Preaching Thoughts on a Non-Preaching Sunday

In today's gospel story of the Samaritan woman at the well, the issue of in-or-out boundaries is hard to miss.  The woman is a Samaritan, an ethnic group generally despised by Jews.  Adding to this problem Jews thought Samaritans' religious views "heretical".  And if that weren't enough, she is, of course, a woman.  Rabbis didn't teach women, only men.  In fact, women weren't considered quite fully human.

Both the woman and Jesus' disciples find it surprising that Jesus speaks with her.  And yet Jesus makes more theological progress with this female outsider than he did with the Pharisee Nicodemus.  She seems to "get it" in a way that rarely happens in John's gospel.

Despite the fact that Jesus was an expert boundary ignorer and crosser, we Christians are rather good at constructing boundaries.  In a world filled with us and them distinctions, we often use our religious beliefs to create more.  We create us and them boundaries between Christians and non-Christians.  And we create us and them boundaries within the faith, using our doctrines and practices to label and divide.

Now I'm not sure this problem can be solved by constructing a generic faith.  It is increasingly popular to say, "I don't worry about doctrines and denominational dictates.  I just try to follow Jesus."  But of course the moment people try to follow Jesus, they must make decisions about what that looks like, what things are required and what are optional, what the core practices are, etc.  And presto, you now have a particular way of being Christian that is different from someone else's way, which can potentially provide the material for yet another boundary.

I actually think we should celebrate our particular ways of being Christian (even as we look critically at those ways so that we insure we are actually following Jesus).  But we should not understand our particularities as dividing lines.  Perhaps an analogy can be drawn with regards to race and ethnicity.  The way to solve racial problems is probably not to obliterate all racial distinctions.  (The nation of Brazil once had an official policy that encouraged dark skinned citizen to become lighter.  Followed to its natural conclusion, racial problem would become a thing of the past when everyone merged into a single skin tone.)  I certainly hope we don't ever reach a point where all people and food and music are of one sort, where we solve the "problem" of diversity by trying to eliminate it.

The problem is not our differences, even our differences of faith and doctrine.  The problem is we judge our group or tradition to be superior, dividing the world up into us and them, in and out.  And then we can say lovely things such as "We don't want people like them joining our church, or moving into our neighborhood, or..."

I find especially appealing the notion that in Christ we become one regardless of whether we are male or female, Jew or Greek, black or white, etc.  It isn't that those distinctions no longer exist.  It is that they are all included together in God's love.  We are all held in God's embrace, and God longs to join us together into something new and wonderful.  Of course it is natural for people to be afraid of those who are different, not like us.  But then again, as it says in 1 John, "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear."

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