Beyond the Pale (Lent 3A)

Beyond the Pale
Homily delivered the Third Sunday of Lent (Lent 3A RCL)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
19 March 2017; 8:00 a.m. Said and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
Readings:  Exodus 17:1-7; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42; Psalm 95

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

In 722 BCE, the Assyrian Empire destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel and leveled its capital Samaria, deporting most of its inhabitants.  The “people of the land” left behind in what was now an Assyrian province did their best in following their religion, something very similar to Judaism, though their Temple was on Mount Gerizim near Samaria rather than on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, and their liturgy and Torah were in a different dialect of Hebrew.  The fact that they tended to be more open to intermarrying foreigners complicated relations with Jerusalem.  When in 586 BCE the Babylonian Empire in its turn conquered Judah and largely leveled Jerusalem, Samaritans shed few tears. Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Temple that Solomon had built and deported Judah’s  leadership elites to Babylon in chains.  Now it was Judah’s turn to survive under foreign rule, and intermarriage was one strategy to get by. 

When the exile ended and Judah’s leadership returned to Palestine, they were led by people like Ezra and Nehemiah.  Having thought long and hard over why God had abandoned Judah and the Davidic kings, they had a simple answer:  infidelity, not keeping the Law.  They blamed the exile on Hebrew men who had married foreign women.  Wanting to make their country great again, they demanded a return to “old-time values” and insisted that men with foreign wives simply divorce them and abandon them and their half-breed children. Break up families to make our country secure!  Erect a fence, a wall around the city and the Law, and define your borders and boundaries, regardless the human cost! 

Many men, especially in Samaria, refused.  Nehemiah reports how he responded: 

“I fought with them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair; and I made them take an oath in the name of God ... Thus I cleansed them from every foreign impurity ...” (Nehemiah 13:25-30). 

Thus developed the mutual hatred between Judeans and Samaritans, fanned ever hotter in 110 BCE when Maccabean High Priest John Hyrcanus, in order to punish the Samaritans for Hellenizing and siding with the new occupying power, the Greek Syrian Seleucids, ordered the Samaritan Temple destroyed. Judean-Samaritan enmity was centuries old by the time Jesus sat by Jacob’s well in today’s Gospel.

We have that odd expression in English:  “beyond the pale.”  A pale is a stake or picket used in a fence as a boundary marker.   A “pale” was a thus homeland, a secured area inside the boundary markers.  The Dublin Pale was the area in Ireland marked as the private possession of the English crown, where English common law and customs reigned supreme.  “Beyond the pale” was the vast region beyond those boundaries and what the English considered civilization.

Samaria was beyond the pale for practicing Jews in Jesus’ era, who considered Samaritans permanently ritually defiling and avoided contact with them. When traveling from Galilee to Jerusalem, many would go days out their way to avoid Samaria.  But in today’s Gospel, Jesus goes through Samaria and stops at Jacob’s well:  he goes beyond the bounds, beyond the pale.

It is about noon, the hottest part of the day and least desirable for hauling water.  

A Samaritan woman approaches to draw water.  She is avoiding others, coming at this time:  even among the outcast Samaritans, she is an outcast.  That’s why Jesus’ disciples are so upset when they return to find him talking with her.  This is “inappropriate behavior,” beyond the pale. 

I am always suspicious when people say their standard for behavior is what would Jesus do?  Our mind’s eye image of Jesus is drawn by the orthodoxies and dogmas of our received faith, our boundaries of culture and homeland, in a word, by our biases.  What we all should be asking ourselves is not “What would Jesus do?” but rather, “What did Jesus actually do?’   

Again and again, we see him reach out to the marginalized, the outcast, and those condemned as sinners, wicked, and foreigners:  drunks, whores, Quisling toll collectors, lepers. He reaches out to Samaritans.  He reaches out to women.  The one time he tries to shut a foreign women out, he listens to her plea to be treated at least as well as little dogs under the table begging for crumbs, and blesses her.  If we understand the word pais in the story of the Centurion’s servant as any gentile reader of that age would have understood it, he reached out without condemnation to those in same-sex relationships too.  He reached beyond the pale, again and again.

Jesus rejected zero-sum, us vs. them thinking.  “God is a loving father who shares the blessings of sun and rain equally with those we call righteous and wicked.”  “None of you poison your kids, do you?  Well neither does God!”  “Call no person father, teacher, or king save our one father, teacher, and King.”  “God can make of these stones children of Abraham!”  In his parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Abraham’s bosom has no distinction between master and servant, only between compassionate and selfish, between whom there is great gulf fixed.   For him men in the resurrection do not own women in chattel marriage, but all are like the angels, having God as their one father and husband.  Jesus rejected us vs. them, and opened his arms wide to all. 

You see it in how he treats this woman today.  He offers her living water, despite the fact that she is a Samaritan woman cast out for her own failure to keep her community’s standards of sexual morality.   She is overwhelmed by the fact that he sees things so clearly, does not condemn her, and still treats her with dignity, respect, and love.  She declares to her neighbors, “This man must be a prophet!” 

We live in an era where people want a secure homeland, and believe that this might be had by building walls, deporting people, and breaking up families.   Many who believe this say they are Christians, trying to get back the old time religion.  But I wonder:  are they following here what Jesus actually did rather than what the Jesus taught them in Sunday School would do?  I suspect they are deceived.  Our God is a God of love and welcome, not of strength through might.  Self-sacrificial love is the Christian way.  We worship God on the Cross crowned with thorns, not Caesar crowned in gold-leafed laurels, robed in royal purple, surrounded by fawning toadies.  Early Christian martyrs died rather than making any show of honoring the symbol of might through strength, the Roman Imperial Eagle or the image of the Emperor.

You know, most of us here today are refugees from other church communities.  Many of us  have suffered, in one way or another, from abusive church communities, some acting only for the best of reasons.  We came to the Episcopal Church, or for those of us who suffered abuse in Episcopal churches, came to this Episcopal Church because we loved the intimacy, respect, and love we felt in this place.  We came here because we found sweet Jesus here, with open arms and not one word of condemnation. We found here at Trinity a place where the veiled boundary between heaven and earth was so thin as to be almost translucent, what the Celts called a thin place.  

Love and compassion is a thin place; loving compassion that reaches beyond the pale is in fact the thinnest of all places.  Inclusion and non-judging welcome is where heaven meets earth.  Christ, this loving gentle man with his little jokes and open arms was the incarnation of God Almighty: compassion incarnate, the thinnest of thin places.  And he calls us to follow him.    

At the Thursday Eucharist, Diana Quirk shared her faith story: one where she took inspiration in the simplicity and service of Francis of Assisi and where she saw the face of Jesus in a pitiful person she was helping, who herself saw the face of Jesus in Diana’s help.  On Friday, I received the following from a friend, Louie Crew Clay, the founder of Integrity, the Episcopal Church’s ministry for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered persons.  He wrote of an experience where he saw the face of Jesus in the face of a bishop willing to go beyond the pale:

“Forty years ago today, March 17, 1977, I was in Jackson, Mississippi, for a consultation of black colleges. Integrity was 2½ years old. Bishop Duncan Gray, Jr., agreed to meet with me at 4pm.  It was a profound encounter for me, disciple with disciple, Suthunah to Suthanah.  He told me that our ministry is very important and that I need to live not just for myself, but in ways that will bring credit to God's work among us, that I need to be committed for the long haul, not just as a flash point for a resume.  He said that he must be candid: that he was stretching the Diocese of Mississippi about as much as they could take in his commitment to racial justice and reconciliation, that he would not be able to make public stands for LGBTQ persons without diminishing the willingness of Episcopalians to join him in support of racial integration.  “But you need to know,” he elaborated, “that I know who my gay priests are, and they have great dignity. They have not put the diocese in awkward positions because of sexual improprieties the way that some straight priests have done.  It is very important that The Episcopal Church embrace the ministry that you espouse. Don't be lonely. God is with you, and that's an awesome responsibility.”  Before I left his office, I knelt before him and asked him to bless me. That blessing continues its efficacy, I am enormously grateful.”

Jesus reached out to others in love and not condemnation.  We encounter Jesus in compassion by and for others.  May we open our hearts and arms, and be a blessing for others always. 

In the name of God, Amen.