Hope is Contagious

The Rev. Sara Warfield

Scriptures: John 4:5-42

On Monday, I woke up with this heaviness in my chest. I looked out the many huge windows of my 5th floor apartment and, even though it was a gorgeous day, I just felt…gray. I’d read about a girls’ school in Iran that had been struck by bombs dropped by my country in my name, killing 175 people, mostly children. Its crime? Being located too close to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

I don’t claim to have a strong grasp of the nuance of international affairs, let alone all the complications of all the conflict in the Middle East. But what I do know is that when Moses came down from Mt. Sinai with two stone tablets to instruct the Israelites in the ways God wanted them to live and be in relationship with one another, one of the commandments was “you shall not murder.”

It’s confusing, though, because later in that same book of Exodus and throughout the story of the Israelites, there’s a lot of murder, and a lot of it is commanded by God. I’ve been listening to an audio version of the Bible starting with Genesis, and I have to admit that a lot of it makes me wince. There’s so much bloodshed. Brothers kill brothers. The Israelite armies wipe out entire cities, including women and children. The numbers of the dead are recorded: 10,000 Moabites, 18,000 Edomites, 22,000 Arameans.

This, too, covers me in heaviness, in grayness. How could this faith that brings me so much life be built on a foundation of so much murder? Now this could quickly devolve into a theology of supersessionism, of our loving Christianity superseding the ways of inherently violent Judaism. Yes, the Old Testament is full of that stuff, we can say to ourselves, but Jesus came and transformed it.

But our Jewish siblings have been wrestling with this legacy of violence throughout their sacred stories just as much as their Christian neighbors have. And they’ve followed many of the same paths as us Christians: some transforming that legacy into a call for peace, for reconciliation, for figuring out how to live with their different neighbors with care and compassion—something many of their neighbors throughout history have not extended to them. And others of our contemporary Jewish siblings have used the violence to justify their own violence.

Just like so many Christians. Newsweek reported this week that the nonprofit organization Military Religious Freedom Foundation “has received more than 200 complaints from roughly 50 military installations since Saturday involving reports of U.S. commanders linking Christianity to the ‘biblically sanctioned’ war in Iran.”

One soldier said, “This morning our commander opened up the combat readiness status briefing by urging us to not be ‘afraid’ as to what is happening with our combat operations in Iran right now. He urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.”

The name of our savior, our Prince of Peace, is being invoked to justify war.

—

Wars cannot be waged by a single individual. Crimes against humanity cannot be committed by a single individual. All the -isms out there—racism, sexism, ableism, not to mention certain phobias—homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia are systemic in nature. A group of people has to agree, maybe explicitly, maybe tacitly, that another person or group of people is evil or bad or objectionable in some way, and then agree that those people should be treated with less respect, more violence, less love.

Jesus’ culture wasn’t different in this regard. Our gospel today heavily implies that Jesus is violating the expectations of his people just by talking to the woman at the well. She is a Samaritan, whom the Jews have come together as a people and agreed are the enemy, perverters of their faith. After all, Samaritans—who by the way come from the Twelve Tribes of Israel themselves—believed that Mt. Gerizim was the proper place to worship, when Jews knew that the Temple in Jerusalem was the correct place to worship.

And Jesus is a rabbi, a Jewish teacher. He is not supposed to talk to random women who may be, according to their tradition, unclean—because women and what happens to their bodies were unclean much more of the time than men were.

Because of the racism and sexism of his time, Jesus is supposed to pretend that this Samaritan woman doesn’t exist.

But Jesus isn’t interested in maintaining systems that condemn others for no other reason than the gender they are or the country they were born in.

In fact, it doesn’t even seem to enter Jesus’ mind not to talk to her. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” Even the woman is surprised that he has acknowledged her existence. “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”

Instead of rejecting her, instead of belittling her, instead of condemning her, as it seems the disciples are ready to do when they return, Jesus ends up offering her living water which will become “a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”

More than that, he knows that she has been married five times and now lives with a man who is not her husband. I’m going to venture to say that even some of us here today would have opinions about her situation. We may jump to conclusions about what kind of person she is. But not Jesus.

Jesus does nothing less than tell this woman, who everyone else looks at suspiciously if they look at her at all, who the Gospel writer doesn’t even bother to give a name, that he is the Messiah. He shares with her his truth, his promise, his hope, his living water.

So I can’t really imagine what this Jesus, who refuses to engage in the prejudice and hate that his culture expects for the sake of tending to this woman’s soul, would think of a war being waged in his name.

Again, these systems of prejudice and hate are perpetuated by individuals coming together and choosing to treat other people badly. A single person can’t make a war happen, not even in a dictatorship. Other people in power must decide for themselves to support that decision, or at least not oppose it.

It’s the same with our embedded systems of prejudice and hate: individuals must choose to mistreat others, and individuals bearing witness to that mistreatment must choose either to support what is happening or to stay quiet, to be complacent, to let it happen.

I think that is the root of my heaviness, my grayness, my despair: that so many individuals choose either to harm or to stay silent when harm is being done. That there are enough people in this world who are willing to deny God’s goodness in others, in themselves, and in the world God has created, that war has become a common way to solve disputes, that mass arrests of black and brown people have become policy, that women and trans people are prohibited from getting the healthcare they need.

But this is also the root of my hope: A single person doesn’t change the world, not even Jesus. But Jesus does choose in every action he takes to live according to love, even when it runs against the grain of what society expects. He is willing to heal on the sabbath even when the most powerful religious leaders think it is sacrilege. He is willing to go into the temple and make a huge scene by turning over tables when he thinks the worshipers are being taken advantage of.

But it’s just him and the woman at the well in today’s gospel. No one else is watching. And still, he grounds himself in love and offers living water to this woman who the people around him would say he shouldn’t even acknowledge exists.

I’m here to love you, too, he’s saying to her.

And it changes her. She runs back to her friends and neighbors and says, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!” She feels seen, acknowledged, loved, and she wants that for all the people in her life. And because of her, the Samaritan community asks Jesus to stay, and they all come to know his love.

All because Jesus is willing to treat with love and respect one person whom everyone else scorns and tosses aside. He gives this woman a joy she cannot hold back, and it spreads.

That’s also how things work. We as individuals can choose to live according to love, even when it runs against the grain of what our culture expects. We as individuals can choose to see and acknowledge and protect the people our culture harms and strips of humanity. And when we do, it spreads. When other people watch you step into your courage, it strengthens them to step into theirs. When other people see the joy you’ve given another person, they’re going to be drawn to it, they’re going to want it for themselves and their people.

War and prejudice and hate spread when we turn aside from harm, when we remain silent. But Jesus’ living water spreads when we have the courage to speak, to act, to love.

Amen.