Message: Love Thy Strangers
Christian Family for the sake of the Stranger
Christ Church United, Deux-Montagnes and
Ecumenical Celebration with Christian from St-Eustache and Deux-Montagnes
WP Xian Unity Jn6 Samaritan Woman 2015
And The Gospel According to John 4:1-30
Please Pray with me: Creator God, Holy one who made
all things that breath. Open our minds, our hearts, our spirits and our bodies
so that we can receive a message of hope. Illuminate, inspire and move us to
greater understanding of your deep, deep love. Amen.
First of all I
would like to thank the wonderful team who come together every year to prepare
this day for us. Thank you for giving me this honor and opportunity today, to
share a piece of myself through the Story of Jesus and the Samaritan Woman.
I have to be honest, I actually feel quite
comfortable in front of an inter-denominational community. That might be
because I have been involved in an ecumenical relationship my entire life.
Inter-church is a deep part of my identity, of who I am. My mother and father
have always had deep faith and both have been going to church every Sunday for
all their lives, a practice they have pasted down to at least half their adult children.
But my parents were both faithful to
their own faith tradition, my mother
Roman Catholic and father Protestant United. I was raised in both, I quite
literally went to two Sunday Schools every Sunday since before I started
kindergarten.
You see, When my
parent moved us into the west island, my father found the perfect faith
community in which to raise his family. There is one building that is home to
two communities… the Roman Catholics celebrated Mass at 9am, where I would
begin in Sunday school, and then join the rest of the church for the
celebration of the Eucharist; and at 11am I would begin in worship with my
United Church Community waiting in anticipation of children’s time , knowing
very well that this was the prequel for Sunday School number 2.
And we did this
every Sunday, well pretty much every Sunday, throughout my entire childhood and
adolescences. Both my parish and my congregation fully supported me in faith,
and for that I am truly grateful. The support of my community is one of the
deeper sources of my faith even today. I grew up in a spirit of hope, and love
and as a child I truly believed that although we might celebrate God
differently we were all really one Christian family.
My family went to
most of our church community’s non-Sunday events and celebrations, especially
all the children’s activities and family activities. We did church to the whole
9 yards, which I’m sure many of you here can relate to, you are here in church
to pray with other Christians on a Sunday afternoon, after all.
My two traditions
did a lot of events together throughout the year; there was a social committee
which had members of both the parish and the congregation working together. And
members of one were always invited to the non-Sunday morning events of the
other. We had a lot of brunches in between the two services. We also would join
forces to feed our community in need, housing a community food cupboard and
worked to host refugee families to enter Canada together.
The community
continues to pray together during Advent in a lessons and carols evening; the
priest and minister pulpit swap, which means one preaches at both Sunday
services one week and the next the other does the same; and the teenagers of
both communities spend all of lent working on the production of the Passion
Play, performing for a Good Friday Evening of reflection and prayer. This
annual services consistently fills the church, it has been for over 20 years. I
grew up in an environment which gave me every reason to believe that God’s
family was just like my family; we didn’t agree on everything but at the end of
the day we really do love each other.
Yes I truly
believed that God’s Church was One, in many colors, in many shapes, but until I
was 13 I really believed that Christians got along.
At 13, my parents brought me and my sisters to an international conference on and for inter-church families; families like mine. This was when my bubble burst, this is when I found out that I was wrong about us all getting along, after all this was in the mid-90s. I met children younger than me who had taken their first communion in their mother’s church one week, and then were refused at their father’s church the very next Sunday. I met teens my age and older struggling to make a choice on confirmation, a decision that seemed to boil down to “am I going to choose my father, or my mother.” But what really opened me to a world I had a hard time fully comprehending at 13 was a presentation given by a young couple from Ireland who were inter-church. They shared their personal experience of the violent clashes and real fear that they encountered consistently in their home country.
The night of my 13th birthday I went for a walk, and I grieved over my beloved church. I cried and honestly asked God why; I prayed until I found peace in the hope that I could help and do something about it. I felt empowered by the Spirit that day as I sang and danced all by myself, in the middle of a field, trusting that my God wanted oneness in the church of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Yes I was certain that this was a divine hope, and at 13 I felt that this was what I wanted to help God do.
I laugh when I think of how colored, or effected I was by my circumstances, my surrounding, my context… I mean I was at a conference on the subject and I was turning 13 and I was in a strange place. But I guess that is when transformation can occur, when you experience something new, when you are taken out of your comfort space, when strangers become friends and friends become family. Yes, church as an unconditional love kind of family.
That was almost 20 years ago and since then I have continued to interact with people of different faith traditions, spending time participating in a Baptist vacation bible camp, a Pentecostal community, the evangelical movement called Inter-Varsity Christian fellowship, I was educated at an Christian Missionary and Alliance Bible College, lead a lay Roman Catholic young adult movement and did a year of discernment with my home diocese, and I lived with a Mennonite for two years. I have many friends in many different Christian tradition, friendships that I cherish, friendships that inspire me in faith and friendships that inspire me in action. I continue to feel encouraged to deepen my understanding of God, doing my best to live a life of hope and love, seeking justice and loving kindness. I am blessed with a diverse family of God’s children who help me in my humble walk with God. We all have our own calling as different traditions, but we are also called to work together, support each other, we are called to encourage each other. As a Christian family we are called to reach out to the hungry, the sick and the strangers together.
Today we heard of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan Woman at the well. She was out at the well in the middle of the day, which can lead us to see her as an outsider in her own community. In that place in the world, it was hot in the middle of the day, this was not the normal time for the women to come to gather water, in fact noon was the least likely time anyone would be out at the well. The Samaritan was at the well at noon probably because she was looked down on by her community. We also find out that she has been married 5 times and she was living with another man who was not her husband… … … Today, it is very dangerous to be a woman, if you are homeless and on the streets, even in our own country. Often women who live on the street will ’marry’ men mostly for protection, and in most cases this protection comes at a price, often in the form of violence and abuse from the very man trusted to protect her. I wonder if the Samaritan woman was kind of like a homeless woman today, just trying to survive.
During the time of the first disciples Jews and Samaritans did not associate, Jews saw Samaritans as lesser even if their ancestors were cousins. They treated each other at the very least like strangers and at the worst like enemies. When the disciples find Jesus with such a stranger they are shocked and don’t think this was a good idea… they were allowing difference and strangeness to get in the way of compassion, empathy, kindness. They were blinded to the value in the proverbial Samaritan Woman, their fear of the stranger lead them… at least at first… to withhold love; yes the disciples were withholding love from a child of God.
Let us be like Jesus, our Christ, unafraid to reach out to the stranger, to reach out to those who are in need of care and compassion. The world is just a little crazy, and there are even more people who are hungry, lonely, sick, in prison, refugees; there are more orphans in the world today than when the disciples began preaching the Good News of God through Jesus of Nazareth, called Christ. I guess we have our work cut out for us, and today I do bring you Good News, because I have seen, I have experienced a church community that over-flowed with love. Yes I bring you Good News, for I have seen the beautiful and awesome things that can happen when people of different faith traditions work together, serve together, walk humbly together, pray together and even raise children together… in my experience the result of such engagement, of such relationship, of such dialogue is a renewed and deeper love for the stranger. Amen.
