Boundary Lines by Marie Alford-Harkey
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Sermon for Lent 3A, March 23, 2014
Marie Alford-Harkey
Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford, CT
John 4:4-42
"Boundary Lines"
Goodness, but we humans love to draw categorize people, don’t we? Christians/Non-Christians. Republicans/Democrats. Liberals/Conservatives. Pro-this/Anti-that. Progressive/Evangelical. Fortunate/Less fortunate. Samaritans/Jews. We like to put people in boxes, with nice neat labels because once we know how to categorize someone, we know all we need to know about them. But the problem with human beings is, they crawl out of those damn boxes.
In the New Testament, Samaritans are a group that is looked down on and despised by the Jews. And yet, Samaritans were very similar to Jews; they were descended from two of the 12 tribes of Israel. They were monotheists. They worshipped the same God as the Jews. But the differences were significant as well. The Samaritans only the Torah (the first five books of the bible), where the Jews followed the much more detailed holiness codes set out in books like Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Samaritans claimed Mount Gerizim as their holy place, while the Jews claimed Jerusalem.
Jews referred to Samaritans as, “half-Jews.” Jews wouldn’t even walk through Samaria in their travels. They didn’t talk to or associate with Samaritans.
Thank goodness that Christians don’t treat other Christians that way today, huh?
So the fact that the woman at the well was a Samaritan certainly separated her from Jesus in some significant ways. The fact that she was a woman was another barrier between her and Jesus. Jewish Rabbis in Jesus’ day certainly didn’t hang out at wells talking to women. We see that when we get to the disciples thoughts about what the heck their Rabbi is doing talking to a woman.
But the story gets more interesting when we listen in on the conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman, because then we realize that the Samaritan woman is not staying in her box as an outcast begging to be accepted. Rather she is very much an equal conversation partner with Jesus, and she ends up being a powerful apostle.
When Jesus asks her for water, she asks him very directly, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”
When he starts talking about living water, she boldly asks him where he thinks he’s going to get such water since he doesn’t even have a bucket. And she doesn’t apologize for being a Samaritan, but instead claims her tradition proudly and asks Jesus if he is greater than Jacob.
Jesus doesn’t answer that question, but talks more about the living water, and how those receive it will never thirst again. She asks for this water – who wouldn’t want never to be thirsty again, never to have to carry the heavy water jug in the heat of the day.
Jesus finally reveals to her that he is not talking about water to drink. He tells her to go call her husband. She answers him promptly and truthfully, saying, “I have no husband.”
And he replies, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband,’ for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.’” Note well that nothing in his answer implies blame or shame about this fact.
There are many possible explanations for this woman’s husband situation. She may have been trapped in cycle of levirate marriage, in which, if a woman’s husband died, she had marry the next male in the family line. It’s possible that she was infertile, which was grounds for divorce for men, and so she might have been “passed” from one man to another. Women in Jesus’ culture and time could not survive without a male protector, so it would have been dangerous for her to be on her own.
These facts about her husbands were just that, facts. Jesus doesn’t judge those facts or this woman. The writer of the gospel who recounts this story seems to have only one reason for telling this detail, and it’s not to show that she’s a “sinner.”
Instead, it’s to show that this is how the woman comes to see who Jesus really is. As she will tell others later, he tells her everything about her life. Because he does so, she realizes that he is a prophet, someone with special knowledge from God.
And when she realizes this, she asks him about the most pressing theological question that plagued the relationship between Jews and Samaritans. She asks him where God should be worshipped. She says, “Our ancestors worshipped God on this mountain, but you Jews say God is to be worshipped in Jerusalem.”
Surprisingly, Jesus tells her that the place where God is worshipped doesn’t matter because the day is coming, no the day is already here, when worship is liberated from any particular place and instead reoriented it toward spirit and truth.
And she gets it. She understands that the day that is coming, the day when spirit and truth are more important than place, is the day of the Messiah, and she tells Jesus, “I know that Messiah is coming who will proclaim everything to us.”
And Jesus tells her: I am he.
She believes him. She understands what she has heard and learned there at the well and she runs away, leaving her valuable water jar behind. She hurries back to Sychar and tells her fellow Samaritans that she has met a man who “told me everything I have ever done.” Come and see, she tells them. This might be the Messiah.
The Samaritans were persuaded by the woman’s testimony, and many of them believed that he was the Messiah. So they invited Jesus to dwell among them. And he did. He went and stayed with the despised Samaritans for two days, and many more people believed. Those who came to believe told the woman, now it’s not just because of what you said, but because we gave heard for ourselves and we know that this is the savior of the world.
This is what it means to be an apostle. We invite people to come and have their own experience of Jesus. And when they do, we discover that Jesus, as always, is present with the very people that we are inviting in, that we have deemed to be outside our borders.
I saw this border crossing in action on Friday, when George and I presented workshops at True Colors, the largest conference for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in the country. It happens every year just up the road at the University of Connecticut. It’s focused on youth and thousands of high school students come, as do lots of college students and adults: teachers, therapists, parents, social workers, and even religious leaders.
George’s workshop was called “queering the bible.” He began it by reminding the participants that we all bring our own experiences when we read the bible, and then he shared some of the interpretations of biblical stories that have been meaningful for him. I watched as young peoples’ eyes lit up at the thought that they could bring have their own experiences of God in which their sexual orientation wasn’t a barrier in their relationship with God, but rather an enhancement of it.
This is such a powerful message for anyone who has felt the sting of rejection from religion.
I still remember the first time I read myself in the bible. When I began to come out as a lesbian, I was just beginning to make my way back to the church after a very long hiatus from Christianity. And I thought well, that’s that. I can’t possibly be a Christian – I’m a lesbian. Then I learned from folks in the LGBT community that there were, in fact, Christian churches and religious leaders who did not believe that being a lesbian was a sin.
I was skeptical. I had 15 years of a different kind of Christianity in my history. It was hard for me to believe that God really loved me – all of me, which included my love for and attraction to women. I went to a welcoming church – my hunger for God was great – but deep down I always believed that we were just fooling themselves. Surely God didn’t really love us lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people just as we were. Surely God wanted us to be different.
I heard educated clergy talk about how queer people could see themselves in biblical stories, and sayings, much like George did at the workshop on Friday. I heard them proclaim Jesus’ boundless love. But I didn’t really believe it. I thought that these readings of the bible were far-fetched, that there was no way that the bible was “really” mean for people like me. Until suddenly it was.
I was in a very low place – feeling lonely, and isolated, and deeply sad – and out of nowhere, the words of Psalm 139 came to me – “God, you formed my inward parts, you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” And somehow, I knew that those words were about me – all of me. Not because I was “born this way” – I have no idea if sexual orientation is genetic or not – but because all of me, my sexuality, my brain, my body – all of me is precious to God. I saw myself in scripture. I saw myself inside the bounds of God’s love.
My own experience of God was nurtured by priests and pastors who invited me to come and experience Jesus for myself. They were patient with me while I struggled to believe that I was not outside Jesus’ boundaries. And when I finally, deeply knew that God’s love really did include me, like the Samaritan woman, I was able to invite my people in to experience him.
When I was a high school teacher and gay-straight alliance advisor back in the Midwest, it was a common occurrence for gay kids to would come to me, crying, and ask me if they were going to hell like their pastors told them. Out of my own experience of Jesus’ boundless love, I could tell them no, and invite them to experience Jesus for themselves. I sat in the halls of a public high school and recounted stories of Jesus to these kids, stories like this one of the Samaritan woman, to help them toward their own experience of Jesus.
On Friday, I listened to a panel of UConn students talking about how their coming out journeys were influenced by their faith – a couple of Christians, a Hindu, and a Jew. What struck me was that these young people were not apologizing for their experience of the divine. They weren’t humbly asking for a place in their faith. They were claiming their place. They were confident that their experiences of God were valid experiences, and they were happy to share those with others.
The thing is, we can’t limit peoples’ experience of God. When we go and tell people about Jesus, and invite them experience Jesus for themselves, we have to let go of what that experience will be like for them. There’s no one way to read the bible or experience Jesus because there is no one way to be human.
When we are in the company of people who are experiencing Jesus for themselves, we are very fortunate indeed. For we are being allowed to see more and more glimpses of the face of God. The Samaritan woman at the well teaches us that there is no one who is beyond the reach of Jesus’ love. We draw the boundaries. God erases them. Amen.