A Reconciling Love
Our church's covenant includes a promise to care for all people, reconciling ourselves to them in love. That kind of love feels harder than ever - and more important than ever.
‘A Reconciling Love,’ a sermon on John 4:5-42, was preached on March 22, 2026, at the Church of Christ at Dartmouth College. It was the 5th and final sermon in a Lenten series on the words of our church covenant. A livestream of the service can be seen on the church’s YouTube channel.
We Americans don’t much like each other, these days.
Each of us likes some of us, of course.
But across the political lines that divide us
there is less and less
love lost.
Affective polarization
is what political scientists call it:
the gap between how warmly we feel
toward members of our own political party
and how warmly we feel toward members
of the other political party.
That gap is increasing.
And it’s increasing
not because we like people in our own political party
more than we used to
but because we like people in the other political party
less.
Significant majorities of people who are Republicans
say that people who are Democrats are closed-minded,
dishonest, immoral, and unintelligent.
Significant majorities of people who are Democrats
say that people who are Republicans are closed-minded,
dishonest, immoral, and unintelligent.[i]
One political science paper described the situation this way:
out-party hate is now stronger than in-party love.[ii]
We hate the Other, in other words,
more than we love those like ourselves.
And it is almost certainly not a coincidence
that we are also more geographically and culturally sorted
than ever before and therefore less likely than ever before
to have meaningful interactions with people not like ourselves.
We dislike each other more than ever.
And we know each other less than ever.
It’s not exactly a recipe
for living together well.
Our covenantal promise to care for all people,
reconciling ourselves to them in love,
feels like a far-away dream right about now.
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But I imagine it felt like a far-away dream back then, too —
on that day in the region of Samaria
when Jesus and a Samaritan woman had a conversation.
Jesus and his disciples are heading north from Judea,
back home to Galilee, when they stop for a mid-day rest
near a small city in southern Samaria.
Jesus is tired —
he’s resting by a well on the outskirts of town
while his disciples are off finding food.
When a Samaritan woman approaches,
water jar in hand,
he asks her for a drink.
A simple request and a radical act.
Her answer tells that truth.
How is it that you, a Jew,
ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?
Jewish men did not speak to unknown women.
And Jews and Samaritans did their best not to speak at all.
Jesus’s question reaches
across the social divide between men and women,
and across a chasm of religious and ethnic difference —
an enmity that was old and deep.
Jews and Samaritans were once one people —
united in a single kingdom.
But no longer.
What divided them was now all anyone could see.
And Jews and Samaritans did have their differences.
Differences in what they included in Holy Scripture.
Differences in the ethnic purity of their societies.
Differences in their understanding of sacred geography.[iii]
And by Jesus’s time,
those differences had hardened into a deep dislike —
so much so that later in John’s Gospel, in a heated argument,
someone calls Jesus a Samaritan.
As a slur.
They didn’t much like each other,
Jews and Samaritans.
__
But Jesus steps right across that line.
And the Samaritan woman meets him there.
And what transpires between them
is the longest conversation Jesus has
with any one individual
in any of the four Gospels.
It’s a conversation that begins with water
and ends with the Samaritan woman becoming
the first person to whom Jesus reveals his true identity
and then, the first evangelist.[iv]
In Eastern Orthodox tradition, she is named
Photini,
which means luminous one.
__
And I imagine she did shine
after that long talk with Jesus.
There’s a moment in the middle
when we can almost see the lights turn on.
They’ve been talking about water —
or, she’s been talking about water
while he talks about gifts from God —
when he abruptly changes the subject.
He tells her to go call her husband.
And she answers “I have none.”
True, he says,
“you have had five husbands and the one
you have now is not your husband.”
What a story those words tell.
In those days, women had little or no say
in who they married,
they had no right to divorce,
and a woman without a husband
was often a woman without resources.
“You have had five husbands” is a story
that aches with hardship and loss.
And in acknowledging, without a trace of judgment,
the truth of what her life has held, his words say:
I see you,
I see your humanity,
I see what your heart has been through.[v]
Jesus looked across a deep and bitter divide
and saw not a despised Other
but a tender human heart.
And as she felt herself seen,
she saw him.
Not just a Jewish man, but a prophet.
And not just a prophet, but the Messiah.
And Photini, luminous, went and told that truth.
__
Jesus saw her.
Not as unreachable, unworthy and Other.
But as a human being held within the mercy of God.
We need to re-learn
how to see one another
like that.
Because whether we like it or not, we —
I mean the big we,
us and all of the people we like to call them —
need to find a way to live together
on this one blue-marble planet that we share.
And by ‘live together,’
I don’t mean papering over real and substantive differences;
I don’t mean giving people a free pass on bad behavior;
I don’t mean compromising on the values we hold dear.
I do mean being willing
to walk to the brink of what divides us
and to see on the other side
not the despised Other but a human life,
one as fully within the reach of God’s mercy as we are —
to see through the categories
that we allow to define our likes and our dislikes,
clear through to the shared humanity
that is more foundational, still.
And even as I say that,
I can hear my own objections —
some that sound a little petulant, like, “but they started it,”
and some that come from a more tender place,
like, “they have no interest in seeing my humanity,
why should I have to look for theirs?”
But in the midst of all that — that thicket of ‘they’ —
there’s Jesus, calling us across
our great divides.
And he sees us, too.
He sees our fear, our anger.
He sees our sorrow at what we’ve become.
And he calls us over, calls us in, calls us beloved.
Come and see, he says, what ripples might flow
from a gesture of connection,
a small act of kindness.
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There are a couple of poets
who’ve been helping me imagine
how to do that.
Naomi Shahib Nye, for one,
in her poem ‘Jerusalem.’
Each carries a tender spot, she writes,
something our lives forgot to give us.[vi]
What if we looked across those bitter divides
with that truth in mind?
What might grow in us,
between us?
Here’s Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer,
in her poem ‘The Spreading.’
Sometimes a seed of compassion
slips into my brain and lands in a place
where before only anger could grow.
These seeds appear
when I stop seeing humans
as only our actions and start
seeing all of us as walking wounds.
They appear when I see others
finding ways to be generous, to be kind.[vii]
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To learn to see our shared humanity
is to begin to heal what’s broken —
in the world and in ourselves, too.
And I think maybe the reconciling love of our covenant,
the reconciling love into which Jesus calls us,
begins there,
in the tenderness and woundedness of the humanity we share.
It doesn’t end there.
But it begins there.
And we could use a new beginning.
__
Yesterday afternoon,
several dozen of us gathered right here
for an interfaith vigil for peace and justice.
And I couldn’t help but feel
as if I was catching a glimpse, a foretaste,
of the kind of community that reconciling love can create.
Not because those of us gathered actually disliked each other
or needed to be reconciled, to be clear —
but simply because there we were,
in our luminous diversity, and our shared humanity,
in the ache of our grief and in our yearning for a better way.
And we prayed together
and we shared words together from our sacred traditions,
and we sang together, with one voice.
What we need is here,[viii] we sang.
Hold on, we sang.
Hold on, my dear ones, here comes the dawn.[ix]
And it was easy to believe that was true.
May it be so.
Amen.
[i] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/08/09/as-partisan-hostility-grows-signs-of-frustration-with-the-two-party-system/
[ii] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abe1715
[iii] Andrew Nagy-Benson, Commentary on John 4:5-42. Connections.
[iv] Debie Thomas, ‘The Woman at the Well.’ Journey with Jesus. 3/8/2020.
[v] Adapted from Amy Frykholm, ‘Living Water,’ Journey with Jesus. 3/1/2026.
[vi] Naomi Shahib Nye, ‘Jerusalem,’ in Red Suitcase, 1994.
[vii] Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, ‘The Spreading,’ on A Hundred Falling Veils, 2/10/2026.
[viii] ‘What We Need Is Here,’ by Amy McCreath
[ix] ‘Hold On,’ by Heidi Ann Wilson
And in that kind of love lies the future of Christianity.