A Courageous Mission

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A Courageous Mission
By Charles Johnson, Pastor
Trinity Baptist Church, San Antonio

Editor`s Note: This sermon was delivered at the Annual Convocation of Texas Baptists Committed in September, 2001.

This famous Woman at the Well was powerless and disenfranchised in every conceivable way by the males of the time.

First, she had the misfortune of being a woman. They defined her personhood only in relation to males. Because they saw circumcision as the sign of a covenant with God, the woman could relate to God and the community of faith only through the man. Because the blood of the sacrifice on the temple altar became the means of atonement from sin, they considered all blood outside the temple life as ritually unclean; thus, they excluded women from worship life during menstruation and childbirth.

Increasingly they excluded and segregated women. They had access to the Holy only through their males. A woman`s court was added to the temple to distance females from the sanctuary. It came to be that a woman`s vow before God was not as valid as a man`s, and that a husband could essentially annul a wife`s vow.

They blamed women as the location of sin and evil and eventually excluded them from testifying in public trial. Women could not be seen in public nor speak to strangers. They could not teach or learn the Torah in their own homes. They were second-class citizens in every way, barred from the worship and teaching of God, just barely human, just scarcely above the status of slaves. This woman had nothing.

Nevertheless, it gets worse. Not only was this individual a woman, but she was a woman without a man. She had no husband. This means she was dirt poor. Women in the first century were dependent both financially and legally on the men in their lives; fathers, husbands, brothers, sons.

Dying from exposure was common in the Greco-Roman world of Jesus` day for baby girls. They did not receive the care and attention that baby boys got. They would die of exposure to the elements, a first-century form of passive euthanasia. Women generally married while teenagers, bore children, and died young. The average life expectancy of a woman in biblical times was 34 years (Oxford Companion to the Bible). Frequently, women died in childbirth.

In short, most women lived in slavery or near-poverty, and worked very hard for wages for their own economic survival, and that of their families. Prostitution was a common vocation for a single or widowed woman. This woman may have been essentially a slave or sexual concubine working for a man who was farming the valley below Mt. Gerazim. She has come to the nearby well of Jacob to fetch water for her master and his men. This woman has nothing.

However, it gets even worse. She is not emotionally well. Who would be in her shoes? She had been married and divorced five times and was caught in a destructive cycle of serial marriages.

Here she was again in another relationship. It was not a healthy, mutual partnership with a man, but just something that would help her barely hang on financially. She had been there five times before and was stuck. This woman was addicted to abusive, self-centered, narcissistic men who had treated her so badly that she long ago had lost any semblance of self. She had no time for herself. She was not important. She would do almost anything to put food in the mouths of her babies, even sell her body, or her soul.

This woman is the profile of battered women. She is Alice Walker`s Celie, in The Color Purple-so used and discarded so frequently at such a young age-she thinks it is just a normal existence for a girl.

She is a typical client of Women`s Protective Services. She reminds me of a woman in my country church in Kentucky who kept reporting to me her husband`s abuse. I finally believed her after a nurse at the hospital called to tell me to come quickly because her husband had bashed in her head with a stick of firewood. Maybe this woman had no fresh cuts or bruises, but Jesus saw plenty of woundedness in her. She was young, yet she felt like she had been going through hell for five lifetimes.

However, it still gets worse! This poor, beaten-down ghost of a woman is also a Samaritan-a mongrel race of half-Jews in the Northern Kingdom who had intermarried Syrians after the Assyrian invasion of 722 B.C. They worshiped Yahweh, but not like their kinspersons to the south. The Samaritans constructed a temple on Mt. Gerazim to rival the temple in Jerusalem. They were the Jews` fiercest opponents. They were like today`s cross-town rivals.

These Samaritan enemies often attacked and robbed travelers from Galilee going on pilgrimages to Jerusalem. In the minds of the Jews, they were a hated, despised and worthless race. As the region between Galilee and Judea, Jews considered Samaria particularly susceptible to outside corrupting influences. Conversely, Samaritans considered Jews heretics, especially in dietary laws and worship practices. There was no love lost between Jews and Samaritans.

So, not only was this human being a woman, she was a poor woman. Not only was she a poor woman, she was an abused woman. Not only was she a poor and abused woman, but also a member of an oppressed minority. In short, the woman at the well was socially disenfranchised, religiously ostracized, economically marginalized, and emotionally victimized. In this unhappy regard, she was not terribly different from many women in the world today. This was a woman who had nothing.

Small wonder the text says that Jesus had to go through Samaria. Agape love compelled him to do so. His entire force of being motivated him toward Samaria.

Jesus went directly through Samaria for evangelistic reasons. He needed to "good news" somebody. Jesus had an intuition that someone in Samaria needed a word of hope and acceptance. Jesus had to go through Samaria because he sensed someone there was at the end of her rope, at the dead-end of life, and needed a way out with God`s love. Jesus was constrained to go through Samaria because there was somebody there who needed to hear that they should never put a period where God only puts a comma.

Are we making our way through Samaria? Are we going to those places that are rough and dangerous? Are we taking the gospel of Christ to those regions in our city, state, nation and world that we have concluded to be inaccessible and inhospitable? Maybe we have a keen interest at stake in doing so.

Philadelphia African-American minister Eugene Rivers tells about the day the street gangs burst into his worship service, bringing their drug war from the inner city. Shots rang out. They riddled the sanctuary with bullets and killed two people. Shortly after that, Pastor Rivers commented, "Unless the church is willing to go out into the streets, the streets will come into the church."

Jesus went through Samaria because he knew full well that every sinner had a future and every saint has a past. As Augustine said, "There are at least as many sheep outside the fold as there are wolves within."

When Jesus saw the Samaritan woman, he spotted a sheep outside the fold. The text says that Jesus was tired out because of his journey, so he took a rest beside Jacob`s well. It was only noon. Jesus had been walking for a few hours, but not far enough to tax a strapping young 30-year-old man.

No, Jesus was not so much tired in his body, as he was in his spirit. He was tired of sexism that demeaned and denigrated women. He was tired of poverty that robbed women and children of their dignity. He was tired of racism that judged a human being by his skin color rather than the strength of his character.

He was tired of social patterns and religious traditions that put down women and kept them from enjoying full partnership. Jesus was tired. Like Rosa Parks whose courageous stance started the Birmingham bus boycotts, Jesus too was "sick and tired of being sick and tired."

Because Jesus had no bucket or rope with which to draw water, he asked the Samaritan woman for a drink. Not only did he speak in public to this half-breed, half-Jew, half-whore, half-person, he even drank after her.

Jesus was no doubt familiar with the rabbinical saying, "A man should hold no conversation with a woman in the street, not even his own wife, still less with any other woman, lest men should gossip." Or, this saying from the Mishnah, "He that eats the bread of Samaritans is like one that eats the flesh of swine" (Interpreter`s Bible).

Immediately, when Jesus spoke to the woman she recognized his Galilean accent. She identified him as a Jew, and wondered just what in the world was going on that this Jewish man was speaking to a Samaritan woman in broad daylight.

Jesus cranked into gear with his unique brand of unconditional love. A love that had no strings attached. A love that transcended every conceivable human barrier and boundary. He gave a love that was perfectly willing to break rules and shatter convention to convey its power to others.

Jesus knows that authentic agape love is always inclusive rather than exclusive. It invites people in rather than boxing people out. Several years ago, I told my congregation after yet another abysmally low attendance at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting, that our mother denomination had excluded so many folks, liberals, moderates, Masons, women, homosexuals and even Mickey Mouse-that soon they could hold their annual meeting in a phone booth in Muleshoe.

The Lubbock newspaper picked up this quote and a woman from Muleshoe called me and asked, "Pastor, what makes you think the Southern Baptist Convention would be welcome in Muleshoe?"

Agape love is always inclusive, never exclusive, and God does the culling, not us. My favorite parable is one of our Lord`s shortest: "The kingdom of God is like a great fishnet and all different kinds of fish are hauled in."

Jesus was modeling the courageous inclusiveness of the kingdom. He was geographically inclusive by going out into Samaria and Judea rather than staying right around the spiritual capital city of Jerusalem. He was gender inclusive by engaging a woman.

He was theologically inclusive by making a friendship with a Gerazim worshiper. He was economically inclusive by identifying with a poor person. He was racially inclusive by loving a Samaritan and morally inclusive by embracing a woman of ill repute.

There is only one reason anyone should believe what we say about Jesus, and that is: that we love with the same kind of sweeping, exhaustive, unconditional love with which Jesus loved. For God`s sake, let us quit telling folks how much more we believe the Bible than the fundamentalists do. Let us quit telling folks how much more we hate sin than the fundamentalists do.

We must stop being reactive to the SBC and its policies of exclusion and pathologies of control. We must boldly call Texas Baptists to the inclusive love of Jesus Christ. The SBC is an old, dead wineskin that cannot hold the new wine of Christ`s global gospel in today`s world. We must discard it and adopt a new wineskin for the combustible, dynamic gospel that is fermenting and maturing among us.

I long for the day when the BGCT quits defending itself and launches out with abandon into the courageous mission of Christ`s inclusive gospel, calling Texas Baptists to such a great vision that only the power of God can accomplish it.

Let us resolve that no child in Texas will go to bed hungry and put that resolution in full-page ads across the state. Let us resolve that we will take every unwanted child to raise with love and care, and put that in full-page ads across our state. Let us resolve that we will undo racism in our land and put that in full-page ads across our state.

And let us resolve that we will support missionaries who want to go into the world with the inclusive love of Christ. Let us raise the money to do so and put it in full-page ads across our state. Then folks will see that we mean business about having no creature separated from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Jesus gave this woman the Living Water that so thoroughly quenched the aching and longing and restlessness inside her soul. With it, she would never thirst again for the temporary security of an abusive relationship. Indeed, this Living Water is a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.

Jesus taught the woman true worship, which is that devotion that knows neither Mt. Gerazim nor Mt. Zion, neither Shechem nor Jerusalem, neither Samaria nor Judea, nor any other human institution, nor any creed, nor any ritual, nor any tradition, nor any doctrine. It is a true worship that is done in the Spirit and in the truth that "Whoever calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved." So, "Present yourself as a living sacrifice, wholly acceptable unto God who is your reasonable service."

Jesus made the woman into a bold witness, perhaps the first evangelist of John`s gospel. She was so excited to proclaim her newfound faith in Jesus Christ that she left her water jugs at the well and raced back into town.

She forgot her menial servitude to her man, because she had found a new Master. A Master who will never mistreat or abuse or neglect her, who related so keenly to her that she knows her story even before she tells it. Twice she said, "He told me everything I have ever done." Though the text does not say it explicitly, we all know what she said after that: "And he loves me anyway! And he loves me anyway!

The woman who had nothing had gained everything she would ever need.

Fred Craddock tells the story of the young boy in East Tennessee whose mother had borne him out of wedlock. He did not know exactly what "illegitimate" meant, but he knew it was not something good. The scorn and rejection that befell his mother in that small mountain town fell upon him too.

About the only public place he ever cared to go in that town was to the church, and he was not very public about that. He would slip in every Sunday after the invocation and take a seat on the back pew, then slip out when they pronounced the benediction. He went because he loved the preacher. He was mesmerized by that preacher. The pastor was tall, stately with long white hair and a long white beard, and a deep voice.

When he spoke, it seemed he might have been speaking the Word of God himself. One day when the boy quietly slipped into the back of the church he saw that the two rear pews were already full, as were the next two pews and the next two. He had to sit in the fourth or fifth pew. The old preacher spoke with particular eloquence and cogency on that particular day.

It seemed he looked straight at the lad during the sermon. When the service was over and the benediction was spoken, the boy stepped out into the aisle to leave. However, two men shaking hands with each other blocked his way. The boy panicked. He could not get through to the door. What would people say when they recognized him as that little bastard boy?

Then, he felt a hand on his shoulder. He slowly turned around to gaze up into the face of the old preacher who asked in a voice that would quiet the angels: "Son, tell me, whose boy are you? Silence came over the chapel. Everyone stopped their chatting and looked directly at the preacher and the boy.

The preacher, looking deep into the eyes of the frightened lad, broke the silence and said, "Why I know who your are! You are a child of God, that`s who you are-a child of God." Then he put his arm around the lad`s shoulders and walked him through the cluster of church people to the door, and said, "Go on, boy! Get out there and claim your inheritance."

There is a world out there dying to claim its inheritance. How will they know they are rich if we do not read them the will?