Roger Ray, pastor
March 27, 2011 Lent 3
John 4:5-24It is never really advisable to preach a sermon in segments since the audience changes pretty dramatically from week to week. Those of you who were not here last week must simply take my word for the fact that today's gospel lesson is the other half a single piece of fabric in which John lays two mirror image conversations side by side.
5So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.
7 A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, 'Give me a drink'. 8(His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 9The Samaritan woman said to him, 'How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?' (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 10Jesus answered her, 'If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, "Give me a drink", you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.' 11The woman said to him, 'Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?' 13Jesus said to her, 'Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.' 15The woman said to him, 'Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.'
16 Jesus said to her, 'Go, call your husband, and come back.' 17The woman answered him, 'I have no husband.' Jesus said to her, 'You are right in saying, "I have no husband"; 18for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!' 19The woman said to him, 'Sir, I see that you are a prophet. 20Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.' 21Jesus said to her, 'Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. 24God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.'
Last Sunday we read the Nicodemus narrative in which Jesus has a conversation with a leading Jewish man under the cover of night. Today Dr. Trobisch has read the second portion, which is a conversation with a member of a rather hated racial minority and a woman at that, and they are talking in broad day light.
Nicodemus was a religious leader with whom Jesus might have talked in the open quite appropriately but he came sneaking around at night. In first century Jewish tradition, a woman doesn't speak to a man outside of her own family and certainly doesn't speak to a man in public.
This text doesn't look particularly sexy to our eyes but to it's original audience, this text begins with a good deal of tension. An unaccompanied woman is speaking to an unaccompanied man whom she does not know. A first century audience might have expected this Samaritan to proposition Jesus but it was actually Jesus who spoke first to her.
He is exhausted. He is leaning against a well. She came to draw water.... At least that is her ostensible purpose, and so he asks her for a drink of water. Like the "whites only" and "coloreds" drinking fountains of the Jim Crow south, she replies that since he is obviously a Jew, he probably wouldn't want to drink out of her jar.
There is taunting here.
The Jews and the Samaritans had a 500 year old racially fueled mutual hatred. At one point, when the Jews wouldn't let the Samaritans participate in Temple worship, they built their own temple on another mountain and the Jews eventually destroyed it.
When Jesus was a kid, some Samaritans came into Jerusalem just before the Passover and spread human bones around the temple, defiling it so that Passover services had to be canceled.... Both economically and religiously, it was tantamount to having to cancel Christmas in our day.
No one had to explain the polarized nature of this exchange to John's audience.
The issues, races and religions of such prejudice change through the centuries but we all know the name of the tune and the steps to the dance. In recent years we have seen the two party system in America become so rife with prejudice that it has resulted in shutting down progress on a host of important issues and literally causing the shut down of government in some cases.
What we can see very clearly is that as long as every issue is defined as being partisan, that no intelligent solution ever emerges and even the compromises which are finally unleashed out of this insane environment looks more like Frankenstein's monster than anything produced by intelligent and well intended statesmen.
But we're familiar with the polar battle lines. One is pro choice, the other is pro life. Both patting themselves on the backs for belonging to the moral camp while the lives of children and young women are reduced to being little more than political talking points.
The Samaritan woman at the well had come to the well alone, which could be interpreted to mean that she had already let go of the normal moral standards of that time and place in which women tended to perform such tasks in groups so that they could keep one another safe from inappropriate contact with men. You can see that as either being intentionally immoral or as being rather more liberated and non-conformist.
Still, faced with a lone Jewish man who was asking for a favor, she went right back to the familiar battle lines. "You are a Jew so you must think this. I am a Samaritan so I must behave this way."
There is almost always a good deal of truth behind racial and political prejudices. Not all Americans who travel abroad are ugly Americans but everyone who has traveled very much has met the ugly American. French people are not always irrationally arrogant but you don't have to spend 7 consecutive days in Paris to find out where that stereotype comes from.
You may recall a few years ago when Jesse Jackson, when talking about the immorality and irrationality of profiling, said that even he had become one of those people who became frightened when a group of black teenagers was walking behind him on a city street. The issue is that if we treat all black teens as if they have criminal intent.... If we treat all Republicans as if they are self serving aristocrats, and all Democrats as if they were lazy welfare junkies, and all Arabs as if they were terrorists, then we are likely to continue to find our prejudices confirmed over and over again.
When Jesus speaks to the Samaritan woman, he ignores her race baiting and makes the conversation personal. He didn't speak to her as someone who was a stereo-type of all Samaritan women, he spoke to her as an individual human being who had personal tragedies and vulnerabilities and who was in need of an opportunity to forgive herself and to have a fresh start.
Yes, it is true that a disproportionately large number of black male youths have criminal records.
But it is also true that when unemployment goes down the crime rate goes down even faster. Being afraid of the adolescent malcontents walking behind you on a dark city street is understandable but if you stop thinking of them as a stereotyped class and start to realize how angry that poverty and hopelessness can make young people then you realize that the solution to your fear is not more police and more prisons but more jobs that pay a living wage.
If getting a part time job at McDonalds is all that you can hope for in your future then turning to crime is a matter of survival. Prejudice is a kind of psychological short hand.... It allows you to form an opinion of blacks and whites, latinos and Asians, Republicans and Democrats, southerners and those other people..... "Yankee" doesn't seem to quite capture it does it?
My good friend, Ron Hertenstein, is a Republican, a retired Air Force Colonel, and you can well imagine that we sometimes have fairly spirited conversations about how to understand global events. But when Ron says that there has never been a terrorist who had a full-time job then he is articulating a point which conservative and liberal, Arab and American, Republican and Democrat needs to sit up and deal with as a fact, not a prejudice or an opinion, but a fact which cuts through the fog of prejudice and gets down to the real point of why our difference so often become irrationally expressed in violence.
Meaningful employment with a realistic expectation of earning a living wage could be the answer to the problems that we are trying to solve with airport security, deployed armies and air assaults against foreign nations. If every time you hear the word "Muslim" you immediately think "terrorist," you'll never remember the tried and true phrase, "it's the economy stupid."
Of course, it's not just the economy. And the differences between Jews and Samaritans had many more complex nuances than simple religious prejudice. There were some substantive issues, some annoying differences, and some competition for territory and resources. But Jesus wasn't Judaism and this woman wasn't the Samaritan nation.
He disarmingly cut through the surface junk that stood between them and spoke to the woman as an individual. In this particular case, she was a woman whose personal life had become a narrative unacceptable to either Jews or Samaritans... unacceptable to her family and her people..... the talk about living water may not have made immediate sense to her but what was unavoidable was that he knew her and yet he accepted her and spoke to her as a fully human person and that is what had been missing in her past five husbands and probably in her mother, father, siblings, neighbors, Samaritans, Jews, Republicans, Democrats and church folks.
I want to ask you to look at the front cover of your bulletin at those 8 points we re-print nearly every week. Let's look at points 4 and 5 again this morning:
4. By calling ourselves progressive, we mean that we are Christians who invite all people to participate in our community and worship life without insisting that they become like us in order to be acceptable (including but not limited to): believers and agnostics,
conventional Christians and questioning skeptics, women and men,
those of all sexual orientations and gender identities,
those of all races and cultures, those of all classes and abilities,
those who hope for a better world and those who have lost hope.
And we could add here: Samaritans or Jews, Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives, Fox News viewers or MSNBC fans. And this matters because of number 5:
5. Believe that the way we treat one another and other people is the fullest expression of our beliefs
A religion that needs to be better than the neighbor's religion.... Nationality which needs to see itself as being some how exceptional.... Classism or race identity which needs to be superior all add up to a religion that isn't worth keeping.
When people visit here they often want to know what it is that we believe but no matter what we tell them, after they hang out here for a few months, nothing we print on the cover of the bulletin matters unless the way we treat one another is obviously worthy of all of the high sounding things we say and sing about and pray about. May God bless our community to always be more than the surface issues, more than the printed page, more than the labels and prejudices of day.
As St John of the Cross warned his community five hundred years ago: We either pass the love test or we will fail entirely. Study hard my brothers and sisters because the love test comes at us every day.
