11.08.09 "First Impressions"
WESTMINSTER PULPIT
Scott D. Anderson
November 8, 2009 “First Impressions”
Isaiah 41: 17-20, John 4: 31-42
As a native Californian, there are a few things I don't understand about my new home, Wisconsin.
One is ice fishing: that venerable winter sport of the upper Midwest where the natives drive their SUVs out into the middle of a frozen lake bed, drill a hole, set up a shanty, fire up the generator, crack open a 12 pack of Miller High Life, and hunker down for a day of fishing fun in subzero weather. These people must have a death wish. I just don't get it.
I have also grown to appreciate Wisconsin in many ways. One of the first things I noticed was the lack of fences in all but the oldest neighborhoods. The vast suburban tract, built in the 1960s, that surrounds the church I attend, Covenant Presbyterian in Madison, is virtually fenceless. Neighbor’s barbeque, kids play, dogs roam, and families hang out on their backyard decks in full view of the rest of the world. Not so in California, my former home, where everything is fenced, walled, locked, or gated.
Since moving to Wisconsin I've pondered that famous Robert Frost poem where two neighbors are rebuilding a fence after the spring thaw. One is asking why the fence needs to be built at all, and the other responds, unthinkingly, with the words his father taught him: "Good fences make good neighbors." Not so in Wisconsin, I thought!
During my first month in Madison the school district placed a referendum on the ballot asking the voters to approve a property tax increase. The state budget was in big trouble—a perennial problem-- and the Madison school board, anticipating budget cuts from the state lawmakers, decided to ask the local citizens to make up the difference in advance of the cuts. There was only one rather large problem, at least from my self-centered, fenced-in California perspective. No one knew how much the cuts from the state would be.
So the referendum was framed like this: 'Vote for this school referendum, and your taxes could go up as little as $85 or as much as $250 the next year. We, the school board, will decide how much to raise your taxes after the state passes its budget in a few months. Just trust us to make the decision.' The referendum passed! It was a pretty dramatic first impression. Fenceless neighborhoods mean something.
First impressions, though, don’t tell the whole story.
A year after I’d arrived in Wisconsin, I learned that following World War II, manufacturing began to grow dramatically in Milwaukee and African Americans from the South were recruited to come north for better jobs and a new life.
The white establishment in Milwaukee, though, had sectioned off the city: whites could live here; blacks could live there, putting in place a pattern of division that has left Milwaukee today as the most segregated city in America. Along with the toxic mix of racial tension there that rears its ugly head in local elections and in the wrenching economic dislocation caused by manufacturing jobs shipped overseas.
During my first week in Wisconsin, Bishop Sharon Rader came by to see me. ‘Scott, you’ll soon discover there are three kinds of Christians in Wisconsin” she said: “Catholics, Lutherans, and the rest of us.” In spite of decades of work to build bridges over our denominational fences, we still find ourselves as Presbyterians and Lutherans and Catholics and United Methodists living a siloed existence.
In my five years in this state I’ve learned my first impressions are not the whole truth: there are so many fenceless neighborhoods in this wonderful state … yet so many fences.
As Jesus leads his band of disciples through Samaria on their way to Galilee, we find that sometimes those fences are built by forces outside of our control, and sometimes we build them ourselves.
Take the woman Jesus meets at Jacob’s well. Yes, she is a woman with inferior status and yes she is a Samaritan, an enemy of Israel. But beyond the culturally imposed barriers of her gender and ethnicity, there is the tragedy of her personal life: five husbands, a live-in lover, and a reputation that means she can’t even draw water at normal hours, when respectful townsfolk come to the well. Maybe she has the worst luck in history (a widow five times over???). While she definitely has learned some survival skills—a fearless verbal parry here, a smart-aleck remark there—she cannot fool Jesus.
He sees through her tough exterior and beyond the socially constructed fences of his day that keep people separated from one another. He sees everything she’s ever done, and he sees beyond it, too. He sees everything she’s ever tried to be. Everything she’s ever had to do to survive. Everything she’s ever dreamed she might be, if things were different. He sees her and loves her, in spite of her. It must have felt like heaven. And maybe her eyes were opened, and she recognized him. No wonder her first impressions of him were so wrong.
It feels like a miracle—doesn’t it—when someone has really seen you? Because the truth is that for most of us, being seen is a rare gift, and a demanding one. It means coming clean about our brokenness. It means telling the truth about “everything we’ve ever done.” It means believing that we are more than a collection of deeds and misdeeds, or the sum of our biological and social circumstances; we are also the possibility of a new creation, in Christ. Being really seen means that we are known, and loved, and forgiven. It is pure grace, simply miraculous. And it can happen anywhere, when we least expect it—at the village well, kitchen sink, in the high school cafeteria, at your office, or possibly even in a Presbyterian church. Anywhere at all, if we really look for it.
I also wonder about the disciples in this drama, where the gospel text this morning picks up the story. They return to Jesus just as the Samaritan woman heads back to town to share her conversation with others. The disciples’ first impressions of what has happened here are also confounded. They’re astonished as Jesus speaks with this unclean, second class enemy of Israel. But they turn incredulous when they find that she, and none of them, has by this pure, miraculous grace become the gospel’s first and most effective evangelist.
As so this great story ends as the disciples are told to lift their eyes and see the fields already ripe for harvest, as the Samaritans pour out of their city and make their way towards Jesus thanks to the witness of the Samaritan woman.
The disciples don’t need to wait the expected four-month growing season for the harvest, he tells them—the harvest of God’s miraculous, gracious reign, planted and offered without being fenced off. The harvest is here! That promised future is now!
The Samaritan woman has sown the seed, and the disciples may now reap. She has labored, and they may now enter into her labor. What the disciples then and now learn is a scandalous gospel truth: they (and we) are neither the originators nor the controllers of the Church’s mission. Someone completely outside the fold bears the good news of Jesus Christ.
Madison area Urban Ministry (our local version of Sacramento’s Interfaith Service Bureau) runs a program for ex-prisoners called Circles of Support. The idea is simple: a small group of church members provides an extended family to someone recently released from prison, including help finding housing, a job, and other needed community services. Most important, these circles of support provide a sense of care and welcome to someone who is often alone in the world and beginning a new life after incarceration.
I recently spoke with several members of one of these circles, a group of older men (all retired), and long time church members. Their journey with one particular man—a man who had never darkened the door of any church-- had been a wild one, with many ups and downs and surprising bends in the road. The journey had unexpectedly led them into the halls of the state legislature as they button holed lawmakers about the stark racial disparities in Wisconsin’s criminal justice system. They met with the county executive’s office because the safety net of social services was virtually nonexistent for convicted felons who had served their time. They confronted several local employers, who because of the young man’s prison record would not join their ministry in offering him a second chance.
These older men, all pillars in their local church, had never done anything like this before. But because of a living relationship with this “outsider”, this “second class citizen”, this “ostracized member of the community”, their eyes were opened and they found themselves utterly transformed and alive in the faith.
One man told me, welling up with tears. “We started out thinking that that we would be like Jesus for this guy. Instead, he became like Jesus for us.”
My guess is that the Samaritan women of our day are not sitting in the pews of our Presbyterian churches. They struggle to survive in Oak Park. They work the dairy farms of the Sacramento Valley. They may spend their days in rustbelt factories or failing schools. Their home may be a prison cell, or a homeless shelter in this neighborhood. Some have immigrated here in search of a life free of oppression and filled with opportunity. They come in all shapes and sizes, encompass all ages and sexual orientations, embody both genders, and are of every ethnicity and from every forgotten corner of our planet.
And while they may not be a member of this church or any other, they, like the Samaritan woman, may indeed be the bearers of the good news, if only we are courageous enough and humble enough and open enough to leave our comfort zone within these four walls and look past our first impressions. They are living reminders that the harvest is ready, with no barriers or preconditions. They are sowing the seed that we may now reap. They are laboring in the fields of Sacramento that we may now enter into their labor.
Yes the harvest is ready: not by any new program or churchly strategy we’ve devised, but by the pure and miraculous grace of God.
Recently the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katherine Jefforts Schori was interviewed by Terri Grosse on NPR’s Fresh Air. “As the first female primate of the Episcopal Church, what are your goals?” “My goal,” she said, “is to participate in that great healing of creation that Jesus testifies to.” To my friends at Westminster Presbyterian Church, as you begin a new chapter in your life and ministry, may that be your goal as well. Amen.
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