No Shame: March 19, 2017

Year A, Lent 3                                                                                   
John 4:5-42                                                                            

            Usually when someone says, “I know what you did” or “I know all about you” it’s not a good thing.  It’s a threat or an attempt to induce guilt or shame.  Thus it has always confused me that this woman at the well went and told the whole town, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done. He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” Why would that be the thing that proved he was the Messiah? Furthermore, why was she so excited about it?

            This Gospel reading is a long one and that is because it was a long conversation.  In fact, it is one of the longest conversations Jesus had that is recorded in the Bible and it was with a Samaritan woman who was alone.  That is three strikes against her already.  Let’s begin with the fact that she was a Samaritan.  To say that the Samaritans and the Jews did not get along well would be like saying the people of Israel and the Palestinians don’t get along.  It’s a huge understatement.  This hostility between the Jews and the Samaritans was centuries old. Some of it had to do with what happened in the past and some was related to how and where they worshipped, which was a big deal at that point. 

            The second and third strikes were that she was a woman and she was alone.  Women typically did not travel far without a male to accompany them.  If they were not with a man who was related to them, they were with other women. Most women went to the well in the morning and the evening when the sun was not so high.  This woman was there in the middle of the day, the hottest part of the day.  Many have assumed that she was avoiding people.  Thus there were many reasons Jesus should have avoided this woman.  Jewish men (especially rabbis) were forbidden to speak to a woman alone who was not related to them.  If seen by others, this would have been a scandal.  She knew all of this which is why she asked, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”  She already knew that this man was different.

            Things got even stranger as Jesus began to engage her in a theological conversation.  He wasn’t just telling her what to do.  He was not merely making a demand. He was forming a relationship with her.  She must have felt relatively safe because she responded and even argued a little, which was a risky move on her part. Then this theological debate took an unexpected turn.  Jesus asked her to call her husband.  When she told him she had no husband, he conceded that she was telling the truth.  He added that she had five husbands and the man she was living with right now was not even her husband. 

For millennia people have interpreted this statement by Jesus as an accusation of sin.  He was confronting her for her sinful behavior. Clearly this woman was a harlot.  She had five husbands and now she was living with someone she was not married to.  No wonder she was there alone in the middle of the day.  She was avoiding people because she was an outcast.  She knew they were talking about her.  She didn’t need to see their critical gaze.  That is one theory anyhow.  In my opinion, it’s wrong. 

In the time of Jesus, women did not have many rights.  A woman could not ask for divorce.  If this woman at the well was divorced five times, it was because five different men divorced her.  Men did not need a reason to divorce.  There was no extensive paperwork.  All they needed to do was to put it in writing.  There was nothing the woman could do to salvage her marriage. Since there were not many occupations available to woman, the only options for a divorced woman was to remarry, move in with a male relative, beg on the street, prostitute herself or starve.  

While a man could divorce his wife for any reason, there was one situation when divorce was recommended.   Because procreation was a so important in the Jewish faith, if a woman could not bear a child in the first ten years of marriage, it was recommended that the man take an additional wife or divorce and then remarry.[1]  It is very possible that the reason she had been abandoned by so many men was due to barrenness. 

Even if the divorces were a result of her being barren and not an adulteress, people would have thought that there was still something fundamentally wrong with her.  She had been abandoned by the men in her life.  She had been abandoned by God.  The respected women and men of the town were almost surely talking about her and judging her.  More than almost anyone, she needed this living water that Jesus was talking about.  She needed this living water because she was barely alive.

Because of her thirst for hope, love and a relationship with God, she was open to Jesus’s words.  She was ready to hear them.  Instead of hearing what most people hear in this conversation (accusation and shame) she heard a man who knew her and wanted to know her more.  He wanted to share the most important thing in the world, his love and acceptance.  He revealed that he knew her story--some of which was shameful to her because she had likely come to believe what others believed about her.  More important than the fact that he revealed what he knew of her, he also revealed a love and compassion for her.  He didn’t care what others said about her. He knew the truth. He knew her heart, before it was corrupted by pain, shame and fear. 

In addition, he also revealed himself, as the Christ—the Messiah. Jesus did not reveal himself to the most important men of the town.  He did not go to the place of worship and announce that he was the Messiah.  No, he went to her, a Samaritan, a woman, a person alone and abandoned.

Thus when she ran and told the whole town of people who had likely ostracized her to: “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done.” ---she was saying that she had met someone who truly knew her and saw past the assumptions and stereotypes.  Because this man, this Messiah had reminded her what it was to feel love and hope, she did not care that she was running into the middle of this town of people who had cast her off.  She didn’t care that they considered her a shameful person.  She had known what it was to live a life of shame.  But now she knew the Messiah and he knew her.  And once she knew that, there was no way she could hold it in.  She had to tell the world.

            People have occasionally told me that they don’t feel comfortable in church because they feel judged.  Others tell me that they worry that if people know the truth, they would not respect them and that is something they don’t want to be reminded of. I think the reason so many people fear being part of a community of faith is combination of those things.  I think people---we---have begun to judge ourselves based on what others have assumed. We have started to believe everything this culture is telling us, that we are not enough.  We have forgotten that the truth lies not in the hearts of others, or even our own, but the heart of God.  More than anything, God wants a relationship with us. God wants to know us and be known by us.  There is no room for shame when it comes to our relationship with God.  No shame.

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[1] Biblical and Jewish law regarding divorce: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3140621?seq=7 and http://www.biu.ac.il/JH/Parasha/eng/toledot/shi.html

Unlimited Mulligans: March 5, 2017

Year A, Lent 1                                                                        
Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7                                                                       

            I was a fairly regular church attendee through my youth, college and even after.  However, for some reason, Lent always came as a surprise to me.  I would come to church one Sunday and I would think, “Why is everyone so depressed? Why is the music so sad?” Then I would look at the altar hangings and see the purple, I might notice something in the bulletin and it would click.  Or right…it’s Lent.  How long is Lent again?  Of course Lent was also identified as the time I gave up something which was never particularly fun.  I am afraid that is how many of us think of Lent…oh that again.  In some ways we treat it as this time we have to get through to get to Easter.  The readings don’t help much. They are all about sin and judgment. 

            Let’s start with the first reading, which we are told--is all about the first sin, when sin entered our world.  Here they were, Adam and Eve, sitting in paradise. They had no 9-5 job dragging them down.  The weather was probably perpetually sunny.  They got along all the time.  God was talking to them, caring for them.  They could eat the fruit from any tree….any tree but one.  So of course they had to eat from that one tree.  For millennia people have blamed this transgression on Eve and I have addressed that in other sermons. The blame doesn’t belong on Eve, at least not entirely. 

There is the serpent of course; we could put all the blame there.  He was crafty.  He took God’s words and twisted them. He appealed to human pride.  However, the blame does not rest on any one person or animal and trying to determine who is to blame is at best useless and at worst detrimental to understanding the text. It’s true.  They committed a sin.  God had given them everything and they jeopardized all of that in the hope that they could be more like God, more like the creator than the creature. 

            Thus, they were expelled from the garden, from paradise.  As a result of this expulsion, instead of being more like God, they were further from God.  They could still communicate with God, but it was harder and seemed to get even harder for every generation thereafter, at least until Jesus came.  While God punished Adam and Eve, he let them live.  They still had food.  They had shelter. They had one another and the promise of children.  While there time in paradise ended, they had a new beginning. They had an opportunity to start over.

            Today we began the service with something called an “Invitation to the Observance of a Holy Lent.” This is part of the Ash Wednesday service, but I find it appropriate for the first Sunday of Lent as well.  The last paragraph reads, “I invite you … to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word. And, to make a right beginning of repentance…let us now kneel before the Lord, our maker and redeemer.”  Some of those things sound ok.  Self-examination, prayer, reading the Bible…those things are fair expectations of Christians.  But repentance, fasting, self-denial…those things do not sound appealing at all.  Those are the reasons that people do not like Lent. 

            Going through Lent without the repentance, confession and self-examination is kind of like expecting to lose weight by reciting body affirmations but not exercising or eating right.  In order to really transform your body, you have to do the work.  Sometimes that work is miserable, but sometimes, it makes you feel really good.  It’s the same with confession, repentance and self-examination. It’s hard to be honest about yourself.  It is hard to do the work that will make you a better person and a better Christian. It is hard to acknowledge your sins and weaknesses and ask God and others for help.  But all those hard things allow you to become a better person.  Confessing your sins and working hard not to sin again doesn’t just make you a better person, it brings you closer to God.  Even though it seems that you are doing all this work for yourself, you are really doing it for God.   Repentance is not merely the acknowledgment and condemnation of our sins…it is a process of renewal.  It literally means to turn around and reorient ourselves. 

            We don’t know what happened to Adam and Eve after they left the garden.  While they certainly felt guilty for offending God---sinning against God, it is not clear that they repented.   We don’t get the end of the story.  It is not until Jesus comes that we get the rest of the story. In many ways that is why Jesus is often referred to as the new Adam.  He provided the opportunity for humanity to begin again.  While the first humans (Adam and Eve) rejected the limitations of their humanity by trying to be like God, Jesus purposefully took on the limitations of humanity by becoming a human.  By becoming human he not only took on the limitations, he felt the effects of our sins. He had to resist sin and temptation. 

            The story of him in the desert with Satan is dramatic and powerful.  We see Jesus standing up to Satan and refusing to prove his divinity.  However, just because he withstood this temptation in the desert does not mean that he lived a life free of temptation and trials.  Much like us, he was faced with temptation every day.  Every day, he had to do the hard work of resisting sin. While he did not sin, he still experienced the effects of the sins of others.  He went through the agony of betrayal, abandonment and even death on the cross.  Because he went through all of that, he was given an opportunity to start over. His resurrection was a new beginning.  It continues to be a new beginning for us all. 

            It would be helpful if we could find a way to think of Lent not as a dreary time full of sadness and gnashing of teeth, but a new beginning.  I am not a golfer, despite the efforts of my grandparents and father.  However, I am going to attempt a golf analogy.  A mulligan is a free shot you get after you have a really bad shot. It does not count on the scorecard.  It is not a real rule, but is often used in more relaxed settings.  But here is the thing about a mulligan.  You still have to swing again. Someone doesn’t just say, you missed that one, let’s move your ball right next to the hole.  No, you get a chance to start over.  In starting over, it is usually most helpful if you avoid doing what you did the last time.  You want the next shot to be better than the last. 

In golf, you usually only get one mulligan per game.  However, in our Christian journey, we get many opportunities to start over without any penalty.  In our invitation to the observance of a Holy Lent, the last line calls us to kneel before our maker and redeemer.  Our maker and redeemer.  Lent is our opportunity to be made a new, to be redeemed by a God who loves us and cares for us.  It’s true.  We still have to do the work and that is not always fun.  But the end…the end is forgiveness, redemption and a new beginning.  That is not something that should make life dreary.  That is a cause for joy.