Response to Wint's sermon on Groundhog Day
The text this week was from John 4, Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. I find I disagree, intellectually and emotionally, with Wint's interpretation, even though some of his points were good.
Jesus stops in a Samarian town at noon and sits down by the well of Jacob that happens to be there. A woman comes to draw water and Jesus asks her for a drink. She asks him why he's asking her, since he's a Jew and Jews refuse to interact with Samaritans. Jesus replies that if she knew who he was, she would ask him for a drink instead. She points out that he doesn't have a bucket and asks whether he claims to be greater than Jacob; he says that people who drink from the well will get thirsty again, but people who drink the living water he can give won't. She asks for living water, since coming to the well is a hassle. Jesus tells her to go get her husband. She says she doesn't have a husband. He says, "You are right when you say you don't have a husband. You have been married to five men, and the one you have now is not your husband. You have told me the truth." (4:17-18) She is convinced he is a prophet and they talk theology for a bit, but then the disciples get back and she leaves. She tells all the people in the town what happened, convinces them Jesus is at least a prophet if not the Messiah, and swings an invitation for him to stay for a couple days.
First of all, the text selection left out a few bits. There's a part in the middle where the disciples and Jesus have a conversation about food; and I included the specific religious import of the well; the selection in the bulletin left it out. (I also used the bible closest to hand, which is a Good News, so that might be part of the difference.)
Wint said that the details in this story characterize the woman more than is immediately apparent. Noon is the hottest time of day, which is why they're alone to have this conversation, and also means that she is avoiding people, drawing water at an unpleasant time. So far so good. But then Wint sets up a hypothetical "traditional" reading of the text to knock it down. She's not necessarily a woman of ill-repute, he says. She could have been widowed five times, and if she's in the awkward situation of being half-married to a dead husband's brother in an effort to get an heir, he wouldn't exactly count as her husband. And that's where he lost me. It is not necessary for the point he wants to make in his sermon ("It's good to listen to people without judging them") to make excuses for the woman's behavior. In fact, doing so undercuts a far more important reading of the text--that women are still capable of making theological small-talk with God even if they have multiple sex partners.
Besides, the text supports something repugnant to her contemporaries in the woman's situation far more than it sets her up as blameless. Jesus is rather emphatic about what she's just told him, in a way that looks very much like he is rebuking her--either for implied untruthfulness or for promiscuity. I asked my mom, "Do you think she's coming on to him when she says she doesn't have a husband?" and Mom said no, that is not an accepted reading. Sexual attraction to Jesus--or the desperate economic straits that might cause such an action in the absense of attraction--apparently don't figure in the Bible. But anyway, in ordinary conversation we don't regularly tell people "You have told me the truth" unless there's an implied "without meaning to" or perhaps "I feel ya." Besides, she's at the well at noon. Whatever the objective morality of her case, the town she lives in thinks she's done something wrong. It is probably more useful to picture her as a fallen woman than as a victim, an impoverished widow, even if she is both of those.
It's also more useful to the congregation. I'm not the only voluntarily-divorced woman who listened to that sermon, and I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one who's cohabited outside of marriage. There are few enough women in the Bible at all, and denying that promiscuous women exist, or implying that we can only sympathize with them if we construe their choices as forced on them by circumstance, eliminates a whole class of people from identifying with anyone in that book's pages.
And there's an absolutely critical lesson in the "traditional" reading anyway. Suppose that Jesus is rebuking not just her untruthfulness (which is the point Wint really wanted to make, that it's divine to be able to trust someone not to judge you, to feel like they know what you're going to say already, so you can safely open up to them), but also her promiscuity. Is that actually so bad?
My personal example is a woman, a member of the church, of my mother's generation, who rebuked me for bad manners on more than one occasion. Sometimes a person who really sees you and understands where you're coming from also disagrees with your choices. Then what? In my experience, then it gets complicated. Some people are seen so rarely that when you see them, you have to bite your tongue on things you disagree with and just shower them with agape to give them humanity to hold onto. But that is very rare, and once they come to trust your warmth (I don't have a better word for it than that), part of seeing them is also admitting their right to see you and to disagree with you, and you teach that by disagreeing with them--without dropping contact or ceasing to listen. Sometimes you can't sustain the level of warmth that they need while also taking care of yourself and offering them any useful steps to grow, and you have to find a professional. But that's only the worst cases. Usually mutual seeing uses disagreements to turn agape into philia, and uses external disapproval to identify, cope with, adjust and heal internal disapproval. A couple weeks ago I witnessed my old rebuker performing what I consider to be a significant breach of manners. I didn't say anything--because we're not friends. To form a friendship, I would have to talk to her about things that matter.
But here's the other problem. This mutual seeing thing--we're talking about forming friendships. And friendships are expensive. You can't have an unlimited number of them; if you form too many new ones, you fall out of touch with your old friends. They feel neglected; they have new growth on their lives that you haven't seen. You no longer sustain their reality in the social world the way you once did. Some friendships are more expensive than others, too. Some people are sustained by a broad network of friends, historically deep, so that they have reservoirs of being-seen to live on when you're not seeing them. But some people don't. Those people need friends the most and they are the most expensive for the friends they have--and if the historical dearth is bad enough, even a large number of contemporary friends can be stressed trying to support them. And people vary in how much support they need anyway.
One role of the church is to provide friendship to the friendless. It's a broad network of people each providing small affirmations. That feeling of instant warmth is an important draw--my intellectual engagement with the phenomenon notwithstanding, it's probably the one that draws me. Unfortunately, even in a church, people un-see each other, turn away from each other's pain, refuse to pay the time and sympathy they see asked for. They're not wrong to do so, because they prevent harm to themselves, but they cause harm to others by it. To ignore that cost, and to ignore the role disagreements play in friendships, is to pretend that churches can be magical happy love lands, and it cheapens the Christian call and plasters over a lot of necessary organizing. A church that befriends the friendless has to organize its members to identify the invisible ones and the ones who have time and vision to spare, and match them up in ways that don't drain anyone to the point of burning out. But that means recognizing that some people are already doing more seeing than others; that some people have blind spots; that some people need training and some need shift rotations, and some need to learn how to pull others out without sinking in themselves (and it has to give that training to the invisible people, so that the visible seers can't claim expertise-superiority over the invisible see-backers).
The church has to stop acting like seeing the invisible is enabling weakness.
Jesus stops in a Samarian town at noon and sits down by the well of Jacob that happens to be there. A woman comes to draw water and Jesus asks her for a drink. She asks him why he's asking her, since he's a Jew and Jews refuse to interact with Samaritans. Jesus replies that if she knew who he was, she would ask him for a drink instead. She points out that he doesn't have a bucket and asks whether he claims to be greater than Jacob; he says that people who drink from the well will get thirsty again, but people who drink the living water he can give won't. She asks for living water, since coming to the well is a hassle. Jesus tells her to go get her husband. She says she doesn't have a husband. He says, "You are right when you say you don't have a husband. You have been married to five men, and the one you have now is not your husband. You have told me the truth." (4:17-18) She is convinced he is a prophet and they talk theology for a bit, but then the disciples get back and she leaves. She tells all the people in the town what happened, convinces them Jesus is at least a prophet if not the Messiah, and swings an invitation for him to stay for a couple days.
First of all, the text selection left out a few bits. There's a part in the middle where the disciples and Jesus have a conversation about food; and I included the specific religious import of the well; the selection in the bulletin left it out. (I also used the bible closest to hand, which is a Good News, so that might be part of the difference.)
Wint said that the details in this story characterize the woman more than is immediately apparent. Noon is the hottest time of day, which is why they're alone to have this conversation, and also means that she is avoiding people, drawing water at an unpleasant time. So far so good. But then Wint sets up a hypothetical "traditional" reading of the text to knock it down. She's not necessarily a woman of ill-repute, he says. She could have been widowed five times, and if she's in the awkward situation of being half-married to a dead husband's brother in an effort to get an heir, he wouldn't exactly count as her husband. And that's where he lost me. It is not necessary for the point he wants to make in his sermon ("It's good to listen to people without judging them") to make excuses for the woman's behavior. In fact, doing so undercuts a far more important reading of the text--that women are still capable of making theological small-talk with God even if they have multiple sex partners.
Besides, the text supports something repugnant to her contemporaries in the woman's situation far more than it sets her up as blameless. Jesus is rather emphatic about what she's just told him, in a way that looks very much like he is rebuking her--either for implied untruthfulness or for promiscuity. I asked my mom, "Do you think she's coming on to him when she says she doesn't have a husband?" and Mom said no, that is not an accepted reading. Sexual attraction to Jesus--or the desperate economic straits that might cause such an action in the absense of attraction--apparently don't figure in the Bible. But anyway, in ordinary conversation we don't regularly tell people "You have told me the truth" unless there's an implied "without meaning to" or perhaps "I feel ya." Besides, she's at the well at noon. Whatever the objective morality of her case, the town she lives in thinks she's done something wrong. It is probably more useful to picture her as a fallen woman than as a victim, an impoverished widow, even if she is both of those.
It's also more useful to the congregation. I'm not the only voluntarily-divorced woman who listened to that sermon, and I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one who's cohabited outside of marriage. There are few enough women in the Bible at all, and denying that promiscuous women exist, or implying that we can only sympathize with them if we construe their choices as forced on them by circumstance, eliminates a whole class of people from identifying with anyone in that book's pages.
And there's an absolutely critical lesson in the "traditional" reading anyway. Suppose that Jesus is rebuking not just her untruthfulness (which is the point Wint really wanted to make, that it's divine to be able to trust someone not to judge you, to feel like they know what you're going to say already, so you can safely open up to them), but also her promiscuity. Is that actually so bad?
My personal example is a woman, a member of the church, of my mother's generation, who rebuked me for bad manners on more than one occasion. Sometimes a person who really sees you and understands where you're coming from also disagrees with your choices. Then what? In my experience, then it gets complicated. Some people are seen so rarely that when you see them, you have to bite your tongue on things you disagree with and just shower them with agape to give them humanity to hold onto. But that is very rare, and once they come to trust your warmth (I don't have a better word for it than that), part of seeing them is also admitting their right to see you and to disagree with you, and you teach that by disagreeing with them--without dropping contact or ceasing to listen. Sometimes you can't sustain the level of warmth that they need while also taking care of yourself and offering them any useful steps to grow, and you have to find a professional. But that's only the worst cases. Usually mutual seeing uses disagreements to turn agape into philia, and uses external disapproval to identify, cope with, adjust and heal internal disapproval. A couple weeks ago I witnessed my old rebuker performing what I consider to be a significant breach of manners. I didn't say anything--because we're not friends. To form a friendship, I would have to talk to her about things that matter.
But here's the other problem. This mutual seeing thing--we're talking about forming friendships. And friendships are expensive. You can't have an unlimited number of them; if you form too many new ones, you fall out of touch with your old friends. They feel neglected; they have new growth on their lives that you haven't seen. You no longer sustain their reality in the social world the way you once did. Some friendships are more expensive than others, too. Some people are sustained by a broad network of friends, historically deep, so that they have reservoirs of being-seen to live on when you're not seeing them. But some people don't. Those people need friends the most and they are the most expensive for the friends they have--and if the historical dearth is bad enough, even a large number of contemporary friends can be stressed trying to support them. And people vary in how much support they need anyway.
One role of the church is to provide friendship to the friendless. It's a broad network of people each providing small affirmations. That feeling of instant warmth is an important draw--my intellectual engagement with the phenomenon notwithstanding, it's probably the one that draws me. Unfortunately, even in a church, people un-see each other, turn away from each other's pain, refuse to pay the time and sympathy they see asked for. They're not wrong to do so, because they prevent harm to themselves, but they cause harm to others by it. To ignore that cost, and to ignore the role disagreements play in friendships, is to pretend that churches can be magical happy love lands, and it cheapens the Christian call and plasters over a lot of necessary organizing. A church that befriends the friendless has to organize its members to identify the invisible ones and the ones who have time and vision to spare, and match them up in ways that don't drain anyone to the point of burning out. But that means recognizing that some people are already doing more seeing than others; that some people have blind spots; that some people need training and some need shift rotations, and some need to learn how to pull others out without sinking in themselves (and it has to give that training to the invisible people, so that the visible seers can't claim expertise-superiority over the invisible see-backers).
The church has to stop acting like seeing the invisible is enabling weakness.