TRY NOT TO SNEEZE ON THE ELEVATOR

The other day, I was in the elevator when I noticed a woman hurrying to catch it just as the doors were beginning to close.  Quickly, I hit the open doors button and the woman squeezed in just in time.  She immediately turned to face the door and put her face into her elbow.

“Oh, you’re going to regret that,” she said to me, “because I’m about to sneeze.”

Yesterday I was working on updating the cover to my book Prayers in the Pandemic which I wrote during 2020, during lockdowns and quarantines, during mask-wearing and one-way aisles in the grocery store.  I wrote a prayer a day for many days and posted them on Facebook, hoping they might provide some comfort.

It’s been six years, but Covid and what happened in 2020 have changed our lives forever.  Not just in the self-checkout lanes that are ubiquitous now in every grocery store, not just in our children being attached to a screen everywhere from home to school and everywhere in between. 

Covid changed how we communicate with each other, in good ways and in bad.  In those early days of the lockdown, I shared a virtual lunch with a friend as she and I Facetimed each other and ate our lunches in front of each other.  At church, we took advantage of the beautiful Florida weather and gathered outside for Morning Prayer.  Every Tuesday, I met a friend of mine at her church, and we walked her church’s prayer labyrinth and prayed.  Somedays, I gathered with friends in the front yard of our former pastor’s house for fellowship, for communion, for reminders that God was indeed present everywhere.

But the truth is that Covid enabled the digital world to become the primary method of communication in the world.  Younger generations now date less, hang out with friends less.  They are content to just message each other on their phones.  There’s a certain safety there.

On Monday, I received my very first iron infusion.  It was not a private room.  And shortly after they brought me back and started to get me hooked up, they brought another woman, an older woman back for her infusion.  I don’t know what she was there for.  I’m always hesitant to ask in those situations because your health information should be private.  You shouldn’t feel like you need to share that.

We didn’t speak to each other at first, even after the nurses left us and the only reason we wound up speaking at all was because when the nurse came in to hook me up to my bag of iron, the bag of iron looked like blood.  It looked like I was getting a blood transfusion and so I commented to the nurse about that and when he left, the other patient spoke up commenting on my blood-colored medicine.  And so I wound up sharing a bit of my story.

Since it was my first infusion, she gave me some tips—she told me not to be afraid to tell them you needed to use the restroom.  And I was a little afraid because the way you communicated that you needed help with something was to ring a little bell they gave you, like I was some kind of Downton Abbey dowager summoning the servants.

In today’s reading, Jesus encounters a Samaritan woman at the well.  It’s a story we are all probably familiar with.  Jesus asks the woman for some water.  She comments on how their two people are not on exactly water-getting terms.  Jesus mentions the living water he can give her.  The woman totally misses the point and scoffs telling Him, “You don’t even have a bucket.”

Here is the interesting thing about the gospels.  Virtually every story is an encounter story.  We see little of Jesus’ interior life, His thoughts, His hopes, His doubts.  We see a little bit of it at Gethsemane.  We are told sometimes that Jesus went off by Himself to pray.  I call Jesus the extroverted introvert.  He loves people, but He needs time to recharge alone.  But most of what happens with Jesus happens in conversation. 

And it’s why His words on the cross, “My God, my God why have You forsaken me?” are so devastating.  He is, in the end, alone, but that’s a sermon for another day given by someone far more knowledgeable about the context and the meaning of those words.

But today’s reading is about encounter.  And it only happens because the Samaritan woman is at the well at the wrong time.  She is there in the heat of the day.  It’s the worst possible time to go get water.  But she chooses that time because she hopes she will be alone.  She is a pariah because of her fluid relationships with men.  And she’s tired of it.  She’s tired of the judgement and gossip and the hate.

So she comes to the well to get water and instead finds there is a Jewish man already there waiting for her.

She might have turned around, but she needed the water.

She did not need conversation, but Jesus spoke anyway.

And note this—He didn’t start by declaring Himself the Messiah and sermonizing.

He began with small talk.  “Could I have some water?”

And that small talk opened a door so wide, that the Samaritan woman abandoned her water, and ran off back to town, back to the people who ridiculed her and became an evangelist.

I personally am horrible at small talk.  When I would visit people in the hospital as a chaplain.  I knew I couldn’t just walk into a stranger’s room and lead with, “So, what shall we pray for today?”  I knew I needed to make small talk, ask them why they were there, who was there with them, who they had at home, what kind of community they could expect to help them. 

It was not easy for me.  My first question was “What brought you to the hospital,” and after multiple people answered with a grin, “the ambulance,” I reworded that question.

It is not necessary for us to have a spiritual epiphany with every stranger we meet on the elevator, but I do think that engaging with people, encountering people in their moment, can open the doors where spiritual epiphanies can happen, not just for the strangers we speak to but for us.  I can’t tell you the number of times God has appeared to me as a stranger.

So this reflection this morning is one for me too.  I’m asking you to do something, but I’m reminding myself that I need to do it more, to engage more, to not be afraid to share the same breath with people even if they have just walked into your elevator and sneezed.

Amen.