Today’s Scripture Reading (September
20, 2017): John 4
I love stories, and one of my favorite story tellers
is Tony Campolo. A long time ago I was asked who my favorite preacher was and I
answered Tony Campolo, I am not sure at the time that I had even considered the
words favorite and preacher ever going
together. Sermons were something to be endured. My boss, and the one asking the
question, quickly responded with “He’s not a preacher, he is a sociologist.” At
that point, I wondered if I was in the
wrong field. All I wanted to do was tell stories.
One of my
favorite Campolo stories is about Tony in Hawaii throwing a birthday for a
prostitute. The story involves jet-lag induced insomnia and a greasy spoon
restaurant, and a prostitute who admitted to her friends that she was
celebrating a birthday the next day. According to Campolo, her friend’s
reaction was not all that encouraging. “What do you want from me? A party?” As
the crowd left the restaurant, Tony decided that that was what he was going to
do; throw the prostitute a birthday party. He organized the party with the
owner of the restaurant after learning that the girls all came in at the same
time every night. Tony arranged for the decorations, the cook baked a cake –
and they waited for the next night to bring the girls in one more time. And
when they came in, the prostitute was speechless. She even took the cake home to
show her mother.
The tear
inducing, final moment of the story, and
Tony tells it much better, comes when the restaurant owner asks Tony what kind
of a church he attends. Tony response: “One that throws birthday parties for
prostitutes.” The owner looked at him and then responded, “Nah, but that is a
church that I would want to attend.”
I told the
story as part of my message one morning some years ago. Apparently, I upset at
least one of my board members who met me after the sermon to remind me that I
would not be throwing any birthday parties for prostitutes in the near future. Living in a world where the
accusation trumps truth, that kind of behavior was expressly against church
policy. I understood why the policy existed, and yet there was something
incredibly sad about the reminder.
I am not
sure that Jesus would fair very well in our contemporary world. So much of what
he did as he ministered to those who needed him would be against our church
policies, policies that are designed to protect church leadership from
accusations. Which raises the question, how are we who want to walk in his
footsteps supposed to minister to those who need us in this world in which we
find ourselves? Of course, Jesus actions
were not exactly the ones that would keep him safe from those who wanted to
accuse him of doing something wrong.
The story of
the Samaritan woman is an excellent example. Jesus’s woman at the well takes
the role of the prostitute in Tony Campolo’s story. Married five times and now
living with a man to whom she was not married, she was the outcast of the town.
To escape the judgmental gazes from the other women in the town, she came to
gather her water from the well when there was, usually, no one there. Noon was
in the midst of the heat of the day, and
most of the woman would have collected their water in the early morning or the evening. On this day, she came to the
well only to find a strange man standing there. She probably pondered the
situation. He was a man, and she was a
woman. He was a Jew, and she was a
Samaritan. Church policy already stood against the two of them engaging in any kind of conversation. And so she gathered her
courage and decided to make her way to the well, get the water, and go home as
quickly possible. With all that stood between them, surely he wouldn’t speak.
But,
instead, Jesus threw church policy away and asked
the woman for water. And this question turned into a moment that would change
the Samaritan woman’s life.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Matthew
5
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