Jesus was seeking, it was honesty.
The woman was amazed? “I can see that you are a prophet.” Then she asked the question that revealed the gaping hole in her soul. “Where is God? My people say He is on the mountain. Your people say he is in Jerusalem. I don’t know where He is.”
I would love to have seen the expression of Jesus’ face as he heard those words. Did His eyes water? Did He smile. Did He look into the clouds and wink at His father? Of all the places to find
a hungry heart; Samaria? Of all the Samaritans to be searching for God, a woman? Of all the women to want to find God, a five time divorcee? And of all the people to be chosen to personally receive the secret of the ages; an outcast among outcasts! The most “insignificant” person in the region!
It is remarkable! Jesus didn’t reveal the secret to King Herod. He didn’t request an audience of the Sanhedrin and tell them the news. It wasn’t within the colonnades of a Roman court that He announced His identity.
No, it was in the shade of a wall in a rejected land to an ostracized woman. His eyes must have danced as He told the secret, “I am the Messiah.”
The most important phrase in the chapter is easily overlooked. “Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, ‘Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?’”
Don’t miss the drama of the moment. Look at her eyes, wide with excitement. Watch her as she scrambles to her feet, takes one last look at this grinning Nazarene, turns and runs right into the burly chest of Peter. She almost falls, regains her balance, and hotfoots it toward town.
Did you notice what she forgot? She forgot her water jar. She left it behind the jug that caused the sag in her shoulders. She left behind the burden she had brought. Suddenly the shame of the tattered romances disappeared. Suddenly, the insignificance of her life was swallowed by the significance of the moment. “God is here! God has come! God cares... for me!”
That is why she forgot the water jar. That is why she ran to the city. That is why she grabbed the first person she saw and announced her discovery, “I just talked to a man who knows everything I ever did...and He loves me anyway!”
The disciples offered Jesus some food. He refused it. He had just been fed. He had taken a life that was drifting and given it direction. He was exuberant!
“Look!” He announced to the disciples, pointing at the woman who was running to the village. “Vast fields of human souls are ripe for salvation and are ready to be harvested.”
For some of you the story of these two women; Grace Llewellen Smith and the Samaritan woman is touching but distant. You belong. You are needed and you know it. You’ve got more friends than you can visit and more tasks than you can accomplish. Insignificance will not be chiseled on your tombstone. Be thankful!
But others of you are different. You paused at the epitaph because it was yours. You see the face of Grace Smith when you look in the mirror. You know why the Samaritan woman was avoiding people. You do the same thing. You know what its like to have no one to sit by you in the cafeteria. You’ve wondered what it would be like to have one good friend. You’ve been in love and you wonder if it is worth the pain to do it again. And you, too, have wondered where in the world God is.
A little girl in Atlanta attended a mission VBS that our youth conducted. She was frail and pale, wearing a dress several sizes too big. She was hungry at meal time but always saved some to take home because often there would be no supper. Old and new bruises spoke of physical neglect and abuse. She heard our young people talk about Jesus all week. On the final day, she came forward and asked, “Does Jesus love girls like me?”
Again, I would love to have seen Jesus’ face when that tiny prayer reached His throne. For indeed, it was a prayer. An earnest prayer that a good God in heaven would remember a forgotten soul on earth. A prayer that God’s grace would peep into the cracks and cover one that the world had forgotten. A prayer to take a life that no one could use and use it as no one else could.
Not a prayer from the pulpit; but one from a bed in a nursing home. Not a prayer prayed confidently by a black-robed seminarian; but one whispered fearfully by a recovering alcoholic.
A prayer to do what God does best; take the common and make it spectacular. To once again take the rod and divide the sea. To take a peasant boy’s lunch and feed a multitude. To take mud and restore sight. To take three spikes and a wooden beam and make them the hope of humanity. To take a rejected woman and make her a missionary.
There are two graves in this sermon. The first is the lonely one in North Carolina. The grave of Grace Llewellen Smith. She knew not love. She knew not gratification. She knew only the pain of the chisel as it carved this epitaph into her life.
“Sleeps, but rests not.
Loved, but was loved not.
Tried to please, but pleased not.
Died as she lived, alone.”
That, however, is not the only grave in this story. The second is near a water well. The tombstone? A water jug! A forgotten water jug. It has no words, but great meaning, for it is the burial place of insignificance.
Count no one worthless for whom Christ died!
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