Grace for an Outcast—Deut. 10: 14-22; John 4: 1-26
[SLIDE 1] Many years ago on Antiques Roadshow, a man came in with a simple blanket. [SLIDE 2] It was not the brightest, best colors, but it was good weaving, and it matched the southwestern United States style. He said it was given to his family by Kit Carson, a well-known American frontiersman, and had been sitting on the back of a chair, somewhat forgotten in the scheme of his living room. The appraiser, however, advised the man that it was one of the earliest types of Navajo weaving, a chief’s blanket, made in the 1840s, and one of the rarest artifacts of Navajo history. In 2002, the blanket was worth over half a million dollars. Another man with a similar blanket sold his for almost 2 million in 2016. It’s hard sometimes to see the value in what we have, and it is equally as hard to find something of value.
In life, we often struggle to see the value in what we have. In our Gospel lesson, Jesus encounters the woman at the well. [SLIDE 3] She is a Samaritan, a person whom a Jewish person like Jesus should not interact with by law and social custom. Samaritans were Jews who intermarried with Assyrian pagans long before this Gospel lesson. Their bloodline and religious practices were mixed with that of the pagans. Verse 9 tells us that Samaritans refuse to have anything to do with Samaritans. In Jesus’s life she would have been an outcast, socially unacceptable to talk to, and certainly no one from whom Jesus should receive a drink of water. She probably thought this was a set up or a cruel joke.
[SLIDE 4] In the exchange, she talks about Jacob’s well, and its historic significance to the people. Both Samaritans and Jews are descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In many ways, the well was almost sacred to the Samaritans because of the connection to their heritage. Jesus changes her perception, though. He tells her he offers the living water—life giving hope. In essence it’s a baptism, not just a drink from a well. Jesus offers her grace in the same way he offers grace to all. She may not be able to see the value of what she has sitting right in front of her, but Jesus sees the value in her, even when others don’t.
[SLIDE 5] While serving a Lutheran church, they started every service with a prayer of confession that said, “O Almighty God, merciful Father, I a poor, miserable sinner, confess to thee all my sins and iniquities,” and it finishes with, “and justly deserve thy temporal and eternal punishment.” I struggle with that sentiment in light of Galatians 3:26-27, “For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. And all who have been united with Christ in baptism have put on Christ, like putting on new clothes.” Despite the ways we may mess up, God sees the value in us and welcomes us to the family calling us “children.” God does not use miserable and wretched, outcast. Instead, God calls us beloved children.
The Samaritan woman knew she was with a prophet, but didn’t realize until the end of the conversation, that she was, indeed, with the Son of God. She didn’t recognize the value of what was right in front of her. Sometimes we also miss this. In the struggles of life, we often feel like an outcast, or like God has abandoned us. A friend of mine said that we always want to be Jesus in the story, but here, we are much more the Samaritan woman: worried, alone, and feeling ashamed of ourselves in some way. But she knew about the hope in the Messiah, and that day she met him face to face. In our times and places of feeling like the outcast, we must remember that we too can encounter Jesus in our lives and find grace for all the places we feel are wrong.
[SLIDE 6] But we must also see the value in something new. Samaritans had a strong reverence for Jacob’s Well given its historical significant and longevity. The Samaritan woman asks Jesus point blank, “Do you think you are greater than our ancestor Jacob who gave us this well?” Jesus was offering something different. He wasn’t bringing her a literal drink of water, but instead, he was offering her a baptism of new life. Jesus didn’t come to offer a literal upgrade in drinking water. This isn’t like going from Deer Park to Smart Water. It was spiritual. Jesus was offering her a renewal and cleansing of soul and spirit. She didn’t realize just how amazing this new offer from Jesus was.
Likewise, the Israelites in Deuteronomy struggled to re-find their covenant with God. Much of the book is Moses re-teaching the people of their covenant and relationship to God before they enter the Promised Land. Moses called them away from their stubbornness and hard-heartedness and into a relationship with God that exists in righteousness, justice, and mercy. They often struggled because they got too comfortable living as outcasts, wanting to do it their own way. You have to remember, their forebearers watched God part the Red Sea, then still turned to idol worship. We can be comfortable living as an outcast, but it will always hold us back from God’s grace in our lives.
It’s often easy to live on the outside, in doubt, worry, anger, ambivalence, and all the other attitudes that keep us on the margins of God’s grace. But just as Jesus made it a point to talk to an outcast at the well, so too, does Jesus make it a point to seek us out when we are feeling the most lonely and vulnerable. God never stops offering us love, grace, and welcome into that family of faith. The only one who keeps us on the margins is ourselves. We leave old wounds to fester. We focus on the struggle and forget God. We hold on to something that keeps us at a distance from the one who loves us. It’s almost as if instead of being an outcast, we’ve cast ourselves out. But God’s love is unending, and God’s welcome is vast. And nothing will take that away from us.
But there’s also another side to this as well. Whom do we hold on the margins of faith and keep as outcasts? If I were to make a list of things and people we don’t like, our society would probably write a list a mile long. We are trained to keep a barrier, to hold the undesirable on the margins, and to say that some are just going to be outcasts no matter what. Yet, Jesus didn’t keep that barrier with the Samaritan woman. Not only did he engage her in a way that was shocking to her, he offered the same hope and grace that he offered to his Jewish brothers and sisters. She might have been hated and an outcast, but Jesus didn’t care. She was also a child of God for him to love just as much as the next person.
[SLIDE 7] One of you sent me the news story on a fraternity at Clemson University. The school has a program to teach life skills to young people with disabilities. Historically, the young folks in that program had never been integrated with the general student population. But one young man with Down’s Syndrome wanted to be a part of a fraternity. It was an amazing moment when he got a bid from Phi Kappa Alpha. The men in that fraternity talked about how this young man brought a new-found sense of joy and brotherhood to the experience. The following year six fraternities and five sororities all accepted special needs students from the life skills program, bringing a new-found sense of friendship to those who were previously living as outcasts in their own university.
[SLIDE 8] Jesus proved both that we don’t have to relegate ourselves to the margins because God loves us and calls us children of God. But God also calls on us to break down the margins. Just as God found us and drew us in when we were the Samaritan woman, the outsider, so too, must we show love and grace to the Samaritans in our lives. It reminds me of the old poem by the poet Edwin Markham, “He drew a circle that shut me out- Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle and took him in!”
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