3/8/26 Sermon

There are some people the world teaches us not to see. Not really see. We see the label. We see the rumor. We see the front they put up. We see whatever it is society has told us they are, and then we think we know them. We do it all the time. And if we’re being honest, we don’t just do it to other people. We do it to ourselves too. We all wear masks. We all have ways of hiding. We all have things we don’t want people to see. We have the face we put on at church, the face we put on at work, the face we put on when we’re scared, the face we put on when we’re trying not to fall apart. Most of us know how to survive by covering up who we really are.

I learned something about that years ago when Beverly and I lived in Richmond while I was in seminary. We lived in a rough neighborhood. It was one of those places where you heard gunshots at night and saw drug deals on corners and knew people were carrying way more pain than anybody ever talked about. It scared me sometimes. It really did. But I also came to love that neighborhood. Because for all the danger and all the chaos, it was full of human beings. Real human beings. Hurting human beings. People trying to survive however they knew how. And if you were willing to spend a little time with them, if you were willing to get past the labels and the fronts and the armor, sometimes the mask would slip for just a second and you’d see the person underneath.

There was a woman I used to see near the bus stop when Beverly needed the car and I had to ride to work. She’d ask me for a cigarette, and if I had one I’d give it to her and stand there and talk for a minute. She looked tough. I mean really tough. She had scars and bruises and makeup so thick it almost looked like a mask. And maybe it was. Maybe it had to be. Maybe that was what it took to get through the day. But every now and then, sitting there on that bench smoking a cigarette and talking, you’d catch a glimpse of the person underneath all of that. And what I remember most was not toughness. What I remember most was hurt. Deep hurt. The kind of hurt you carry so long it hardens onto your face and becomes part of how the world knows you.

And the truth is, it wasn’t just her. It was everywhere in that neighborhood. The young guy trying to act like a thug because that was safer than letting anybody know he was scared. The old man who stayed drunk all the time. The people always asking for money. The people trying to look harder, meaner, rougher, more untouchable than they really were. And if you were willing to stay in the conversation long enough, what you usually found under the mask was fear. Fear and pain. A person trying to survive. I even went to the funeral of a friend there, a brilliant guy who could talk theology with real depth, and yet he wore a mask too. A mask he thought he needed in order to make it. And that mask helped put him in the wrong place at the wrong time and got him killed. I watched that happen more than once.

And it stayed with me.

But I think I first really learned how to look past a mask from a man named Shorty. Shorty was one of those larger-than-life people. He was 6’7”, Native American, and one of my heroes when I was younger. He had this way of seeing right through people, not in a cruel way, but in a way that made you feel like maybe the real you had just been noticed. Every year we’d go on these huge camping trips in Cook Forest, Pennsylvania. There’d be over a couple hundred people there—friends and friends of friends and people nobody could quite explain how they got there. And one year, when I was maybe seventeen or eighteen, a young woman came who everyone noticed right away. She was beautiful, but she had that same look I’d later recognize in Richmond. She looked tough in a way that didn’t feel natural. It felt learned. It felt like armor.

The first day, everybody wanted to be around her. Everybody was laughing with her and hanging around her and acting like she was the most interesting person there. But it doesn’t take long for rumors to spread, and by the next night nobody wanted much to do with her. The rumor was that she was a prostitute. Or had been. And for most people, that was enough. That label was all they needed. They had their category. They had their judgment. They had their excuse to stop seeing her as a human being.

I was sitting around a fire playing guitar that night when Shorty came out of the darkness and told me to put it down and follow him. I remember protesting, but when a man that size tells a kid my size to do something and seems serious about it, you don’t really argue. He led me through the woods to another fire where she was sitting all alone, just staring into the flames. No one else around her. No one else wanting to be seen with her. The rumors had done their work. The mask was all anybody could see.

Shorty sat down across from her and just looked at her until she finally looked back. And then all he said was, “What’s your story?” That was it. No speech. No lecture. No judgment. No pretending. Just: “What’s your story?” And she burst into tears. Absolutely burst into tears. It was like the mask cracked right there in front of us. We sat there with her all night while the fire burned down and the sky slowly began to lighten, and she told us things I never imagined. She told us about abuse, about betrayal, about things done to her by people who were supposed to love her and protect her. She told us about addiction and survival and hopes she still had and the kind of life she wanted but didn’t know how to reach. And what I remember from that night is that for the first time, I didn’t see a label. I saw a whole person. Broken, yes. Wounded, yes. But fully, unmistakably human.

Out of all the things Shorty ever taught me, that may have been the best lesson. You do your best not to judge people by the mask. You do your best to understand that most of us are wearing one. You do your best to look beyond what the world says a person is and try to see who they actually are. I’m still not great at it. I fail at it all the time. But I think following Jesus has a whole lot to do with learning how to do exactly that.

Because that is what Jesus does in this story from John. Jesus sees a woman at a well, and before he says a word, the world has already told him who she’s supposed to be. She’s a woman, and men weren’t supposed to speak to women like that in public. She’s a Samaritan, and Jews and Samaritans had generations of hostility between them. She’s alone in the middle of the day, and that alone tells you something is off. Before Jesus ever opens his mouth, the categories are already there. The labels are already in place. The boundaries are already set. There’s every reason in the world, according to the world, for Jesus to keep walking.

But Jesus doesn’t keep walking.

He speaks to her.

And that might not sound like much to us, because we’ve heard this story so many times, but it’s everything. Jesus crosses right over the line everybody else agreed not to cross. He talks to her like she’s worth talking to. He engages her like she matters. He doesn’t reduce her to the categories hanging around her neck. He doesn’t begin with contempt. He doesn’t begin with avoidance. He begins with relationship. “Give me a drink.” That’s how this whole thing starts. With a simple human request. With vulnerability, even. With Jesus making contact where the world says there should be distance.

And from there the conversation just keeps going deeper. She starts at the level of social boundaries. Why are you talking to me? Jesus starts talking about living water. She thinks he means literal water. Jesus is talking about the thirst underneath the thirst. The deeper thing. The soul-level thing. The place in us that’s dry and aching and restless and always reaching for something that will finally satisfy and never quite finding it. And then, as only Jesus can do, he keeps pressing through all the polite layers and all the defenses and all the half-truths until suddenly this woman is standing there known. Not mocked. Not shamed. Known.

And that’s an important difference. Jesus tells the truth about her life, but he does it in a way that opens a door instead of slamming one shut. He’s not exposing her so he can humiliate her. He’s seeing her fully so he can set her free. He’s not interested in winning an argument or proving a point. He’s bringing her into the light. And when somebody has spent their life living behind a mask, being brought into the light can feel terrifying at first. But it’s also the beginning of healing.

That’s why this woman runs back to town the way she does. She doesn’t run back because Jesus gave her a moral scolding. She runs back because she’s been seen. Really seen. She’s encountered someone who looked all the way through the labels, all the way through the history, all the way through the pain, and still stayed in the conversation. Maybe for the first time in a long time, maybe for the first time ever, she’s been treated not as a problem, not as a scandal, not as an object lesson, but as a person. A person worth telling the truth to. A person worth revealing God to. A person worth sending.

And that’s part of what makes this story so beautiful. The woman everybody else would have written off becomes the first witness in the story. She goes back and tells the town, and they come because of her. The disciples, meanwhile, are still standing around confused because they can’t get past the fact that Jesus is talking to her in the first place. She gets it before they do. She moves before they do. She becomes a bearer of good news before they can even stop being scandalized by grace.

That’s how Jesus works a lot of the time. He keeps choosing the people the world has already sorted into the wrong category. He keeps seeing people the rest of us don’t want to see. He keeps loving people past the point where we would have backed away. He keeps treating people like they’re made in the image of God even when the rest of us are still stuck on the mask.

And the truth is, this isn’t just about how we look at other people. It’s about how Jesus looks at us too. Because we all have masks. We all have the version of ourselves we project. We all have our respectable mask, our angry mask, our strong mask, our church mask, our successful mask, our “I’m fine” mask. We all have that thing we hide behind because we are afraid that if people saw what was really there—the hurt, the shame, the need, the fear—they might walk away. So we hide. We manage. We perform. We keep the conversation on the surface. We stay thirsty and then pretend we aren’t.

And then Jesus meets us at the well.

And he starts talking.

And before long he’s past all the old lines we use to protect ourselves. Before long he’s naming the thirst under the thirst. Before long he is drawing us toward something deeper and truer than the self we have constructed just to survive. Before long the mask starts to slip. And that can be frightening. But it’s also mercy. Because Jesus doesn’t remove the mask in order to destroy us. He removes it in order to give us back to ourselves. He removes it in order to show us who we are beneath all the fear and all the performance and all the lies this world has told us about ourselves and about each other. He removes it because he knows that underneath all of that, there is still a beloved child of God there.

That’s what Shorty did that night, in his own rough, human way. He sat down across the fire from someone everybody else had reduced to a rumor and a category, and he asked her story. He didn’t ask what she was. He asked who she was. And that changed something. It changed how I saw her. It changed how I saw other people. It changed how I saw Jesus. Because that’s so much of what Jesus does. He asks for our story. He sits with us longer than anybody else does. He stays when other people leave. He tells the truth without taking away dignity. He sees all the way through us and somehow loves us more, not less.

So maybe the question for us this morning is pretty simple. Whose mask have we mistaken for their identity? Whom have we reduced to a label? Whom have we decided we already understand without ever once asking, “What’s your story?” And maybe just as importantly: what mask are we still hiding behind ourselves? What would it mean to let Jesus meet us there? What would it mean to let him get past the surface? What would it mean to believe that the one who knows us most deeply is also the one who loves us most completely?

Because the good news of this story isn’t just that Jesus was kind to one woman a long time ago. The good news is that this is who Jesus is. He’s still crossing boundaries. He’s still speaking to the people everybody else avoids. He’s still naming the thirst under the thirst. He’s still tearing down the old lies. He’s still pulling masks off gently and truthfully and lovingly. He’s still making whole human beings out of people the world has tried to break into pieces.

And if we’re going to follow him, then we have to learn to do the same. We have to become the kind of people who see past labels. The kind of people who are not shocked by grace. The kind of people who are willing to sit down across the fire, or across the table, or across the street, or across the sanctuary from another human being and ask, “What’s your story?” The kind of people who care less about what the world says someone is and more about who they are before God.

Because when the mask comes down, what we usually find is not some monster. What we usually find is a wounded person. A thirsty person. A scared person. A person made in the image of God. And sometimes, if we stay in that holy moment long enough, what we find is that grace was already there before we arrived.

Amen.