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This weekend many congregations celebrate Juvenile Justice Sabbath, raising a voice on behalf of the almost a quarter of a million of California's children arrested each year. Ignoring the plight of these children, most all of whom are poor, black or Latino, is in direct opposition to Abrahamic faith. A justice system that transforms young offenders into hardened criminals is no justice at all, for any of us.
It’s an interesting week to be thinking about Juvenile Justice. An article in the LA Times yesterday began: “The Goths in their black T-shirts were there. So were the punks with fluorescent hair and multiple piercings. There were even a few adolescent boys carrying skateboards among the nearly 1,000 Oxnard youths and other supporters who turned out today for a hastily-organized peace march meant to pay tribute to Lawrence King, 15, the Oxnard 8th grade student who prosecutors say was slain by a classmate this week.” (Catherine Saillant, LA Times Staff Writer 021708)
I’m guessing that most of us heard about that crime in the course of the week. We may have also heard that the shooter, Brandon McInerney, age 14, has been charged as an adult with 1st-degree murder in King's death, with a special allegation that the killing was a hate crime, because Lawrence King had recently come out as gay.
That particular story of juvenile violence could have easily gotten lost amidst so many other stories that occurred the same week. We were shocked by a shooting that killed 6 at Northern Illinois University by a student who went off his meds. Then just 3 days ago and closer to home in Glassell Park, Marcos Salas was killed while walking his 2 year old daughter; then Avenues Gang member Daniel Leon was shot by police.
When gangs seem to be taking over our lives, something in our gut tells us to punish the hell out of them. In California we’ve given a lot of influence to our gut. Let the following statistics hit you in the gut:
· California alone has sentenced fifteen times more children to life without parole than the rest of the world combined. 73 of these youth serving life without parole in the U.S. committed their crimes when they were, like Brandon McInerney, 13 or 14. Half of these 13 and 14 year olds are African American.It’s understandable that people want to punish crimes. The problem is it doesn’t really solve anything beyond giving a brief sense of satisfaction that offenders got what they deserved. Furthermore, the statistics show that our gut reaction doesn’t take into account things like racism and economic class. We end up scapegoating particular groups because we aren’t patient enough & willing enough to look at our own role in the problem. Scapegoating is a game that never ends. No one escapes.
· For 59% of these youth, this is their first sentence for a crime. They had neither criminal records nor any juvenile adjudication.
· In almost a quarter of these cases, the youths were sentenced to life without parole for participating in a crime that led to murder. They did not kill anyone themselves.
· In California, African American youth are twenty-two times more likely to receive the sentence than white youth.
No one knew that better than the Samaritan woman. She was a scapegoat three times over: as a Samaritan, as a woman, and as one who’d had five husbands. When Jesus asked her for a drink of water, she confronted Jesus with all her pent up resentment. She essentially said, “How dare you?!” Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water." She responds like a street wise woman from the Bronx: "Honey, it looks to me like you ain't got no bucket, and this here well is real deep. If you be dissin’ our man Jacob and his water, then you better prove it, cuz I ain’t buyin’ it." The outcast in her own country is defending her country and culture, because she had no other place to get her cultural identity. Besides, she’s not there for a Sunday stroll. She’s there because her latest man told her to fetch water for him, a task made all the more onerous since it is done for the sake of a man who has taken advantage of her outcast status. To be ordered now to get water for yet another man, and an enemy of her people at that, raises her hackles, and rightly so.
When Jesus describes the living water he wants to give as “a spring of water gushing up to eternal life,” he got her attention. He offered her an encounter with the living God instead of a bucket or a plan of salvation or a self help technique. She said, “Bring it on.” One pastor (Gil Baillie) tells of an experience of going to see Howard Thurman, an elder statesmen of the civil rights movement and the black church. Gil Bailie asked Thurman what he needed to do to help the world. Thurman told him he was asking the wrong question. It’s not about what he needs to help the world. He should ask what he needs to do to come alive, because what the world needs is people who come alive. Gil Bailie was talking buckets like the woman; Thurman was talking living water like Jesus.
Jesus didn’t pursue the theological discussion about living water. He went to the heart of the matter: “Go, call your husband, and come back.” When I learned the story I always heard that Jesus was getting the woman to face up to her moral failure. But the rest of the story reveals that what Jesus was really doing was to uncover the social matrix of Sychar. Surely you’ve heard the version of the story that accuses the woman of running from one man to another because of her insatiable thirst for men. But it was men, not women, who had the right to initiate divorce. This woman received all of the blame for the divorces and for her current tenuous status of living in a common law arrangement with a man. Apparently none of the blame went to any of the men. In a small town, to include the men would have meant a significant part of the population was connected with the scandal. No wonder the woman has to absorb all of the blame! She had to take the fall for the good of the town. Jesus called into question that whole way of thinking.
The other story we read this morning also takes place around the need for water. The Israelites were thirsty. The way I learned it, the Israelites were to blame for grumbling to Moses about the lack of water. After all, they’d just received manna to meet their need for food. “Why can’t they learn to trust God for water?” Let’s remember that they had just started their forty year journey through the desert. When they left Egypt they had imagined a brief trip to freedom. They would have been justified to think that a leader as gutsy as Moses would at least have a destination in mind, if not a plan to get there. Now they’ve camped at a place that didn’t even have water. What were they supposed to do? What would you do (what have you done) if you needed to get water for your children to survive?” Maybe the best option they had was to quarrel with Moses.
Don’t we see the same thing happen when those in charge believe that a leader – be it a president, a general, a governor, the head of the CIA, or a pastor – needs to be protected from taking responsibility for a mistake “for the good of the …” – fill in the blank: country, military, state, intelligence community, or church? Someone else has to take the blame. Usually it’s simply someone further down the food chain, like a White House staffer, or a lieutenant, or the head of a state agency, or a church member. But sometimes it’s entire categories of people.
We’re too impatient to look at the big picture behind our current problems. So immigrants are blamed for the failed economic policies of the leaders of nations when they are simply exercising their best option to help their children survive. Gays are blamed for the weakening moral fiber of the nation when their God-given sexual orientation has been labeled unacceptable their entire lives. Youth gangs are blamed for making up the idea of retaliating against ones enemies when our military keeps doing the same thing with even more severe consequences around the globe.
Jesus pulls the rug right out from under the whole practice of scapegoating. First, his approach to the subject of the woman’s multiple marriages opened her to reconsider her cultural identity so she could move beyond it. That didn’t come as a result of becoming convicted and freed from personal sin. She came to understand through Jesus’ line of questions that a door was opening for her to freedom. She didn’t have to be the scapegoat for her community; and her culture didn’t have to be the scapegoat in relation to the Jerusalem Establishment. All this drew from her the exclamation that Jesus is a prophet, someone she understood to be one who explains the Torah. She is beginning to see Jesus himself as offering a viable alternative to her cultural inheritance.
Jesus relativized the cultural claims of both Samaria and Jerusalem by subordinating them both to worshiping in spirit and truth. In one fell swoop, Jesus totally jettisoned the scapegoating structure of the Jerusalem Establishment vis-a-vis Samaria. Neither temple matters. Neither temple is legitimate. What matters is worshiping the Father in spirit and truth. By unveiling the scapegoating mechanism of the town, Jesus has undermined the sacrificial religion that depends on that scapegoating mechanism. That is to say, a society can worship in spirit and truth only when it has faced the way it lays the blame on certain groups of people rather than accepting responsibility for its own actions.
The woman got it. So she leaves her jar and goes back to the city to tell all the people that this stranger has just told her everything she’s ever done. She presents to her fellow townspeople the same challenge Jesus presented to her: a challenge to her status as communal victim that in turn challenged the legitimacy of their whole set up. By telling them that this man told her everything she had ever done, he also told her everything they have ever done. The people are confronted with the truth of their scapegoating activity. The shock of seeing the communal scapegoat suddenly act out of freedom from her assigned role must have been profound.
Perhaps the same freedom could be theirs if they listen to her and then listen to the new man in town. They have to make a vital choice as a community. Either they try to retain the status quo or they accept the radical change that the woman has accepted. The only way to retain the status quo is to find another scapegoat. Fast. The stranger who has so radically changed the woman is the obvious choice. Otherwise, they need to listen up to what this prophet tells them, admit to the truth of their scapegoating activity and change radically to worship in spirit and truth.
What led the woman to choose freedom was that Jesus respected and unconditionally loved her. We’re all thirsty for a love that affirms us as worthy human beings. That’s what Jesus offers, and what he invites us to offer. The thirst is exacerbated when sexism and racism are added to it.
Prison is a sure place in our modern world for a person's spirit to die of thirst, and people of color are much more likely to be found there. Skin color offers a multitude of ways daily for people to have their affirmation dried up. When a black Latina woman goes shopping with a fair-skinned woman of Mexican heritage and the sales clerk keeps addressing her fair-skinned friend, she gets thirstier. When a white husband goes to buy a car with his wife and she is doing most of the talking, but the sales person keeps addressing the man, sexism is increasing thirst. It happens to people in wheel-chairs, when others talk to the person pushing the chair as if the one in the chair isn't there. It happens to children when we address the adult with them on a matter that more directly involves them. And so our world continues to be thirsty for unconditional love from One who shows no preferential treatment.
It looks like the people of Sychar believed in Jesus. They invited him to stay. What Jesus has done is gather the whole town around the well. The woman is no longer the victim at the center; she is at the edge around the well with everybody else. The center is now Jesus. The Samaritans have accepted the truth of what they were doing socially in their own town and have moved to the level of worshiping in spirit and truth, thus freeing themselves from their scapegoat status in relationship to the Jerusalem Establishment. Jesus has not placed a different well to rival Jacob’s well; he transformed Jacob’s well and thus the town. The people of Sychar renounced the system built on the victimization of one person and accepted from Jesus the truth that makes them free.
Could the same happen for us?
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