Sermon, March 27, 2011, Lent 3 - "Touchy Subjects"

“Touchy Subjects”, A Sermon preached by The Rev Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, March 27, 2011 at Church of the Ascension, Rochester, New York

7A 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.)
27Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?”(John 4:7-8,27)

There are some subjects that we all learned early in life were not appropriate to discuss in polite company, and two of the top ones on that list of taboos are religion and politics. After all, these are subjects upon which reasonable minds tend to differ and about which people tend to have rather strong opinions and feelings. If one wants to have polite cocktail party conversation, it’s probably not wise to venture into such explosive territory. Usually, we reserve such conversation for our closest circle of friends and family, and even then, only go on at length with those who most likely agree with us, for the most part. In some cultures religion and politics are so closely intertwined that its next to impossible to speak of one without the other. In our contemporary American culture, with our commitment to the separation of church and state, we try to keep the two in separate camps, but we are not always able to do so and indeed we are actually the most religious of Western secular democracies. These are topics that go to the heart of our very existence in human community, that touch upon our sense of identity as citizens of a country and of the world. It’s no wonder that they are areas that tend to arouse passion.

In the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well, we see Jesus breaking all kinds of social taboos. He talks religion and politics with the Samaritan woman, and even more startling he gets personal with her too, about her own life and about his identity. This on their first meeting! Jesus is not one to dance around important subjects. He is not one to be diplomatic or to worry about what folks will think of him. He goes where he wants to go and speaks with whom he wishes to speak about what most matters to him. Commentators have long noted that Jesus’ journey to Galilee from Jerusalem through Samaria seems to have been a deliberate choice on his part to travel through hostile territory, even though there were routes he could have taken that would have kept him in friendly territory all the way. He chose to travel among the foreigners even when he had other options available to him. And while traveling, he chose to engage those foreigners in genuine, authentic conversation.

For Jesus to speak to a Samaritan woman was not simply unusual, it was downright scandalous. Judeans and Samaritans were all descendants of Jacob, the Samaritans through Joseph and the Judeans through Judah. When the Israelites were taken into captivity in the 6th century BCE, their captors took the professional people, the artists and the skilled laborers to work for them and left the “poor trash” behind. Those who were left behind intermarried with the locals, the Palestinians and thus were born the Samaritans. As between Jews and Samaritans there was no contact. It was a strict racial divide which no self-respecting Jew would cross, just as most white people in this country before the Civil Rights movement would not have considered striking up a conversation with an African American person who was not a family servant.

Then there is the sex issue. Men in that culture never engaged a woman outside their own family in conversation and certainly not in public. It simply wasn’t done. Indeed that sex segregation is still very much a part of Middle Eastern culture even today. Jesus would have been crossing a boundary to talk to a Jewish woman at the well, but he just made it worse by talking to a woman who was also a Samaritan. Its hard for us today to imagine how strong these cultural taboos were and to fully appreciate how shocking this story would have been to the first century audience for whom it was originally written. It would be as if a wealthy, Wall Street stockbroker were to seek out a homeless immigrant woman living in the subways of New York City for advice and conversation on the vagaries of the stock market. It simply isn’t done. Yet Jesus did it.

Not only did Jesus cross racial, sexual, religious and ethnic boundaries to talk with this woman, but he did more than ask for a glass of water. The two of them engaged in a conversation that touched on important religious and personal issues for each of them. The woman remarks to Jesus about the differences in their two tribes’ beliefs about where is the most holy place to worship God on earth – Mr. Gerazim for the Samaritans, and Jerusalem for the Jews. Jesus tells her that the time is coming when those kinds of religious differences will not matter, when all people will worship God in spirit and truth and those kinds of denominational differences will be immaterial. “God is spirit, and those who worship God must worship in spirit and truth”, he tells her.

Jesus is not interested in the denominational and interfaith differences between the religious traditions of humankind. He points to the divine reality behind all religious traditions – the God who is spirit and truth – and calls all of us to hold lightly the rules, regulations, ritual practices, sacred places and traditions of our own religious tradition, remembering that these are pathways to God, or containers through which we can access God, but God is beyond and greater than all of them. It is all too easy for we humans to fall prey to the sin of idolatry –to worship the trappings of our own religious tradition rather than the God to whom that tradition points. The interreligious conflicts that tear our world apart today illustrate how desperately we need to follow Jesus’ example in interacting with people of different religious traditions. Conversation, dialogue and respect for the dignity of those who worship God differently than we do are how we follow Jesus when it comes to interfaith encounter.

Jesus also broke the cultural taboo of speaking of intimate personal matters with a relative stranger. In his day, reality TV and the culture of complete self disclosure that marks our Facebook world did not prevail. One did not speak of personal matters outside of one’s immediate family. Jesus not only revealed to the woman that he knew about her personal situation, that she had had five husbands and was living with a man not her husband, but he also revealed to her his identity as the Messiah, something he rarely did with anyone. He was not judgmental about her personal life either. It is important to remember that in that culture, a woman could not seek a divorce. If a divorce happened, it was at the behest of the husband. For this woman to have had so many husbands she must have been either widowed or divorced (which was tantamount to abandonment) in each of the five marriages. The fact that she was living with a man not her husband may well have been simply a matter of economic necessity – women could not own property, could not work for wages and so were completely dependant upon men for their very survival. We don’t know the exact circumstances of this woman’s life. Jesus did not jump to conclusions about her moral rectitude based merely upon the fact that she had been married numerous times. He accepted her as she was, with her history and her “baggage” and entrusted her with the truth about himself.

Jesus and this Samaritan woman were able to have an authentic relationship and to establish trust between them because they did not judge each other based upon racial, ethnic, religious or sexual characteristics and they did not keep secrets. They laid everything bare between them and when they did, God was able to use them both as a means to bring even more people into relationship with God. The willingness of Jesus and this woman to violate restrictive and discriminatory cultural taboos of their day, opened the way for God to infuse their relationship with love and divine energy.

 Jesus and the Samaritan woman give us much to think about, especially in the multicultural and pluralistic world we live in today. In our pluralistic and globally connected contemporary culture, it is obvious that we humans need to begin to work to cross the many racial, ethnic, religious and other boundaries that separate and alienate us one from another, and learn to engage in real and authentic dialogue with one another. Interreligious dialogue is absolutely crucial for the peace and welfare of humankind in the 21st century. As with Jesus and this woman, it is not enough to maintain a polite distance, to merely tolerate the one we call “other.” We must be willing to take risks, to talk about things that matter deeply to each of us, to begin to listen to one another so that we can find common ground. We must be willing to be non-judgmental, to see the humanity of those who are different from us, and to respect their way of being in the world. Jesus models for us an engagement across religious and cultural boundaries that is respectful, authentic, loving, compassionate and open to learning from the other as much as imparting wisdom to the other.

In our contemporary context, we have many opportunities to cross racial, cultural, ethnic and religious boundaries and to build bridges of cooperation and understanding with people who are different from us. Racism is still alive in our country today, so any efforts we make to heal the sin of racism in our country and our church is a step towards the kind of encounter that Jesus had with the woman at the well. I commend to you the Anti Racism training available through the diocese at various times during the upcoming year. That program provides a rare opportunity for people of different races to engage one another in the kind of truth telling conversation that Jesus and the Samaritan woman shared at the well. Interreligious dialogue is alive and well and active in Rochester. There are many opportunities throughout the year to cross religious boundaries and to learn from our interreligious neighbors the wisdom and truths that they have to share about God which serves only to deepen our own Christian commitments and faith.

“God is spirit, and those who worship God must worship in spirit and in truth.” To experience and know the truth of God and the spirit of God we must break down the barriers of race, class, ethnicity, sex, religious affiliation and any other category by which we push people away and dehumanize them. We cannot avoid the touchy subjects – religion, politics, ethics – the truth of God will be revealed when we can talk about those very things with authenticity and integrity across racial and cultural boundaries. Our baptismal covenant commites us to work for justice and peace and to respect the dignity of every human being. Jesus is our model. May we follow in his path. Amen.