|
Sermon February 24, 2008 |
A Sermon Preached at
Preacher William Willimon recounts a conversation with a fellow pastor.
Seems his colleague had a new woman join his church. He said, “She
spent most of her life as a
I think the pastor made that last comment tongue in cheek. If you read the Gospels you know what sort of people Jesus likes to hang out with. Hanging out with outcasts got Jesus crucified. “This man receives sinners and eats with them,” was the complaint of his critics. And here in this morning’s Gospel he’s at it again, in broad daylight and in the center of town schmoozing with an outcast. She’s a three-fold outcast: a Samaritan—a non-Jew—and it was against the law for Jesus to share a drinking cup with her; she’s a woman in a culture where only the men gathered every morning for pious prayers—prayers which included the prayer, “Thank God I am not a woman;” and she’s notorious in the community because of her marital history. She’s a three-fold outcast, but not only is Jesus chatting with her, his conversation with her is the longest one he has with anyone in the Gospels. Furthermore, she’s the first person to whom he reveals himself as the messiah. And finally she is the first evangelist: she’s the first one in John’s Gospel to go out and tell her friends that Jesus might be the messiah.
Now most days I think most of us prefer to think of ourselves as insiders, not outsiders. We like to think of ourselves as pretty good people, rule keepers and folks who work hard for the good of the kingdom. If we’ve been strippers, prostitutes, drunks, drug addicts, card sharks or petty thieves we keep it to ourselves and try to forget it. It comes as a sort of affront to us when we’re in “insider” mode that Jesus has such a fondness for outcasts and sinners. And yet it is precisely our sense of deserving and entitlement that gets in the way of our awareness of grace. Ironically it is probably when we are most aware of our shortcomings that we are most open to the action of the Holy Spirit. It is when we are feeling most broken that God’s love for us comes as the best news—then that we are most grateful and most likely to act with compassion and kindness to others who are also broken people.
I’ve felt this contrast in my own life pretty strongly. I entered ordained ministry looking good. I had a two prestigious academic degrees, a perfect-looking family: wife and two children and a housecat. I excelled as a teacher and was a star in seminary. But all that did little to make me a good pastor or preacher. Ironically, I didn’t hit my stride in ministry until I got divorced—to the rage and consternation of my bishop—and became a failure in the eyes of many. After that I understood what my old friend Bishop Jane Dixon meant when she came back from rehab proclaiming, “People think church is for squeaky-clean people who’ve never done anything wrong—but that couldn’t be further from the truth.”
Lent, I think, is a good time to get in touch with our outsider-ness. With the compulsions and weaknesses that put us in the need of the grace of God. It is a good time to get in touch with our kinship with people who have led and continue to lead less than perfect lives. Time to get in touch with the sense of entitlement that makes us grumble about what we don’t have, makes us yell at those we love, and prevents us from enjoying life. There are springs of living water out there, flowing for you and me, but sometimes we can’t see them because we don’t know how thirsty we are.
A group of alumni visited their old university professor during a reunion weekend. Their conversation soon turned into complaints: life was full of stress and distress. The professor excused himself from his guests at this point, to go fix them all coffee. He returned with a tray with a pot of coffee and an assortment of cups. The cups ranged from fancy china to old mugs in various states to plastic give-away jobs. The former students each chose a cup and poured. When they were all served the old professor said, “Look: you all chose the best cups. You think highly of yourselves and you do deserve the best. But notice that the coffee in each cup is the same. And what you really wanted was the coffee. Now consider this: life is like the coffee: Jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold the good stuff: the love, the good we do and the good we receive. If we concentrate on how the container looks, we miss the goodness of the coffee. God brews the coffee, not the cups. Enjoy the coffee. The happiest people don’t have the best of everything, don’t look the best, often fail and sometimes are broken. The happiest people, however, are grateful for the grace they have received. So live simply. Love generously. Care deeply. Speak kindly. And give thanks for the God who loves you.”
I can’t offer you better advice than that. AMEN