2020.03.15 | Those Kind of People
The Rev. Dr. Mary Ellen Kilsby, former senior minister at First Congregational Church UCC in Long Beach, California (1988−2000) was a bit of a legend in her own time. She was one of the first women to serve as senior minister in a large church in our denomination, and she was a guiding light for liberal Protestantism and progressive social justice work throughout her life.
One of my favorite stories about Mary Ellen has to do with her early advocacy for LGBT rights. She was one of the first five pastors in the UCC in California to lead her congregation through the Open and Affirming process in 1992, and she did it with style. For example, she suggested that her congregation celebrate their decision to become an Open and Affirming Church by entering the Long Beach Gay Pride parade in 1992. The Church Council agreed.
One of the gay members volunteered to lead the congregation’s contingent in the parade by driving his red convertible carrying Mary Ellen and her spouse like homecoming royalty. He posted signs on the car doors that read: “The Rev. Dr. Mary Ellen Kilsby and her lovely husband ‘Bud.’” Several members of the congregation walked behind the car carrying signs with messages such as these:
Straight but not narrow
Jesus loves you just the way you are!
We’re an “Open and Affirming” Church
Later that day, Mary Ellen went to the Long Beach Press-Telegram office, and bought a full page ad in the Sunday paper stating: “We’re that church with those kind of people. Come and worship with us!” And people did.
Jesus never rode in a red convertible or marched in a Gay Pride Parade, but like Mary Ellen Kilsby and FCCLB, he was well known for his faith leadership that attracted and welcomed “those kind of people.”
II
The woman at the well in today’s gospel story was one of those kind of people. She was seen as different and undesirable by many in her context.
She was, for example, different from Jesus. She was a Samaritan. He was a Jew. She was a person from a different branch of the Abrahamic family tree. They both shared the common ancestor, Jacob, who dug the well where they were meeting. Yet, she was a Samaritan and he was a Jew, and their people didn’t mix [1].
You may think your relatives can’t get along. But check out these sons and daughters of Jacob! They make the Hatfields and the McCoys look like Sunday School playmates. The Samaritans were from the north, and the Jews were were from the south. They parted company 900 years before the birth of Christ. They disagreed about which sacred texts were most important. They disagreed on how to interpret the texts that they shared. And, they disagreed about what was, theologically speaking, clean and what was dirty. Just imagine a family reunion of Samaritans and Jews in this season of COVID-19!
In addition to disagreeing about scripture and its interpretation, the Samaritan and Jews disagreed about which site was the true and best place to worship Yahweh. The Jews said it was Jerusalem, while the Samaritans said it was Mt. Gerizim [2].
For as long as anyone could remember, Jews and Samaritans did not get along. They didn’t mix. And yet, there they were—Jesus, a Jewish prophet, and an unnamed woman from Samaria. There they were at Jacob’s well—mixing.
There they were at the crossroads of their communities, dipping buckets into the same well that their ancestor Jacob had dug. There they were talking with each other--and not just for a hot minute. They were engaged in what turned out to be the longest recorded conversation between Jesus and another person in the entire Bible. There they were—Jesus, the Jewish prophet, and this Samaritan woman—challenging convention, breaching barriers, and dipping into the deep well that had stained both of their families for centuries.
III
What irony! Both characters were “otherized” by their people, and both branches practices social distancing from each other, and there they were--engaging with one another in civil discourse, getting acquainted, and coming to deeper understanding and appreciation for each other.
“Otherized.” I wonder, is this a term you use? It’s been around for a long time, but I hadn’t heard it used much before I moved to the Bay Area. Otherizing means to “view or treat (a person or group of people) as intrinsically different from and alien to oneself” [3] --and not in a nice way.
A common conception of the woman at the well is that she was a floozy. In today’s passage, Jesus noted that she has been the wife of several husbands, and that the man whom she was with now was not her husband. One wonders what happened to all of those husbands? Maybe they divorced and disgraced her. Or maybe they were not actually her husbands. Maybe Jesus just used the term “husband” to be polite. Maybe she had just been “shacking” serially with all of those men.
A nuanced read of the woman at the well is that she was a widow many times over. If that were the case, the Samaritan woman may have been seen as a threat to other women whose marriage weren’t stable. Or worse, maybe people pitied her so much that they were uncomfortable being around her because the thought of so much suffering made them uncomfortable. Or even worse, maybe really judgy people were telling her that she had done something to deserve her multiple losses, and that God was punishing her as a result.
So who was the woman at the well? Was she a divorcee, a floozie, or a widow--who knows? We don’t and we won’t, and John doesn’t say.
In a way, it doesn’t matter which identity best fits the Samaritan woman, because all three depictions frame her as “other.” And, whatever the case may have been, she had gone to Jacob’s well in the middle of the day, after everyone else was gone, so that she could avoid being otherized.
Maybe she was avoiding the “mean girls’” eye-rolls, their gossip, their pity, and their slights. But, instead of finding herself alone, she encountered a person who knew all about her, welcomed her, shared a cup of water with her, and offered living water that quenched her soul, and she was never the same again.
IV
It’s important to take a moment and reflect on the phenomenon of otherizing in this COVID-19 season, and how quickly individuals and whole societies can get swept into the behavior of otherizing, particularly when massive numbers of people are getting sick, there is not yet a medical cure, and millions of people are getting sick--and close to 2M people could die in the US alone.
It’s important to take a moment and reflect on the phenomenon of otherizing, because people of faith haven’t always shown up in a way that would have made their prophets proud. Think for example of the Crusades against the Muslims in the Middle Ages, the European and Colonial American witch hunts that persisted from the 14th to the 18th Centuries, and the anti-antisemitism, anti-socialism, anti-ableism, and homophobia that fueled Hitler’s rise to power and the Natzi’s attempts to exterminate Jews and everyone else they classified as “other” during World War II.
Though we might wish that these horror stories were all a thing of the past, that’s simply not the case. Our Commander and Chief, at first claimed that the CoronaVirus was no big deal, and then, yesterday, he proclaimed a national emergency and blamed it all on his predecessor and foreigners--on others.
These occasions remind us of how desperately we need to learn from Jesus’ example about how to build bridges instead of walls, receive rather than reject our human family members, and cooperate with rather than discriminate against each other; because, in the middle of the day--and at the end of the day--the well that we drink from doesn’t belong to us, and the water that it provides is meant for all of us.
Think about that--the well and the water that comes from it belongs to God. God created these gifts, and God wants all of us to drink of this living water so that our souls might be quenched and we might be sustained on our journey through the wilderness of Lent and the wilderness of life. Amen.
Footnotes:
[1] James D. Purvis, “Samaritans,” in Harper’s Bible Dictionary. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 898-899.
[2] Ibid.