An Afternoon in a Refugee Camp

The refugee camp in Bijelo Polje, 2004.

When I was fifteen, I visited a refugee camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I don't remember much about it--- I think the people there were refugees from Kosovo maybe? I don't remember much what the camp director told us about how the camp ran, how many people were there, how long people could expect to be there. But I do remember the children in the camp. How we tried to play games with them but really the kids were clinging to us so tightly we could barely move our arms to toss a ball, and the ball would come right back to us. My sister, who was fourteen then, said she still remembers the face of the little girl who held her hand the entire time. She remembers trying to get her to play but she'd just smile, shake her head and just hold her hand. I remember not all the children had shoes, but perhaps it was just because it was summer? I remember the concrete everywhere--- different from the images of tent cities with blue UN tarps like we usually see on TV nowadays. But this camp was concrete encased in a chain link fence. I remember the faces of the children pressed into the fence as we left.

The woman who translated for us while we were in Bosnia went on to work in a local school there and I remember her telling me that the children at that camp went to her school. So these refugees had different opportunities than ones crossing the sea or living in a tent on a border somewhere. But whenever I hear about refugees in the news, I remember the feel of tiny hands gripping mine with fierce longing. I remember the faces of children so desperate to be treated as something other than a criminal or a burden or unwanted that they were willing to attach themselves to a stranger like me who could not even remotely speak their language or, let's be realistic, throw or catch a ball.

And so when the president of my country issues an executive order banning refugees from entering the country for 120 days--- except those from Syria who will be banned indefinitely--- I get angry. How dare we prioritize a mythical concept of safety over the lives of children? I remember the faces of the kids watching us leave--- those were not the faces of terrorists. Those were not the faces of threats to our national security. They were the faces of children wondering why they lived in a cage. Wondering when they would have a home. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, 65.3 million people around the world have been forced from their homes, including nearly 21.3 million refugees. Over half of refugees are under the age of 18. These are the people we are really rejecting.

So let's stop allowing our politicians to feed us lies about our safety and instead embrace our fellow human beings. Call your representatives. Financially support organizations working with refugees. Reach out to local organizations that help with resettlement (if you are in the Baltimore area, check out the Refugee Youth Project). Pray and work for a world where people are not forced from their homes in pursuit of peace and stability. Remember that it is not our safety that is a concern but the safety of these children in camps.

Water Breaking Forth in the Wilderness

In 2009, I went on an experiential educational trip to the border with Methodist Federation for Social Action folks through BorderLinks. There, I saw "water breaking forth in the wilderness" (Isaiah 35:6). I wrote about the experience for December 18 of the Baltimore-Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church's Young Adult Advent Devotional (see page 19 of this PDF or continue reading below). I have been reflecting a lot recently on my adventures traveling, and this experience is one that burns brightly for me this Advent season.

Scripture: Isaiah 35:1-10
Focus: Opening your eyes to hope 

In the desert where we were, a tall blue flag shot up into the sky, anchored to the dusty earth by a blue jug.

Water.

 

Here, on the border, where so many are lost in the wilderness, whether the symbolic wildernesses of greed or grief or the actual desert, here, there was water breaking forth. This hospitality is what we had been waiting for, whether we knew it or not.

We were a group of young adults participating in an experiential education program focused on immigration. Earlier that day, we met with some high school students living on the border who, when we shared our names and what the border meant to us, overwhelmingly spoke of death.

That stuck out in my mind as we saw this flag that symbolized water, which was being offered by a migrant shelter in Altar, Mexico, a simple place with hot food and a warm place to sleep.

When we arrived, no one was there yet for the night, so we waited. We had no idea what we should expect, but one of us got out a guitar and began to sing. Slowly, people began to arrive, including a young family, a teenage boy, and two brothers. They were exhausted and the language barrier made it difficult to strike up a conversation, but they joined us in song. Then we ate together, piecing together stories.

That night was filled with life and warmth, even though the realities of the dangers of the desert hung over us.

Reading Isaiah brought me back to that night at the migrant shelter. Isaiah's litany is one of hope in the midst of death; the hope we have been waiting for in the midst of the death we have seen around us.

Preparing ourselves for Jesus' arrival this Advent season is about opening our eyes to that hope at the same time it is about how we can nurture those blossoms God has planted in the wildernesses of this world. As that shelter on the border was, we can be waters breaking forth, offering life to people in their wilderness places.

PRAYER: Holy One, we reach out to you, seeking relief from the wildernesses around us. But we know we aren't the only ones. Return us to your joy, and give us the courage to bring your realm to this place. Amen.

Breaking through Fear

And yet again I have been remiss in writing. Apologies! But here is a sermon I preached today at St. Paul and Norrisville United Methodist Churches on the birth of Moses.

This sermon is significant to me for a number of reasons: 1. The book of Exodus is my favorite book in the bible, 2. I relied on my work in college on race as a social construction which was awesome, and 3. This sermon is the one I am using for my Provisional Membership Examination in February where the Board of Ordained Ministry of the Baltimore Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church will decide if I will be commissioned (in non-church speak it basically means that I need this sermon for a big interview that will determine whether or not I'll have a job when I graduate).

I thank both churches my family and my friends Amanda, Laura, Nancy, Kim, and Gavin and of course to my partner Aaron for their support and affirmation of my calling.

So, here's the sermon.

Scripture: Exodus 1:8-2:10 1

Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. He said to his people, "Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land." Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.

Jesus' baptism using imagery from this story

The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, "When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live." But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, "Why have you done this, and allowed the boys to live?" The midwives said to Pharaoh, "Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them." So God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and became very strong. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families. Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, "Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live."

Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a fine baby, she hid him three months. When she could hide him no longer she got a papyrus basket for him, and plastered it with bitumen and pitch; she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds on the bank of the river. His sister stood at a distance, to see what would happen to him.


The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him, "This must be one of the Hebrews' children," she said. Then his sister said to Pharaoh's daughter, "Shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?" Pharaoh's daughter said to her, "Yes." So the girl went and called the child's mother. Pharaoh's daughter said to her, "Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will give you your wages." So the woman took the child and nursed it. When the child grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter, and she took him as her son. She named him Moses, "because," she said, "I drew him out of the water."

Sermon: Breaking through Fear

Good morning everyone! I am excited to be here today. The book of Exodus was the first book of the bible I read in its entirety as a child, probably because I really liked the cartoon version of the story The Prince of Egypt when it came out in 1998. Many of us are familiar with the story of Moses, or at least a version of that story, because every Easter evening The Ten Commandments is shown on TV. It is an epic story, so to preach on the birth story of Moses is challenging, but it is also an honor.

So will you pray with me?

Patient Teacher,
one who has delivered us through times of trial to see your presence among us
grant that this morning we may feel that presence, that you may speak to us
through this scripture, the words of my mouth, and the meditations of all our hearts,
so that we might better live out your teachings. Amen.

The world that we begin with this morning is a dark one, beginning with the words, "Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph." At the end of Genesis, Joseph forgave his brothers and brought them to Egypt to escape famine and there they enjoyed Pharaoh's favor. For them, Egypt was a place of refuge. But many many years have passed, so many that the story of Joseph has been lost to the new Pharaoh. And so he begins to oppress the Israelites.

Dennis Olsen, a professor at Princeton seminary writes, "A tempting political strategy for new leaders, whether an Egyptian pharaoh or a Nazi Hitler, involves trying to solidify power by singling out a relatively weak minority or outsider group and calling them an enemy. Fear of others can be a powerful source of unity."2 Fear can bring people together, but ultimately it tears them apart. Fear is not a strategy that can be sustained, and it is a strategy contrary to the very life that God is calling us to live.

Living in the Norrisville area, most of us have not known this systemic fear. Many of us may have heard of it through stories of growing up black in the south before and during the Civil Rights Movement. Or stories of living under Nazis in Europe. These are stories where we can taste the darkness and the horror of what it may have been like to wake up as those Israelites, one day living normal lives and then beginning to see their dignity taken away. In these first and second chapters of Exodus, we see that first the Israelites are conscripted into forced labor, but they continued to multiply and so the Egyptians forced them into complete slavery. The fear here, then, does not just belong to exclusively to the Israelites. Maintaining a culture of fear in which to oppress one group means that the oppressors, the Egyptians here, must also be fearful. Fearful of revolt, of losing power, but mostly they are afraid because they have seen how easy it is to have your dignity taken away.

But some Egyptians and Israelites broke that cycle of fear, as we see in our scripture reading this morning. We're going to explore the Hebrew midwives and Pharaoh's daughter specifically. These women model for us our roles as the Church in the world today. We are to break through fear and move our communities to the abundant living that Jesus calls us to when he says in the Gospel of John, "I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly."3 The story of Exodus is a story of moving into our calling to abundant living, though the way is difficult.

Shiphrah and Puah, the midwives, are the first we see to stand up to Pharaoh's reign of fear. It may seem strange that Pharaoh would summon these two women, these two lowly Hebrew midwives, and invite them to conspire such appalling and horrific genocide with him. Why not just jump straight to his order to all the Egyptian people in verse 22 to throw all the Hebrew boys into the Nile? The text does not tell us why he whispers his evil plans to these midwives, but we can imagine why. This story of the Egyptians forcing the Hebrews into slavery is not simply a story of finding a workforce, but it is the story of the construction, the creation, of a people who were once favored by another Pharaoh into a hated and feared people.

Many of you have heard me talk extensively about my experience in Bosnia. In Bosnia, Muslims and Christians lived side by side before the war, as Hebrews and Egyptians did before the rise of this new Pharaoh who did not know Joseph. But after the fall of Yugoslavia, leaders like Slobodan Milosevic looking for power used propaganda to turn Christians from seeing Muslims as neighbors, coworkers, and friends to seeing them as monsters who needed to be eliminated. This also happened in Nazi Germany, and in places like Rwanda, and even in the USA in areas for instance where the KKK was prevalent. This culture of fear that functions to create a distinct "us" and "them" between people who used to be friends is common throughout history.

The difficulty I imagine Pharaoh had with his propaganda was the Hebrews' fertility. In most cultures and times, fertility is seen as a blessing from God. So too it was in this case, as the midwives are rewarded in this story with families. So Pharaoh wants to hide that evidence of blessing from the Egyptians, for surely it is more difficult to oppress a people you know are favored by God. He calls the midwives to make murder look like God's blessing is being taken back, so that the Hebrews will be known for their inability to keep their sons alive past birth.4

At very real risk to themselves, these women stand up to Pharaoh, rejecting a part in his evil plan. The text says that these women feared God, and that was their motivation for defying Pharaoh. There is that word fear again, and it seems to conflict with my understanding of Pharaoh's reign as one of fear and God's as a reign of abundant living. And certainly in my understanding of God, fearing God is not something I talk about much. For me, following God comes out of a love for God, not fear. But in this sense, fearing God does not mean being afraid of what punishment God will reign down for disobeying: in the tradition of the Old Testament fearing God is much more complicated. According to J. Cheryl Exum from Boston College, the center of this scriptural concept "to fear God" is a sense of God's mystery that affects our behavior, so that we are "guided by basic ethical principles and in harmony with God's will."5 These midwives have a sense of God's mystery that guides them in their daily walk. They ignore Pharaoh and continue to participate in God's blessing of the Hebrew women.

They are called before Pharaoh again, and Pharaoh asks why the boys are continuing to live. Should the midwives have spat in Pharaoh's face and denounced his evil, he would have them killed and found new midwives. This is typical of those in power even today--- if you hear something you don't like, silence them and find someone willing to tell you what you want to hear. So the midwives play on Pharaoh's own creation of the Hebrews as somehow not human. They say that Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women. They describe the Hebrew women as more like animals because they can just pop out babies without midwives, though more dignified Egyptian women need help.6 This is a lie, but it feeds into Pharaoh's own construction of Hebrews as more like animals than humans. So Shiphrah and Puah catch Pharaoh up in his own lies and go back to work among the Hebrew women, and the people multiplied and became very strong.

I read a book this summer called A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell about the end of World War II and Italian resistance to fascism. She focuses specifically on the actions of a few families living in valleys in Northern Italy at the end of the war. These were families who suffered under Mussolini, many of whom had lost sons to the war, and now they were being oppressed under the German Nazis who has moved in following the collapse of the Italian government. These were ordinary Catholic Italian peasants who hid Jewish refugees in their homes, made them part of their families. It is a story we know little about, but it is a powerful one. Mary Doria Russell ends the book talking about Hitler: "One hollow, hateful little man," she writes. "One last awful thought: all the harm he ever did was done for him by others."7 I always get chills reading that. Because the author of this novel is right. Hitler probably didn't even fire a gun--- all the atrocities he committed were done for him by other people. Pharaoh himself did not kill Hebrew babies. No, his genocidal plans were carried out for him by others. But Shiphrah and Puah stood up and refused to do harm for Pharaoh, and the people multiplied and became very strong.

Theirs is an example for us as the Church. The Church has a long and unfortunate history of being Pharaoh, but we also have a history of moments that we acted as those midwives, as those Catholic Italians did when they hid Jewish families during World War II. But when we choose to live abundantly, those relying on fear to maintain power become desperate.

Pharaoh in his desperation gives a new order to his people, "Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live."

In the film The Prince of Egypt, a young Moses learns of this order by looking at the drawings on the wall of the temple that depicted history. The drawing describing this order of Pharaoh is haunting: rows of soldiers hold babies by the leg preparing to throw them in the Nile, and more children are drawn falling through the water into the waiting mouths of crocodiles. And it is into this horror that Moses' mother gives birth.

She hides her son as long as she can, but ultimately she turns to the Nile, where so many have died already, and tries to subvert Pharaoh's orders. She does not throw her child into the Nile but places him in a basket onto the Nile.

And then we meet the daughter of Pharaoh, another example for the Church. She is a child of Pharaoh, so surely she knows her father's order to throw all the Hebrew babies into the Nile. Surely she knows this baby is a Hebrew. And yet, she opens the basket, sees the baby, hears its cry, and something stirs within her. Her own father Pharaoh has put so much effort into making a distinction between Hebrew and Egyptian that he believes himself that Hebrews are more animal than human. He raised his daughter to fear the Hebrews. But she sees through the fear and her heart is moved for the baby. She takes him as her son, thoroughly destroying the barrier that her own father was trying to construct between Hebrew and Egyptian.

As the Church, this breaking of barriers is also our work, despite history as the constructors of those barriers. Ephesians 2:14 reads, "For Christ is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us."8 We are supposed to open the basket, know the baby is a not one of us, know that society is telling us that we should shut the basket and leave it there among the reeds, and instead allow ourselves to be moved by compassion to make that baby our own.

The story of Pharaoh's daughter reminds me of the ministry of a church in Tucson, Arizona, a ministry called No More Deaths in which volunteers provide food, water, and medical care to save the lives of people crossing the treacherous border between the USA and Mexico.9 Earlier this summer, volunteers from this church found Gonzalo lying barely conscious on the side of a remote road. He was severely dehydrated from drinking contaminated water from a cattle tank, and he was going to die. But volunteers from this Tucson church found him and laid him in the back of their pick-up. He asked if he was dreaming, and then after being assured he wasn't, he asked, "Are you angels?"

Are you angels? Perhaps that would be what baby Moses would have asked if he had been old enough when he saw Pharaoh's daughter's face.

Now, No More Deaths volunteers have been arrested before while transporting immigrants like Gonzalo to receive medical aid, and some have been stopped by police and interrogated just for leaving water for weary travelers to find. After being treated, Gonzalo was deported--- but he was alive because of the love of these No More Deaths volunteers. They were like the Pharaoh's daughter--- these volunteers opened the basket floating down the river to find Gonzalo, a person they have been told they cannot help at the risk of arrest. But they have compassion. They saw that Gonzalo was a child of God and so they reached out to him.

And so we have seen who we are supposed to be in this story. But who are we now?10 No one here is really like Pharaoh, but almost all of us, myself included, can be like all those Egyptians who may not have come up with Pharaoh's horrible ideas but who still do his dirty work for him from time to time. Sometimes this is just because we afraid for ourselves or our families, sometimes it seems simpler to follow orders, but most of all it is that sometimes the fear we live in tells us that there is no other way to live.

But God pokes a hole in our fear. God strengthens us when we act as those midwives, choosing to honor God rather than fearing Pharaoh, or when we act as Pharaoh's daughter, moved by compassion to use our own place and power for justice and love instead of for fear.

May we all break our own cycles of fear to live more abundantly. Amen.

Inside and Out

Yes, pretty much all I write now are sermons, but do not worry because I have a bunch of story ideas wandering about in my brain. Hopefully after this crazy semester, I will have a chance to write! Ha.

This is a sermon on John 4:5-42. I preached it at Bernardsville United Methodist Church in New Jersey, where I preach once a month as part of my supervised ministry. It is a very small congregation, and the people are so wonderful and friendly. I thank them for their support of me as a student pastor, especially when I change up the service a bit due to the length of the scripture reading and make them learn a bunch of new songs at once!

This sermon was difficult for me to write, as I mention in the sermon itself, because I don't like Jesus in this story. When I first read this passage, I said to myself that there are a few passages from John that I really like--- why couldn't this week's reading be one of those? I thought, give me the Jesus who said about the adulterous woman that you who are without sin throw the first stone.1 That's the kind of Jesus I can get behind. I thought, give me the Jesus who puts mud on people's eyes to make them see.2 A Jesus who heals using dirt, who gets messy--- I like that kind of Jesus. Give me the Jesus who weeps when he gets to Bethany after the death of Lazarus and sees the tear-stained faces of Mary and Martha.3 A compassionate Jesus, one moved by our pain, that's a Jesus I believe in. So this week, I read the text and found at first an evasive Jesus and I kinda wanted to shake him. To tell him that's not how he's supposed to behave. But I was really intrigued by the character of the Samaritan woman, so I couldn't get the passage out of my head this week.

from Hermanoleon clipart http://bit.ly/hwWCDN

Scripture: John 4:5–42 4, from Eugene Peterson's paraphrase The Message

He came into Sychar, a Samaritan village that bordered the field Jacob had given his son Joseph. Jacob's well was still there. Jesus, worn out by the trip, sat down at the well. It was noon.

A woman, a Samaritan, came to draw water. Jesus said, "Would you give me a drink of water?" (His disciples had gone to the village to buy food for lunch.)

The Samaritan woman, taken aback, asked, "How come you, a Jew, are asking me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?" (Jews in those days wouldn't be caught dead talking to Samaritans.)

Jesus answered, "If you knew the generosity of God and who I am, you would be asking me for a drink, and I would give you fresh, living water."

The woman said, "Sir, you don't even have a bucket to draw with, and this well is deep. So how are you going to get this 'living water'? Are you a better man than our ancestor Jacob, who dug this well and drank from it, he and his sons and livestock, and passed it down to us?"

Jesus said, "Everyone who drinks this water will get thirsty again and again. Anyone who drinks the water I give will never thirst— not ever. The water I give will be an artesian spring within, gushing fountains of endless life."

The woman said, "Sir, give me this water so I won't ever get thirsty, won't ever have to come back to this well again!"

He said, "Go call your husband and then come back."

"I have no husband," she said.

"That's nicely put: 'I have no husband.' You've had five husbands, and the man you're living with now isn't even your husband. You spoke the truth there, sure enough."

"Oh, so you're a prophet! Well, tell me this: Our ancestors worshiped God at this mountain, but you Jews insist that Jerusalem is the only place for worship, right?"

"Believe me, woman, the time is coming when you Samaritans will worship the Father neither here at this mountain nor there in Jerusalem. You worship guessing in the dark; we Jews worship in the clear light of day. God's way of salvation is made available through the Jews. But the time is coming— it has, in fact, come— when what you're called will not matter and where you go to worship will not matter.

"It's who you are and the way you live that count before God. Your worship must engage your spirit in the pursuit of truth. That's the kind of people the Father is out looking for: those who are simply and honestly themselves before him in their worship. God is sheer being itself— Spirit. Those who worship him must do it out of their very being, their spirits, their true selves, in adoration."

The woman said, "I don't know about that. I do know that the Messiah is coming. When he arrives, we'll get the whole story."

"I am he," said Jesus. "You don't have to wait any longer or look any further."

Just then his disciples came back. They were shocked. They couldn't believe he was talking with that kind of a woman. No one said what they were all thinking, but their faces showed it.

The woman took the hint and left. In her confusion she left her water pot. Back in the village she told the people, "Come see a man who knew all about the things I did, who knows me inside and out. Do you think this could be the Messiah?" And they went out to see for themselves.

In the meantime, the disciples pressed him, "Rabbi, eat. Aren't you going to eat?"

He told them, "I have food to eat you know nothing about."

The disciples were puzzled. "Who could have brought him food?"

Jesus said, "The food that keeps me going is that I do the will of the One who sent me, finishing the work he started. As you look around right now, wouldn't you say that in about four months it will be time to harvest? Well, I'm telling you to open your eyes and take a good look at what's right in front of you. These Samaritan fields are ripe. It's harvest time!

"The Harvester isn't waiting. He's taking his pay, gathering in this grain that's ripe for eternal life. Now the Sower is arm in arm with the Harvester, triumphant. That's the truth of the saying, 'This one sows, that one harvests.' I sent you to harvest a field you never worked. Without lifting a finger, you have walked in on a field worked long and hard by others."

Many of the Samaritans from that village committed themselves to him because of the woman's witness: "He knew all about the things I did. He knows me inside and out!" They asked him to stay on, so Jesus stayed two days. A lot more people entrusted their lives to him when they heard what he had to say. They said to the woman, "We're no longer taking this on your say-so. We've heard it for ourselves and know it for sure. He's the Savior of the world!"

Sermon: Inside and Out

I want to confess today to you that I do not like the Gospel of John, and I don't mostly because of stories like this one we read today about Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. Jesus in this story rubs me the wrong way--- he won't answer people's questions directly, he is not even a little bit humble, frankly, I think he is kind of a jerk in this story. At least, that's what I thought the first time I read this story.

But then I reread the passage and began to see the story unfold differently. I saw a Jesus who was tired, but who was willing to engage in theological discussion with not only someone he was raised to believe was ethnically inferior but also a woman. And I saw in that woman a firey example of how we are to respond to Jesus. This was a scandalous conversation, one that invites us to enter into scandalous conversations as well.

Will you pray with me?
Holy One-in-Three who enters into the midst of our emptiness and quenches our thirst,
may you enter into these words I speak today and into the reflections of all of us here today, that we might better understand your truth that is living water.
Amen.

Now that I've opened our exploration of this text this morning with rather honest description of my original reaction to the text, I want to return to it, try to get a better picture of this story. Jesus in this story is leaving from Jerusalem for Galilee, journeying through Samaria, which is a big deal that we in our modern times don't often recognize. See Jews and Samaritans both descended from ancient Israel, and even practiced similar religions, worshiping the same God. Yet there was a hostility between them that was so strong Jews would often go out of their way to avoid crossing through Samaria even though that added miles to their route!5

Samaritans are often used as unexpected foils to those we expect to be good religious folk throughout the gospels, as you will remember in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus' and the gospel writer's audiences would just hear the word Samaritan in these story and sneer--- and then be incredulous when they realized the Samaritan was the good guy! A good Jew would avoid Samaria, and if he or she could not, then he or she would have to avoid contact with Samaritans at all cost. Jews couldn't even buy from Samaritans.

Our unnamed Samaritan woman at the well knows this. She can tell that Jesus is a Jew, and so, given her history with Jewish people, she is suspicious. And she calls Jesus out on it. She says, "How come you, a Jew, are asking me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?" She comes from a group of people marginalized by another ethnic group, the Jews, who are themselves marginalized under the Roman Empire. Because of this doubly outcast status, the Samaritan woman is wary when someone of a group who has oppressed her approaches her. When Jesus answers her, he doesn't respond to her question, instead giving her a cryptic response about living water. If I were her, I would say, "Listen mister, you asked me for water. Now you are the one offering it? Make up your mind." Her response to him, while perhaps is not as uppity as mine would have been, is still guarded. In my imagination, her words are hard. She asks Jesus if he has a bucket hidden somewhere to fetch the water, and then if he presumed himself greater than Jacob. She isn't gullible. And if Jesus is going to play games with his evasive answers, she can play them right back.

But when he speaks again of living water, I believe she drops her hard exterior a bit, just enough to reveal to us and to Jesus that her thirst is real, when she says, "Sir, give me this water so I won't ever get thirsty, won't ever have to come back to this well again!" Let us remember that she is coming to this well at noon, not an ideal time to get water because you wouldn't want to be carrying back the heavy jar of water in the heat. She really could be desperate, a marginalized woman looking for the comfort of a cool drink of water that does not wear off. And Jesus knows this.

Some interpreters see the turning point of the story to be the next exchange in the story, the one where Jesus reveals to her that he know about her husbands. This woman has had five husbands and now lives with a man who she is not married to. But I like Eugene Peterson's interpretation of her response. She seems sarcastic here: "Oh, so you're a prophet!" She says. The turning point for me comes in her next question. Here, she finally engages Jesus' theological conversation, and she does it with what seems to me a little jab at the divergence of their ethnic religious traditions. "Well, tell me this: Our ancestors worshiped God at this mountain, but you Jews insist that Jerusalem is the only place for worship, right?"

This woman is the first character in the Gospel of John to engage Jesus in serious, theological conversation.6 And Jesus takes her seriously! This is a big deal. The first character to challenge Jesus theologically in this Gospel, and I don't mean challenge in a bad way, but challenge in the sense of growth, is a Samaritan! And, not only that, but she's a woman! That is, after all, what scandalizes the disciples when they return to the well to find Jesus having a theological discussion with this unnamed woman. In the New Revised Standard translation of this passage, we read that the disciples were "astonished that he was speaking with a woman."7 And they make the situation so awkward really that the woman leaves them, even neglecting to bring her water jar back to town with her.

And then compare Jesus' conversation with the disciples with that of Jesus' conversation with the woman. We read this morning from The Message that They couldn't believe he was talking with that kind of a woman. No one said what they were all thinking, but their faces showed it. The New Revised Standard version gives us insight to some of the questions running through the disciples minds even though these questions are never voiced: "What do you want?" or "Why are you speaking with her?"8 These disciples we see are not like the woman who told Jesus what she thought.

What would this situation look like today in our world? Though talk of Samaritans and the lack of women's rights seems out of place often today, when broken down we see the same troubles in our world. There are barriers that are physical, like the Wall on the border between the USA and Mexico. Jesus traveling from Jerusalem to Galilee through Samaria is a little like someone from this area going to vacation in Cancun, but to get there rather than taking a plane and bypassing the poverty and the violence on the border, that person decides to walk through the desert, on roads controlled by drug cartels. We avoid those areas, but Jesus seeks them out. And not only does Jesus seek such places out, but he sits himself down by a well to rest there and gets caught up in conversation with someone the disciples would not approve of.

I don't know if any of you have heard of the organization Borderlinks; it is an experiential educational program run out of Tucson, Arizona, and Nogales, Mexico, to teach people about life on the border. I had to opportunity to go in 2009 with a group of other young adults.9 One of the most powerful parts of the experience was when we spent the night in a migrant shelter in the dusty town of Altar, one of the gateways people take into the desert to go North. It is a place where you can find guides to take you across the desert.

In the courtyard of the shelter, there was a huge barrel of water with a flag reaching way up into the sky coming out of it. This shelter is one of those wells for people, a place where people can stop, rest, and get a drink and a meal. Before dinner, we shared songs to welcome tired souls as people came in. We met Pedro, a man in Altar looking for money to buy a prosthetic leg as his old prosthetic was splitting. He said he needed the leg so he could work harder. We met José, an eighteen year old, small, quiet, who sang softly along with us even when he didn't know the words. We met Juan, who came for dinner but did not stay the night as he was going to begin to cross the desert that night. He told us he had been deported fifteen times. What kind of desperation is it that someone who had been deported fifteen times would be getting ready to again cross the desert? It is a physical desperation like the Samaritan woman at the well had.

But as our story tells us that the Samaritan woman was looking for more than fulfillment of their physical thirst. The moment of change for the woman was engaging in theological conversation with Jesus. So the moment of change with her was that moment that Jesus affirmed her self worth, affirmed her by engaging her, and by not judging her. I think we all have a need for that, don't we? We need someone to just be there and affirm our humanness, help us remember that we are made in the image of God. When we were at the migrant shelter, people came into the shelter so exhausted and down, but we were there playing music, asking them about themselves, and just trying to be present with them.

The story of the Samaritan woman at the well becomes more though than just a story of a woman who pushes back against Jesus. It is this very conversation in which she pushes back against him, in which she questions Jesus, that she comes to know him as the Messiah. Samaritans, too, believed in the coming Messiah, and in their conversation, she attested to her own belief and hope that all would be made known when the Messiah comes. When Jesus tells her that indeed he is more than a prophet but the Messiah for whom she waits, she is tongue-tied--- for once! She does not respond to him again, and instead leaves when the disciples arrive. But when she returns to the village, she begins to talk to others saying as much to herself as to them, "Come see a man who knew all about the things I did, who knows me inside and out. Do you think this could be the Messiah?"

The good news, the reason why this woman is spreading the word about this man she met at the well, is that, if he was indeed the Messiah, he knew her inside and out and still loved her, still wanted to share with her the living water, the meaning of abundant life. It wasn't that he could figure out how many husbands she had. In fact, though the Samaritan woman is often referred to as a prostitute by preachers, there is no place in the text where that assumption comes from other than the fact that she is a woman, essentially.10 Her husbands could be the result of a Levirate marriage, a custom in which if one brother died without giving his wife children, his brother would marry her, of which there are several stories in the Old Testament. There are many reasons why she could have had so many husbands in her life, but the numbers remind us that women in her day were dependent on men. And Jesus never once condemns her or even judges her in this story.

Rather, Jesus knowing her inside and out meant that he knew she was a Samaritan, he knew she was a woman, he knew she was a little uppity, he knew what she had lived through. He also knew that the hour is coming and is now here that God will neither be worshiped on a mountain or in Jerusalem, but in spirit and in truth. He knew her inside and out and still saw her as one of those who could leave the mountains and Jerusalem temples behind to instead worship in spirit and in truth. And she does: she invites her own people to enter in on this scandalous conversation with her to come and see what it is like to be known and still offered this living water, this promise of life abundant.

She is inviting us too. Shall we go hear for ourselves?

"God will protect us, even from Sarkozy"

Crossposted at OnFire.

Immigration is not just a USAmerican "problem"

I began to understand the importance of comprehensive immigration reform not in interactions with immigrant communities in the USA, with whom I had little contact despite living in a farming community, but in studying abroad in France and traveling across Europe. In France, I took sociology and history classes that touched on the social impact of migration of maghrébins (North Africans primarily from Algeria but also Morocco and Tunisia)--- a particularly salient issue as there have been riots in these ethnic communities that have received national attention (in 2005 mostly, but this is not new or over--- watch the film La Haine [Hate] for an artistic exploration of this social dynamic). I spoke with my host family and other French people about Islam and immigration. And I began to see how across Western Europe, immigration is a hot button issue--- from the insanity of the border security in the UK (I stood in line once as the only white person in a long line of brown men in Heathrow for "random" security checks--- I was the evidence that they were supposedly not racially profiling), to the debates over whether or not Turkey should be admitted into the European Union, to learning about Turkish immigration to Germany and initial attempts to prevent Muslims from becoming citizens. In October 2008, one of my best friends, a Bosnian woman (so a woman from the "other" Europe and a Muslim---read: not white enough), was supposed to come visit me but her ticket was revoked when it turned out she needed a visa in order to land in Germany twice (she had two layovers in Germany and would have spent a grand total of two hours in the country). So I began to study the insanity of xenophobia (fear of the foreign) in my own country (you can check out some of my reflections here).

The news today turned me back to the mess that is xenophobia in Europe. Last month, French president Nicholas Sarkozy announced mass deportations of Roma immigrants (more commonly, though derogatorily, known as gypsies--- for more of an explanation check out the Slate article called "Why do the Roma wander?").

"Hey, hey Sarkozy why don't you like the gypsies?" (VAMA feat. Ralflo's "Sarkozy versus Gypsy")


This is nothing new, of course: Italy, for example, declared a state of emergency in 2008 "due to the presence of Roma" and, let's not forget, during the Holocaust, the Nazis exterminated 220,000 Roma in its attempt to "purify the race."

And, for the French government, such despicably racist and xenophobic policies are nothing new. They are forever trying to ban the veil and blaming young men of color for everything wrong in the world. Last September, police invaded and dismantled a migrant camp in Calais. This event has stuck with me these past months because I have often wondered where those families went and what it was like to live through such a traumatic experience of loss.

Thursday and Friday, French police began the ethnic cleansing* program, resulting in the removal of some 700 people and a dismantling of 40 Roma camps, according to the BBC. Robert A. Kushen, executive director of the Budapest-based European Roma Rights Centre, pointed out in an interview for the New York Times that "Mass expulsions based on ethnicity violate European Union law...and the failure of France to do individual assessments of each case--- as opposed to cursory examinations of papers by the police--- also violates European Union rules." Sound familiar?

If that does not sound familiar what about this story from the UK's The Guardian:

Although [an unnamed 27-year-old Romaian man] has lived in Marseille since he was child, he still has no papers, and cannot get a job. "This discrimination will not go away. France has become the opposite of liberty, equality and fraternity," he said. Asked about any friends and acquaintances among the 1040 people to have gone home "voluntarily" from Marseille to their native countries since January last year, he said he doubted they would have gone happily. "Even in Romania you had discrimination," he remembered. "No one wants us. There is no place for us. Not in Romania, and not in France."

I read these articles and am constantly reminded of the stories of refugees denied asylum in the USA, of immigrants who arrive in the USA as children and know nothing of their "home countries" and yet are deported, of USAmerican politicians who are attempting to overturn the fourteenth amendment to deny citizenship to USAmerican-born children of immigrants. Xenophobia is not exclusive to the USA, which is something we must remember as we are fighting for comprehensive immigration reform in our own country. The reason for the French government's stance on immigration is an appeal to the populist vote--- much like the increase secure-the-border furor in the USA. This is a problem across the world--- and not just in the global North: in South Africa, for example, there have been violent attacks against immigrant communities. While we do need to focus on policy and reforming immigration law step by step in the USA, we need to be thinking globally of how we can create a world in which we welcome strangers rather than demonizing them.

"Come, you blessed of my Abba God! Inherit the kindom prepared for you from the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you fed me; I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me; naked and you clothed me. I was ill and you comforted me; in prison and you came to visit me...The truth is, every time you did this for the least of my sisters and brothers, you did it for me."**

***

The title of this blog, comes from a quote in a New York Times piece from Ioan Lingurar.

* I know a lot of activists reject using the term ethnic cleansing when talking about Arizona's SB1070 and other anti-immigrant policies because its connection to the Bosnian genocide such a term brings with it. I am not suggesting that we forget that the term ethnic cleansing served as a euphemism for genocide. However, I am asking that we look at the definition of ethnic cleansing--- the forced removal of an ethnic group from a geographical area--- and use the weight of the term to name the reality of anti-immigration policies like France's.

**Matthew 25: 34-36,40, The Inclusive Bible: The First Egalitarian Translation, Priests for Equality (Sheed and Ward 2007).

***
UPDATED November 9, 2010 with the "Sarkozy versus Gypsy" song.

Struggling for the Soul of the USA

Reflection on "good news" from Arizona*

Judge blocks parts of Arizona immigration law

By JACQUES BILLEAUD and AMANDA MYERS (AP)

PHOENIX — A judge has blocked the most controversial sections** of Arizona's new immigration law from taking effect Thursday, handing a major legal victory to opponents of the crackdown.

The law will still take effect Thursday, but without many of the provisions that angered opponents — including sections that required officers to check a person's immigration status while enforcing other laws. The judge also put on hold a part of the law that required immigrants to carry their papers at all times, and made it illegal for undocumented workers to solicit employment in public places.

U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton put those controversial sections on hold until the courts resolve the issues.

Opponents say the law will lead to racial profiling and is trumped by federal immigration law.

This news story made the rounds of the Faith in Public Life office this afternoon and we all breathed a big sigh of relief--- relief for a short moment anyway. Then we turned back to the work we are doing this week to continue to protest Arizona's SB1070 and laws like it.

Not two hours after the news of the judge's decision to block the more heinous portions of SB1070, Rev. Trine Zelle of Arizona Interfaith Alliance for Worker Justice reminded us in a phone conference that in actuality, SB1070 has been enforced since its passage April 23. It is merely the next in a long line of policies (she named NAFTA and the USAmerican government's funneling of immigrants through the desert in Arizona in particular) that ultimately "tighten the noose" around the immigrant community, dehumanizing them by forcing them to live in paralyzing fear.

This is why we so need comprehensive immigration reform over the misguided and racist "solution" presented by SB1070. Rev. Peter Morales, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, said on the phone call today, "Our public policy ought to represent our most humane values not our narrowest fears. This is a struggle for America's soul. Will we operate out of fear, or out of hope? Will we retrench into racial profiling...or move forward with optimism and acceptance into a multiracial and multicultural future?"

So let us give thanks for the judge's ruling today while recognizing that this struggle for the soul of the USA is not over yet. Let us stand up to fear with hope, continuing to work for justice for all our brothers and sisters.

***

**To learn more about what parts of SB1070 will still go into effect tomorrow and what has been blocked, check out an article from the Arizona Daily Star here.

*This summer I am a Beatitudes Fellow at Faith in Public Life. The Beatitudes Society is a progressive Christian resource center for and network of faith leaders that offers seminarians like me internships at key national social change organizations. Faith in Public Life is one of those organizations, focusing on "advancing faith in the public square as a positive and unifying force for justice, compassion and the common good," a lot of which is in making the progressive faith voice audible in the media. I believe God has called me to parish ministry, yet I felt strongly that I needed experience outside of parish ministry if I want to be an effective pastor working for a just world. I have not been disappointed with this decision.

Kneeling in Altar

Cross posted at OnFire.

So rock me mama like a wagon wheel

Rock me mama anyway you feel
Hey mama rock me
Rock me mama like the wind and the rain
Rock me mama like a south-bound train
Hey mama rock me
-"Wagon Wheel," Bob Dylan; Old Crow Medicine Show

The border, la frontera, is death. Again and again when I was in Nogales I heard this expressed by people who call the border home, people whose existence is this increasingly militarized space. Again and again, I saw white crosses, x's that marked the spot, signifying the death in the desert along that line drawn in pencil by men far, far away.

There is a dusty fear here. As a member of the OnFire Borderlinks delegation in October 2009, we traveled from Tucson to Nogales to Altar and back. These memories hit me this week as I sat in front of a computer working at Faith in Public Life when I came across this article by Elliot Spagat from the Associated Press:

Mexican drug cartel killings near Nogales increase

ALTAR, Sonora- Very few residents dare to drive on one of the roads out of this watering hole for migrants, fearing they will be stopped at gunpoint. They worry they will be told to turn around after their gas tanks are drained or, worse, be kidnapped or killed.

A shootout that left 21 people dead and six wounded on the road last week is the most gruesome sign that a relatively tranquil pocket of northern Mexico quickly is turning into a hotbed of drug-fueled violence on Arizona's doorstep...

Nogales, the main city in the region, which shares a border with the Arizona city of the same name, has had 131 murders so far this year, nearly surpassing 135 for all of 2009, according to a tally by the newspaper Diario de Sonora. That includes two heads found Thursday stuffed side-by-side between the bars of a cemetery fence.

The carnage still pales compared with other Mexican border cities, most notably Juarez, which lies across from El Paso, which had 2,600 murders last year. But the increase shows that some small cattle-grazing towns near Nogales are in the grip of drug traffickers who terrorize residents...

"If no one puts a stop to this, these will become ghost towns," said Jose Martin Mayoral, editor of Diario del Desierto, the newspaper in Caborca....

That phrase ghost towns echoes in my mind as I sit here, so far from this fear on the border yet still so affected by it. When I sat down to write this post, I thought about what it was like to sit in a van in Altar looking out into the desert at the road people took to get to the U.S.A. without documents. We couldn't get out of the van because the entrance to the road was patrolled by gangs. I wanted to write about NAFTA and the failed war on drugs, corruption and USAmerican citizens' own complicity with the violence that is migrating over this border in the way people are forced into drug and human trafficking. I wanted to compare the low levels of violent crime in USAmerican Border cities with the fact that Ciudad Juarez, just over the border from El Paso, Texas, is one of the most violent cities in the world.

Yet as I read this Associated Press article and think about what Altar and Nogales meant to me and why I am so saddened to read about the violence on the border, the image that keeps coming into my head is that of José, an eighteen year old who looked so much younger who came to the migrant shelter in Altar the night we were there. He was alone. I didn't get much of his story and don't know if any one of us did, but what I remember about José was the quiet way he sang along to the music as my friend David played guitar in the courtyard to the shelter. We sang song after song as the sun set and the coolness of the desert at night set in around us.

The sacred to me was in the movement of José's lips as we sang "Wagon Wheel" until the haunting beauty of the song dissipated in the darkness and we entered the shelter to eat.

As I continue to sit in front of a computer, I meditate on the movement of God in that moment and I just wish I could give it to you, the way the night air felt against my skin, the sound of Susanna's voice as she led us all in the song, the weight of it all. Would it change you, would it make you ask more questions, make you stop and think when you read about the increased violence of border cities on the Mexican side of the border?

"Wagon Wheel" is a song about traveling south, about getting to Raleigh to be with a lover, where if he died in Raleigh, he says "at least I will die free." I don't know if José ever made it north, but if he did, he only had a few months before SB1070 reminded the rest of us how undocumented people living in this country are not free, continuing to live in prisons of fear from a different violence. José reminds me why we need comprehensive immigration reform so badly, why I pray he is neither living in the border cities in Mexico nor in Arizona but that he has a chance to live free of that fear. That we all have the chance to live free of that fear.



***

All the pictures are from the OnFire Borderlinks delegation in October 2009. All the pictures are from the OnFire Borderlinks delegation in October 2009. Check out the posts about our trip from David, me, Mallory, Lindsey, and Jen.

Securing the Border

Reflecting on the Importance of Understanding Current Events and Language in the Debate over Immigration*

The following is the blog post I wrote for the Faith in Public Life blog Bold Faith Type inspired by four weeks of reading news coverage about immigration. Each morning, we read the news, clipping articles for our Newsreel. I find the Newsreel to be a very important tool for faith leaders because keeping up on current events helps us break out of that insulated church world that we often find ourselves in.

For me, this is particularly true as I try to educate myself about issues like immigration. After weeks of reading about the debates over immigration reform, I felt I had to write something to point out the problems with further militarizing an already overly-militarized region. However, in writing for the blog, I did have to check a lot of the more angry, more lefty language I use. In the first draft, I used the word "militarization" several times, knowing as I wrote it that in most cases it wouldn't make the final cut but continuing to use it because that is the word that best fit my meaning. Sometimes, though, we do have to sacrifice precision of meaning, the passion behind the words, in order to best present an argument in a strong but non-threatening way, a way that allows us to speak across partisan barriers.

Sometimes, I feel like the political language we use is like the constructed differences between Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian--- all are the same language, but differences are fabricated and used to pledge allegiance to one group in opposition to another, to identify people ethnically just by a word they use. If we want to build community, though, we have to recognize when those political differences are necessary and when we can try instead to use the other language to communicate our values.

I thank Kristin and Nick for their help moving the post away from my more militant lefty, more academic writing to something that better fits in the Bold Faith Type blog.

A False Sense of Security

In the ongoing debate about immigration, some erstwhile supporters of reform say we must first "secure the border" before we can think about comprehensive reform. In his speech Thursday morning President Obama seemed to kowtow a bit to that perspective when he said that there are more "boots on the ground" at the border than at any other time in US history, a reference to his administration's announcement last week that they will be deploying 1200 new troops to the Southwest border as well as seeking funds for two Predator drones to patrol the border.

The GOP insistence on border security relies on the belief that crime is an out-of-control problem on the U.S. side of border. This false sentiment is consistently espoused by conservative politicians like Arizona Governor Jan Brewer who recently asserted that

"the majority of the illegal trespassers that are coming into the state of Arizona are under the direction and control of organized drug cartels and they are bringing drugs in."

In fact, according to Politifact, "statistics have consistently shown that immigrants, including illegal immigrants, actually have lower rates of criminal activity and incarceration than do the native-born children of immigrants." Moreover, US border cities have among the lowest rates of violent crime in the country.

The debate pitting border security against comprehensive reform is not only built on a shaky foundation of evidence, but is also a false dichotomy. We cannot secure the border without comprehensive reform, without a way for individuals to legally and fairly enter the system. As C. Stewart Verdery, Jr., former Assistant Secretary of Policy and Planning at the Department of Homeland Security, wrote in a recent report:

"Waiting for an airtight border to solve our immigration problems would be an unrealistic, impractical, and unsuccessful strategy."

We need our politicians, from members of Congress here in Washington and state political leaders like Gov. Brewer, to drop the "secure the border" rhetoric and instead focus on what we know will work: comprehensive immigration reform. Faith leaders have been leading the charge for reform that protects our values and our interests as a country, and this week, they ramped up the pressure and urged Congress to build on the momentum from the President's speech.

Wednesday, Hispanic and African American pastors launched a coalition debunking the myth of the "black-brown divide" and pledging support for immigration across racial and ethnic lines. Thursday, an interfaith delegation delivered a letter to White House officials with almost 600 signatures from faith leaders in support of comprehensive immigration reform and announced a coordinated month of action for reform. The grassroots mobilization, Justice July, will include pulpit swaps between citizen and immigrant clergy, vigils, and acts of civil disobedience.

The faith community isn't backing down on the overwhelming need for reform. They know that the pragmatic and moral solution is a comprehensive one, and not one that relies on faulty logic and calls for militarization along our Southern border.

***

All the pictures are from the OnFire Borderlinks delegation in October 2009, which I blogged about here. This is the Mexican side of the fence that cuts Nogales, Arizona, USA from Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. The art is the work of Lupe Serrano. Art is not allowed on the USAmerican side as art was not allowed on the Soviet side of the Berlin Wall. Isn't that funny?

***

*This summer I am a Beatitudes Fellow at Faith in Public Life. The Beatitudes Society is a progressive Christian resource center for and network of faith leaders that offers seminarians like me internships at key national social change organizations. Faith in Public Life is one of those organizations, focusing on "advancing faith in the public square as a positive and unifying force for justice, compassion and the common good," a lot of which is in making the progressive faith voice audible in the media. I believe God has called me to parish ministry, yet I felt strongly that I needed non-profit experience if I want to be an effective pastor working for a just world. I have not been disappointed with this decision.

Disrupting Dinner in Luke 7:36-50

This is a sermon I wrote as my final in Biblical Literature: Gospels, Epistles, Apocalypse taught by Dr. Althea Spencer-Miller.1

Disruption

Luke 7:36-50, this story of a sinful woman anointing Jesus, is about disruption. Here, Jesus and the disciples are just lounging about at Simon's, talking and eating. Maybe they are talking theology. Maybe not. The point is that here they are in their own world and this woman--- who is a sinner, the author reminds us--- crashes their party. She transgresses into this world they have made for themselves.

And a woman in the city, who was a sinner, having learned that he was eating in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster jar of ointment.2

These are the words from which we begin. We are left to imagine for ourselves her entrance into the scene. Did those who served Simon the Pharisee welcome her inside knowing her plan before the meal, allowing her to wait in the shadows until Jesus was reclining at the table? If so, she could have emerged quietly to place herself at Jesus' feet so smoothly perhaps she would not be noticed at first. Did she push her way into the building until she found herself at Jesus' feet? Pushing her way in could have alarmed Simon and his other guests. Certainly each possibility, and there are many others, has much different consequences for the ways in which she was disruptive, but the author leaves it open, writing only that when she learned Jesus was at Simon's house, she brought an alabaster jar of ointment with her.

But however the woman comes to Jesus' feet, she is ultimately an interloper. She has crossed into a space constructed such that she and her emotions are unwelcome. Yet she brings with her sacred space. Here she is a woman, a sinner crossing into a space seemingly reserved for men, the educated, the religious, yet she is not a sacrificial goat. She is not like the woman accused of adultery in John 7:53- 8:11, presented to Jesus as a sacrifice, forcing him to chose between her and the law of Moses. Instead, the woman who is a sinner in Luke 7:36-50 is a priestess at the crossroads.3 She enters into Simon's house with her alabaster jar to make sacred the space, ministering to those witnesses at the table; her presence is disturbing in a prophetic way. She disrupts.

Introduction to Interpretation

Now we have established where the sinful woman is, but before exploring the text further, we must establish where we are as interpreters.4 We are not approaching this text from a void, but are influenced by our social locations. For instance, you will notice so far that when I speak of the sinful woman in Luke 7:36-50, I have not referred to her as a prostitute. There is absolutely no textual evidence to label her as a prostitute; it is tradition that has imposed a misogynistic view that a woman's greatest sin is a sexual sin, thus, if the sinful woman in this story's sin is so great she washes Jesus' feet with her own tears, it must be a sexual sin.5 Notice that when a man is presented as a sinner in Christian scriptures, we never once ask ourselves if his sin is sexual in nature, but tradition has us labeling women like this woman and Mary Magdalene as prostitutes with no textual evidence. The label prostitute could have been used by ancient church leaders as a way to discredit women's prophetic voices in scripture as a way to discredit women's prophetic voices within their communities.6

My own location as a feminist calls me to bring into question traditional understandings of this story of the woman anointing Jesus. However, I am also a white, middle-class, US American woman, and therefore am susceptible to readings of Luke 7: 36-50 that do not challenge traditional interpretation or that instead glorify the woman's gender in a way that does not question her work. Therefore, I am attempting here to read this passage with you as a feminist who is in process of grounding my feminism in queer, womanist, and particularly border-crossing theories. Though I must be careful to avoid appropriating and assimilating such theories since I am white, middle-class, and USAmerican, I feel that feminism is not prophetic without roots in queer, womanist, and border-crossing theories. If we are to understand the prophetic nature of the disruption that is the woman with her alabaster jar anointing Jesus.

Disheveled

So let us return to the story.

She stood behind him at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing his feet and anointing them with ointment.7

The disruption this woman brings is not merely through her uninvited presence. Her presence alone is a transgression; however, presence can easily be blotted out of the minds of those seeking to preserve that safe, closed world they have created for themselves. This woman is disturbing. She not only crosses the border into a world where she did not have a place, but she does so with such emotion. She weeps with her hair unbound, disheveled, disturbing with her presence, appearance, and actions.

How does this initial picture of her bathing Jesus' feet with her tears and drying his feet with her hair strike us? I think today for many of us this is a very erotic image. This returns us to the way tradition has forced onto this woman the identity of prostitute, so her actions are always suspect as being somehow sexual. For many societies, women's hair is seen as sexually connotative, causing men to become lustful animals if it was revealed. Even Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:2-16, Paul commands women to cover their hair when prophesying, calling prophesying without a veil disgraceful.8 His anger to the Corinthian community does not seem to fit with his assertion in Galatians 3:28 when he claims that male and female do not exist within the one-ness of Christ. So here we see how in early Christian communities there was a struggle over what women's place as prophets was--- a debate that continues today, particularly around ordination as not all mainstream denominations even ordain women yet.9 Claiming this Luke passage as sexual is a way that the early church could discredit the unsettling behavior of this woman, hair unbound, touching Jesus Christ.10

Yet did early Christian communities see this woman with unbound hair to be as erotic as we might today? Certainly, as can be seen in Paul's desire to curb women's power for fear that others will reject Christianity based on the power women had within the community. However, some have pointed out that in Greco-Roman culture, unbound hair on women is often a symbol of grief as well as gratitude and supplication in worship to the gods.11 Scholars believe Luke was written to a community familiar with Hellenistic customs and living with a tension between traditional Jews and the budding Christian movement,12 indicating that the readers would be familiar with Greco-Roman customs concerning women's hair. For instance, seminary professor Charles Cosgrove points out that Sabine women of ancient Italy, made famous in numerous works of art in the Renaissance and who were abducted to be forced into marriage with Roman men, begged for peace by entering the battlefield with disheveled hair.13 In ancient Greco-Roman texts we see numerous examples of women unbinding their hair to symbolize their grief and plead for peace from the gods.

Could the woman in Luke 7:36-50 be read as grieving? As a transgressor, border-crosser, disruptor, this woman most certainly would lament. However, her grief perhaps does not fit against Jesus' parable to Simon and Jesus' own description of her.

"A certain creditor had two debtors; one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he canceled the debts for both of them. Now which of them will love him more?"14

Here, Jesus answers Simon's internal monologue of disgust over the idea of Jesus allowing a sinful woman to touch him with a story. This story places God as the creditor and Simon and the woman as the debtors, as the sinners. Then, Jesus interprets the woman's actions for Simon:

Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love.15

Here, the woman could not be grieving over forgiveness, could she?

But that depends on what forgiveness means. According to scholar Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, "the Greek word for forgiveness [used here in Luke], aphesis, is the same root used for 'release' in Jesus' inaugural proclamation."16 The inaugural proclamation is a reference to the story in Luke where Jesus returns to Nazareth and reads from the scroll:

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."17

So then when Jesus speaks of forgiveness in the story of the woman, he is saying that she has shown great love because she has been released. For me, release signifies liberation. Sin, then, can be read as oppression.18 God as Liberator has released this woman and Simon from oppression. Though we do not know the woman's background, we can presume that as a woman she suffers at the intersection of the Roman imperial oppression as well as sexism, whereas Simon may only be oppressed by Rome. Still, liberation is a beautiful thing, yes? Why the grief?

I see this woman's tears, her unbound hair as an expression of gratitude for liberation, the focus on Jesus' body is also grief. As I mentioned before, she is creating sacred space in her transgression into Simon's home; she is a priestess rather than a scapegoat because she is released, according to Jesus. The great love she is showing is gratitude, but is gratitude tinged with grief. She is lamenting Jesus' death. I will begin to look at this more as we explore the parallel versions in the other three gospels, but the act of anointing in itself is incredibly prophetic in the scriptures. The word Messiah, or Christ in the Greek, means anointed one. The only human to anoint Jesus in Luke's gospel is a woman, this woman in Luke 7:36-50.19 Though Jesus is anointed by the Holy Spirit at his baptism when the Holy Spirit descends upon him like a dove,20 this act by a human cannot be overlooked as it has been:

She stood behind him at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe is feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing his feet and anointing them with ointment.21

This great love she has shown in gratitude to the Liberator is also grief that his work as the anointed Liberator will result in his death. Jesus' work is also a crossing of borders, a disruption, and that disruption is not a purely joyful act for it does not always end well.

Looking at Luke 7:36-50 alongside the Parallel Stories in the Other Gospels:
Matthew 26:6-13, Mark 14:3-9, John 12-1-8

When we focus on the anointing in Luke 7:36-50, as interpreters we must remember how we are influenced by the other gospel stories of the women anointing Jesus. In all four gospels, there is a story in which a woman anoints Jesus. The authors of Luke and John describe a woman anointing Jesus' feet, whereas the authors of Matthew and Mark describe a woman anointing Jesus' head. Only in the gospel of John is the anointing one named: she is Mary of Bethany, grateful for Jesus' restoration of her brother but seeing that Jesus' work would lead to his death. The others are unnamed, and they come to the house of Simon the Leper rather than Simon the Pharisee. And Simon is not the one who questions the actions of the woman; rather it is the disciples in Matthew and Mark, and Judas in John, who question her. Jesus, in these three stories, focuses not on the woman's love, but on the anointing itself as a prophetic anointing for burial.

I am turning us to these stories not to turn to the gospels to add up all the parts of the stories into one big mess, as is done at Christmas when we add the magi from Matthew to the shepherds from Luke with the prologue from John and call it one story. However, looking at the differences between Matthew, Mark, and Luke in particular help us to see what is important to the author, presuming that Luke and Matthew both used Mark as well as their own independent sources L and M respectively. Luke's account of this story is completely different from both of these because the issue here is not the cost of the ointment as it is in the other gospels when the disciples say:

"Why this waste? For this ointment could have been sold for a large sum, and the money given to the poor?"22

Luke mentions nothing about money. Instead, Luke portrays Simon as disgusted that Jesus allows a sinful woman to touch him, to disturb their meal, to trespass into their lives. The story in Luke is one that is about disruption in ways that the other gospel stories are not.

Recognizing the Tensions between Resistance and Entanglement23

However, bringing up the ways other gospel writers depict this story of a woman anointing Jesus brings to light other interpretations that we must acknowledge. We are dangerously deluding ourselves if we think that our reading of the text is the only reading or even the best reading. We must make ourselves aware of the diversity of interpretations in order to best understand the consequences of our text. Textual meaning is unstable,24 so here, we will look at some of the ways in which Luke 7:36-50 can be read not as a disruption in which the woman doing the disruption is a prophet-priestess, but instead read in a much more passive way.

Scholars like Jane Schaberg suggest that the gospel of Luke is not as liberatory of a gospel as one might think. She claims that the woman's anointing in the story cannot be related to Jesus' death as I have related them. The authors of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are explicit that this story of a woman anointing Jesus is a story of anticipation of Jesus' death, whereas Luke places the story much earlier in his gospel and changes the focus of the story entirely. Thus, the story can be read such that the woman's prophetic power in the Luke story is taken from her rather than evident in her border-crossing.25 In this reading, the woman has very little agency. She acts, but her action is to praise Jesus for forgiving her. Surely this gratitude is positive, but when the woman is presented only as praising, she loses so much power in the situation. Jesus is the one who acts here.

Similarly, reading sin as oppression and forgiveness as release is not the only way to read this story. Many of us are much more familiar with the idea of sin as disobedience, and see this story as a much more individual story, focusing on forgiveness of sin as a forgiveness of personal disobedience that does not take into account the experience of the oppressed and the oppressor. So again, reading Luke 7:36-50 as a more individualistic story ties into reading it as not prophetic: here, the woman is helpless to do anything but praise God, for it is God--- and Jesus, which also alarms those at the table with him26--- who forgives. All we as individual sinners can do is praise God when we too are forgiven.

Recognizing these different readings of the same text helps us better situate ourselves in our own interpretations. We must recognize the validity of other readings in other contexts to better understand what our interpretations are not saying. Scholar Stephen Moore in his study of Revelation reminds us that, while it is ethically important to read texts as liberatory, these texts have been used throughout the ages to support imperial hetero-patriarchy with good reason.27 Interpretations of Luke 7:36-50 as silencing and denying women's agency as priestesses are as rooted in the text as our own interpretations. We must inoculate ourselves from the idolatry of thinking there can only be one interpretation so we can hold ourselves accountable to our readings.28 What are the ethical consequences of our interpretations? What does it mean for our community to read the woman anointing Jesus as grateful rather than disruptive?

However, the fact that there is not one interpretation, not one fixed meaning, reminds us Luke 7:36-50 and the bible itself is a hybrid text, a crossroads text.29 I read this story of the woman anointing Jesus with ointment and her tears as a crossroads text in the way she is disruptive, but even when we read this story differently, it remains a crossroads text because that is what scripture is. Retired bishop of Stockholm and professor emeritus of Harvard Krister Stendahl exclaims, "What a lovely Bible that tells us that sometimes we might need to think, and not just to think that it is all settled."30 As we move into the impact of our interpretation of this story of disruption in our own community, let us remember that ultimately in interpreting we need to think, and not just to think that it is all settled.

Disruption in Our Community

Luke 7: 36-50, this story of a sinful woman anointing Jesus, is about disruption. She disrupts Simon's guests' meal, kneeling at Jesus' feet, her unbound hair unsettling in such a setting. And instead of rebuking her, Jesus turns to Simon and the other uncomfortable guests, asking if they see this woman.

Then turning toward the woman, he said to Simon, "Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has bathed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little."31

Here, we are told that this woman represents for us as Christians "proper" Christian behavior, though Simon and those at the table with Jesus are greatly disturbed by the extravagance of her actions towards a man who does not seem to care that she is a sinner. Instead of reprimanding her, instead of trying to dilute the emotion in her actions to make those at the table more comfortable, he tells them that her faith has saved her.32

What would it look for our community to have such faith? How do we translate the woman's behavior to our own contexts? With the words of this story within us, "how then shall we live?"33 To answer this question, we must return to her role as a priestess in her creation of sacred space by her very crossing of borders. She made people uncomfortable with her extravagance: shouldn't we? So, we are called to be that woman, looking for Jesus within our own community.

And the king will answer them, "Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me."34

There are those within our communities who are in need of that prophetic love, who need to be anointed with gratitude even as we grieve for the situation in which they are. Think of those whose feet have been bloodied from walking for miles through the desert in search of food and work only to find abuse at the hands of employers and neighbors in this new land. So we are grateful for the thankless work these folk do for us, but it should be a gratitude tinged with lament because we know that theirs are feet like Jesus'. It is this lament that should be driving us into houses like Simon's, disrupting the conversation to make people uncomfortable. Those are the feet that we should wash with our tears and dry with our hair, anointing them in the knowledge that these are feet like Jesus', feet whose journey for dignity may lead to the death of detention centers and denial of human rights.

Here, we see that not only is the woman in this story the trespasser, but so his Jesus. Jesus has forgiven the woman, has released her, and so Jesus presents their story, the story of him and the woman, to those at the table with him as a radical alternative to how as Christians we are to live, a new way to strive for a better world.35 Because, that is what this story in Luke 7:36-50 is about: how to live the struggle for a better world. Yet, we are at the crossroads in this text: Jesus is telling us that we ought to be the woman here when we too often are Simon and the uncomfortable people at the table with him, more concerned with the fact that our dinner has been disturbed than Jesus' message of release for the captives. Instead, let us turn to that question that comes up for us when we read the last verse of this story:

And he said to the woman, "Your faith has saved you; go in peace."36

What would it look for our community to have such faith?

***

1Because this sermon is for a final, and I made some formatting decisions based on this. The lengthy footnotes are to show how I am incorporating my academic work into this sermon. The formatting choice of headings is a way in which to create space for modifications if I were to use this sermon. Indenting and italicizing the biblical passages, though not proper citation format, is intended to better highlight these passages as they are the foundation for the sermon. In addition, this sermon is more intellectual than those I have preached before in part because I have not preached since attending seminary but also because the churches at which I have preached are not intellectual churches. Whether or not the church is intellectual, though, I see sermons as an important place in which to educate and encourage the congregants' exploration of texts and theologies.

2Luke 7:37, The Harper Collins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version (San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers, 2006).

3Here, I am using language and theory from Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, second edition (San Francisco: Aunt Luce Books, 1999), specifically page 102. This theory and that of Leticia A. Sáenz-Guardiola, "Border-Crossing and Its Redemptive Power in John 7:53-8:11: A Cultural Reading of Jesus and the Accused," Transformative Encounters: Jesus and Women Re-viewed, ed. Ingrid Kitzberger (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 267-291, which is based on Anzaldúa's theory ground my work in this sermon.

4In this section, I rely primarily on Dale Martin, "Introduction: The Myth of Textual Agency." Sex and the Single Savior, (Louisville/London: Westminster/John Knox, 2006), 1-16.

5While many biblical scholars comment on the fact that there is no textual basis by which to name this woman as a prostitute, I draw specifically here on the work of Barbara E. Reid, "'Do You See this Woman?': A Liberative Look at Luke 7.36-50 and Strategies for Reading Other Lukan Stories against the Grain," A Feminist Companion to Luke, edited by Amy-Jill Levine with Marianne Blickinstaff (New York: Sheffield Press, 2002), 106-120.

6While understanding this traditional way to discredit women, I still believe that we can reclaim the label prostitute in reference to these church leaders to challenge the ways in which women's greatest sin is constructed as sexual. I have not fully explored this idea, but I thought it important to mention here as a possible place from which to introduce queer theory.

7Luke 7:38, The Harper Collins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version.

8First Corinthians 11:5-6, The Harper Collins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version.

9I refer here to the work on 1 Corinthians and the the Acts of Thecla in exploring the ways in which women were resistant to Paul and others' misogynist understandings of women's roles within the church: Antoinette Wire, "Women Prophets in the Corinthian Church," In Conflict and Community in the Corinthian Church, Ed. J. Shannon Clarkson (New York: United Methodist Church Women's Division, 2000), 35-52; and Beate Wehn, "'Blessed Are the Bodies of the Virgins': Reflections on the Image of Paul in the Acts of Thecla," Journal for the Study of the New Testament 23 (2001), 149-164.

10Again, this is a place in which there is room to explore the sexuality in Luke 7:36-50 with a grounding in queer theory. Unfortunately, I do not have the space to explore the queerness of this passage in this particular sermon.

11I turn here to the work of Charles H. Cosgrove, "A Woman's Unbound Hair in the Greco-Roman World, with Special Reference to the Story of the 'Sinful Woman' in Luke 7:36-50," Journal of Biblical Literature 124/4 (2005): 675-692. While Cosgrove is a professor at an evangelical seminary, I still found his work on the meaning of hair in the Greco-Roman world to be very interesting. This is a place, however, where more interpretation could have been done in light of the meaning of hair within ethnic communities today.

12Ronald J. Allen, "The Story of Jesus according to 'Luke': The Gospel of Luke," Chalice Introduction to the New Testament, ed. Dennis E. Smith (St. Louis, Missouri: Chalice Press, 2004), 179-180.

13Charles H. Cosgrove, "A Woman's Unbound Hair in the Greco-Roman World, with Special Reference to the Story of the 'Sinful Woman' in Luke 7:36-50," 684.

14Luke 7:41-42, The Harper Collins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version.

15Luke 7:47, The Harper Collins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version.

16Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, "The Gospel of Luke," In True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary, edited by Brian K. Blount. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), 168.

17Luke 4:18-21, The Harper Collins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version.

18Liberation theologian James H. Cone writes that salvation is liberation in God of the Oppressed (Harper San Francisco 1975). Andrew Sung Park, also a liberation theologian, writes that we must complicate our understanding of sin because sin as the great equalizer does not convey the reality of the oppressed's experience as the sinned against in The Wounded Heart of God: The Asian Concept of Han (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 1993). Here I attempt to bring both theologians into my understanding of who this woman in Luke 7:36-50 was/is.

19Jane Schaberg, "Luke," Women's Bible Commentary, expanded edition with Apocrypha, edited by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 374.

20Luke 3:22, The Harper Collins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version.

21Luke 7:38, The Harper Collins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version.

22Matthew 26:8-9, The Harper Collins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version. This verse is almost identical to Mark 14:4-5 and John 12:5.

23This heading comes from Stephen Moore's work on Empire, "The World Empire Has Become the Empire of Our Lord and His Messiah: Representing Empire in Revelation," Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New Testament (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006) 123. His postcolonial reading of the text reminds us of the ways in which liberation hermeneutics can neglect the struggle within a text, that struggle within ourselves, in which we navigate resistance and assimilation.

24Dale Martin, "Introduction: The Myth of Textual Agency," 4.

25Jane Schaberg, "Luke," 375.

26Luke 7:49, The Harper Collins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version.

27Stephen Moore, "The World Empire Has Become the Empire of Our Lord and His Messiah: Representing Empire in Revelation," 122.

28Dale Martin writes that interpretation does not mean that "anything goes" but rather that "...we may read texts to derive legitimate meanings" in "Introduction: The Myth of Textual Agency," 2.

29Leticia A. Sáenz-Guardiola, "Border-Crossing and Its Redemptive Power in John 7:53-8:11: A Cultural Reading of Jesus and the Accused," 275.

30Krister Stendahl, "Why I Love the Bible: Beyond Distinctions of Intellect and Spirit," Harvard Divinity Bulletin 35.1 (2007).

31Luke 7:44-47, The Harper Collins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version.

32Luke 7:50, The Harper Collins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version.

33At the end of Clarice J. Martin, "The Haustafeln (Household Codes) in African American Biblical Interpretation: 'Free Slaves' and 'Subordinate Women,'" Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation, ed. Cain Hope Felder (Minneapolis: Fortress), 231, we are presented with this question concerning our interpretation of the Haustafeln in the light of USAmerican history of racism and sexism. It is a question we should ask ourselves each time we read a text.

34Matthew 25:40, The Harper Collins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version.

35Leticia A. Sáenz-Guardiola, "Border-Crossing and Its Redemptive Power in John 7:53-8:11: A Cultural Reading of Jesus and the Accused," 290.

36Luke 7:50, The Harper Collins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version.