Have you ever noticed how often we find God starting conversations in the Bible? It was God who called to Adam and Eve while they were hiding, God who spoke to Abraham, God who called to Moses from a burning bush, God who woke Samuel late at night, God who whispered to Elijah when he was broken and depressed, God who caught up Isaiah into His throne room and even God who spoke to Jesus from heaven at His baptism and transfiguration. God causes encounters because God loves and desires conversation. We have seen that Jesus’ conversation with this Samaritan woman confronted the culture and disrupted her understanding. Jesus, by His action of sitting down and asking this woman for a drink, revealed that the divides of prejudice were unjust, ungodly and unacceptable; that there was no race that was superior or inferior, that the incarnate God, the very One in whose image we were all made, would not keep Himself, His love or even His conversation from anyone, of any race for any reason. Jesus didn’t just talk to her or at her, to use the language of John, He “used together” with her, He asked to drink from her cup. When Jesus asked this woman for a drink, He wasn’t just confronting the culture, He was also disrupting her understanding. This woman had only one experience in her life, Jews don’t use together with Samaritans. It’s not that she understood it or even agreed with it, but she had lived it, it was the only thing she had ever lived and so she assumed and believed this was the only way she or anyone else would ever live. Our culture affects our understanding and our beliefs far more than we realize or admit. Jesus is not merely trying to confront the culture around us, He desires to disrupt the understanding within us. There are things that we have all learned and believed that are more cultural than Scriptural, more our understanding than God’s character. This means that all of us have places in our thinking, believing and living that are out of God’s order. God creates conversation so that He can begin the work of restoring order, first in us and then through us. This morning I pray that we will not recoil at the idea of possibly being wrong, but that we will see that true redemption happens within the safety of conversation, where confrontation and disruption lead to the restoration of God’s order in our lives.