Faithsplaining

John 4: 5-30, 39-42
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
March 15, 2020

Have you ever spoken about something of which you have extensive knowledge and expertise, only to have someone reply with “Well, actually…” and attempt to explain what you just said? One word for that is mansplaining: “Mansplaining is a pejorative term meaning ‘to comment on or explain something to a woman in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner’.” Jesus isn’t exactly engaging in mansplaining, but he is doing some of what I’m calling ‘faithsplaining’ – responding to someone else’s religious or spiritual knowledge or experience with one’s own religious knowledge or experience as normative or even superior to theirs.

You can almost hear Jesus saying ‘Well, actually…’ in the way he responds to the woman at the well. When he says, “Woman, believe me”, he could just as easily be saying “Well, actually, the hour is coming when you will worship God neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.” Even though Jesus does break the taboo barriers between men and women and between Jews and Samaritans, Jesus still has the attitude of an evangelist at your front door: “If you knew what we know, it would be better for you. You don’t know the real truth but we have it.”



It helps to know some of the biblical backstory between Jews and Samaritans, between Judah and Samaria. From about 1030 to 930 BCE there was a united kingdom of Judah and Israel—Judah was in the south, Israel to the north. When King Solomon died, the 10 northern tribes of Israel refused to accept his son Rehoboam (ruh·how·buh·uhm) as king, mostly because he would not lower the high taxes instituted by his father. Jeroboam, who was not descended from King David, Solomon’s father, led a revolt against Rehoboam who then fled to Jerusalem. Jeroboam then became king of the northern kingdom of Israel and Rehoboam became king of the southern kingdom of Judah.



About 200 years later the northern kingdom of Israel was attacked by the Assyrian empire. Territory was annexed and people were taken captive and deported. A dozen years later it would happen again, reducing the kingdom of Israel and its capitol city Samaria even further. Yet the bulk of the Israelites remained, though some fled south to Judah. 

(Some scholars interpret the Samaritan woman's five husbands as the different empires that invaded and occupied the northern kingdom over a period of centuries.  The current 'man she is living with' is the Roman Empire.  There is also the layer of interpretation regarding how easy it was for men to divorce and cast women aside. Jesus does not judge her.  He merely states the truth.)



The southern kingdom of Judah and its glorious temple in Jerusalem also suffered attack and captivity from the Babylonian empire. When the exiles returned, the people of the north now called Samaria offered to help the exiles reconstruct the temple in Jerusalem but were turned down flat. The Samaritans then harassed the returnees for rebuffing them.

The two peoples who were once one each developed their own worship, their own religious center, their own expectations of who and what the Messiah would be. Through the centuries they would continue to have nothing to do with each other, even to the point of Jews in Galilee traveling south to Jerusalem going around Samaria.

Differing religious beliefs and experiences, spiritual needs, and the nature of truth can split families, friends, or a group of people, not to mention whole nations, empires, and continents. The more we try to get at the truth it seems the more we splinter and argue and turn away from each other. When did we lose our curiosity about each other? When did it become all about us and our version of the world as we know it? Social media is the latest embodiment of the fact that we are all witnesses to our own experiences. Yet it is the experiences of the most vulnerable, abused, disaffected, and oppressed that we need to not only listen to but amplify and lift up to the extent that the way we live fundamentally changes; so that the way they live changes for the better.

UCC colleague Sara Bartlett reminded me this week: “The vulnerable are worthy of the rest of us rearranging our lives. I seem to remember Jesus doing this often, without hesitation, and with joy.”

If this pandemic is teaching us anything, it is how interdependent we are and yet how isolated we can be at the same time; how we disseminate information and then what we do with it, how we react to it; how we can distance ourselves, deny the truth until it affects us and those we love; how generous and open we can be and how selfish and stubborn we can be; that it all boils down to the fact that our survival depends on not on our religious faith but on our faith in humanity.

 Is it possible for us to believe each other, as witnesses to our own experience? Can we trust one another? Can we depend on one another? Can we take care of each other? Can we be just and forgiving with one another? Can we put aside power and control and entitlement for cooperation and sharing and grace? Can we lay down our weapons, whatever we use to hurt and shut down, which means admitting our worst fear to ourselves? Are we ready to be one human race? And if our religious faith gets in the way of this, are we ready to ask ourselves why?

 “God is spirit and those who worship God must worship in spirit and in truth.” Truthfully, I haven’t the faintest idea what that means, and yet I think it means to be open-minded, wholehearted, curious, courageous, and generous in our search for truth; that we not limit what it means to worship, that we not limit truth; that as the last hymn says, ‘O God, grant yet more light and truth to break forth from your Word’ and so also from each one of us and in our life together. 

What truth and light will yet break forth from our life together as Church and from this crisis?

Amen.

Benediction – enfleshed.com


God meets us in the hard places.
The territories of struggle.
The sites of desperation.
The places of deepest need.
In our fears and our pain,
God comes beside us.
With a commitment to extending this care
to one another and all our neighbors,
so that none may be left alone,
the Spirit sends us with peace.