Sermon for Christian Unity Sunday: 25 January 2015
Sermon for 25 January 2015
(now with edits, as preached on 27 January for the ecumenical Jerusalem Week of Prayer Service)
(now with edits, as preached on 27 January for the ecumenical Jerusalem Week of Prayer Service)
John 4:1-42 (The Samaritan Woman at the Well)
The Rev. Carrie B. Smith
Grace and peace to you, from God our
Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
A few days
ago, as I was busily preparing for this service, I was interrupted by a
surprise visitor in the church office. This is pretty common, but unlike most other
church visitors, this one was neither Lutheran nor Christian nor overtly religious
at all. The man introduced himself as a PhD student in anthropology from
Colombia. He is writing about peace and conflict resolution, and had just
arrived in Jerusalem from a visit to Northern Ireland.
This visitor
shared with me that up to now, he has been studying conflict resolution from a
strictly secular viewpoint. But a surprising thing has happened in the course
of his research. He has been working with a particular indigenous community in
Colombia, which has the distinction of holding a successful peace treaty with
FARC, the notorious guerilla group which terrorizes so much of the region. In
his studies, he is seeking to understand what made this unlikely peace possible.
He asked them: Why did it work for their community and not others? What was the
catalyst for change? Again and again, the people answered him, “The Gospel. We
learned about Jesus.” It seems that missionaries from the north had arrived in
the 1940s, and the people saw this as the turning point in how they learned to
deal with conflict, division, and threats from the outside.
The idea
that the Gospel of Jesus could inspire a peace treaty was a shocking and somewhat
unbelievable answer for this analytical, secular PhD student. Confused, he set
out to talk with Christian clergy in a variety of conflicted settings. He is on
a quest to learn what it is about Jesus and his message that could be such a catalyst
for peace and reconciliation. He asked me: Was Jesus a pacifist? Does the
Gospel lay out specific instructions for resolving conflict? What is it about
the teachings of Jesus that made peace possible for this little community in
Colombia, and is it transferrable to other communities and contexts?
These are
tough questions, and I felt uncomfortable speaking for all of Christendom, much
less trying to put words in the mouths of indigenous Christian people half a
world away.
But what I
did do was tell him the story of the woman at the well. I talked about how in
the Gospels Jesus again and again transgresses boundaries and barriers between
people, in this case by talking not only to a woman, but a Samaritan woman. I
told him how in this story Jesus not only asks for a drink, but continues below
the surface to a deeper well of conversation, in which truths are revealed (“I
have no husband”) and a new path forward is shared (“The hour is coming…when
true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth”). This meeting of
Jew and Samaritan, male and female, which by social standards never should have
happened, becomes transformative—not just for the Samaritan woman, but for her
entire community, as she becomes an apostle and evangelist, sharing the Good
News of what she has seen and heard.
After
hearing the story of Jesus and the woman at the well, my new friend suddenly
smiled. “Aha! This reminds me of a story I heard in Colombia,” he said. “The
leader of the indigenous community said they had never actually seen the
guerillas, only their bullets coming out of the trees, so they had no idea what
they looked like. The people wondered if they breathed fire. They imagined they
had tails, and maybe even horns on their heads. But when they decided to work
towards peace, and he finally saw the ones in the jungle who had been sending
the bullets, he was very surprised. When he went back to the village, he shared
the news that the guerillas had two legs, just like them.”
Once the
people saw that the “monsters” in the jungle looked like their own brothers and
sisters, the conversation about living in peace could begin.
 |
| Jerusalem, HaNeviim Street Photo by Carrie Smith |
Is there
something magic in the message of Jesus that makes peace treaties simple to achieve
and conflict resolution a piece of cake? Clearly not. Here in Jerusalem, it’s
easy to see how knowing the Prince of Peace doesn’t mean we Christians possess the
answers to ending human divisions. In a
divided city, even the church is divided. East and West, Catholic and Orthodox,
Protestant and Evangelical, local and missionary, male and female—even without
mentioning the greater reality of the political conflict in this place, it’s
plain to see that “One Bread, One Body” is a song of hope and longing, not a statement
of reality. In fact, it is somewhat ironic that I stand here today, as a called
and ordained female pastor of a schism church, to preach on Christian unity. As
a woman and a Lutheran, it could be said that I represent all by myself several
of the reasons the church has divided over the centuries.
It’s clear
that the message of Jesus alone doesn’t provide a recipe for peace or an easy
answer to the problems of human division, violence, and hate. But what we see
in the Gospels is Jesus’ insistence, again and again, on defying convention,
breaking social barriers, and loving the “other.” We see Jesus sharing the
Gospel of love with all, with no regard to social, religious, or ethnic
boundaries. He defies even the advice of his own disciples when he eats with
sinners and tax collectors, preaches to scribes and Pharisees, and offers new
life and living water both to a man of privilege like Nicodemus, and an
outsider like the Samaritan woman at the well. It is Jesus’ audacious,
boundless, persistent movement beyond and through human-made barriers which inspires
Christians to continue the difficult work of building peace, seeking justice,
and fostering reconciliation. It is Jesus’ consistent movement toward the other
which inspires us to see people instead of bullets, and neighbors instead of
enemies. We continue on the path because we believe the transformational love
of Jesus, working in and through the
church, is what ultimately will heal all that is broken and divided in the
world.
The story of
Jesus meeting the woman at the well is good inspiration for us this week, as we
gather to pray for Christian unity and an end to the divisions within the
church of Christ. We look to the transformational conversation between Jesus
and the Samaritan woman as an example of what can happen when we dare to step
into someone else’s space, to speak another’s language, and to hear another’s
truth—a bit like what we are doing during this Week of Prayer for Christian
Unity. This is a great start indeed.
But then, I’m
uncomfortable hearing this Scripture as merely a “pat on the back” to those of
us who are making efforts to attend each other’s churches this week. In fact, I’m
always a bit nervous when I read a Scripture text and my interpretation means I
see myself in the role of Jesus. Why do you suppose this particular scene from
Jesus’ life was chosen for the Week of Prayer? If this text comes to us only to
serve as a model for doing ecumenical work, then it’s far too easy to see
ourselves and “our church” as Jesus, and to see those “other” churches—you
know, the “wrong ones”—as the outsider, the Samaritan woman Jesus so graciously
accepts, loves, and transforms.
Soon, we’re feeling pretty good about
ourselves. Soon, we’re expecting our ecumenical partners to undergo a
transformation. You know…to be more like us.
No…I’m
pretty sure that if we are to see ourselves in this text at all, we are the
disciples who are out getting food. We’re the followers of Jesus who are so
busy making sure we get a proper lunch that we miss an opportunity to receive
the living water. Safe inside our churches, our traditions, our hymnbooks, our
interpretation of Scripture, we miss transformative moments, when Jesus shows
up unexpectedly, offering new life from the well of God’s grace and mercy.
During this Week
of Prayer for Christian unity, this text convicts and challenges us. It is a
reminder that while we are busy maintaining boundaries and traditions and
doctrinal purity, Jesus is at the well, offering hope and life to all who will
hear. Jesus is at the well at high noon, having heated conversations and
transforming lives. Jesus calls us back to this living water, back to the Word,
and back to our shared identity as children of God, in spite of our
differences.
For those of
us living in this diverse and multi-religious city, and who worship in diverse
and multi-cultural congregations, the idea of transcending boundaries and
embracing the “other” is Good News warmly welcomed and received. But for
others, perhaps especially those whose religious and ethnic traditions have
been ignored, challenged or persecuted, this may sound like a threat. In any case,
many of us may be asking:
Why do we need to work and pray for Christian unity?
Do we do it
because it makes Jesus happy?
Will we have
to compromise our principles?
Does unity
mean we have to all be the same?
If so, whose liturgy, whose interpretation,
whose traditions will win?
Dear sisters
and brothers in Christ, we don’t pray for unity so all differences will
disappear. We pray and confess and seek unity in the Body of Christ because the world needs the Gospel more than we need
our walls. We pray for unity because energy spent on protecting boundaries
is energy not spent proclaiming the Good News of God’s love, forgiveness, and
mercy. We confess our complacency and our acceptance of disunity because energy
spent defending ecclesiastical territory means energy not spent seeking human
rights and dignity for our neighbors of all religions.
 |
| Greeting Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilus, Latin Patriarch Fouad Twal, and Propst Wolfgang Schmidt of Redeemer Church for Greek Orthodox Christmas |
We seek
unity in the Body of Christ because maintaining proper, respectable and appropriate
distance from each other means we may not hear a living word that we ourselves need. For it just might be
that the word of hope, the bread of life, and the living water we need today is
being preached, and shared, and offered up in the church down the street, in a
language we don’t know, at a well we’ve never visited.
And so we humbly
pray for unity in our diversity, that all may hear—and that we may hear for
ourselves--that Jesus truly is the Savior of the world.
Let us pray…this
is a prayer written by my American Catholic brother in Christ, Thomas Merton:
O God, we
are one with you.
You have
made us one with you.
You have
taught us that if we are open to one another,
you dwell in
us.
Help us to
preserve this openness
and to fight
for it with all our hearts.
Help us to
realize that there can be no understanding
where there
is mutual rejection.
O God, in
accepting one another wholeheartedly, fully, completely,
we accept
you, and we thank you, and we adore you,
and we love
you with our whole being,
because our
being is in your being,
our spirit
is rooted in your spirit.
Fill us then
with love,
and let us
be bound together with love as we go our diverse ways,
united in
this one spirit which makes you present in the world,
and makes
you witness to the ultimate reality that is love.
Love has
overcome.
Love is
victorious.
~ written by
Thomas Merton (1915-1968)
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