HOW TO SHARE OUR FAITH
A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

John 4:5-29;John 6:24-35

President Obama learned a valuable lesson in the last couple of weeks.  I would sum it up this way: If you want your well justified critique of someone's behavior to be taken seriously by the majority in our society, don't call them ˜stupid" in your public statement.  It remains, the word stupid, one of the ugliest words to be used in our relationship with others.

Growing up the way I did in rural farm boy Indiana, the use of that word was as common in everyone's usage as was the manure out in our barn stalls.  We called each other stupid.  The town kids would call us country bumpkins stupid and we returned the favor as we hit them.

It is a word that I haven't really used for decades and I cringed when I heard the President use it, because I, along with many of you, just knew that it would serve to distract our fellow citizens from that ongoing continuing conversation of the existence of racism in our lives.

What I am about to wade into is no more fun to try to say than it is to hear.   But I know that the white church in the United States has traditionally been and continues to be sinfully quiet on issues of racism.  I am not proud of some of the things that I got taught as child growing up in Hoosier land, but it is part of me.  I am a racist living in sobriety.  I am also homophobic and sexist, just to name a few of my bad qualities.  I say I am a racist, homophobic and sexist the way if you walked down our church hallways any night of the week and encountered someone from an AA or NA meeting you would say they are alcoholic or a drug addict.  If you meet someone who has been sober and non-using for the last thirty years they are quick to identity themselves as an addict or as a drunk who is now living in sobriety.  Addiction is a lifelong pattern, a reality that one never fully escapes from.  They  have learned to own up to saying to themselves and their world, "I am an addict seeking every day to live soberly."  I am a racist who seeks every day to be openly embracing of the wide, beautiful diversity of people in my world.  I was taught racist things since I was old enough to observe my world and I work diligently every day to try to overcome, to embrace a world of diversity in spite of those attitudes that I do not believe serve me today, nor do they serve the people of this world, well.  But many of those detestable characteristics got planted in me when I was so young it is simply impossible for me to eradicate their existence in me.  So, I try to keep an open mind with myself and try to create alternate patterns of belief and behavior to counteract the other stuff. 

I am not a good racist for a couple of reasons.  First, I am openly confessing --I seek to be a better person than the racism I was taught.  I believe that racism is a cancer that left unchecked multiples in uncontrolled ways and will ultimately kill the very society that it is part of.  

I have never really enjoyed the metaphor of the United States as a melting pot of races.  Some people say, "I don't see color; I am color blind when I see people."    First, I don't believe them and secondly, I think, "What an absolute shame not to see color."    Because when I look at a rainbow, what I am rejoicing in is seeing how beautiful the full spectrum of colors is, both individually outlined and held as a whole.  I have grown to enjoy the Canadians' image of their society as a patchwork quilt.  Today I understand God's creation exactly that way, as a widely diverse group of people distinctly and wonderfully made in a variety of colors, sizes, sexualities and gender identities, intellectually and spiritually diverse and all intimately connected at our deepest and most intimate places with an array of stitches and weavings that form us as one human race.

I am devoted to the church that names Jesus as our Christ, Jesus as the one that we seek to model our lives after, and I am deeply devoted to that group of people who seek to follow the ways of Jesus. I want us to be in active conversation with others about what we find to be most true.  There is a great spiritual hunger in our world for a faith community that humbly seeks to live up to what Jesus taught.  There are hundreds, probably thousands of people in this town, in the University, those seeking to make a living in business and those retired, who are hunting for a spiritually robust faith community that, while being intellectually curious, demands that our lives reflect the justice filled, compassionate, merciful essence of God.  People by and large are rightly tired of religion based on recitation of correct beliefs.  What folks are hungering and thirsting for are ways to be in a direct, ongoing, intimate relationship with God that makes our world and our lives better for having lived meaningfully.  Are we doing that?  Are we living and talking in meaningful ways about our faith?

In both stories from John's Gospel this morning we have Jesus offering bread and water , the essences of life, to the people he is having conversations, in a form that will feed their deepest hunger and thirst.  Especially in the story of the woman at the well, it is conversation that Jesus is having with a person of another race about faith, about ethics, and about morality and community standards.  Jesus is Jewish and the woman is double trouble -- she is woman and she is Samaritan, or what many today would call a Palestinian.  The hatred and mistrust between the Jews and the Samaritans was just as intense in Jesus' day as now.  When Jews and Samaritans walked down the street and met, they crossed over from each other and never met eye to eye except in utter disdain.

It is not always easy is it to have a conversation with someone about faith, religion, ethics, and morality.  Relatively speaking, it is easier to do what I'm doing, talking with you all listening!  This is not a conversation.  Conversation, where people respectfully talk back and forth to each other, is not easy. What marks a true conversation is that the two people talking must be open to the honest possibility that either or both of them may be changed by what is said.  That is a conversation.  I love it when, in conversation with you, I learn something and so do you. 

Most of us do a lot more lecturing than we do conversation when it comes to sharing our faith .  And, if the truth be told, people, we included, can become very defensive around religion and faith.  Sometimes folks will start talking to me and when they learn who I am will tell a dirty joke to try to scare me away.  I was weaned on dirty jokes.  It takes more than that to get me out of a conversation.  Many folks have just been so abused by faith, by religion, that they just get mad, angry, and stop talking.  I love to be able to tell people that I too am angry at what church and faith and religion has done, continues to do.  Being honest that even the faith that I represent has been far from perfect, opens up many people to some marvelous conversations.

Gender and human sexuality gets in the way sometimes, doesn't it?  "Well," she says, "Think of this!  A Jewish man, a rabbi, talking to a Samaritan woman in public?  Will miracles never cease?  I wonder what he is really after?  Who is he anyway, this man talking to a woman?" Now she is really defensive, and I can understand it.  I can appreciate her defensiveness because she has had five husbands and she is living with a man now to whom she is not married.  She has had it up to here with men.  And here is yet another man who says, as he sits by the well, "Hey lady, how about a drink?"

I want to pause here to acknowledge that this woman has been blamed for being loose.  Five husbands and now a live-in guy.  In her time and culture, divorce was not the woman's choice.  The men passed the women around.  One took her, tired of her and got a divorce from her; still another took her and then got a divorce and over and over it occurred five times.  She did not choose to take on five husbands and another man.  She was chosen; she was taken, she was passed around like a piece of meat.  And now some new guy says, "How about a drink."  Do you understand why she is defensive about having a conversation about faith and religious practice?

I've told some of you before that one day, down on 3rd street at Marsh, soon after we moved here and I didn't know my way around the store, I asked a woman in an aisle, "Could you tell me where to find peanut butter?"  She turned around and looked at me, and said, "Are you trying to hit on me?"  I said, "Lady, I'm looking for the peanut butter."  A little later when I found it over on aisle five, there she was.  She said, "Oh, you were hunting for the peanut butter."  I understand defensiveness, but our task is to find a way to get beyond it where real conversation can happen.

In the last couple of weeks I have told many new people that I have encountered that you are a congregation of some of the most kind, caring, intelligent, giving, truly wonderful people that I have ever met.  I have recommended you to people, not because I work here, but because I truly experience you as some of the most delightfully serious and fun faith folks I have ever known.  I'm big on how God is alive and moving in this congregation as a place where there are sane and deeply inquisitive and faithfully serving people whom others would do well to be in conversation with about everything from homelessness, ecological concerns, Christology, world hunger, evolution and good recipes for the vegetarians as well as we meat eaters.

I love to invite to this church because of who you are and what we are doing together and what we dream of doing as our lives evolve.  As you invite others to come here, remember that many people have been badly hurt by religion and churches and we need to patient and loving with their hurt.

Perhaps the deepest pain of all though, the biggest thing to overcome, is the fear of not being accepted.  There are people who visit churches and never really fit in because they are afraid that if people really knew them they wouldn't be accepted.  We get visited by many Muslim friends who are hunting for a welcoming and affirming Christian congregation where they can make friends, have relationships and conversations in this culture.  I tell them that by the grace of God and our goodwill, in this congregation that they will never, ever be disrespected.

I love being in conversation with people visiting us seeking to make sense of our unique religious footing, that affirms that we are followers of the way of Jesus and that that includes fully affirming the faith and rights of those who  do not have our particular faith position. 

Remember with me the story of the king who gave a banquet because his son was getting married.  The people who were invited didn't show up and so the king said to his servants, "Go out in the streets, to county fair, the alleys, those standing in line at the restaurants, and those out in the country and everywhere and invite them in."  They brought in the good and the bad from everywhere. 

There was one person who the king kicked out for not being appropriately dressed.  The King said to the servants, "You keep going out and inviting everyone in.  If anybody has to leave, it will be by my decision, not yours,"  Judging is God's business, not ours.  All we do is our job and it is our job to say, "Everybody, everybody is welcome, everybody come."  There will not be day when anybody is refused a place by us at this table.

And so the woman said, "We think we ought to worship God in this mountain and you Jews think you ought to worship in Jerusalem." And Jesus said, "This is not the point.  The point is worshipping God, serving God in spirit and in truth, and the time has come for everyone to do so together, not according to place, but according to God's nature, which is welcoming to everyone." 

We come to the table, all are welcomed.  Jesus says that God has the drink that is eternally refreshing and the bread that feeds us in the depths of our souls.  All are welcomed to eat of it here.

Amen.