The Table We Keep Setting

When Jesus told the Samaritan woman that true worshipers would worship the Father in spirit and truth, He was dismantling every velvet rope religion had ever erected. Not this mountain, not that temple — but something wilder, more honest, more dangerous to the gatekeepers.

Rachel Held Evans once wrote about communion tables that kept getting longer, chairs that kept being added. That image haunts me when I read John 4. Here was a woman excluded five times over — wrong ethnicity, wrong gender, wrong history, wrong theology, wrong mountain — and Jesus sat down at her well like He had nowhere else to be.

Worship in spirit and truth is not a purity test. It is aeli­mination of purity tests. A church in Portland I once visited had written above its entrance: "No ID check at the door of God." Inside, a recovering addict read the Psalms aloud while a retired professor held the bread, while a teenager who was not sure she believed anything yet poured the cup. That was not chaos. That was what Jesus described — worship unshackled from who is worthy enough to offer it.

Spirit and truth means we stop performing reverence and start practicing it. We stop curating who belongs at the table and start setting more places. The Samaritan woman left her water jar and ran to tell her whole city. True worship always sends us back toward the people we were taught to avoid.