"Othering" - Lent 3A

Saint John 4:5–42

Dr.  Fred Craddock remembers returning from a conference and being seated next to a couple on an airplane who were everyone’s worse nightmare.  They had an opinion about everything none of which were positive.  

As they paged through the airline’s magazine, the husband remarked to his wife about the obligatory column from the company’s CEO touting some accomplishment by an employee, an enhanced service, or an improvement to the fleet.  Few things in the world are as benign as these articles but this couple noticed something that set them off.  

“Remember,” said the man to his wife loudly enough to be overheard six rows back,  “when this article would have only been published in English?  Look!  Now they have to have it in Spanish and even in Japanese.” 

It should not have been a surprise because the flight was coming from California on an airline with primary routes to Japan and the rest of the far east.

When they were done with that rant they turned their attention to Dr.  Craddock and asked him the standard questions about where he was from, what he did while he was visiting California, and where he was going.   

He said he was going home to Atlanta and that he had been at a conference at Yorba Linda University.

“That’s a Seventh-Day Adventist School isn’t is?” they asked.  “Are you a Seventh Day Adventist?” 

 “No,” he said, “I’m of the denomination Disciples of Christ.” 

“Never heard of it,” the husband said. “So what are you doing with the Adventists?”

 Dr.  Craddock  explained they were working together on sermons, church, things like that. 

“You’re not a Seventh Day Adventist, but you spent time with them?” the woman said. 

“Yes.” He said.  

She said, “Then you were ‘othering.’” 

“I’m sorry,” Craddock said, “I’m not familiar with the term.” 

The husband explained, “Our preacher uses it all the time. He just making us sick with it. Go out and be with others. We ought to get acquainted with others. We ought to relate to others. Others, others, others, just always ‘othering.’ If I hear it one more time, one more sermon on ‘othering,’ I think I will just throw up.” 

“It’s just a fad, dear.” The wife replied.  “Soon he’ll  be on to something else.”

Dr.  Craddock had heard enough.  “So you are Christians, are you?” he asked. They nodded smiling. 

“Go to church?  Read the bible?  Believe in doing what Jesus did?”  Again smiles and nods.  

“Then you know the stories about Jesus and how one day he met a woman at a well who was a Samaritan.”  Now they were right with him and hanging on his every word.

“You know what he was doing?  He was ‘othering,’ he said, “is not just a fad it goes all the way back to Jesus.  It’s what Jesus was about.  He was always ‘othering.’ Let’s hope his attitude toward others never goes away any time soon.”

Craddock, who in his life was one of the kindest, gentlest of men, reported with great glee that he returned their sugary sweet smiles with one of his own and never heard another word from them during the rest of the flight.1

During this time when we fear an unknown virus we especially need each other.2  

On the web sites of churches who have had to cancel worshipping together for the next few weeks out of an abundance of caution one of the things they universally mourn is the fellowship that is going to be lost.  They won’t get to raise their voice in song.  They won’t get to sit together to listen and pray.  They won’t get to see old friends and welcome new people.  They won’t get to “other” and it makes them sad.

We loose something, we loose a lot, whenever we see “the other” as a threat.  We loose something when we worry that our friends, or people we don’t know who are visiting our church home might bring a “bug” in that might cause us to catch something and have to stay at home for at least two weeks.  We loose a great deal when we can’t ‘other.’

For whatever reason the woman who came to the well at midday was not big on “othering” and her relationships suffered for it.

I’m sure you have heard sermons on this passage in which her reputation was not only called into question but completely besmirched all because of the multiple husband business.  Scholars, even women scholars, have portrayed her as some sort of floozy, a loose woman, flitting from one relationship to another. 

They speculate that the reason she had to come to the well in the middle of the day is because she is embarrassed about her past and wanted to avoid the dirty looks and snide remarks from the other woman.    The picture is painted of a woman with glossy nails and heavy mascara who just can’t seem to settle down with one man.

Have you ever heard of Occam’s (Ockham’s) razor?  You can’t buy it in drugstore, online, or through the mail because it is the rule in logic that the simplest of competing theories be preferred to the more complex.  Let’s apply this rule to rehabilitating the woman’s reputation.  

Perhaps the reason  she was at the well at high noon was because she had been there earlier and had been so busy cleaning her house all morning that she didn’t notice she had run out of water.  She was there because she needed more.

She could learn a thing or two from some of our fellow Americans who have decided that the thing to do during a health crises is to stockpile toilet paper.  Have they no friends who would be willing to share a roll or two or shop for them if they found themselves quarantined?   

It’s the same principle that causes some people to stock up on bread, milk and eggs before a snow storm.  Really?  Two days later, when the roads are clear and life is back to normal, how much French toast will they be able to eat?

Back to the woman and about her multiple husbands.  

The cause might have been  death.  I can imagine the pain in her over outliving one or two husbands might have made her want to avoid crowds and retreat into herself. 

And remembering the ease of a husband to divorce his wife in those days she might have suffered abandonment.  Watch the old coot go out for more hand sanitiser one day and never come home.  Even if all the women were completely on her side and thought the guy a cad who would want to talk about what a jerk he was day after day?

Any of these reasons are far more probable and much more kind than pinning a label on her, calling into question her morals, and having it stick through the centuries.

The important part of this story for us is that Jesus did not see her as an “other” although he could have.

There are countless more “others” between these two strangers.

The first was that he was a man and she was a woman.  In that culture, as in some now, unrelated men and women were forbidden from talking to each other in public. 

The second, however, was even more important.  He was a Jewish man and she was a Samaritan woman.  These two groups had a history of social distancing that dated back at least seven centuries.   To apply Ockham here the differences were a matter of the Samaritans’ willingness to marry non-Jews; their rejection of any of what we would consider books of the Old Testament except the first five and their belief that the place where God was rightly worshiped was Mount Gerizim and not Jerusalem.

So deep were these divisions that they wouldn’t even use each others kitchen items.

“Nevertheless, Jesus neither flinches nor flees from the Samaritan woman at the well.  Jesus and the Samaritan woman carry on conversation at some length at midday.  His radical inclusion of a historically dreaded ‘other’ speaks volumes about Jesus.”3

I think it was Jesus’ willingness to see her as something more than an “other” that brought about her realization that he was something special.  He saw her for who she really was, another child of God  and it touched her deeply.   It had to have been a beautiful moment when she discovered, as it is for all of us when we discover, that we are loved by God.

I think that is what caused the woman to drop her water bucket, leave Jesus standing by himself at the well with cup in hand, and run into town with her proclamation that was really a question.

“In her, ‘He’s not the Messiah – is he?’ I hear a playful openness, a wonderful willingness to consider that God was larger than her preconceptions. [It is a] first step, a courageous willingness to be shocked, surprised, intruded upon”4 and included.

That’s why she went back to town!  She wanted to include others in this love she had found.  And look at what happened.  

On the strength of her word the people decide to include others too.  The people of her village don’t throw Jesus and his equally Jewish followers out of town but rather they ask them to hang around for a couple of days. 

This would have been unheard of!

It would be like the Democrats and Republicans not only having their conventions at the same time, in the same city, but in the same building.  It would be like FOX News and MSNBC sharing the same headquarters.  It would be like tea with Bernie Sanders and Donald J.  Trump.

It would be like Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and  Antonin Scalia having dinner together, and going to the opera together, and going on vacation together. Oh, wait! That really did happen!  And so did this!  

A Samaritan town welcomed Jewish guests all on the strength of one woman’s witness.

Imagine what this “othering”must have looked like.

The Samaritans invite the Jews to stay with them for a while and, remarkably, they do, for two days. What a picture—Jews and Samaritans, men and women, walking back to town together, eating together for two days, sleeping under the same roofs together.5

People who had believed each other to be so socially and theologically different that they would even use the same set of dinnerware were now having a party.

Nothing like that had ever happened before. Ancient enemies, people who believed in the very depths of their hearts that the others were so wrong, so outside orthodox definitions of morality, that contact with them was repugnant, unthinkable—those people spent two days together. They must have eaten together. They must have shared dishes and utensils and cups even. They had never done anything like that in their lives. They must have slept under the same roofs. I’ll bet they had a party. I’ll bet they had a banquet and drank a little wine—men and women, Jews and Samaritans. And I’ll bet before Jesus and his friends left to resume their journey to Galilee, they embraced.6

I am neither a profit nor a sage but I can tell you that we will get through this current crises.  

We will take precautions, of course.  We will heed the advice of local and state officials.  We will listen carefully to the wisdom of the likes of Dr.  Anthony S.  Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and others who actually  know what they are talking about.  We will mute those who don’t know or don’t care to know anything but preconceived notions and conspiratorial ideas.  

We will wash our hands and be kind to one another and care for one another until this goes the way of  the Swine, Avian, Sars, Ebola, and H1N1  scares.  It’s not the Black Death, Cholera, Leprosy, Small Pox or even the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918.  This too shall pass.

Until that day comes I hope we remember how much the fear of the other is costing us not only in dollars but in the emotional toll this isolation brings. 

We need each other and some day we will look back at this difficult time and remember what that unnamed woman who came to draw water and Jesus who needed a drink taught her town, his disciples, and now all of us.  Namely: “othering” is a good thing.  It is a very good thing indeed.

When that someday comes – as it always has and always will – maybe we’ll even be able to say: Thanks be to God for this hard earned lesson.  

__________

1.  Fred Craddock, The Renewed Homiletic, ed. O. Wesley Allen Jr. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 47-48.

2.  This sermon was preached at the outbreak of the Covid-19 virus.

3.  Andrew Benson-Nagy, “Saint John 4:5-42. Commentary 1. Connecting the Reading with Scripture.” Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship. 2 (Louisville: Westminister|John Knox Press, 2019): 72–74.

4. William H. Willimon, “Ordinary Revelation.” Pulpit Resource 33, no. 1 (2005): 37–40.

5. John M. Buchanan, “Astonished.” Sunday Morning Worship.  The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. February 27, 2005.

6. John M. Buchanan, “Included.” Sunday Morning Worship.  The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. March 3, 2002.