Crossing Borders And Breaking Down Boundaries
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Readings
Series I, Cycle C
Luke reports this story in such an understated and matter-of-fact style that one could easily miss the significance of what is being described here. In the space of four brief verses, we're told that Peter and John are sent on behalf of the apostles in Jerusalem to pray over and lay their hands upon some recent converts to Christianity. But mind you, they are doing this in Samaria, of all places. That's not only remarkable; it's nothing short of revolutionary.
As you no doubt recall, there was a long history of enmity between the Jews and the Samaritans. It all started back in the eighth century B.C., when the Assyrians invaded the Northern Kingdom. As conquerors were wont to do in those days, they proceeded to transport the brightest and best of the population away. Basically, the only folks they left were the ones they had little use for -- the poor, the less educated, and the unskilled. Eventually, these people began to intermarry with the strangers that the Assyrians had settled in their land, and the result was an entirely new race, the Samaritans.
In the sixth century B.C., a similar fate befell the Southern Kingdom. The Babylonians invaded, conquered, and carried off the brightest and best from that country. However, they stubbornly refused to lose their identity. Intermarriage was strictly forbidden, in order to keep the Jewish bloodline pure. When they were allowed to return in the fifth century B.C., and began to rebuild Jerusalem under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Samaritans from the Northern Kingdom offered to help. But by this time, they were considered a mixed breed -- impure and inferior. Thus, the Jews wanted nothing to do with them. From that day onward there remained an unhealed breach and a bitter hatred between the two races.
You pick a lot of this up in the Gospels, of course. When Jesus' critics wish to insult him, for instance, they call him "a Samaritan" (John 8:48). When Jesus is talking with the Samaritan woman at the well (something that surprised even his disciples), John carefully notes that "Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans" (John 4:9), the implication being that, ordinarily, these two groups did not speak to one another, much less interact. They did whatever was necessary to avoid contact, even if it meant traveling miles out of their way. In fact, in Matthew's Gospel, when Jesus sends the disciples out as missionaries, he initially tells them, "Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans" (Matthew 10:5).
And yet, here in this passage, Peter and John are specifically sent to Samaria, in order to welcome these people into the Christian community. According to Luke, they "went down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit" (v. 15). But if you ask me, the Holy Spirit was already there, because it had been the Spirit that prompted Philip to preach the gospel to the Samaritans in the first place. You see, the dangerous thing about the Holy Spirit is that one can never be sure where it will lead you or even to whom it will lead you. Jesus said it was like the wind. "The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit" (John 3:8).
Simply put, the Holy Spirit is not restricted by national borders or racial boundaries. It pays no attention whatsoever to the arbitrary distinctions that we seem to draw among ourselves. Just as God makes the sun shine on the good and evil alike and sends rain upon both the righteous and the unrighteous, so, too, does the wind of the Spirit sweep across the land, whether it be inhabited by Jew or Samaritan. As far as I can tell, there is nothing you can do to plan for the Spirit or even to predict whether it will blow into your life like a gentle breeze or a window-rattling squall. About the best you can do is be willing to move when it does and not be too choosy about where it ends up taking you, since you're not the one doing the choosing.
Judging by this passage, however, one of the trademarks of the Holy Spirit is to give people a way back into relationship with each other. Maybe something like this has even happened to you. For example, if you have ever found yourself being moved toward reconciliation with someone to whom you had previously been estranged or offering a word of forgiveness that you had not originally planned to offer -- if you have ever found yourself taking a risk that you didn't think you had the courage to take or reaching out to someone you had intended to walk away from -- then chances are you were being carried in that direction by the winds of the Holy Spirit. But just in case you're wondering, here's how you can tell for sure. If it felt like a fresh breeze just blew down the cluttered corridors of your life, blasting open locked doors and setting you free, then it's a pretty safe bet that the Spirit was at work. I dare say, Peter and John must have felt that way when they suddenly found themselves laying hands on the very people with whom they wouldn't even have shaken hands before.
I don't know how many of you are familiar with a man named Edward Lorenz. He is best known for his contributions in the area of physics. However, that's not actually how he began his career. He was a research meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1960s. The project he happened to be working on was mapping out weather patterns. The way he figured it, if astronomers can look 76 years into the future and accurately tell us when Haley's Comet will return, he ought to be able to predict the weather a month from now. He just needed to determine all of the variables and come up with a system that would help him chart it out.
He was working on a Royal McBee computer, which, by today's standards, probably chugged along about as fast as a small riding mower. But it was perfectly able to perform the kind of calculations that he required. What Lorenz did was to observe how weather patterns changed over the course of time. Based on this research, he came up with a dozen mathematical formulas defining the relationship between air temperature and barometric pressure, between pressure and wind speed, and so forth. He plugged them all into his computer and let the systems fly. Piles and piles of printouts stacked up around his office, each one detailing the development of a particular weather pattern.
The only problem was that he could never make these patterns repeat themselves. There were similarities, but never exact duplication. Even when he plugged in the same variables, they always seemed to produce a different result. That puzzled Lorenz, because, in effect, he had constructed an artificial universe here on his computer. All of the rules that governed these weather patterns were fixed. They weren't being influenced by any other factors. Thus, one would think that you should be able to arrive at a predictable outcome. But no matter how often he tried, Lorenz could never make the weather patterns do what they were supposed to.
Finally, one winter day in 1961, he decided to take a shortcut. He wanted to look at one part of a particular sequence in more detail, but he didn't want to start the whole run over again from the beginning. So he started it in the middle instead, giving the pattern its initial conditions by typing the numbers straight from an earlier printout. Then he went down the hall for a cup of coffee.
When he returned, Lorenz found a weather pattern so different from the previous one that there was simply no resemblance between the two. He checked his numbers. He checked the vacuum tubes in the computer. Then he realized what had happened. One of the numbers he was working with was .506127. To save space, he had rounded it off to .506, thinking a difference of .000127 was inconsequential. After all, in a vast weather system, a number that small would be like a baby's sneeze, or perhaps the beat of a butterfly's wings. However, as Lorenz had just learned, even that tiny number, way down there in the hundred-thousandths, turned out to be the difference between a gentle rain shower and a monsoon.
His discovery was the beginning of a new branch of science, which we know today as "the theory of chaos." Chaos theory teaches us that a tiny, seemingly inconsequential difference at one point in a system changes the whole system. It's almost as if the entire universe is connected, woven together in a single fabric, and a change anywhere else in the universe affects the whole. What Lorenz eventually concluded from this is that not only we will never be able to predict the weather -- at least not exactly -- we're not going to be able to predict much of anything else either. There are simply too many variables. Everything happening in the universe affects everything else. That's why life tends to be rather chaotic (which, of course, you don't have to be a physicist to verify). There is an essential messiness and randomness to life that cannot be controlled, no matter how hard we try. That's the bad news about chaos theory.
Here's the good news. Apparently, there's a boundary to it. Because what Edward Lorenz discovered on his good, old trusty Royal McBee computer and what scores of scientists after him later confirmed is that even though chaotic systems never behave the same way twice and are therefore unpredictable, there is an outer limit beyond which they will not go. In other words, while it's true that Lorenz could never get his weather systems to repeat themselves, he couldn't push them into total chaos either. There was this mysterious force, Lorenz concluded, that kept pulling at the chaos and forming it into patterns.
Lorenz and his colleagues decided to name this force "the strange attractor," since that's precisely what it seemed to be doing -- attracting and arranging the chaos.1 The Bible, of course, has a different name for this force: the Holy Spirit. Way back at the very beginning, the book of Genesis tells us, the Spirit of God moved across the face of the chaos and began shaping it into order (Genesis 1:1-2). And that Spirit has never stopped moving. It keeps pulling at us and pushing us in new and surprising directions.
Peter and John found that out firsthand. For centuries, the relationship between Jew and Samaritan resembled little more than chaotic estrangement. The only thing that seemed predictable was that these two groups couldn't stand being together, much less coming together. That is, until the winds of the Holy Spirit swept in, like an unpredictable change in the weather, and brought them together.
____________
1. Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion (Cambridge: Cowley Press, 2000), pp. 93-96.
As you no doubt recall, there was a long history of enmity between the Jews and the Samaritans. It all started back in the eighth century B.C., when the Assyrians invaded the Northern Kingdom. As conquerors were wont to do in those days, they proceeded to transport the brightest and best of the population away. Basically, the only folks they left were the ones they had little use for -- the poor, the less educated, and the unskilled. Eventually, these people began to intermarry with the strangers that the Assyrians had settled in their land, and the result was an entirely new race, the Samaritans.
In the sixth century B.C., a similar fate befell the Southern Kingdom. The Babylonians invaded, conquered, and carried off the brightest and best from that country. However, they stubbornly refused to lose their identity. Intermarriage was strictly forbidden, in order to keep the Jewish bloodline pure. When they were allowed to return in the fifth century B.C., and began to rebuild Jerusalem under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Samaritans from the Northern Kingdom offered to help. But by this time, they were considered a mixed breed -- impure and inferior. Thus, the Jews wanted nothing to do with them. From that day onward there remained an unhealed breach and a bitter hatred between the two races.
You pick a lot of this up in the Gospels, of course. When Jesus' critics wish to insult him, for instance, they call him "a Samaritan" (John 8:48). When Jesus is talking with the Samaritan woman at the well (something that surprised even his disciples), John carefully notes that "Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans" (John 4:9), the implication being that, ordinarily, these two groups did not speak to one another, much less interact. They did whatever was necessary to avoid contact, even if it meant traveling miles out of their way. In fact, in Matthew's Gospel, when Jesus sends the disciples out as missionaries, he initially tells them, "Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans" (Matthew 10:5).
And yet, here in this passage, Peter and John are specifically sent to Samaria, in order to welcome these people into the Christian community. According to Luke, they "went down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit" (v. 15). But if you ask me, the Holy Spirit was already there, because it had been the Spirit that prompted Philip to preach the gospel to the Samaritans in the first place. You see, the dangerous thing about the Holy Spirit is that one can never be sure where it will lead you or even to whom it will lead you. Jesus said it was like the wind. "The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit" (John 3:8).
Simply put, the Holy Spirit is not restricted by national borders or racial boundaries. It pays no attention whatsoever to the arbitrary distinctions that we seem to draw among ourselves. Just as God makes the sun shine on the good and evil alike and sends rain upon both the righteous and the unrighteous, so, too, does the wind of the Spirit sweep across the land, whether it be inhabited by Jew or Samaritan. As far as I can tell, there is nothing you can do to plan for the Spirit or even to predict whether it will blow into your life like a gentle breeze or a window-rattling squall. About the best you can do is be willing to move when it does and not be too choosy about where it ends up taking you, since you're not the one doing the choosing.
Judging by this passage, however, one of the trademarks of the Holy Spirit is to give people a way back into relationship with each other. Maybe something like this has even happened to you. For example, if you have ever found yourself being moved toward reconciliation with someone to whom you had previously been estranged or offering a word of forgiveness that you had not originally planned to offer -- if you have ever found yourself taking a risk that you didn't think you had the courage to take or reaching out to someone you had intended to walk away from -- then chances are you were being carried in that direction by the winds of the Holy Spirit. But just in case you're wondering, here's how you can tell for sure. If it felt like a fresh breeze just blew down the cluttered corridors of your life, blasting open locked doors and setting you free, then it's a pretty safe bet that the Spirit was at work. I dare say, Peter and John must have felt that way when they suddenly found themselves laying hands on the very people with whom they wouldn't even have shaken hands before.
I don't know how many of you are familiar with a man named Edward Lorenz. He is best known for his contributions in the area of physics. However, that's not actually how he began his career. He was a research meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1960s. The project he happened to be working on was mapping out weather patterns. The way he figured it, if astronomers can look 76 years into the future and accurately tell us when Haley's Comet will return, he ought to be able to predict the weather a month from now. He just needed to determine all of the variables and come up with a system that would help him chart it out.
He was working on a Royal McBee computer, which, by today's standards, probably chugged along about as fast as a small riding mower. But it was perfectly able to perform the kind of calculations that he required. What Lorenz did was to observe how weather patterns changed over the course of time. Based on this research, he came up with a dozen mathematical formulas defining the relationship between air temperature and barometric pressure, between pressure and wind speed, and so forth. He plugged them all into his computer and let the systems fly. Piles and piles of printouts stacked up around his office, each one detailing the development of a particular weather pattern.
The only problem was that he could never make these patterns repeat themselves. There were similarities, but never exact duplication. Even when he plugged in the same variables, they always seemed to produce a different result. That puzzled Lorenz, because, in effect, he had constructed an artificial universe here on his computer. All of the rules that governed these weather patterns were fixed. They weren't being influenced by any other factors. Thus, one would think that you should be able to arrive at a predictable outcome. But no matter how often he tried, Lorenz could never make the weather patterns do what they were supposed to.
Finally, one winter day in 1961, he decided to take a shortcut. He wanted to look at one part of a particular sequence in more detail, but he didn't want to start the whole run over again from the beginning. So he started it in the middle instead, giving the pattern its initial conditions by typing the numbers straight from an earlier printout. Then he went down the hall for a cup of coffee.
When he returned, Lorenz found a weather pattern so different from the previous one that there was simply no resemblance between the two. He checked his numbers. He checked the vacuum tubes in the computer. Then he realized what had happened. One of the numbers he was working with was .506127. To save space, he had rounded it off to .506, thinking a difference of .000127 was inconsequential. After all, in a vast weather system, a number that small would be like a baby's sneeze, or perhaps the beat of a butterfly's wings. However, as Lorenz had just learned, even that tiny number, way down there in the hundred-thousandths, turned out to be the difference between a gentle rain shower and a monsoon.
His discovery was the beginning of a new branch of science, which we know today as "the theory of chaos." Chaos theory teaches us that a tiny, seemingly inconsequential difference at one point in a system changes the whole system. It's almost as if the entire universe is connected, woven together in a single fabric, and a change anywhere else in the universe affects the whole. What Lorenz eventually concluded from this is that not only we will never be able to predict the weather -- at least not exactly -- we're not going to be able to predict much of anything else either. There are simply too many variables. Everything happening in the universe affects everything else. That's why life tends to be rather chaotic (which, of course, you don't have to be a physicist to verify). There is an essential messiness and randomness to life that cannot be controlled, no matter how hard we try. That's the bad news about chaos theory.
Here's the good news. Apparently, there's a boundary to it. Because what Edward Lorenz discovered on his good, old trusty Royal McBee computer and what scores of scientists after him later confirmed is that even though chaotic systems never behave the same way twice and are therefore unpredictable, there is an outer limit beyond which they will not go. In other words, while it's true that Lorenz could never get his weather systems to repeat themselves, he couldn't push them into total chaos either. There was this mysterious force, Lorenz concluded, that kept pulling at the chaos and forming it into patterns.
Lorenz and his colleagues decided to name this force "the strange attractor," since that's precisely what it seemed to be doing -- attracting and arranging the chaos.1 The Bible, of course, has a different name for this force: the Holy Spirit. Way back at the very beginning, the book of Genesis tells us, the Spirit of God moved across the face of the chaos and began shaping it into order (Genesis 1:1-2). And that Spirit has never stopped moving. It keeps pulling at us and pushing us in new and surprising directions.
Peter and John found that out firsthand. For centuries, the relationship between Jew and Samaritan resembled little more than chaotic estrangement. The only thing that seemed predictable was that these two groups couldn't stand being together, much less coming together. That is, until the winds of the Holy Spirit swept in, like an unpredictable change in the weather, and brought them together.
____________
1. Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion (Cambridge: Cowley Press, 2000), pp. 93-96.
