Isms

The Sermon Study Guide is here.

Romans 3:19-26; John 4:4-15

February 3, 2013 • Portage First UMC

VIDEO INTRO

Two weeks ago, on the morning of January 21, the day of the inauguration ceremonies, a popular and well-known conservative pastor from the west coast posted the following on Twitter: “Praying for our president, who today will place his hand on a Bible he does not believe to take an oath to a God he likely does not know.” The responses, as you might guess, came strongly and swiftly, but as far as I know, to this date, that pastor has not yet apologized or responded to the criticisms. More than that, at my last check, 3,456 people had “re-tweeted” that comment. In some ways, you can say his tweet was maybe rather mild (some of the responses were not!), and that it just represented a strong disagreement he has with President Obama. But that tweet is part of a larger issue, and that’s the perception many people have, especially young people, of the church, that the Christian faith and the church are hate-filled. The Barna Group, a Christian research firm, did a study in 2007 about attitudes toward the church, and that study became the basis of the book unChristian. It was a study aimed at unchurched young people, and Barna found that the two top perceptions of modern-day Christianity are both hate-filled. 91% of those surveyed believe that Christianity is anti-homosexual, and 87% of those same folks believe the church is judgmental. “Only a small percentage of outsiders,” the report found, “strongly believe that the labels ‘respect, love, hope and trust’ describe Christianity…Christians are primarily perceived for what they stand against. We have become famous for what we oppose, rather than who we are for” (Kinnaman & Lyons, chapter 2).

The church has an image problem, and that’s part of what we’re trying to address in this series of sermons as we seek to bust a few of the myths that exist about the church and the Christian faith. Over the last few weeks, we’ve talked about how the church is perceived to be antiscientific, or all about rules, or insensitive to those of other faiths, but today we come to what is, perhaps, the most troubling, for there are many in the younger generations who believe the church is hate-filled—specifically that we are, by nature, racist, sexist, and homophobic, among other things. They believe that we are more against certain types of people than we are for anyone, that we subscribe to many different “isms.” But is that a true picture of the Christian faith? Are those folks right? Are Christians called to be hate-filled?

It isn’t hard to look around and find a basis for such charges. I’m only using these three as examples of this larger perception of Christians being hateful, and there are certainly others we could include. But let’s just think about these three for a few moments. Sexism, for instance—the belief that one sex is superior to the other, and usually that’s seen as men lording it over women. Certainly, it’s not hard to find Bible passages that could be read that way, even in the New Testament. We recognize that much of the Bible was written in largely patriarchal cultures, and most of us cringe when Paul writes to the Corinthians, “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church” (1 Corinthians 14:34-35). If you followed that to the letter today, it’d be awfully quiet in our Sunday School rooms, and many churches would be empty altogether. It also doesn’t help that Paul wrote, “Wives, submit to your own husbands as you do to the Lord” (Galatians 5:22). That’s also a passage many men favor having read at their wedding! And, more seriously and sadly, there are traditions within the Christian faith where passages like that are used to justify oppression of and even violence against women. As I’ve said before, I knew a church in Muncie where a class was held to teach men how to make their wives submit. Passages like this have also been used in the past to keep women from full-time, professional ministry. Did you know that the first woman to be ordained to the ministry in the United States was in 1853, in a Congregational church? Pentecostals really led the charge and the change in allowing women to serve as pastors (Russell, Exposing Myths About Christianity, pg. 89); the Methodists didn’t get on that bandwagon until 1956. So is Christianity sexist?

Or what about racism? It’s a sad part of our history that, even though the New Testament never mentions the color of someone’s skin (cf. Russell 101), the Bible has been used to justify slavery and inequality between the races. Using twisted interpretations of various Bible verses, churches were used to proclaim that one race was inferior to the other. Slaveholders would beat their slaves during the week and show up in church on Sunday. The Methodist church split in 1844 over this issue (17 years before the civil war began) because the southern churches were in favor of slavery and the northern churches were helping slaves escape. Even after emancipation and the end of the war, the division remained. The northern and southern Methodists didn’t come back together until 1939, almost a century later. And though there were more Christians involved in the civil rights movement of the 1960‘s than purely secular folks, the struggle remained. And remains. Sunday mornings are still the most segregated time in American culture. Is Christianity racist?

And what about the struggle over homosexuality? The church is split, broken over this issue. Our own denomination, despite taking a clear stance many years ago, continues to struggle with what it means to live in a world with changing attitudes. A phobia is “an intense, abnormal, or illogical fear of a specified thing” (Russell 91). It tends to be demonstrated by “demonizing” the other person, especially someone or something we don’t understand. And when we demonize we tend to generate more heat than light on the matter. The truth is that Christians have widely divergent views on this topic. As Jeffrey Burton Russell puts it, “Some believe that charity outweighs the biblical texts. Some believe the biblical texts should be ignored altogether. Some note that the evidence pointing to physical causes of homosexuality was obviously unknown to ‘culture-bound’ biblical writers. Some continue to believe that the traditional views of the Bible need to be reaffirmed” (93). Some are willing to act on their beliefs violently, or at least verbally and attack those they don’t agree with. Our own General Conference, the decision-making body for the whole United Methodist Church, continues to debate this topic when they meet every four years. And it’s just another, maybe more current example of the way the world perceives us as hate-filled (cf. Russell 87-94, 101-103).

Sexism, racism, homophobic, hate-filled. As we’ve said all through this series, despite the fact that there are people who do act the way the world perceives all of us to act, the standard by which we judge the Christian faith is not how others act, or even how you and I act, or how we feel. The standard is always Jesus, and how the Bible calls us to live out our faith. So, for a moment this morning, I want to take a step back from the heat of these topics and look at how Jesus treated people, then look at what Paul says about who can be saved and how, and then see if we can respond in any way to this myth.

Our Gospel reading this morning contains the beginning of a story about Jesus and an unlikely conversation companion. John begins the story in a startling way—not, maybe, startling to us, because we’ve probably read it before. But he says here that Jesus “had” to go through Samaria. Well, that’s simply not true. Jesus didn’t HAVE to go through Samaria. Granted, Samaria was the shortest, quickest route. But it wasn’t the only route to take if you were going from Judea in the south back to Galilee in the north. Samaria lay right between the two areas, but because the Jews and the Samaritans hated each other, most good Jews would go across the Jordan River, through the valley and around Samaria, avoiding it completely. They would go the long way so as to avoid contact with those dirty, rotten Samaritans. It was thought that contact with them would make you “unclean,” or unsuitable for worship. Basically, it was a sin to have contact with the Samaritans. But it was also true that sometimes the Samaritans attacked Jews who were traveling through their territory. It was a mutual hatred, and in fact, Jesus and his disciples had gone “the long way” before (Wright, John for Everyone, Part One, pg. 40; Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, pg. 201). But this day, John says, Jesus “had” to go the short way—not because he was on any pressing schedule. I believe he “had” to go this way so that he could talk to this woman.

She wasn’t someone people talked to normally. She came to the well at noon, most likely because she wasn’t welcome there in the morning when the rest of the women came to get water. Either she is a social outcast (perhaps because of her many marriages and divorces or the lifestyle she is living currently) or she knows that travelers will be at the well at noon and she wants to contact them (Bailey 202). Either way, she is a woman of ill repute. Now, good Jewish men didn’t talk to decent women if they weren’t married to them, and they certainly wouldn’t be caught alone with a woman like this. The risk was too great. They could be accused of immorality, or even drawn into immorality, and at the very least, they could be the subject of gossip (Wright, John, 41). In fact, the standard protocol here, when the woman sees Jesus literally sitting on the capstone of the well, would be for her to stop and wait for him to withdraw at least twenty feet. Only then should she approach the well (Bailey 202). But it quickly becomes obvious Jesus isn’t going anywhere, so John tells us she came up to the well. The well Jesus is sitting on. She’s going to have to get past him to put her bucket through the hole in the top.

True to custom, she doesn’t speak to him. But Jesus, who was known to break all sorts of rules, does talk to her. In fact, he asks her for a drink. Again, we don’t think anything of that, though as this is cold and flu season, we might be reluctant to share a drink with someone. But this whole thing of hatred betweens Jews and Samaritans centered around the belief by the one that the other was impure, unholy, they were a sinner, and that by touching them, interacting with them, you would become impure as well. You would be sinning. This was a deep-seated tradition, reaching back five hundred years (Bailey 203). Five hundred years of arguing over who were the true people of God. Five hundred years of dogged determination not to share a drink or a plate of food with the other. Five hundred years of treating the other person, distant relatives, as nonhuman. And with six words, Jesus tears down the barrier: “Will you give me a drink?” (4:7).

There’s much more that could be said about this story, but I want us to notice this today: Jesus reached out to and interacted with and treated as human someone no one else wanted anything to do with, someone who was considered to be a sinner, someone whom everyone thought they had labeled. Jesus broke social convention and five hundred years of tradition because he saw a soul in desperate need of hope, salvation, rescue. Now, let me point out that Jesus didn’t stand there and approve of this woman’s life. He calls her on the carpet. He points out her failed marriages and her current sinful and broken life. He doesn’t hide from that. In the conversation that follows, he is very blunt with her. But he doesn’t avoid her. He doesn’t shun her. He doesn’t hate her. He loves her and offers her hope.

Well, we say, maybe that was just one instance. Was it? Did Jesus act this way toward anyone else? Well, tax collectors were considered traitors and sinners and were despised by most people in that day. (Some things never change!) And yet, Jesus called a tax collector to be one of his disciples (Mark 2:14). In Jericho he called a short little tax collector down out of a tree and had dinner with him (Luke 19:1-10). (You’ll hear more about that next week.) Jesus went to dinner with most everyone. He allowed a “sinful woman” to wash his feet with her tears (Luke 7:39), and he was known by those who thought they were important as a “friend of sinners” (Matthew 11:19). Jesus hung out with people no one else wanted. He argued with the so-called “religious” people, and he loved the so-called “sinners.” There was one time when he was confronted with a woman caught in the act of adultery. The religious leaders threw her at Jesus’ feet and asked what they should do. After telling them they could stone her if the person who had no sin in his life threw the first stone, he then turns to the woman, tells her he doesn’t condemn her, and tells her to leave her life of sin behind her (John 8:1-11). To those whom others hated, Jesus showed love, and he demonstrated why loving God and loving others is the greatest commandment of all (Matthew 22:35-40).

But what about Paul? We know Paul wrote most of the early New Testament, and we also know Paul has a reputation for strong words. Paul is often characterized as a sexist, excluding women from worship. But, on that issue, Paul seems to be writing particular commands to particular churches who are having time-bound difficulties, because we also know Paul worked alongside many women in his ministry. At the end of his letter to the Romans, he calls Phoebe a “deacon,” a leader in the early church (16:1), and says she has been helpful to him. He greets Priscilla and Aquila, wife and husband, and isn’t it interesting that he names her first, when usually in that culture (as in ours, for that matter) people were listed the other way around? He names Mary, Junia, Tryphena and Tryphosa, and Julia as women who have worked alongside him in the cause of the Gospel. And that’s just in Romans! Paul also appreciated the work and companionship of at least two slaves we know of—Luke, who traveled with Paul in various places in the book of Acts (cf. Card, Luke: The Gospel of Amazement, pgs. 15-21) and Onesimus, who was converted under Paul’s ministry (cf. Philemon). Now, it is true that Paul has strong words on the topic of homosexuality, and his writing in Romans 1 is very much at the center of today’s debates over the topic. Paul is writing about that much like we would use a current example in the news or in the culture to describe or illustrate a larger point. He’s talking about rebellion against God, and in his culture there were many examples of that kind of brokenness. The emperor, Nero, was known to engage in all sorts of bizarre sexual behavior, with women and men, and Paul is not simply saying, “We don’t approve of this.” Rather, he’s showing what happens when one part of our life becomes our defining characteristic. That’s idolatry, which is Paul’s larger concern in this chapter. He also goes on to talk about envy, greed, murder, gossip and other sins in the same chapter. What happens when we rebel against God? Not “we” as in individuals, but “we” as in the human race. Well, Paul says, God gives us over to pursue the glorification of ourselves rather than God’s plan (cf. Wright, Paul for Everyone: Romans, Part One, pgs. 20-27).

Paul’s overarching concern in the larger letter, which he gets to in the part of chapter 3 that we read this morning, is what makes us right with God, in essence what gets us out of the mess we’re in. For Paul’s people, the Jews, it was all about the law—doing what the law commanded, and not doing what the law commanded them not to do. Pastor Deb talked about this a couple of weeks ago. The problem, as they discovered, is that no one can keep the law completely. The other problem is that when we try, it becomes all about our performance, doing the “right” things, or it becomes all about who we are. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul makes this point. He says that if anyone has anything to boast about when it comes to their pedigree or their lineage, he has more. “Circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless” (Philippians 3:5-6). Paul says, I had it all together. I did everything right. And yet, it wasn’t enough. It didn’t matter who I was. It didn’t matter what I had done. I could keep the law until the end of my days, he says, and all the law would do is tell me what my sin is. “Through the law,” he writes, “we become conscious of our sin” (3:20). And that’s all the law, the strict hard rules, could do for me.

What the law does not do and cannot do, Paul says, is define what salvation is, what righteousness is. That’s why Jesus came, he says, to provide the hope of living in a righteous way. “This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe” (3:22). “All,” he says. In other words, Paul is not so much concerned about who we are. He’s concerned about whose we are, and the labels don’t matter. “There is no difference,” he says, “between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (3:22-23). In other words, we’re far too quick to judge, to call others “sinners,” when, in fact, we are sinners as well. There is no ranking of big sins and little sins. The law tells us what sin is, but Christ tells us who we are and who we can be in him. We are people who have all sinned, who are all in need of grace, and who have no business pointing the finger at others. We can, like Jesus did, lovingly point out the sin in someone’s life, but if we can’t do it with love, we shouldn’t do it at all. If we can’t do it with love, we’re not really doing it in Jesus’ name. Remember how he treated the Samaritan woman? Remember what he said in the Sermon on the Mount? “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?…You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:3, 5). For Paul, and for Jesus, what justifies us is not who we are but whose we are. And when he makes us his own, he calls us to leave our life of sin, as he did with the woman by the well and many others.

I’m not trying to say we shouldn’t have firm convictions. Our church does. The United Methodist Church says, “Racism plagues and cripples our growth in Christ, inasmuch as it is antithetical to the gospel itself…we recognize racism as a sin and affirm the ultimate and temporal worth of all persons” (2012 Discipline, para. 162.A). Our Social Principles go on to say, “We affirm with Scripture the common humanity of male and female, both having equal worth in the eyes of God. We reject the erroneous notion that one gender is superior to another…” (para. 161.E). And our Church goes on to say, “We support efforts to stop violence and other forms of coercion against all persons, regardless of sexual orientation…We affirm that all persons are individuals of sacred worth, created in the image of God…The United Methodist Church does not condone the practice of homosexuality and considers this practice incompatible with Christian teaching. We affirm that God’s grace is available to all” (paras. 162.J and 161.F). So the church has a viewpoint, a stance, a conviction, but that last statement I read is very important. God’s grace is available to all. There should be a difference between holding a strong conviction about a belief or practice and hating the person who believes or acts differently—because we are always in ministry to all. We worship one who came not as a person of power but as a baby in a manger (cf. Bailey 204), the very epitome of powerlessness, and then he grew up and told us that the greatest commandment was to love God with all our heart, soul, strength and mind, and to love our neighbor as ourself (Mark 12:28-31). In the final analysis, that is what shapes our faith. No matter what the myth is, or what people accuse us of, at its heart, our faith is one that calls us to love God, love others and offer Jesus.

As we bring this series to a close, we’re going to share in the sacrament of Holy Communion. More than anything else, this table—this bread and this cup—ought to bring us together, because it reminds us of what Paul said. We are all sinners, in need of grace and mercy. The bread and the cup remind us of what Jesus did to give us grace, to bring us mercy. And so we’re going to do communion a little differently this morning. You’ve noticed by now that the table is in the center of the congregation, or as I prefer to think about, it’s in the midst of the community. And after I bless the elements, we’re going to invite you to come as you are ready and take the bread, dip it in the cup and receive the communion there, in the midst of your brothers and sisters in Christ. But here’s the challenge: if there is someone here you have a grudge against, if there is a broken relationship here, if there’s someone here that’s just so different you don’t understand them—I want to challenge you to come to the table with that person. Bring them with you. Or take communion to them; we have extra chalices on the table this morning for just that purpose. Share the table today with someone you might have an “ism” against, and find the love of Christ poured out on both of you.