Sermon by Tom Are Jr. | February 18, 2024 | Fourth Presbyterian Church

First Sunday in Lent
February 18, 2024

The Heart Has a History

Tom Are Jr.
Interim Pastor

John 4:1–26

In the Gospel of John, Jesus talks a lot. One of the early conversations is with a Samaritan woman. Despite Jesus being rather chatty, there are a number of reasons this conversation should never have happened. Jesus was a man; she was a woman. In that day it was rare, even inappropriate, for men to speak to women in public. In addition, Jesus was Jewish; she was Samaritan. Jews and Samaritans did not care for one another. Racism exacerbated by violent history made this an unlikely conversation. And yet, if a Jew and a Samaritan were going to have a conversation, there is one subject everyone knows would be raised: Where do we worship? She says, “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you insist that it is necessary to worship in Jerusalem.” It seems to be a question of geography. Where is the best place to pray?

I love this sanctuary. It’s easy to remember that we are in the presence of God in this room. Place matters. And yet we also know that God is not tied to place. So, what do we do with this woman who wonders if Jerusalem is more holy than Samaria?

John editorializes, “Jews do not share things with Samaritans.” That is both right and absolutely wrong. I get what John means. Jews did not share meals with Samaritans. They didn’t share prayers. They didn’t share neighborhoods. They didn’t share water jars. But what they did share was history.

She mentions worshiping on “this mountain.” She speaks of the sanctuary on Mt. Gerizim, where Samaritans worshiped, but as she speaks to Jesus, this temple no longer exists. It was destroyed 150 years before, when John Hyrcanus, the Jewish high priest, led a band of soldiers to destroy the sanctuary on Mt. Gerizim. Over time, power shifted, and the Samaritans extracted revenge. The hatred ran both ways, and everybody bled. At the root of the violence was a theological claim: We matter more to God than you. God lives with us.

She asks Jesus, “Do you think your people matter more to God than me?”

This conversation between a Samaritan woman and a Jewish Jesus feels contemporary, particularly in these February days of Black history.

Race is a subject to which I should speak with humility, because there are very few days in my life I have had to be mindful of race. I grew up assuming that the way I experienced the world was normative, even universal. I now recognize for people of color there is never a day when race can be ignored, for it is planted in the ground with housing covenants, and it is planted in the economy. It lives in the language of our politics, and it finds theological justification in some churches; much like it was in Jesus’ day.

I am instructed by Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr., Professor of African American Studies at Princeton. In his book Begin Again, he states that to be a person of color in America is to do battle with what Glaude calls “the lie.” The lie, he identifies, as “a broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions” that insist that white lives matter more than other lives (Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, p. 7). I am sure you do not believe that, but it is nevertheless the consistent teaching of America. There has never been a period, including our own, when the culture has not insisted that white lives matter most. And for people of color, I imagine it takes great courage to engage the spiritual battle to deny this lie that for so long and with such persistence continues.

I think the Samaritan woman shows the same courage.

When she asks Jesus about where to worship, it is a question about history. Do you stand with those who have burned down my church? Do you stand with those who still insist that God cannot hear me pray?

If a Jew and a Samaritan were going to talk, this would be the question that would arise, because they didn’t share things, except a painful and bloody history they can’t forget.

Philosopher, George Santayana says, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Santayana implies forgetting the past comes easily. He has a point.

In Billy Collins’ poem Forgetfulness, he writes of how easily we forget things. The poem reads:

The name of the author is the first to go

followed obediently by the title, the plot,

the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel

which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never

even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor

decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,

to a little fishing village where there are no phones. …

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember

it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,

not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river

whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall ...

(Billy Collins, “Forgetfulness,” Questions about Angels)

Collins is right: forgetfulness is an unwavering march the mind makes despite all efforts to the contrary. I find myself struggling to remember people’s names. Back in Kansas City, when I would visit friends in the hospital, finding my car in the parking garage after the visit felt like something of a victory. When the chair of a committee asks, “Tom, do you want us to report to the Session in the same fashion as last year?” I just say “Sure” and try not to let on that I don’t remember how it was reported last year. I can forget just about anything.

Given this reality, it is odd how I find some things impossible to forget.

For the longest time I couldn’t forget a conversation Carol and I had in 1986 about curtains. You don’t need the details (although, I could provide them easily), but suffice it to say, it was a conversation that left us both a bit injured. Because of the injury, the conversation is not only remembered with clarity but also experiences a resurrection of its own every now and then, working its way into other conversations that have nothing to do with curtains. Santayana says, “Remember the past or you are condemned to repeat it.” When the past involves injury, it’s not Santayana, but Faulkner who is more on point when he said, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past” (William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun).

If you ever go to a new doctor, she will ask you to provide a medical history. Issues, surgeries, medicines. Why? Because what happened in the body yesterday has implications for how the body is today.

The heart is the same way. Hearts have a history. Our hearts are shaped by experience. Some good, some painful. And we carry that experience with us into new experiences, and it shapes how we see the present.

That’s why sometimes in heated conversations I found myself talking again about curtains when curtains had nothing to do with what we were talking about. Jesus understands that every one of us carries history with us. Sometimes dramatic, sometimes traumatic, sometimes less severe, but we all know injury.

Sometimes we bring that injury here. The pain of a failed relationship. The lost job that, more than attacking our income, lays siege to our self-worth. Friends betray us, or the church lets us down. A friend or perfect stranger fails to see your humanity. There are injuries we cannot easily forget. I don’t know what injuries you may bring with you today, but sometimes they rise up into ordinary noontime conversation when we think we are there just to get a sip of water, and all of a sudden a word in the present brings the past crashing in.

This Samaritan woman, who carries in her heart the degrading injury of those who assumed they were more righteous, she asks, “What do we do with this past Jesus?”

And if I understand the text, he promises her that she is not defined by the evil the world has done to her but by the love that God has for her. It is an invitation to reframe the lie of her past. To see the present defined less by what the world has done to her and more by what God has done for her.

In high school I bought my grandfather’s car. It was a chocolate brown Pontiac Catalina with 146,000 miles on it. All of those miles logged on the backroads of South Carolina as he supplied hardware stores with paint supplies.

He said I could have the car for $500 — as is. I gave him $500. He counted the money, twice, and then gave me the keys. When I got it home, I began the process of removing the sugar. Little sugar packets — the kind you get in restaurants — were everywhere. They were under the seats. In the seats. In the glove box. Even in the defroster vents.

Every day he would go to Hardee’s for breakfast. He would get a coffee from the drive-through. “Cream and sugar?” “Just sugar.” He drank his coffee black, but they were offering free sugar. At the end of the week he would come into the kitchen with a handful of sugar packs and one by one empty them into the kitchen sugar bowl. His “little extra compensation” he called it. He did this for the same reason he saved every can and jar. For the same reason he wore his shoes until his feet got wet and wore his shirts until his elbows poked through the sleeves. This man was a child of the Depression, and that yesterday governed every today. He never shook the fear that there would not be enough. But it was deeper; there was a sense in which he feared he himself was not enough.

Toward the end he had few rational thoughts, as his brain was dying faster than the rest of him. But the few thoughts that remained were Depression thoughts. As many days as not, he would return from the dining hall at the Presbyterian Home to discover little sugar packets stuffed in the pocket of his sweater, taken from the racks on the tables.

I am like him for reasons beyond genetics. We get trapped by our yesterdays. Particularly by the pain of our yesterdays. In various ways the world can batter you, deny you, ignore you, imply that it is others who really matter.

Jews and Samaritans had just such a history, and that is why John says, “Jews don’t share things with Samaritans.”

But Jesus said to her, “There is a day when we will be defined not by what the world does to us” — and he knows how the world can destroy you. He promises that there is a way to reframe that past and recognized we are not defined by what the world does to us, but by the love God has for us. It takes courage to trust that when the world says you are not enough, that that is a lie. For the truth is the love of God defines you, claims you, and will never let you go. But to trust that in this world, well, it takes courage.

But there is a miracle in this story from John, for it seems that in John’s congregation there were both Jews and Samaritans. They are together. It couldn’t have been easy. But somehow they mustered the courage to face the truth of who they had been, and they chose to set that life aside, to recognize that former way of being as a lie, and to embrace the truth of who we are. They began to share things like meals and prayers and neighborhood — and to build a new history.

I don’t know what burden you may carry with you to this sanctuary today, but I hope you hear the promise Jesus gave to a Samaritan woman: You are not defined by what the world has done to you, but by the love that God has for you.