St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church

III Lent A

John 4:5-42
Romans 5:1-11 "Now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God." Now - we can seek reconciliation with those who we might kill, thereby saving ourselves.
Exodus 17:1-7

Wrath. Often in scripture, a reader gets the sense that the God one is encountering is not the meek God we might see in Jesus. It is not a nice, sweet pollyanna who lets their opponent win to encourage their self-esteem. The person, the being, the essence, of the object of our attention, our GOD, is drawn to be severe and often angry.

No doubt that people often experience God as angry. The everyday experience of death within families with short life spans, the brutality of the state, the natural disasters around us, or even the loss of a possession, a hangnail cold sore, each one of these can feel like God's judgment upon us. Each one of these may indicate Divine disfavor and fickleness. In such a world, God is constantly angry at something, at someone, and He doesn't always choose his or her victims with any obvious sense of justice.

Well, perhaps there is some justice. But who can tell when random events happen and the patterns, the answers to why such events happen seem obscure. People assume that if something bad happened to you, you deserve it.

God is often considered, in scripture, a fire; found in an earthquake; the victor. He is the one who will vindicate us even when we've been humiliated. We may have been fired from our job, but he will find us another. We may have been accused wrongly, but we'll be proven innocent in the end. God will stop what is going wrong. He'll stop it suddenly. He is just working in his own time, in ways we cannot see clearly, just yet.

But we are left feeling abandoned by God's wrath.

If you've ever felt unjustly hurt or harmed, or for no reason exploited or treated poorly, or just had nature itself gang up upon you, you may have felt that little pang of "why me, Lord?" You may have wondered, like Job, if you had done something wrong. Perhaps you think about how you could have changed the past a little bit so that you could have avoided your current misfortune. You would have wondered how you could have avoided God's wrath.

Forget about getting the things we wish for, let it be said that I just want things to run the way they should. No surprises, alright, God? That's all I want. No surprises.

Paul states that "we will be saved by him because we have been sanctified." Paul transforms the way we are to see God working. The cross reveals God's wrath. And that it's not God's wrath. All we have seen - the cruelty inherent in persons, the aggression we heap upon each other, the subtle forms of distrust and contempt, this is just human. We did not recognize them before. But now they are before us. And now, by knowing what they are, where they are, by holding them up to the light of God's love, we can better say that the violence around us is not from God.

The simple point that we are scandalized by the cross is itself a remarkable transformation. Not everyone has been scandalized. This could be divine judgment. It could be Jesus getting what he deserved. But it is none of these things: The truth of the matter is that it did not need to happen. We don't need to be afraid of what God has in store for us because God does not want us to do what we so easily do to each other.

This is a remarkable idea. Because it is fully justified for us to be afraid of other people. I was listening to a thinker who said that loving thy neighbor was a human, not a religious idea. All societies had it, her argued. Now I sympathize with this idea, but I think he probably overstated the human ability to love one's neighbor.

Freud, for example, questions this. "Why should we do it, he asks? My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection. If I love someone, he must deserve it in some way. But if he is a stranger to me... it will be hard for me to love him. Indeed, I should be wrong to do so, for my love is valued by all my own people as a sign of my preferring them, and it is an injustice to them if I put a stranger on par with them...." Then he continues along this path of reasoning. "I must honestly confess that he has more claim to my hostility and even my hatred. he seems not to have the least trace of love for me and shows me not the slightest consideration. If this grandisoe commandment had run, "love thy neighbour as thy neighbour loves thee," I should not take exception to it." He then objects to love thine enemies, and then saying that "at bottom," to love thy enemies and to love thy neighbor as thyself "at bottom it is the same thing.

It is more rational to fear than to have faith.

Perhaps this is the crux of the problem: the opposite of faith is not faithlessness. It is fear. It is not atheism, or apathy. To lack faith, is to be reduced to a perpetual state of anxiety and worry and be completely overwhelmed by the tasks of the day. To lack faith is to lose a sense of one's own agency or power. It is to fall into nihilism and constant despair. Perhaps what we name as the root part of our faith is obscure. Perhaps one is simply a general optimist in the fates. But it is not faithlessness. As Christians, we might call it the power of love, a trust that is woven deeply into the web of all creation.

Jesus recognizes that this faith is not merely in on nation's hands, held tightly like some prize. So he engages the the Samaritan woman, a woman from another ethnicity, a woman of a different religion, even though some readers would be offended by her presence.

Jesus is not offended by her.
Now those reading this passage should be offended.
The Samaritan woman is an offensive person. And yet Jesus continues talking to her.

The way people sometimes experience fear is through offense. In the community we learn not to be offended so easily, but also, how to take care for each other. People can be offended by all sorts of things: this inevitably makes it difficult to build relationships. they can be offended by words. by art. by blood. Christians should be hard to offend; but we should also know how our words harm others. We always defend the dignity of others; we still keep our hearts upon the just and righteous causes. We trust that God wins at the end of time. But outside of our desire to halt the abuse, we are not offended by the cultural differences that reveal the variety in the human condition.

The path that offered by Christ, however, is one liberated from wrath. In the good religion it means a new sort of fellowship, upon which the bonds of what is excellent about civilization rest. This might be a clue regarding how we can move forward as a faithful community.

To some extent our society has found a useful ways to avoid each other's aggression; to avoid the troublesome nature of other offensive people. Just keep people apart. Stay in our own homes. ensure they watch TV. Just keep them away from each other. This is what often happens in urban environments. Lots of people, but most anonymous, meeting people only in designated safe places.

The church, however, is more like an extended family based upon mutual trust. It is not meant to be coercive: unless setting an example worthy to be repeated means coercive.

[the following was removed from the sermon....
The faith of the church, of any fellowship, is always a response to the very real needs of our community. We respond in different ways
1) a place for parents to be ensured their children have a place after school.
2) for food that is connected to the area
3) perhaps a home-cooked meal on the occasional Monday

[You probably know the health benefits of fellowship: we're less likely to go on benders at church; nor will we take pleasure at aggressively humiliating others by increasing their anxiety. We're not the sort to tell people their lives are worthless. We will usually give people a few kind words of support rather than alienation. And we won't feel alone.

Yes, so those who go to church are healthier, more resilient and live longer. They also have better marriages, use fewer drugs.

1. Religious people usually exhibit healthful behavior and make positive lifestyle choices.
2. They benefit from active social support groups within the church.
3. Religious involvement promotes feelings of self-worth and confidence in the ability to control one's own affairs.
4. Prayer and meditation may help people deal with unpleasant situations and avoid or relieve stress and depression.
5. Religious commitment can cause positive emotions that favorably influence the immune system.
6. Faith promotes a positive outlook that enables its believers to better cope with the vicissitudes of life. .... ]

Jesus did not take offense; he wasn't afraid to offend. These acts were examples of a generous and magnanimous heart. The wrath that was thus promised upon humanity was not from the Gods or God. Freedom from wrath was where God would be.

As a community of faith, we do what Adam smith thought markets could do - make the edges of people a bit more bearable. Make people a bit more human. By being togheter, we encourage others, we defend each other's dignity, we help each other - through example - become better parents, teachers, friends and doers of the word. What we see in the gospels is that we do not need to fear one another do to this. through God, we've been liberated from the wrath that we feel awaits us. Now instead of God as the fearful parent, we encounter God as friend. And perhaps this is our call: a church that is called - not to be judge; not to be tyrant, not to be policeman - but as friend to the world.