Sermon: On Knowing, Not Knowing, and Journeying

John 4:5-29

On Knowing, Not Knowing, and Journeying

James Sledge                                                                                       March 23, 2014

It has been twenty years since the genocide in Rwanda that, by some estimates, killed more than a million people. A long, complicated history of animosity and discrimination lay behind the genocide, but the events of 1994 were unprecedented. One group decided simply to wipe out the other. During the slaughter, many took refuge in church sanctuaries, only to be killed there, often hacked to death by machete. If you go to Rwanda today, there are stark memorials to this tragedy in some of those churches. In one, bloody clothing lies draped over pews, and skulls are arranged on shelves. Many of these memorials display a quote from a young survivor of the genocide that reads, “If you really knew me, and you really knew yourself, you would not have killed me.”

It is easy to hate the other that we do not know. I’m convinced that dramatic change in acceptance of gays, lesbians and same sex marriage in our country is largely about knowing. When gays and lesbians were seen by many as a strange and scary other, not like anyone they knew, it was easier to hate. But as more and more people came out and became known, the ignorance allowing such hate became harder and harder to maintain.

Still, it is remarkably easy to encounter another without actually knowing her or him, and our tendency to cluster in like groups makes this even easier. I see this all too often in the church. Some liberal/progressive Christians refer to conservative counterparts as dim-witted, ignorant Neanderthals. And some conservatives speak of liberal counterparts as heretics who reject Jesus and the Bible in favor of the latest secular fads.

If you’re on Facebook, you see the posts where one side blasts the other. And whether the divisions are religious, political, ethnic, or economic, the language is remarkably similar. The other is demonized. Name calling is the norm, and “idiot” is the tamest word used. When one of these posts about “those idiots” is made, an online echo chamber ensues, as one comment after another weighs in on how “those idiots” are totally lacking in any redeeming quality or human decency. And woe to the well-intended person who tries to introduce a bit of restraint or calm consideration of “those idiots’” point of view.

About fifteen years ago, our denomination tried a new approach in our then seemingly endless fight over same sex relationships and ordination. We formed a commission made up of people from one end of the theological spectrum to the other. There were those who saw ordination of gays as anathema, totally at odds with Scripture, along with their polar opposites. And based on the way this issue had been fought for years in presbytery meetings and General Assemblies, a lot of people had little hope this try would be any different.

But something remarkable happened. The commission did not begin its work by debating. They began by sitting down at table together. They ate meals with one another, fellowshipped together, and studied the Bible with one another. They came to know one another, and in the process discovered that those on the other side were also good, faithful people. In the end, the group produced a report that would have permitted gay ordination. And remarkably, the report was unanimous, without a single dissent. That the report was never fully implemented speaks to the difficulty, on a denominational scale, of duplicating the commission’s process of getting to know each other. And so, the other could remain, “those idiots.”

There’s nothing new or unique about seeing the world in us and them terms. In Jesus’ day, the big divide was between Jews and Gentiles, but Jews had a special animosity toward Samaritans, their ethnic and religious cousins. They were seen as ethnically inferior and as having perverted the Jewish faith. And in our gospel today, Jesus encounters one such Samaritan. Even worse, she is a woman, and, we will discover, she is an unmarried one.

When Jesus speaks to her, he crosses all sorts of cultural and religious boundaries. Rabbis did not teach women. Jews would not drink from something touched by a Samaritan. Understandably, the woman is surprised Jesus when acts as he does, but she responds and enters into conversation with him. And this conversation is all the more remarkable compared to a different conversation that happened shortly before.

Unlike Jesus’ conversation with this unnamed, Samaritan woman, that earlier conversation was with Nicodemus, a prominent Jewish leader and teacher. As with the Samaritan woman, Nicodemus misunderstands Jesus at first, taking literally what Jesus means figuratively and spiritually.  But unlike the woman, Nicodemus makes no progress in his conversation. He does not come to know Jesus better. He does not suspect he is in the presence of God’s Anointed. Nick would seem to have all the advantages. He is Jewish, an educated Pharisee who knows his Scriptures and religious teachings, but he ends his conversation as befuddled as when it began, while the woman becomes a budding evangelist.

In both of these conversations, the theme of knowing is highlighted, a theme found in the prologue of John’s gospel which says of Jesus, He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. The good religious folk, people like Nicodemus, seem to have the hardest time knowing Jesus. Indeed with Nicodemus, what he already knows seems to get in the way. Unlike the Samaritan woman, he cannot let Jesus lead him to new understanding, to a more intimate knowing where he begins to recognize Jesus.

Nicodemus, it seems, knows too much, or, at least, is sure about too much, and so there is little room for him to discover a Jesus different from his expectations. The Samaritan woman has no such problems, and so Jesus is able gently to lead her from misunderstanding and confusion toward a deeper and deeper knowing.
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When Jesus calls us, he calls us to a journey into something deeper. It is a journey toward full humanity, something called “abundant life” in John’s gospel. And it is a journey toward God’s new day, what Jesus calls the kingdom of God, that day when God’s will is fully done here on earth. These two are closely related. Becoming fully human is about life in tune with God’s will, life patterned on Jesus who always did God’s will. But, as Nicodemus shows us, there is a perpetual temptation for good, religious folk to let their religion, its doctrines, its understandings, and its ways of doing things, get in the way of this journey toward God’s new day and our true humanity, toward knowing God and knowing self.

It is a problem that appears over and over in the gospels. The good, religious folk struggle to fit the Jesus they meet into the religious categories, images, certainties, and expectations they have acquired in the practice of their faith. But those who are on the margins and who have been ostracized by good, religious folk have a much easier time getting to know Jesus and answering his call to follow.

All of us have religious images and certainties we have picked up along the way, images of God, of Jesus, of faith and what faithful life looks like. But these images are, at best, incomplete, and may get in the way of knowing Jesus. C.S. Lewis writes in A Grief Observed, “My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time,” noting that it is God Godself who does the shattering.  “(God) is the great iconoclast,”
says Lewis. “Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of (God’s) presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins.”
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As we continue our journey through the season of Lent, let me invite you to remember Jesus’ call to you, and so to continue your journey toward God’s new day and toward your full humanity, toward knowing God and knowing self. This is a journey we make as individual persons of faith, and together as the body of Christ. And when we allow Jesus to lead us deeper and deeper into God, beyond what we think we know, not only we will come to know God better, but we will also come to know ourselves better, and so be able to hear more clearly where Christ is calling us, as individuals and as a congregation. As we come to fuller knowledge of God and knowledge of self, we will continue our journey toward where God lovingly beckons us and beckons our world.