The Religious Outcast

Well, my name is René, I'm one of the pastors here. I'm so glad that you guys are here, whether you're in the auditorium or watching on cable or the internet or over in venue, it is great to have you here. Grab your message notes. Conversations with Christ is what we call our series here in the month of September, and I want to start by asking you a question just by show of hands. How many of you have ever tried to speak a foreign language? Can I see a show of hands? Raise your hands if you've tried it. All right, how many of you would be honest and say that at least once you have mangled that foreign language pretty badly? Can I see it? How many of you would be honest and say at least once you have mangled English pretty badly? Can I see that show of hands? Good. I can relate to that, and that's probably why I love those websites where people post funny mistranslations that they see in their travels.

You don't understand, I'll show you a few of these, like this one. Welcome tourist, we speak English. I love this one that says it all right there. Or this label on a piece of clothing. Qualification. Washed by hand, no chlorine, no ring in coleslaw. Well, I agree, and I feel like not enough people are taking a stand on this issue. You should never ring your clothes in coleslaw. How about this one? Keep off the lake. Keep off the lake. This is for Jesus and Peter only, but still no walking on the water. And I don't know if this next one is a nightclub or a bookstore, but it advertises fragrant and hot Marxism. At last. It's what the world's been waiting for. Or how about this one? Do drunken driving. That seems like a weird rule to me. It's a bad rule. And finally, proudly displayed as the giant English translation on this storefront, "Smart noshery makes you slobber." Don't you just want to go into that store and see what they're talking about?

Cross-cultural communication is hard, and I want to talk about it today because I want to talk about how tough it is to communicate our faith. Because would you agree with this? We live in a culture right here in Santa Cruz where most of the people that you meet actually are not from church culture, right? And so how do you explain something that's as near and dear to you as your faith? Cross-culturally without unnecessarily offending. Without coming across like you're judging or condemning or excluding. How do you communicate your faith and make any sense at all?

Well, today I want to look at a story in the Gospels where Jesus goes into a culture that has no idea who he is and also where there is every imaginable type of barrier. Racial barriers, gender barriers, social barriers, political barriers, and yet he leaps right over them and communicates. How does he do it? Let's talk about Jesus and the religious outcast. In this September series we're looking at four different conversations Christ has in the Gospel of John, and today's story shows us how to share Christ, Christ's way. I'd love for you to grab your Bibles and open them up to John 4. That's found on page 752 in the Auditorium Bibles, page 728 over in the venue Bibles. How does Jesus bridge the culture gap? And by the way, if you're here today and you would say you don't know much about Jesus, how would Jesus explain himself to you?

This is the famous story of Jesus and the woman at the well, and I see here four elements of reaching out to a culture that doesn't have any idea about Jesus. And number one seems kind of obvious, but it's this close proximity. Jesus models close proximity; he goes to where the needy people are, and that's something that so often we leave out. We get so into our church culture we don't go anymore to where the needy people are. But look at how Jesus does this here in John 4 starting in verse 3. It says Jesus left Judea and went back once more to Galilee. Now it says Jesus had to pass through Samaria. I want you to with your pencil or pen circle the word had because if you read it too fast you'll miss it. That's a joke sort of because no religious Jew of the first century had to go through Samaria.

And here's why. Let me tell you the amazing story. About 500 years before this happens, the Jews were conquered by the Assyrian army who actually made little sculptures to brag about the fact that they conquered the Jews, and most of the Israelites were taken as captives out of Israel and over to Assyria. But the few Jews that were left intermarried with the other people who were left there in Israel territory, and those were the Canaanites. And what they did was they combined Jewish religion with Canaanite religion, Jewish culture with Canaanite culture. This is how they survived in the ruins. They intermarried, and it became this big religious and ethnic and racial and social mix.

All right then, when the other Jews would taken away, been taken away into captivity, moved back in, they hated these people. They thought of them—and we know from literature of the time that they called them half-breed dogs. They thought of them as collaborators, as religious heretics. In fact, they hated them so badly they would not let a Samaritan—and that's what they came to be called because they were in the region called Samaria. The Jews in the time of Christ wouldn't even let Samaritans worship in the temple in Jerusalem. And so the Samaritans said fine, we'll build our own temple on our own mountain. And they went to a place called Mount Gerizim, and this mountain became really the icon of the friction between the Jews and the Samaritans.

It was the last straw for the Jews that the Samaritans would have the gall to kind of start their own religion and build their own temple. And the big argument became which mountain is the right mountain to worship God on, Mount Zion in Jerusalem or Mount Gerizim in Samaria, and the tensions just escalated so much. The Jews hated the Samaritans, the Samaritans hated the Jews, and it went beyond just hate. It was like a blood feud between cousins. Something like what you see between the Shiites and the Sunnis right now in the Middle East. About 130 years before Christ, some people went from Jerusalem up to Mount Gerizim and laid waste to the temple there and massacred the people who were worshiping there on the Samaritan Holy Day.

And then when Jesus was a little boy, when Jesus was about nine years old, a group of radical Samaritans came down and they took over the temple grounds in Jerusalem, and instead of destroying it, they desecrated it by spreading all over the temple grounds dead body parts. And so the temple was desecrated. And then to get them back a few years later, a group of Jews from Jerusalem went up to Mount Gerizim and massacred some more Samaritans on their Holy Day. And to get them back, around the time that Jesus was an adult—and we know all this from ancient historical sources—there was a group of Jews who were on a pilgrimage from Galilee down to Jerusalem, and they made the mistake of going through Samaria, and some Samaritans ambushed them and massacred all of the pilgrims.

And so when I say there's tension between the Samaritans and the Jews, I mean this was the worst kind of tension you can imagine that's going on in the world right now. This was absolutely a bloody feud. And so naturally it got to the point where to travel from Judea, where Jerusalem was, heading up north to Galilee, where the Sea of Galilee was, any Jewish person of the day would actually cross the Jordan River and go the wide way around to go up north through the region of the Decapolis. They did not go the straight route through Samaria. In other words, no Jew had to go through Samaria. But Jesus had to. He goes right up the taboo and very dangerous route because there was a divine appointment waiting for him at a well near a village called Sychar at 12 noon the next day.

And so the good news really about this story for you today is if you feel like, man I'm a long way from God, if you walked in today and this is your first time here and you feel like man the roof of this church is gonna cave in if I ever come to church, the good news here is you may be off every other religious person's beaten path, but Jesus comes looking for you and he loves you and he finds you and he wants his followers to do the same. And I have to say one great way to get into close proximity with people that you might not get into close proximity with, one great way to rub elbows with people in our town is to do a serve the bay project. This comes up again on October 18th; you can get ideas on servethebay.org.

Our church cooperates with a whole bunch of other churches. These are so much fun. We just plunge into our community and we serve. We serve beach flats and we serve the homeless services shelter. We serve local schools. We paint and clean and plant and weed, and honestly part of the goal is to just put us in close proximity. Put us to places where maybe where you don't normally go to. Start some relationships. Be a good neighbor because to share your faith you need to get close to people. You need to walk across the street. You need to go over social and economic and racial barriers. You need to have a barbecue with your neighbors. You need to get out of that deadly Christian holy huddle and into close proximity, and you see Jesus doing this here in the story.

And then once he's there, really interesting, you see Jesus literally finding common ground with this Samaritan woman, and before we look at how Jesus did this, I just have to say you and I need to keep our eyes open for finding common ground with people, getting into close proximity with people, because you never know when God has a divine appointment waiting for you. Several years ago, I told some of you this story. One day I was flying back from an event that I spoke at, and I was reading an article that I'd found in the newsstand of the airport on forgiveness. It was in USA Today or something, and I'm reading this article, and you know how you get the sense sometimes that people are watching you? And I look around and I didn't see anybody, and I go back to reading the article, and I still get that sense, and so I look behind me, and there peering through the crack between the seats is this eyeball, and it's scanning my article, reading over my shoulder like this.

And I said hi, and this one voice says, oh hello, I'm sorry, but could I borrow that article on forgiveness when you're done? I said sure, you can have it right now, and I kind of fed it back through the crack, and she grabbed it, and I didn't know what this person even looked like, right? And she read it, and then she fed it back through the crack, and I said, you know, how did you like it? And she said it was good, and the people next to us were sleeping, and so she had to get close to whisper, and she said, I really need to learn more about forgiveness. She said because in fact what I'm doing on this flight is I'm moving from my hometown to seek forgiveness and to get a new beginning, and then I kid you not, she did not know who I was from Adam, and she says this sentence: she says, do you have any suggestions for how to get a fresh start in life?

And I almost felt sorry for her; I really did to kind of give me an opening like that. So I thought, well, I can't just go straight to, well, I'm a pastor. And so I said, well, tell me where you're moving, and she said, oh, you probably never heard of it. I said, give me a try. She says, well, it's a little town outside Santa Cruz called Aptos. I said, what? No kidding! I said, I work in Aptos. And she's, what do you do in Aptos? I said, well, I'm a pastor, and I could see her face shrink back from the little hole like, oh no, who have I been talking to? I said, but wait, I'm talking still through the crack. I go, wait, wait, wait, it's probably not the kind of church you're thinking of, and I see her kind of going, oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I had an uncle once who was a priest, and she just kind of bundles up, and I could tell the conversation is just over. She's not buying anything.

And so we walk out of the airport San Jose at about the same time, and we just happen to be next to each other again, just happen to be, and picking me up from the airport at the curb is our junior high pastor at the time, John Olson, and John's wearing a long t-shirt and raggedy shorts and flip-flops, and his hair is spiked up and it's bleached white, and he's got a super amount of hair product in there, and he's all sunburned like he always was from spending time in the sun, and I'm like thank you, Jesus! And I turned to her and I go, oh, before you go, I'd like you to meet one of our pastors, and her face just lights up, and she goes, I think I'm gonna try this church. And she did check out the church, and you know that woman today as Valerie Webb. No, that's not true; that part of the story is not true. That needs a great ending, right? And I married that woman, but I know she did come and began regularly attending that church.

But what happened? Because I was sort of forced to be in close proximity in an airplane, we got into a great conversation and literally discovered common ground both in Aptos, and my contention is those kinds of possibilities surround us all the time, all the time, if we just kind of have our antenna up and with a heart of compassion and love try to build these bridges. And I want you to see how Jesus does this to this unlikely person here in verses 5 and 6. It says, so we came to a town in Samaria called Sychar near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. Now if you read this too fast, you'll miss it. Circle the words Jacob. Do you see that? And Jacob's well? And the well? John keeps repeating himself about the well. Why? Again, the Jews hated the Samaritans, the Samaritans hated the Jews, but both the Jews and the Samaritans loved Jacob. This is literally common ground; he was an ancestor of both of theirs.

And so Jesus goes to that spot, literal common ground. To help you imagine this, this is actually a vintage photograph of this very well. These days it doesn't look like this anymore; it's actually covered by a modern church. You can't see this well anymore today, but a hundred years ago it still looked very much like it must have looked in Jesus' day. This is a picture of where this story happened, and that's common ground right there. So the story says, then when a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, will you give me a drink? Because his disciples had gone into the town to buy food. Now the woman has come from the little town called Sychar that is five miles away from the well, and the previous verse had stated that it's the sixth hour—that's 12 noon—so it's hot. She has walked five miles to this dusty well at high noon, so what do you think is on her mind? A religious discussion? Now what's on her mind? Shout it out: water.

And so Jesus starts talking, but not about religion, about water. He says, will you give me a drink? And then the discussion goes in a spiritual direction. But what an example! How do you talk about spiritual things without being overbearing? Well, how did Jesus do it? Start the conversation at common ground and then just provide a chance for people to enter into a spiritual conversation. How do you do this? Hundreds of ways, but here's just one example: the question, how is your weekend? Isn't that an obvious natural question to ask? How is your weekend? Ask people at work or school or the neighborhood. They tell you, you tell them. One of the things you tell them is, I went to church, and if they're interested in talking about that subject further, they'll go, really? What church? Twin-Lakes Church? And they'll go, I've heard about that church; it's supposed to be crazy. I don't know about that church. Or, oh yeah, I've heard good things about that church, or I don't like church; turn me off, burn me to it; churches are the problem. Either way, that conversation goes in an interesting direction, and if they're not interested in it, they don't have to talk about it.

Watch how Jesus does this because all he says is, could I have a drink? And after the woman hears that, she says, I don't understand how is it that you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink? Now let me ask you a question: how did she know Jesus was a Jew? Just think about that for just a second. Did he say, greetings, I a Jew, ask you for a drink? No. So how did she know that? Well, there's only one way. He said one sentence, so there's only one way. Jesus must have looked very Jewish, and we've talked about this before. That means he must not have looked like this blonde hair, blue eyes. We know Jesus didn't look like that. If he would have looked like that, she would have said, how is it that you being Swedish ask me for a drink? You know?

But this is a super important point because Jesus was a Jewish guy. Why is this so important? Because Jesus was a part of his culture just as firmly entrenched as you are in your culture and I am in my culture, and yet he takes deliberate steps to reach out cross-culturally, not just with people that he would naturally relate to. She's a Samaritan; she's a woman. Men in those days didn't even look at women in public, let alone actually stop to talk to women. Plus, you'll see in a second she has been divorced five times, and she's now living with somebody that she's not married to, and in the original text, the suggestion is this man she's living with is actually married to somebody else. And so very scandalous sexual and marital history, especially in that culture that this woman has. I mean, the Hebrew Scriptures explicitly prohibit this kind of behavior.

So what's Jesus do? I want you to see Jesus is deliberately reaching across every single barrier that could possibly exist between human beings here. He's reaching across a racial barrier, a cultural barrier, a gender barrier, a morality barrier, a religious barrier, but he doesn't care. Do you see how radical this is? He reaches right across all the human divides to reach her. He deliberately picks her, not the male chief of the village, not the male high priest of her town. He picks her, as we'll see, to be the first missionary of Christian history. So I want you to ask yourself, how can I reach across barriers? How can I find common ground with others? Maybe through sports or computers or kids the same age or exercise groups or scrapbooking or book clubs or something else. Get find a way to get common ground with people who are not already all connected to the church.

And by the way, let me just say this: you might be here and you're not a Christian. You're like, this is making me uncomfortable, like strategies for evangelism. Wouldn't the world be a better place if we all did this? Reach across all the barriers to try to find common ground because it's only then that we can get to the third point, and that is have a clear message. Clearly communicate to others what it is that we actually hold dear and believe. Now sometimes clear communication can be very tough, and just as kind of a fun example, a couple of weeks ago I showed you one of those kids snippets videos where dads record their kids talking, and then the dads acted out. It's a brilliant idea, and here's one where the kids are playing driver's ed. Watch this.

This is the honker; that's the key, and there is the wheel to drive the car. This is where you put your foot to get it moving. You mean the pedal? Yes. What does this one do? That one opens the top. Watch, see it opens the top. I can see the sky; that's mostly out. What do you do if it wins the phone? If it wins and the you are writing, what rings? I said when rain, then we would close the windows. And what would you do if it was sunny after it when we could open the windows? But what, the call be dirty? What would the call be dirty? What? How do you turn on the car? You have to push a button on the carbide or the switch button. I don't remember what it looks like. You don't? Then how do you turn it on when you don't remember what it looks like?

Don't you love these kids? Now, this is a brilliant idea, but you ever feel like you're in that conversation, wanes, wings, wings, rings, and you go back and forth? You're just not clearly communicating. Well, let me give you three kind of quick bullet points for having your message stay clear. And the first one is this: keep it simple, especially when you're sharing your faith. You know, you don't have to date a dump; you don't have to explain somebody the whole Bible at once because look at Jesus; he never does that. He says to her, you know what? If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water. Simple, elegant. He goes, okay, we're talking water; we're both thirsty. He says, everybody who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

This is so rich; it's simple but not simplistic. It's brief but it's deep. What he's saying is this water doesn't satisfy. In fact, nothing in life truly satisfies you eternally; you always get thirsty again. And you know, it's not just poor Samaritan outcasts who feel this way. There are so many examples of this, but years ago, the great tennis player Boris Becker said, I had won Wimbledon twice; I was the youngest player; I was rich; I had all the material possessions; I had everything, but I was so unhappy; I had no inner peace. The famous actress Sophia Loren said, although she had everything, quote, in my life there is an emptiness that is impossible to fulfill. And you might think, well, I wish I had their problems, right? But the point is their problems are everybody's problem, and that is we're made to be in a relationship with God, and when we don't have that, we've got a spiritual thirst that can't be quenched by anything else.

And so Jesus says to her, do I have a drink for you? Spiritual water to quench that spiritual thirst. That's simple; it's direct. And the next, keep it positive. Keep it simple and keep it positive. Watch how Jesus does this. The woman said to him, sir, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water. And he tells her in verse 16, why don't you call your husband? Let's talk about this as a family. Well, um, well, it's like this, Jesus, I don't have a husband. And Jesus says to her, you know, you're right when you say you have no husband. The fact is you've had five husbands, and the man that you now have is not your husband. What you've just said is quite true. Isn't this fascinating? Circle the words you are right and what you've just said is very true. He says just about the only positive thing there is to say about what she just said. Well, you're honest, and he says it twice. What you've just said is really true. Stay positive. Why? Well, first, because nagging never works, but second, because this woman did not need to try to be better. What she needed was Jesus.

This woman didn't need to try real hard to be a better person because that never works for long. What she needed was Jesus Christ. He keeps it simple; he keeps it positive, and that leads right into keep it focused. Keep it focused. But the woman, starting in verse 19, tries a diversionary tactic. She's getting uncomfortable with this conversation. She says, sir, I can see you are a prophet. I guess so, right? I can see you're a prophet. And so since you know so much, and since I want to change the subject, you know, our forefathers worshiped on this mountain, and your forefathers say we need to worship in Jerusalem. What's the mountain to worship God on? Notice how she goes straight for the biggest sort of tinderbox argument that these two groups have with each other.

And I've noticed so many times when I'm trying to share about the church or share with good news with somebody, people immediately want—if they get uncomfortable with the conversation—they want to go to controversial politics. Yeah, well, what do you say about this controversy? Yeah, well, what do you say about this political issue? Right? It's always easier to talk theology or politics than it is to talk about your own pain. And look at how Jesus directs her back to what's really the important question. He says, you know, believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. So radical of a statement! A time is coming and has now come when true worshipers will worship the Father in the spirit and in truth. God is spirit, and his worshipers worship him in spirit and in truth. So radical, but so beautiful.

You know, if you're being distracted from your decision to come to Christ by all kinds of currently controversial issues right now, Jesus would say to you what he essentially said to this woman, and that's this: let the controversies aside for now because what God is looking for is worshipers first. Jesus is standing at the well, so to speak, for you, right next to you, waiting for you with open arms with a living water, so drink that in. Next in the story, one thing after another happens just bam, bam, bam, rapid pace. The woman basically drops her water jar because this is ringing trooper. She runs back to the city, and it says she tells everybody in the city, you have got to come and hear a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah? And tons of people come streaming out of the town because they want to hear Jesus, and the Bible says many people of the Samaritans believed in Christ that day because of the woman's testimony and what they were about to hear.

And at the same time, from another direction, the disciples come back to Jesus, and they have some lunch for him, and Jesus says, I got something more important for lunch. And that's when he gives him point four: a compelling vision for sharing Christ. He says to the disciples this in John 4:35, open your eyes, look at the fields; they are ripe for harvest. And the disciples look up, and what do they see? They see a crowd of Samaritan men running down the hill toward them. And so you got the Samaritans who hate Jewish guys, and you've got the Jewish disciples, and you know Peter's there; he'll cut off your ear at a moment's notice; he's got a fiery temper. And so this is a race riot waiting to happen, and Jesus says, no, reorient your thinking, open your eyes. He's saying you're afraid of them, but these are people God loves. I know they're different, but he says, open your eyes; you need to see them with a fresh vision, not as the others, not as your opponents, not as the weird ones, but as the ones God loves.

In other words, he's saying to them, see what I just did? Now you do it. Go for it! Here they come! And he's saying that to you and me too. As you go out this week into Santa Cruz and you see people all around you, if your immediate reaction is maybe scorn or anger or maybe indifference or just sadness, Jesus would say to you, open your eyes and see the fields as white for harvest. Cross barriers in the name of Jesus to spread his love and his gospel message. And this crossing of barriers, by the way, doesn't just stop at outreach.

I want to close with a great story. I happened to see a little kids book the other day that reminded me of a great true story of Owen and MZ. Do you remember the story about 15 years ago, the tidal wave that started in Banda Aceh finally hit the coast of East Africa, and it swept out to sea a little baby hippopotamus? He was separated from his family, and he finally found his footing on a reef off the shore near Mombasa, Kenya. And hundreds of people came out at night with their torches and flashlights to try to save this baby hippo because when the tide came up, he was gonna drown, but he just kept running away from people because he was afraid, afraid of his rescuers.

And then finally a rugby player tackled Owen, and a big cheer went up, and they decided to take him to an animal preserve near Mombasa. And by the way, they named him Owen because that was the name of the rugby player who tackled him. Isn't that a great story? So they take him to this rescue place, and he was exhausted and Owen was confused; he was afraid. But that little baby hippo found comfort in the presence of MZ, a 130-year-old tortoise. And these are actual pictures of the two of them. A less than one-year-old hippo was adopted by a 130-year-old tortoise, and this male tortoise, by the way, seems to be very happy with being a mom. The hippo literally just follows the tortoise exactly the way it would follow its real mom.

But here's the rest of the story: the tortoise himself was lost and rescued just like all the other animals in this particular preserve. He was saved way back when he was merely a hundred from being somebody's dinner. And I saw this story, and I thought, is this not what Jesus wants us to do for one another, right? We're all lost. Think of the parables, the parallels. He comes out and rescues us; sometimes he's got to tackle us because we're afraid of him, and we run away. But then he takes us to a community where everyone's a rescue, and he says, I want you older ones to help the new ones. Now, you might not have much in common; it might be hippo, tortoise, Jew, Samaritan, Democrat, Republican. You know, Niner fan, Seahawk fan—that could happen. That could happen. God still does miracles. But you know, he's saying get over your barriers and come together in this compelling vision of a family united by the salvation of Jesus Christ.

Let's pray and ask God to create that kind of a community here. Would you bow your heads with me? With our heads bowed, who do you relate to in this encounter? Maybe you can relate to those disciples, and you need to see people with a fresh vision, not just as the others but as the ones Jesus loves. But maybe you can relate to the woman, and you know you're lost and lonely and thirsty. The good news is Jesus still seeks out people who are lost. Father, I pray that those who are thirsty would just drink in your living water today, that they'd run to you, Jesus, whose arms are open wide, who adopts the orphans, who seeks and saves the lost, who doesn't let any barriers stand between us and you. And my prayer for each of us is that you'll keep our eyes open to the people around us that you love and to those divine appointments that you are going to enact this week for people in this room. Open our eyes, and we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.