Jesus and Women | The God of Missional Grace

The narrative of the Samaritan woman is a story of a broken heart and a broken soul. She represents a broken people living in a broken land. John 4 shares how Jesus makes his way into all of this brokenness and displays one of the millions of reasons why we can say that God is a missional God.
 
In perhaps one of the most well known portions of the Bible Jesus makes his way into a land that was expressly avoided by good Jewish people. He was not afraid to go into places of need, places that other people avoided. Why would he go there? Simply, because God loves Samaritans. Not because they deserve love but because God is a God of grace. How ironic that a people who celebrated God choosing them would try to withhold him from others. How much more ironic that many try to do the same today.

In Samaria, Jesus comes to an interaction with a woman that has come to the well at midday. She comes at a time of low social interaction around the well. She is about to be surprised. The interaction with Jesus displays at least two things: One, this woman is deeply affected by sin and shame. She had been married many times before and she was still not done (she lived with another man). These attempts at "fixing" her deepest needs with these poor substitutes had taken its toll on her life. The second display is the need for a better reality. She needed something more real that what she thought was real. Relationships are real. They cause hurt and pain and longing and despair. Relationship without foundation and purpose becomes a cheap alternative to the real thing. Reconciled relationship with the Father of all things is what makes real, become real. She interacted with Jesus over her sin and shame and water. She found grace that addressed all of these. She found a satisfaction for her real thirst.

The grace of Jesus Christ doesn't stop with this woman. Even the confused disciples needed the missional grace of God. Why? Well, because they did not understand mission...at all. So Jesus explains to them the mission that he is on. They got it. Well, maybe not right away but in the book of Acts we find Peter and John back in Samaria, back among these people, preaching, laying hands on them, and praying for them to know the love of Jesus by grace through faith. They were unaware at the time that they met this Samaritan woman how this missional grace would change their future. But eventually they got it...by God's grace we will too.

Finally, the missional grace of God becomes contagious. Grace is like that. This woman declares that she is known. She calls the people that she purposely avoided to come to know the one that knows her. What good news! You are known. Really known. Known by grace. Known for all of your faults...failures...shame...guilt...and yet...grace. Grace that moves toward you. Grace that steps into your mess. This grace is overwhelming to those that know the depths of their failure. This grace is life-giving to those that have failed at life.

Here, with this woman that is not known by name... not pictured or described... just a nameless, faceless woman, the savior of the world declares his mission of grace, openly, for the first time. The cosmic purposes of God, that have been millennia in the making, collide here...in Samaria...with this woman...such amazing grace.

When Jesus was moved to mission, even mission to people unlike himself, he did not pack up his stuff and move to a new country. He did not buy a house in Samaria. He did not stop doing all that he had been doing in his life before this time to make room for mission. Why do we?

Why do we feel that mission is moving? Or mission is special training? Or that mission is something foreign and forced? Mission is meeting. Meeting people that God is calling and sharing with them cosmic moments of God's amazing grace. They are your neighbors, friends, acquaintances, and even strangers...for now. God's grace transforms us all into his adopted children.

We have people all around us that are broken and seeking to quench an unquenchable thirst with water that will never suffice.

Pray that our hearts are ripped by grace.

Pray that we step out of our patterns and see the people that God is calling all around us.

Pray that we equip and encourage one another to offer living water.

Pray we follow Jesus, the face of the God of missional grace.

Put Sex in its Place!

1 Corinthians 7:1-16

"But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband." 1 Corinthians 7:2

Paul is addressing one of the most sexually driven societies of history. The Greek and Roman legacy of uninhibited sexual conquest is well known. Sex was a way to make money for those that were slaves. Sex was a form of worship that was expressed through temple prostitutes as a sacrifice to the idols of fertility. 

In short, sex was a money making enterprise. Sex was big business, and business was good.

The natural response to becoming Christian for these Corinthians was to refrain from sex. If sex was the problem then the problem could be eliminated. Some of them decided to simply stop having sex. Yet, Paul does not approve of this response. Sex is a problem. More pointedly, the desire for sex, unabated, is a problem. To remove sex from the marriage was not a way to solve the problem. In fact, it made the problem worse. If the man and wife were to withhold sex from the other it could increase the temptation to fall back into previous ways of obtaining sexual satisfaction. Paul says, keep sex in marriage. But he means, keep having sex in marriage.

We face a society that sells sex. Here, sex is big business and business is good. Our kids are taught to relent to their desires for whatever they want. We are sold a lie. So that we will buy the result of that lie. This is not enlightenment. It is indulgence. Indulgence leads to becoming inconsequential. As a person. As a nation. As a culture.

Sex belongs.

But it does not belong in public.

It does not belong outside of marriage.

It does not make me a better person to have control over my sexual desires.

But those that have control over their sexual desires (including the ones that share them with their spouse) are more consequential people.

Is Christianity Intolerant?

Lately I have heard many accusations of intolerance used toward Christianity, mainly by the media or pseudo-media types. The stand of Christians against certain social issues like gay marriage and abortion have brought many charges of intolerance against them. This seems rather odd considering the roots of Christianity.

Early on the church was the picture of social acceptance and tolerance. In a letter form a Roman governor, Pliny, to the Roman Emperor, Trajan, Pliny accused the Christians of being accepting of "many of every age, of every social class, and of both sexes". It is the work of Christ on the cross that formed one new people from among the many different people groups. One that knew not "Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female." (Galatians 3:28) How is it that a people created with tolerance at their core have come so far that we are accused of being the very thing that we were set apart from.

One contribution to these accusations certainly are the media and its outlets choice of issues to proclaim as right or wrong. The fact is that the media abuses people into thinking they are getting information that is well investigated and presented with journalistic integrity. Yet, more and more, the media becomes a money making entertainment outlet trying to keep up with its cable competitors and all the while pushing a poorly thought out product on the unthinking public. It doesn't help that the vast majority of us are content with this shoddy method and getting our fill of information by way of internet cookies out of sheer laziness. The media and entertainment outlets find a story that sells and they will ride it as long as they can. Aggressively presenting Christianity in poor light is nothing new but the recent years are proving that these outlets are themselves barely tolerant of anything that looks like Christianity.

A second reason must fall squarely on the shoulders of Christian leaders themselves. For some reason, every time I turn on television (which isn't often) there is someone claiming to speak for Christians and pressing their own agenda. Somehow, this all accepting faith became a right wing republican, white anglo-saxon, bad hair, and even worse people skills only club. I watch programs like the 700 club and TBN and I can not help but wonder how I got mixed up with the like of these people. They have found like 2 issues that people will send them money if they talk about religiously (no pun intended, well sort of intended) and they ride it to the bank. Sound familiar.

Christians, Atheists, and whomever else find ourselves in the same boat strangely. We are all at the mercy of these information outlets that seem less concerned with real information than they are being a host to commercial parasites coming up in another minute and a half. I get that commercials pay for the programs but when the so-called news is swayed by its advertisers then why do we still watch it. It is simply not good information (sort of like the History Channel is not real history). We can not be this foolish.

The truth is that I don't know very many intolerant people. Christian or non-Christian. I don't think that someone who stands up and says they do not believe that it is moral to be led by your sexual desires is intolerant anymore than it is to say that it is wrong to allow greed to govern your life is.

As a whole, I do not think Christianity can be seen as intolerant. Especially in view of the teachings it presents as foundational to the faith. But it is easy to see why the actions of the few have led to this now common opinion (because it is the one given by the media) and have caused incredible intolerance to Christianity in turn.

The Idolatry of God's Word

Therefore, you have no excuse, everyone of you who passes judgement, for in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things.

-Romans 2:1

The next section of Romans is one where Paul will turn his attention on the Jews. He has already concluded that the Gentiles are without excuse for the depravity of their thinking and therefore cannot stand before a true and just God (see below). He will now show that Jews will be unable to stand before this God because of their depravity. Ironically, the law that was sent to set them apart from all humankind, set them apart from God. There are many lessons we, as Christians, can take from the response of the Jews toward their God.

So much of Jewish identity is their tradition and their ancestry. The key person that they connect themselves with is Abraham. They also connect themselves with the law (esp. the Pentateuch, or the first five books of the Bible) that was given to Moses. In Paul's view, the law was given as a guide or a tutor to show the lack of humanness in them and their need for God to make them fully human (see Galatians 3:15-29). The law and the God who gave it were never supposed to be equal and they were never supposed to be separated.

Unfortunately, this is not what the Jewish people did with the law. Instead, they made the law the only pathway to God and even made the law constrain what God could (or would) or could not do. They were unable to see God do something new. The law became their identity. They began to place their entire trust in the law. They began to praise and lift up the men that committed their lives to interpreting (or at least giving their opinion on) what the law said and what it meant for them. The law became an idol. It became a false or physical representation of God. It is not! The Holy Spirit gave God's Word, the Holy Spirit communicates through God's Word, but God's Word is not your God!

The Jews used God's Word to abuse people. They became a testimony against God.  They placed the burden of following its requirements on all others while they themselves broke the very laws they were judging others by (see above and the rest of Romans 2). They believed that because they had the law that they were upholding the law. In other words, the possession and provisions of God's Word made them righteous. The idolatry of God's Word was the precipice of their idolatry (see the Prophets esp. Jeremiah), this was not their first offense. Paul says, they are without excuse (Rom. 2:1). God will judge them according to the law that they have made into an idol. 

Ironically, by that law no one can stand before God. 

No one.