Who Knows? [Sermon]

The story of the people of Israel moving from Egypt to the promised land is pretty well-known. After they reached the promised land, each tribe settled in a different area.

After King Solomon died, his son Rehoboam became king and required high taxes and forced labor from the people. The ten northern tribes rebelled and formed the northern kingdom of Israel, under a new king Jeroboam. Judah and Benjamin remained as the southern kingdom of Judah.

Later, the Assyrians attacked and conquered the northern kingdom of Israel and relocated most of the population. The Assyrians adopted the religion of the land and worshiped the god of the Israelites, and married and had children with the remaining people of Israel.

These are the Samaritans.

So to the people of Judah, or Judea, the Samaritans are the descendants of rebels and invaders.

They’re not well-regarded.

This is why Jesus uses a Samaritan as the person who cares for the man who was robbed and beaten in the parable we call The Good Samaritan.

And it’s why today’s story is about a Samaritan Woman.

Let’s go to God in prayer.

God of wisdom, may the words that I speak, and the ways they are received by each of our hearts and minds, to help us to continue to grow into the people, and the church, that you have dreamed us to be.

Amen.

Women did not have high status in Judah during the time of Jesus. To be fair, women did not have high status in much of the world during the time of Jesus. And there were rules for men and women to be separated , and not just in sports and bathrooms. So when Jesus was alone and speaking with a lone woman, this was not a good look.

Further, this woman was a Samaritan: a descendant of the rebellious northern tribes and the Assyrians who invaded them.

So it makes sense that the woman says

“How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”

She’s a woman. She’s from a people that the Jews look down on.

She also says the well was from their ancestor Jacob. If you remember the stories from the Hebrew scriptures, Jacob was called Israel by God. This well was created before the captivity in Egypt, before Joseph was sold into slavery and ended up in Israel, before he invited his family to live in Egypt during the famine, before Moses led them out of Egypt and back to the Holy Land.

So the well was created by Jacob, or Israel, ancestor of both Samaritans and Jews, long before there were a separate Israel and Judah, and before Samaritans were even a people.

So one unusual part of the story is the interaction of Jesus with a Samaritan woman.

The other unusual part, and the part that often stands out to people, is Jesus’ knowledge of the woman’s life: He knows she had five husbands and was with someone who is not her husband.

How does Jesus know this?

The traditional reasoning is that Jesus is the Son of God and knows all things. That works for a lot of people. Others may look for a more earthly explanation. Maybe he had spoken to someone else about her. Maybe there was some sign in her clothing. Maybe Jesus was actually interested in someone that others would just look past.

The Samaritans asked Jesus to stay with them. He stayed two days, and many Samaritans came to believe.

Why does this story matter today?

We live in California. Until 1848, this was Mexico. That’s why there are so many towns with Spanish names.

The ideology of Manifest Destiny was that the United States should spread across the continent, and led to displacement of indigenous people and the Mexican-American War. This nation killed many people whose ancestors had lived here for thousands of years and drove the survivors onto reservations, and drove many of the Mexican people – themselves various mixes of indigenous, Spanish, and African heritage – south.

The United States – largely the white United States – saw these people as inferior.

Meanwhile, women could not vote, or own property, or in many cases even divorce an abusive husband.

And while we have made some real progress in the nearly two centuries since 1848, we are sliding back toward the idea that a lack of melanin in one’s skin somehow makes one superior to someone with a darker complexion, and that an SRY gene, usually – but not always – on the Y chromosome, makes someone a man, superior to women.

What disturbs me is how often these ideas are put forth by people who call themselves Christian. Followers of Jesus.

What Jesus are they following? Who knows? It’s not the Jesus who spoke with a woman who was a mix of people the Jews considered less-than.

Periodically I mention a cartoonist named David Hayward. He’s a former pastor and draws under the name “The Naked Pastor.”

He has a cartoon where Jesus is carrying a sheep back to the fold.

The other sheep say

Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!

Hold it right there!

That sheep wasn’t lost.

We kicked that sheep out!

And Jesus says

I know.

And I found the sheep.

Repeatedly, Jesus is erasing the lines between people.

David Hayward has a cartoon about that, too.

And people, including people who claim to be following Jesus, keep drawing lines back in.

They don’t seek to know the people they’re keeping out. They don’t want to know their stories. They don’t want to know their struggles.

Most of all, I think they don’t want to know their humanity. Because once we see other people as people, it’s harder to demonize them and make them into scapegoats.

We’ve heard people called criminals and mentally ill. Sometimes people are called animals, or vermin. This is useful. If I can get you to focus on them as an enemy, you may not notice if I am doing something that harms you.

The people coming into our nation, fleeing persecution and poverty, are not the enemy.

The people who were here before our nation conquered the land are not the enemy.

The people whose lives are different from ours are not the enemy, even if we don’t understand their lives.

They are all people. Just as we are people. And if we took the time to get to know people, maybe we would see them as people. Even if she was a mixed-race woman who had five husbands and now is living with a man she is not married to.

Here’s a real challenge for this week:

I would like each of us to find someone we are at least a little uncomfortable with, and ask them about themselves.

Maybe we will ask “how is your life?” or “what would make your life better?” or just “how are you doing?”

Give people a chance to let us understand who they are. And maybe we will see them as more human.

Who knows?

Amen.

Let’s sing CH 351 Fill My Cup, Lord

* Scripture quotations marked NRSVue are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. https://www.friendshippress.org/pages/about-the-nrsvue

* Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James version of the Bible.

#humanity #othering #people #SamaritanWoman