Opening thoughts and reflections on friendship

Since the announcement of my appointment as the 12th Rector of St Martin’s Providence, these last weeks have been filled with the experience of saying good-bye. This particular experience of saying goodbye is a very bittersweet one. It’s hard for human beings to say goodbye, which is why some of us long for nothing better than to just disappear in the quiet of the night – as it were.

Saying good-bye is hard because as I have experienced these last weeks, among the many, many expressions of love, affection, gratitude, good will, and good luck, there has been sadness in the face of a sense of impending loss. I have had to remind myself on numerous occasions over the last weeks that there is no greater testimony to the quality of human relationship than the experience of sadness at the moment of departure.

In John 14:1-14, the Gospel for Easter 5, we are given a continuation of Jesus’ very extended and prolonged good-byes to his disciples – known appropriately as the Farewell Discourses. John gives Jesus four long chapters for his good-byes, whereas on my last Sunday at Trinity Cathedral the sermon slot allows me an interval counted-out in mere minutes.

The culmination in Jesus’ long farewell comes in chapter 15:12 when Jesus tells his disciples to love one another as he has loved them. Yet, for me, the punch line comes in verse 15 when Jesus declares that his disciples are no longer his servants, but his friends. We are called to be Jesus’ friends and this is made concrete through the way we become friends with one another.

Arresting images

I am arrested by the first image that the writer of 1^st Peter offers us in the Epistle for the 5^th Sunday in Eastertide:

Like the newborn infants you are, you must crave for pure spiritual milk, so that you may thrive upon it to your soul’s health…[1] 

The writer of 1^st Peter here is drawing upon the primary image for the connection of one human being to another – that of infant at the mother’s breast. Through it he offers us a vision of what is involved in being a Christian community of friends.

There is a very particular school of psychoanalysis known as the British School of Object Relations Theory. Object Relations Theory departs from the classical Freudian School in seeing the primary impulse of human nature, not as seeking gratification, but object relating. Object relating is the psychological term for human connection, fulfilled in relationships.

1^st Peter can be read in a classical Freudian way where the focus is on the newborn’s desire to be gratified by the spiritual milk. After all we all desire to be fed, to have our hunger satiated, to experience the gratification of being full. Yet an Object Relations reading focuses our attention beyond our need to be fed to our desire for connection. The infant does not treat the mother’s breast only as an on-demand feeding machine. The breast becomes the first object for relationship. Relationship is further mediated through the loving gaze of the mother in whose face the infant learns to recognize its own reflection. The infant discovers itself to exist as it glimpses a reflection of itself in the mother’s, eyes, the mother’s smile, her voice, and her touch.

Object Relations Theory and Christianity, at least on this point, seem to me to share a profound understanding of human nature. The Christian understanding of human fulfillment is friendship with God. As Jesus tells his disciples friendship with God is reflected and experienced through friendship with one another. As 1^st Peter suggests, the roots of our capacity for friendship are found in the earliest experience of encountering another.

It is no coincidence that both 1^st Peter and the Object Relations School identify the roots of human friendship to lie in the encounter between infant and mother. Through having tasted the spiritual milk, our desire is to come and find rest within the loving gaze of God is nurtured. In the face of Jesus we glimpse ourselves made in the image of God. This is an image of relationality. God has revealed God self as a community of relationships. So to catch a glimpse of our own nature reflected back to us through verbal gaze of Jesus who calls us friends, we are nurtured into relationship with God through the quality of spiritual friendship binding us together as a Christian community.

The writer of 1^st Peter now offers us a second arresting image:

So come to him, our living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight …[2] 

After I was ordained a deacon in 1985 and then priest the following year, I began a journey of surprising discovery about myself. Very quickly, I discovered that it was as if neon sign above my head flashed: if you struggle with an experience of estrangement, speak to me. I found this rather bewildering because I was the only one it seemed who could not see the sign.

Through the experience of others being drawn into conversation with me about what troubled them most I found myself compelled to seek in psychotherapy the training and skills I felt I had not been equipped with in the seminary. More significantly, I now understand that entering into psychotherapy training was also a way I could give myself permission to enter into begin my own self exploration in therapy.

Here, I learned that the one thing that troubles human beings most is a sense of marginalization, the experience of estrangement or rejection. Through beginning to notice this in others I was led to reflect on my own experience of living life on the periphery with the feeling of never really fitting-in. Marginalization or that sense of estrangement was a very confusing experience for me, because, the source of my feelings of marginalization were not immediately obvious to anyone else.

I learned that all of us have, not one identity, but several intersecting and often, conflicting identities. For instance, I was male, which is no mean signifier in patriarchal society. In addition to being male, I was a white, educated male, and as such equipped to make the most of the opportunity afforded me, and to successfully negotiate the dynamics of an unequal society in pursuit of my own self-interest. Yet, hidden within, or maybe not so hidden as I thought, the source of a profound sense of marginalization lay in knowing a truth of which I was ashamed. I was gay.

If we first discover ourselves through catching our reflection in the face of another, what happens when we are unable to find any externalized reflection of the most feared and painful parts of our self?

Over 18 years of ministry at the sharp end of mental health, I worked through my own sense of being marginal by ministering to others whose experience of marginalization seemed more obvious and more serious than my own. Human sexual identity and human emotional and psychological wellbeing are both fearful regions of our individual and collective experience. We all experience the nature of conflicting sexual desire. We all experience a continual assault upon the stability of our mental and emotional wellbeing. What do we do with these fears? We project our fears into those who evoke in us our deepest dreads – for how often have we felt there but for the grace of God, go I.

A farewell discourse

During these last four and half years, my ministry at Trinity Cathedral has reconfirmed that we often come together as spiritual friends through a shared experience of estrangement. Knowing my own experience as I do enables me to recognize the familiar tones of another’s struggle. My own experience sensitizes me to know what to look for in others. When I see the signs of fear and confusion in another’s eyes, I allow myself to become known to them.

Becoming known is not about sharing everything about me. It is not about inappropriate levels of self-disclosure. Becoming known is about signaling my availability to walk with another the path that leads out of the place of fear. In so doing I am signaling that this is a path I have trod before and can be trusted to be their guide along this way.

For me availability is the key to ministry. It’s the availability of the mother in giving herself over to the needs of her infant. Similarly, it is also the availability of the priest to likewise mirror for the community and its individual members God’s invitation into spiritual friendship.

God’s always communicates with us within the constraints of temperament. For some of us the invitation to spiritual friendship leads to a direct and somewhat mystical experience of God. For most of us God’s invitation to spiritual friendship will be chiefly known through our ability to be available for spiritual friendship with one another.

Through all the varied aspects of ministry, my chief concern is always to mirror the love of God. It would be a mistake for you to assume that I do this always from a place of confident strength. It would be a mistake to assume that I mirror from my abundant experience of the love of God. Most of the time I mirror from a place, not of abundance, but from a place of my own longing. In reflecting the love of God to others, my hope is that I may catch a glimpse of its return to me in the faces of others.

Mirroring is a process of seeing and becoming seen. Being able to see into another’s struggle is no help to them unless you offer a reciprocal experience of becoming seen by them. The mutuality of human connection lies in the ability of two people to make an impact on one another. There is no relationship without mutual recognition.

Over these last weeks, so many of you have taken considerable trouble to tell me how much my ministry has meant for you. Many of you have spoken about the experience of my recognizing and meeting you at a place of need and of my journeying with you through experiences of doubt and fear. My parting charge to you is to go and do likewise with one another.

The writer of 1^st Peter reminds us that God calls us all to spiritual friendship not in spite of, but because of our experience of fear and estrangement wherever the sources of those feeling might lie. In the Christian community we are called to like living stones, let ourselves be built into a spiritual house, for we are no less than a royal priesthood claimed by God as his own.

[1] 1^st Peter 2:2

[2] 1^st Peter 2:4

Random Thoughts

Some of you have already reported to me that this year, Holy Week and Easter at St Martin’s had special quality. No doubt this has much to do with Fr Bill+, whose reputation for liturgical sensitivity is well earned. I also want to say how appreciative I am Bill+, for your generous invitation to me to be the preacher today.

Today is known as Low Sunday. It seems no one really knows anymore why the Sunday after Easter bears this enigmatic descriptor. At least Low Sunday is marginally better than Quasimodogeniti, which was the name for this Sunday in the old Latin Rite, deriving from the opening words of the introit As newborn babes, desire the rational milk without guile. There is a suggestion that the name derives from an early custom of the newly baptized, having worn their baptismal albs all week, today enjoying a much-needed change of clothes.

This Sunday is also known as Doubting Thomas Sunday. In churches up and down the land preachers will be addressing the imagined polarization of doubt and faith. Thomas, depending on your theology emerges as a personification of the evils or the virtues of doubting. Episcopalians tend towards Thomas as a kind of everyman, a personification of the virtue of doubt. For us the seeds of faith are sown in the fields of doubt.

Psychologically, I have always felt that the name Low reflects a very necessary ebbing of energy following the energetic highs of Holy Week and Easter. The Sunday after Easter has always been for me a time for some well-earned and very needed recuperation. Except that this year, Low Sunday is the occasion for meeting a new congregation – not a time for me to luxuriate in lethargy. 

Conversing with the Text

Part I   When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the [Temple authorities and their henchmen]… .[1]

So this is how it begins. The disciples of Jesus – dis-spirited – hiding themselves away – utterly exhausted and confounded by the events of the last week – exhausted beyond imagining – but the worst kind of exhaustion – the kind that also is accompanied by an agitated state of heightened anxiety. So this is how it all begins. Yet, it wasn’t meant to be this way!

Until Thursday night when it became clear to them that events were taking an unexpected turn for the worst – until then they had felt on the crest of something so huge. For months they had had this sense of growing momentum, of expectation that the world as they knew it was about to dramatically change. After all, were they not the Messiah’s inner circle?

For months now, Jesus had been showing them that he meant business. Ever since they had left Galilee it had been one amazing event after another. There was even that strange event with the woman at the well, in Samaria of all places. Then there was the amazing confrontation with the Pharisees over Jesus’ healing of the man blind from birth, which had both frightened them, and yet convinced them that Jesus, was unstoppable. Then only a week ago had Jesus not demonstrated his messiah-ship beyond doubt by raising Lazarus from the dead? Jesus was definitely the one who was about to spear-head a volte face, a turn-about-face, not only in their personal fortunes, but the fortunes of the whole Jewish nation. Jesus the Messiah – the promised-one – about which the prophets had spoken – the one who had finally come to set things right.

How had it come to this? If only Jesus had somehow not overplayed his hand with the Temple Priests. If only he had taken the way out that the governor had been trying to offer him. If only he had not confronted the authorities, a confrontation that had so terrified them and scattered in all directions. Even Peter, whom they all looked up to, their rock, had denied the Lord in the end, just as Jesus had said he would.

But what were they to do? Jesus had pushed it too far! He had miscalculated and this had cost them all dearly. First the death – that shameful death that now stigmatized all of them -the stigma of their leader’s death by crucifixion – as if Jesus was a criminal. Oh the shame of it all – shame as well as- as well as the loss, the grief, and of course their own guilt.

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The resurrection was a complex experience for the disciples. It’s easy to relate to their experience of bewildering loss and disillusionment. We can even relate to their fear of being persecuted by the forces that put Jesus to death. I think it’s harder though, for us to recognize the effects of shame and guilt in play within them at the end of Easter Day. There is the guilt of having failed Jesus, denying and deserting him at his eleventh hour.

Yet, I imagine it’s the shame that is most crippling. The disciples were ashamed of the way Jesus had died. How could the Messiah have been put to death on a cross? Even more problematic, how could someone who died such a publically, shameful death, be resurrected?

The disciples had seen Jesus die. They had witnessed his burial and now the worrying mystery of the tomb being empty simply adds to their sense of terror and confusion. It’s true that Mary Magdalene had reported her enigmatic experience of the risen Christ earlier in the day. Yet how can the men credit with any authority the witness of a mere woman?

The disciples behave as human beings behave in the face of overwhelming, and conflicting emotion. Secluded behind doors of wood and walls of plaster they seek that feeling of safety amidst a hostile, external world. Yet, the doors of wood and walls of plaster are emblematic of the impenetrable walls and doors within their minds. These, they have erected to shield themselves from the tsunami of conflicting emotion. Within them feelings of grief, fear, disillusionment, guilt, and shame vie for self-accusatory, ascendancy.

Part II    Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ He showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 

Locked away within the turmoil of conflicting emotions the disciples are not mentally ready to recognize Jesus. The old adage – the mind recognizes only what it is already looking for – applies here. They don’t expect to encounter Jesus because for them, he is dead. They don’t recognize him when he appears in their midst until he evokes a connection between his present transformed appearance and the wounds of his crucifixion. All the post resurrection appearances in both Luke and John operate on this pattern, either Jesus shows them his wounds or he breaks bread with them, only then do the disciples know him.

What we call memory results when chains of associations become linked together, build-up from the isolated impressions stored away in our minds. These linkages in the chain of associations that build memories become broken as a result of overwhelming emotion such as grief or shame, which can only be processed with time. What we can see in the post-resurrection appearances is Jesus repairing the associational links in the disciple’s memories, broken by the trauma they experienced on Good Friday. Through action – i.e. breaking bread, or showing his wounds, Jesus reconnects the broken links of associational impressions in the disciples minds. The result – they recognize him as he now appears – seemingly miraculously before them – connecting the post resurrection Jesus with the Jesus they remember.

Then they rejoice! Can you feel their sense of, ‘phew! Jesus isn’t rejecting us for our failures as disciples and friends, after-all.’ It is so crucial that we note here that Jesus does not seek out new and better disciples. He returns to those who have failed him. He breathes new life into them and sends them out to forgive sins.

Part III    Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’

We are so familiar with Luke’s version of the descent of the Holy Spirit on Day of Pentecost that we tend to skate-over John’s less dramatic version of this event. Here in the locked room, Jesus forgives the disciples for their human limitations. He then, breathes the gift of the Holy Spirit into them empowering them to now go-out into the world to forgive sins.

Christians often, terribly misunderstand this passage. Jesus is not sending the disciples out to judge others. He is not commissioning them, as the Church has so often seen itself, as the arbiters between right and wrong. Jesus is not sending them out to judge the world. He is sending them out to extend their experience of having been forgiven by inviting others into the experience of forgiveness. 

Receiving this Text

Accepting forgiveness can be a complex process. Perhaps Jesus has this in mind when he tells the disciples that some sins will be retained. Human beings and human communities have a tendency to resist forgiveness. We cling to past hurts and grievances, refusing to forgive or be forgiven. Such retention of past sin harms us and harms our communities, impeding the creation of more creative associational links , i.e. more hopeful memories that are able to support new and better choices.

What we hear in this text is God’s invitation to know ourselves to be truly forgiven. When we so come to know ourselves, then how can we not invite others into that same experience, especially because as miserable failures, we human beings are only too aware of the harm that results when sin is retained.

John’s account of Jesus’ appearing to the disciples at the end of the first Easter Day helps us to frame a question about the future. I would like to suggest the over-riding question for us is and will continue to be: what kind of community are we dreaming of becoming? As your rector-elect, I seek only to frame the question. Together, we as the community of St Martin’s will begin to answer that question as we journey into the future.

However, what I feel I can do is to remind us of who we are. We are the heirs to the historic tradition of catholic and apostolic Christianity, physically situated on Orchard Avenue, in Wayland Park, in Providence, RI. More particularly, our historic catholic inheritance comes to us through the distinctive channel of over a thousand years of Anglican Tradition. This is a tradition of Christianity that understands that the function of being the Church is to exist for those who are not yet its members, and for those who may never come to see themselves as members of the Church. Our task is to witness to the presence of God, active in the world around us. We are to be what the Celts knew of as a thin place through which, the expectations of Kingdom of God permeate into the world around.

Like many Christian communities today facing the fearful uncertainties of a future yet to become known to us, we experience the temptation to retreat into a fearful self- preoccupation, like the disciples at the end of the first Easter Day. We are the Church. Our purpose is to attest to God’s work in the world. Each of us must be an extension of our community, reaching-out to others with whom we live and work and enjoy social connections in order to invite them into the community of the forgiven.

The importance of the right word

In his blog Listening Hermit, Peter Woods describing himself as a helpless digger into etymological meanings draws our attention to John’s use of the Greek word kleiso meaning closed, as in the doors were locked. He describes rolling the word around in his mouth as he tries to work out what the word associates-to, in his mind. Finally, it comes to him. Klesio is related to another more familiar Greek word, ecclesia. Where Klesio means closed, ecclesia means not closed.

It is important to note that ecclesia comes to be the word the first Christians adopted to refer to themselves as a community. The first Christians had come to see themselves as an open society, a society with open doors. This development, so soon after the death of Jesus sharply contrasts with John’s description of the disciples on the Day of Resurrection and following weeks. Jesus, at the end of Easter Day finds his disciples not only cowering behind closed doors, but locked away within closed minds.

At St Martin’s we are the Church – the Ecclesia – a community with open doors – a community of the forgiven extending God’s invitation of forgiveness into the world part of which involves the healing of our broken memories. This is the message of the resurrection. Let this Easter message give shape and content to our over-riding question: what kind of community are we dreaming of becoming? In some ways it’s less important to know the answer and more important to keep asking the question. Because its only when we ask such a question that we begin to participate with God in God’s dreaming us into becoming.

[1] It is regrettable that the English translators have not taken more care in giving the impression that John is hostile to all Jews. An anachronism describes the tendency to read back into history phenomena arising in later period. We need to understand that John, himself a Jew, leader in a completely Jewish Christian community is not suggesting that the disciples were afraid of Jews in general, but afraid of a specific group – the Temple religious authorities, who have already bribed the soldiers at the tomb to say that the disciples had stolen the body of Jesus. The fear John locates in the disciples is a fear of a persecutory religious authority structure that oppressed all classes of Jews. A tension with religious authority continues to be a live issue for John and his community. For while he writes after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD and it power structures, new tensions have emerged between the Christians and the synagogue authorities of his day. This is a doctrinal tension. For the Rabbis following the destruction of the Temple, John’s Christian Community is a dangerous heretical movement that threatens their attempts to reestablish Jewish religious cohesion around the synagogue and the practice of the Law. The Christians pose a danger for the Rabbinic Movement because many while, secretly worshipping in the church on first day of the week, continue to attend the synagogue on the Sabbath. It’s these overlapping boundaries of allegiance that pose the doctrinal tension. This doctrinal tension is quite different from the later emergence of the racial tension associated with anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is our issue not John’s. We have to deal with our guilt at the criminal complicity of the Church in the crime of anti-Semitism, and not read it back into the Gospels. For John and the other Christian writers the issue is their struggle with Jewish religious authority, it is not a hatred of all Jews

This Lent the Lectionary takes us to John’s Gospel with four of his Signs of the Kingdom stories. John builds his theology of love and the Kingdom of God around and through these stories. We began on Lent 2 with the story of Nicodemus and his nocturnal and clandestine visit with Jesus and will end on Lent 5 with Jesus’ visit to Mary and Martha and the raising of their brother Lazarus. The hallmark of these signs stories is the focus on Jesus’ true identity and the effect when this  becomes known to the other actors in the drama of each story.

Today we are given the story in which Jesus heals the man blind from birth. We need to remember that each Sunday the lections refocus us on the question: how is God seeking conversation with us today? Today’s conversation opens with Jesus once again challenging the crude and cruel conventions of his religious society.

A useful Metaphor

John unlike the other Evangelists does not construct his Gospel around the chronology of Jesus’ three years on the road. Instead, he constructs a theology of Jesus’ ministry around his seven Signs of the Kingdom stories. Each of these stories functions like a play. I suggest the concept of a play as our metaphor for capturing the complex flow and movement within these stories.

Today’s story is a play in four acts:

• Act 1 – Jesus and the disciples encounter the man blind from birth. This is not any blind man, for its crucial for John’s later development of the plot that we know from the outset that this man was born blind. The discussion about sin ensues and Jesus challenges his disciples assumption that illness or misfortune results from sin. Instead, Jesus invites them to see the man’s blindness as an opportunity for God to open not only his eyes, as in to restore his sight; the man’s blindness is an opportunity for God to open all their eyes to the bigger picture of things, as in invite them into insight.
• Act 2 – Jesus and the disciples exit to stage right. Entry from stage left, the blind man’s acquaintances and neighbours. In this act the drama unfolds around their confusion about what has taken place for this man. The only way they can make sense of it is to dispute that this is the same man, whom they have known as blind from birth. He protests that he is the very same and that the man Jesus, healed him. The act closes with the group asking: so where is he? The man formerly blind says he does not know. At this stage he knows only that he can now see, and does not know who has performed this healing.
• Act 3 – The group take him to the Pharisees – scholars of the Law, because this is all too much for them to handle. The Pharisees can’t work out what has happened either. They end up arguing among themselves with one group saying this could not be a healing because Jesus performed it on the Sabbath, and so Jesus himself is a sinner; ipso facto God can not work through sinners. The other group object that the evidence of their own eyes is that God has acted, Sabbath or no Sabbath. Two interesting developments now take place. Having asked the man who he thinks Jesus is and shocked by his answer they call for his parents in an apparent attempt to continue to question the veracity of the man’s blindness. We should note how the focus now subtly shifts from questioning the healing to questioning Jesus’ identity. The act concludes in considerable disarray. The man’s parents fearful of being cast out by the Pharisees put the whole responsibility on their son for declaring who Jesus is. We see the man, under the relentless pressure of the Pharisees’ interrogation moving from the simple statement: all I know is that I was blind and now I can see, to: the facts seem to be these, this man cured my blindness, an action that clearly cannot be performed by someone who is breaking God’s Law, therefore, all I can say is that he is of God. We now see him in the process of moving from sight to insight. We see the religious authorities approaching the invitation to insight, and pulling back in horror. The act ends with them rejecting the man, who for dramatic purposes, is left alone on the stage.
• Act 4 – Jesus enters from stage right having heard that the Pharisees had rejected him. He asks the man who has healed him? Remember that the man was blind when he last encountered Jesus so he has no way of recognizing him. Jesus identifies himself and the man proclaims his belief that Jesus is the Messiah. The act close with Jesus teasing the Pharisees with the suggestion that: if you were truly blind you would not be sinners because you can’t be blamed for what you can’t see. But because you claim to be able to see, and clearly have no insight, then for that you are culpable.

The play spirals back to end on the opening theme of sin and culpability.

Text and context

This is a text, which we simultaneously hear echoing in three contexts:

1. The original context of Jesus, the disciples, the man blind from birth, and the confrontation with religious attitudes that enshrine the hardness of the human heart rather than the love of God.
2. Some 60 years later John records this original story in his Gospel. John reconstructs the story to connect with the issues, current in his own community. We hear the echo of a mighty struggle between the Johannine Community and the Jewish Synagogue. John is writing after the destruction of the Temple in 70AD. Judaism had regrouped around the Synagogue-centered Rabbinic movement, the descendants of the Pharisees of Jesus day. The Synagogue had expelled the Christian community by John’s day leaving John’s community struggling to hold itself together in the face of persecution from without, and division from within. One of the significant divisions in the Johannine community was between those prepared to proclaim Christ and take the consequences and those who still wanted to secretly follow Christ for fear of being excommunicated by the Synagogue – a theme played out in the story between the Pharisees and the man’s parents.
3. In 2014 we receive this text within the context of our own time and place.  We hear the echo of Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees and the Johannine Community’s struggle with the Synagogue some 60 years later. Our task to to receive this text as God’s desire to open a conversation with us about the challenges of being faithful in 21st Century America.

For me the story of the man blind from birth opens us to the challenges of continuing to live our lives as a community being called by God to proclaim the expectations of the Kingdom. We live in a time when under the impetus of unparallelled change older forms of Church are passing away and we still can’t quite see what will take their place. This fills us with anxiety.

In my last sermon blog on the story of Jesus and the woman at the well, I drew some general conclusion about the similarities between the community of John and our Anglican tradition in the Episcopal Church. I did so to remind us of the unique gifts that we as a tradition offer the wider society of our day. https://relationalrealities.com/2014/03/28/the-woman-at-the-well-a-sermon-delivered-to-an-unknown-community/

Receiving the text

As he walks along with his disciples they come across a blind man. The disciples give voice to the age-old desire to explain-away illness and misfortune in terms of sin. They ask: Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents; that he was born blind. 

It always pulls me up short when I encounter the tendency of people who consider themselves quite religious to use religion and religious explanations as a mask to validate the hardness of the human heart. 

Wanting to see this man’s blindness as the result of his or his parent’s sin comforts the disciples and give them a false sense of security. This illusion of security holds out the prospect that if they can avoid the commission of sin, then the callous gratuitousness of affliction, will pass them by.

I don’t often recall these days that my undergraduate degree was in law. Growing up in New Zealand it was the English Common Law tradition that I was trained in. This tradition still forms the bedrock of most American State legal systems, though not all. English Common Law works by appealing to precedent. Precedent operates when counsel, or the judge appeals to an earlier decision of a court of equal or superior authority, as binding, i.e. binds the court in the present case to arrive at the same conclusions as in the previous case. The legal device of distinguishing is the way counsel argues that there is a crucial difference between the precedent and the present case, thus arguing that the judge is free to decide the present case on a different basis.

Distinguishing is not only a legal device. As the disciples demonstrate the desire to distinguish is deeply rooted in the human psyche. Though Episcopalians don’t usually appeal to sin as a distinguishing device, we nevertheless distinguish all the time when we attribute another’s misfortune to the results of their own carelessness, or their own fault.

Jesus challenges our desire to protect ourselves from our fears in the same way that he cuts right through the disciples desire to distinguish themselves from the man blind from birth. Like us, the disciples are seeking to distance themselves from this man’s fate because of their fear – fear that the precariousness of life’s bad fortune could strike them at any time. In so doing they act-out religion’s tendency to scapegoat those different from us when their point of view or their misfortune threatens our security or complacency in some way. We love to scapegoat such individuals or groups by casting them into the role of the other, the outsider, the sinner, and appealing to religion to validate our actions in doing so. Throughout his ministry Jesus’ most serious conflicts always center on his confrontation with religion operating as a mask for the hardness of the human heart.

How we distance ourselves from our own fear of life’s unpredictability is one theme in this story that we need to take to heart. There is also another theme that seems to me to be significant. This story offers us a nuanced play on the movement from sight to insight. If we receive this story of the man born blind into our own lives, by which I mean, allow the authority of this story to apply to us, we immediately face some uncomfortable questions:

1. Where and to what do our fears still blind us?
2. Do we have the courage to allow our blindness to be healed and begin to see?

These two questions are challenging enough. But there is a third and more difficult one to face.

3. Having recovered our sight can we risk the journey from sight to insight?

The man born blind seems at first to be content simply to have his physical sight back. Yet, John’s point is to show us how by refusing to be cowered by religious authority, he moves from the possession of physical sight to the acquisition of spiritual sight. To put this another way, we see him moving from sight to insight. It’s only through insight that he discovers who it is that has not only healed him, but more to the point, calls him to a new experience of life.

What is this new experience of life, you ask? If we read-on into chapter 10 we find Jesus offering his own interpretation of this story of the man blind from birth in his metaphor of the shepherd and the sheep. The sheep are not confused by the voice of the imposter because they know the shepherd’s voice, and knowing him for who he is, they trust him. The new experience of life is a life lived with the courage to trust. Trust means that no matter what – we know ourselves to be loved. Is this not the best insurance policy against the fear of the unpredictability and precariousness of life?

I. Some general observations about John’s Gospel

Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well is one of those very rich stories that functions for John as one of seven Signs of the Kingdom. We love these stories from John, especially– the wedding at Cana, Nicodemus’s night-time visit –which formed last week’s Gospel reading, and of course the raising of Lazarus and the story of Mary and Martha. Today’s story of the woman at the well, like the others Sign stories, appears only in John’s Gospel. Why is this?

John’s Gospel is the last of the Canonical Gospels to be written. John writes within the context of the Christian Community in Jerusalem. It’s fair to assume that already possessing the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, John’s community didn’t need yet another synopsis of the events of Jesus’ Ministry. After all, by now everyone knew the story back to front.

Although Matthew and Luke follow Mark’s blueprint, they each add additional stories while also bringing their own theological and community context to bear on Mark’s blueprint. Therefore, John’s adding of new story material is in itself, not remarkable. What is remarkable is that John’s purpose in writing seems so very different from the other synoptic writers. John is not telling the story of Jesus’ ministry through the chronology of times, places, and events. John is building a theology of Jesus’ ministry around his series of seven stories, each intended to be sign that in Jesus, God’s Kingdom breaks into the human dimension of the here and now.

II. Approaching the text

On the face of it the story of Jesus and the woman at the well is rather complex with a number of different moving parts. It could be thought about as a play in three acts.

The first act of the story opens with a conversation between Jesus and a woman he encounters at Jacob’s well.  This is a place of significant religious and historical controversy. Both Samaritans and Jews claim Jacob as their ancestor. Jesus surprises the woman by asking her to give him a drink of water. From his request there then ensues a conversation about living water.

You might ask, what is so surprising for the woman that Jesus should ask for water from her? In order to answer this question, we need to know something of the social and political context for this encounter.

By asking her to give him a drink, Jesus is challenging social convention. He surprises the woman with his request because as a man Jesus shouldn’t have spoken to her in public. She was neither his wife of a female relative. In fact, he addresses her, ‘woman’ , implying a relationship of equality, not hierarchy existing between them. This Samaritan woman is doubly taken aback because she can see that Jesus is a Jew, and Jews don’t speak to Samaritans. In asking the woman for a drink Jesus is not only challenging social custom he is also challenging political and religious exclusivity. In order to more fully understand this we need to take a detour into historical context.

After Solomon’s death the United Kingdom of Israel, united by his father David breaks apart into the Northern Kingdom of Israel with its capital at Samaria and its Temple on Mt Gerizim, and the Southern Kingdom of Judah centered on Jerusalem and The Temple. Here is where the similarity to Crimea comes in. In 722 BC the Assyrians destroy the northern Kingdom of Israel and deport around 30,000 Israelites in order to relocate five other ethnic groups to replace them. Over time the remaining Israelites intermarry with the foreigners. In 587 BC the southern Kingdom of Judah falls to the Babylonians and the people in Jerusalem are taken off into captivity in Babylon. However, unlike the fate of the northern exiles who never return, in 538 the Jerusalem exiles are allowed to return and begin to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. The Samaritans object to this and petition the Persian King to withdraw Persian support for this initiative. thus cementing the hatred between Samaritans and Judeans.

The core of the enmity centers on notions of pollution. The Judeans despised the Samaritans because of their intermarriage with non-Jewish populations, rendering them racially impure. The Samaritans, on the other hand despised the Judeans whom they saw as having polluted the Law of Moses through the Levite reforms instituted during the period of exile in Babylon between 587 and 538. For the Samaritans had despite intermarrying remained faithful to an older operating system – to borrow from the language of computer software, i.e.the Law as it was understood in 722.

There is a dramatic shift of focus as we move into the second act of the story. Here Jesus requests that the woman go fetch her husband. Her response opens the way for her to recognize Jesus’ true identity. Taken by itself, this section alone has led to the familiar misogynistic (women hating) patriarchal treatment of the woman as a prostitute, or even worse and adulterous. Yet, Jesus, nowhere implies that the woman is of anything but impeccable character. Quite the contrary, he sees her as an evangelist, who not only recognizes him as a prophet but also brings the rest of her community to faith.

Jesus’ reference to her five husbands is a historical metaphor for the five foreign peoples with whom the Samaritans had intermarried. The man she is currently with, and who is not her husband, extends the metaphor to include a sixth group of foreigners introduced by Herod the Great in 37 BC. Unlike the first five this man is not her husband and this alludes to Roman occupation, which had forbidden intermarriage between this last group and the Samaritans population.

In the third act we see the return of the disciples who had been shopping for supplies. They arrive back and totally misconstrue the situation they come upon. They are scandalized that Jesus should risk both social and religious criticism by talking to a woman and a Samaritan woman to boot. This final act of the play concerns Jesus’ discussion with the disciples about mission. Mission, is an important theme for John who introduces the metaphor of gathering in the harvest – a harvest that someone else has planted. Here Jesus is telling his disciples to embrace the Samaritan converts, that through her testimony the woman is bringing to Jesus. This woman, whom they condemn has recognized his true identity as the Messiah. As a result, she now brings her neighbors and friends to also believe in him. This is a harvest, the seeds of which the disciples have not sown, but yet now must bring into the community of Jesus’ followers. 

The nature of Christian Community

This is an important story for John and his community. The core of John’s teaching centers on the primacy of love – a kind of love conquers all, approach to faith. In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ central commandment is to love: as the Father has loved me, so I love you, therefore you must love one another. 

John’s community comprised a number of different groups with different theological understandings. In the absence of common agreement between them, this teaching on love holds them together in some semblance of community. Like our own Anglican tradition, John’s community is defined not by agreement on shared belief.  It is held together by an emphasis on right relationship. For Episcopalians, right relationship rests on our behaving with love towards anyone who is willing to join us in worship. Our unity lies in our being able to recite the words of the Book of Common Prayer, despite holding different understandings as to what these words might mean. For John, the woman at the well is a Sign of the Kingdom because it powerfully depicts Jesus reaching across the social divisions of gender relations, as well as the political and doctrinal divisions rooted in a history of conflict and mutual antipathy.

Text and context

Understanding biblical texts is usually a more complex business than we are often led to believe. We see in this story of the woman at the well the interlacing of three layers of context:

1. We have the historical context within which an event takes place, i.e. a meeting between Jesus and a woman at Jacob’s Well sometime between 30 and 33 AD.
2. We have the reporting of the original story by John writing about the event many years later, probably around 90-100 AD.
3. We have our reception of John’s text in the first decade of the 21^st century. This is always how the ministry of Jesus comes to us – transmitted across two thousand years of time.

Of the three layers, it is the third layer, our reception of this text and the meaning we give it, that is our chief focus. Therefore, I ask the question: what might this text mean for those of us sitting here this morning?

Receiving the text in the here and now

There is a trap that a visiting preacher can fall into if he or she is not careful. The trap is to speak with certainty or authority, assuming a knowledge of his or her hearers and their community that he or she does not possess. I have only the most general awareness of how my reflections on this story might be received. All I can say is that this story introduces a conversation that God is intending to have with this community. Lacking specific knowledge of this community, I would like to make some general points from my experience of how God might intend to have this conversation with any Christian community.

This story from John’s Gospel depicts Jesus demonstrating what a relationship of love, looks like.  This is not erotic or sentimental love I see here. I see a love of mutual respect emerging between Jesus and this woman. I note a growing tenderness, which differences of gender, ethnicity, and religion cannot frustrate. In contrast to the worldview of his disciples, Jesus values diversity! This is often a real issue for Christian communities. You know the old joke: the Episcopal Church welcomes you – but only if you are like us. As a Church, we may be very theologically inclusive, yet the fact that our parish communities are shrinking indicates another old adage: that we behave as if everyone who might become Episcopalian – already has.

In our communities, we must examine and uncover attitudes of mind and heart that result in our clinging to safety rather than risking to reach out to those who are different from us. Our Anglican tradition has so much to offer the modern world and it continues to amaze me how it remains America’s best-kept secret. Through the sheer accident of history, Anglican Christians have developed an idea of Christian Community that is not a community defined by shared believe, but one defined by the generosity of God experienced in common worship.

We are the community where traditional worship and a radical commitment to face the challenges of our contemporary context, meet and engage one another. Our parish communities are rooted in the local, rather than the universal. We are Catholic Christians of place and locality and this must embolden us to embrace new populations whose arrival can be seen as a challenge to our sense of privilege  -which to be honest, is a boat that sailed a long time ago.

Let us not only love one another but love the stranger. Let love empower us to catch up with the world around us, embracing it as it really is, and not retreating into fantasies of how we still long for it to be. Let us offer the deep richness of our Anglican Tradition’s valuing of toleration and welcoming of diversity. These are two qualities so badly needed in a world of increasingly polarized divisions.  We offer an appreciation of dignified worship through which the echo of the ancient Church can still be heard. Accompanying this is an appreciation of beauty.  Our Anglican Tradition commits us to sitting in the tension between being faithful to the Tradition with a capital T and being open to the challenges of being Christian in a world of rapid and bewildering change where many are alienated, cast adrift without the anchor of traditions of any kind.

However, what we have most to offer the world around us that simple truth lying at the heart of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman. This simple truth is that the only thing that matters is the quality of our relationships. Individually and communally we are only as good as our ability to build effective and loving relationships with others. Through relationships that we build connections. Through relationship, that weave webs of mutual support based on the simple notion that my prospering is dependant on my concern for your wellbeing.

The world is sorely in need of receiving the Signs of the Kingdom. These signs become our expectations for the continued realization of the Kingdom of God, something that is already here as well as still in the process of unfolding. As Episcopalian Christians, we are called individually to lives lived in, and through community defined by right relationships, not shared belief. We live out the Signs of the Kingdom through the promises of our Baptismal Covenant http://www.episcopalchurch.org/page/baptismal-covenant  .

Like the woman at the well, may our neighbors say to us: It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Saviour of the world.