Unity
Sermon by James W. Crawford
Third Sunday in Lent, March 7, 1999
Last weekend Linda and I went to the theater in Cleveland Circle to see Bill Murray's latest film entitled "Rushmore." Our four children over the last 20 or 25 years worshipped Bill Murray, so we would slip in now and again to assay his comic progress. Who can forget "Ground Hog Day" about having the worst day of your life, over and over? Or "Caddieshack," a video nearly wearing out our VCR when our so-called kids—three of them now over thirty—come home. It is about the snobs against the slobs, a winner every time. And "Rushmore," a somewhat weird and off-beat film taking place in a Southern California Independent School, bearing the tag line, "All's fair when love is war."
We found the theater packed. Tons of people, hundreds of teen-agers out on Friday night at the flicks, stocking up on popcorn, soda, Snickers, and meeting, greeting, and looking each other over. Those films, "Rushmore," "Payback" and "Jawbreaker" aside, the Circle Theater provided ambiance, access, availability triggering social electricity, designed as well as chance connection. What a hangout!
Just like that well in Scychar where Jesus encountered a woman come to draw water. You see, a well in that scorching, desert land provides the social equivalent of the Circle Theater. At the well, drawn by the necessity of water, the citizens of Sychar, by chance or choice, encounter one another. The well provides not only a source of water; the well serves as the village's hangout. And at that well we witness and participate in a dramatic, world-changing event. Remember? When Jesus meets a Samaritan woman they engage in conversation, she begins with antagonism, wondering how he, an alien Jewish male, dares speak with her, a foreign Samaritan female. As the conversation progresses she addresses Jesus as teacher, then prophet and then finally— finally—as Christ. Beneath this conversation, amid this encounter at the well, flowing from the confrontation with the townspeople and the disciples in this vivid and glorious narrative, John illuminates the ultimate unity of humankind; he embraces us all in the arms of the God who through Jesus meets the woman—who meets us— at the well.
I
So we ask first of all, who do we see at the well? Well, we see the Galilean and the Samaritan. From John's point of view, they represent not simply individuals, they represent ethnic siblings—Semites, both of them. They share turf, tradition, culture. But years ago the Samaritans went their own way; they turned their backs on their Jewish countrymen; they sliced and diced the religion; they hooked up with military enemies, and as a result Jews and Samaritans treated one another with a virulent contempt and hatred. John sees the initial meeting of that Samaritan woman and that Jewish man Jesus as an explosive mixture of ethnic dynamite.
And what happens at this meeting? How does the conversation take place? We see our Galilean operate as if no breach exists. We see the Galilean, Jesus, who John understands to represent "all embracing community." We see the Galilean treat the Samaritan with neither condescension nor contempt.
Jesus approaches this apparent antagonist with neither disdain nor prejudice, but with deep recognition of her full humanity. "May I have a drink?" he asks. No hostility; no superior bearing. A monumental breakthrough, ethnic and national barriers treated as irrelevant.
Can you imagine what difference we might see if the uniting presence we witness at Jacob's well were operative in our churches, in our city? What if ethnic and national barriers were treated as irrelevant in 20th century Boston? You know we have Max Kaiserman's newsstand out here on our corner. I purchase a variety of daily and weekly fare from him. This month Boston Magazine features a major article entitled, "How the City Really Works. The Twelve Tribes of Boston. Brahmins, Blacks, Irish, Italians, Jews—We spill Their Secrets and Reveal the New Tribes Shaping Boston's Future." Hmm. Intriguing! The article begins with this observation, "Not long after breaking bread and talking turkey with their Native American hosts, the pilgrims who arrived on these shores cast a greedy eye on their land. Stealing it, these pioneering Yankees soon discovered, was a piece of cake, mainly because the tribes were so busy feuding among themselves. . ." "What is it?" asks the article. The air? The water? For better and for worse, what makes tribalism so much a part of the warp and woof of Boston's history? Surely, for better, says the article, tribalism, diversity, multicultural pervasion lends "richness, texture, humor" compared to other cities "whose identities," it says, "have been homogenized, pasteurized, franchised to death. Think milk. Think malls. Better yet think Minneapolis." But for worse, insists the article—for worse,—"this tribalism translates into parochialism, with warring tribes putting pettiness, spite and turf ahead of some obvious solutions to common problems. And because tribalism means that one group often refuses to acknowledge the value of another; it can reduce the city to less than the sum of its extraordinary parts . . ."
Sad. We live still with our equivalent of the Galilean-Samaritan division right here in the hub of the hub of the universe. We see it in struggles over our schools; we witness it in housing patterns; we glimpse it in suburban zoning and tax structures, in gated communities, in club memberships, in health care. Whoever we are, regardless of our heritage, we know the condescension we can hold for the so-called "them," ostensibly of inferior breeding, cruder culture, primitive traditions. Or vice versa, we can feel the contempt the so-called "they" may hold for us and our peculiar traits, cultural habits, religious traditions, racial characteristics. At the well of Jacob, we see Christ, evident as dynamic love, embracing differing nations drawing us into solidarity and communion. We see Galilean and Samaritan and all their figurative descendants—you, me—the nations of humankind bound as one community. We see comm-unity.
II
But we see more. We see a Galilean man and a Samaritan woman, a male and a female. Watch carefully, for here again John interprets the Christ as source of inclusive community. Remember? Late in John's narrative our Lord's disciples arrive at the well bringing lunch from downtown. They discover Jesus talking to the woman. They stand stunned at what they see. They yearn to challenge the woman: "Who do you think you are? What do you want?" They look at Jesus, shocked, appalled. They cannot believe their eyes: "What good is she? What do you want with her?"
Do you see what John is doing? Here, again, he dissolves cultural contempt and inferiority. Here he takes on gender disparities. Women in the surrounding culture count for nothing. Men and women do not speak in public. Women take second place. When they are born, the family mourns their birth, praying for a son. That is the world John and Jesus know.
But—but—John and the community he writes from confess: man and woman, female and male in the realm of the inclusive Christ exist in their full humanity with and for one another. Traditions, cultures, social structures, ideologies providing deference to anyone because of gender— all of these collapse where the inclusiveness we call Christ permeates the life of the community.
Some of you may have seen recent news dispatches from Boston College about Professor Mary Daly. She teaches classes—and has for years—for women only. I do not wish to engage in the arguments over civil rights and educational access now going on at BC, but I do recall one of Professor Daly's aphorisms making a profound impact on how we think, perceive and talk about God. You will remember. It had to do with our masculine pronouns for God, the "he's," the "hims," we tend to use much of the time when we talk about God. Mary Daly said, "If God is male, the male is God." If God is male, the male is God!
It has worked out that way, and it is a catastrophe. Oh, how we need extend the fullness of God and the love of Christ beyond male identity! Even as we used the phrase, "Our Father who art in heaven" in the Lord's prayer this morning, we sang a text in our processional hymn making reference to God as "Father-Mother," using words—words, whatever they are—always inadequate to express the full dimensions of God, but surely in this case attempting to offer a wider allusion to Divine identity. Whatever her fight may be at BC, Mary Daly is right to call our attention to the deleterious social consequences of labeling the Godhead as male, social consequences over the millennia supporting the heresy of male supremacy. This heresy works itself out in the sexual tyranny, abuse and shaming haunting women's prisons as reported this week by Amnesty International—a heresy continuing to deprive our churches, our universities, our professions, our commerce of the infinite gifts of half the human race.
And yes, just as Jesus met that woman at the well on a face to face basis, demonstrating the Divine mandate to full personhood of all God's children, male and female, we testify to the love of God in Christ affirming the rich and fully human dimensions of every race, creed, class, both genders, the physically or mentally challenged, straight or gay, and their blessed and rightful journey toward the promised realm of God. In that realm—God's realm—our misogyny, our xenophobia, our homophobia dissolves. When Jesus meets the woman at the well we understand that what sustains human communion is the love grounding the universe, whose depths affirm the dignity of every woman and man and the mutuality of the human community.
III
And just once more, John's ancient imagery takes the religious tradition of the Jew, whose religious home lies in Jerusalem, and the Samaritan, whose religious home lies on the side of Mount Gerazim, and John points beyond the parochialism of both Mount Gerazim and Jerusalem toward a new loyalty described as "worship in spirit and in truth."
Do you know what John does here? Astounding! John abolishes religion. He takes our pious "isms", our liturgical rites, our church institutions, our sacred terminology, our devout theologies, our glorious anthems, and our hallowed words, and walks right through them. In this encounter at the well John exposes religious alienation for what it is: pious illusion driving human fragmentation. And he exempts none of us: Congregationalist or Episcopalian, Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, Jew. John sees in the literal commitment of Jews to Jerusalem and Samaritans to Mount Gerazim, the figurative commitments all of us make to holy places, religious ritual, sacred buildings wedging us from one another. John knows we may be separated by ethnic origin and gender conflict, but he knows as well we use religion to justify assaults on one another. He sees religion, its rights and temples, its priesthood and procedures, its ties to tradition and rules, our veneration of liturgical style and devotion to our ancestors and their deeds as deflection from our full identities and subversive of our conveying saving love and life. Oh, John understands our preoccupation with institutional survival, our obsessions with delineating what makes us different from everyone else, our eagerness to reach out and convince others that our brand of truth, our style of worship rates among the best.
But John sees our routine religious practice as diversion from investment the loving Christ invites us to make in a suffering, divided, splintered humanity. He tells us our figurative Jerusalem's and Mount Gerazims whether they be right here at the corner of Dartmouth and Boylston, or down at Holy Cross Cathedral, or at a Jamaica Plain Synagogue. Yes, on this side of the Square, or that side of the square, John tells us our jealous guarding of hierarchies, doctrines, prayer books, hymn texts, bylaws, priesthoods demonstrates primarily the continued fracturing of humankind. When John announces "the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipper will worship . . in Spirit and in truth," he means we surrender all our sectarian, parochial, ethnic, orthodox, ideological and cause-oriented sovereignties, whether Congregationalist or Catholic, Episcopalian, Baptist, Presbyterian or Jew. He invites us to the sovereignty of outgoing healing, recreative Love, to turn our lives over to it, root ourselves in it, drink deeply from it, serve as bearers of it to weary, fragmented individuals, families, neighborhoods, churches, cities and the world. We are free at last, announces the evangelist, from those sectarian, parochial and orthodox entities we seek in our insecurity, liberated finally to be instruments of justice, peace and joy bound to recreative love we call Christ . . . worship and mission in the unity of Spirit and Truth!
Do you remember how John concludes his narrative? The woman retreats from the well; she steps away from her encounter with the thirsty Jew. She asks, "Can this be the Christ? Can this be the Christ?" And to our evangelist, John, who, describing this encounter, witnesses to Jesus dissolving ethnic divisions, healing sexuality and gender wounds, melting religious boundaries, John answers the woman's awe-inspired question, "Can this be the Christ?" Indeed! Of course! Who else?
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