[Sermon to be delivered at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona, the Third Sunday in Lent, March 12, 2023]
✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. Amen.
This morning we welcome again among us an old friend. No, do not bother looking around because this old friend is part of the Church Triumphant, and we just heard her story a few moments ago. Here in the West we lost our name for her despite it being tucked away in older editions of the Roman Martyrology, but we did keep this wonderful account in St. John’s Gospel. In the East however, the Tradition keeps her post-Baptismal name of Photini, “the Enlightened One”, alive and well. Like Mary Magdalene she is accorded the honour Ἰσαποσόλη or “Equal to the Apostles.” She is known also as “Mother of Evangelists” for obvious reasons. The tradition takes her from Samaria to Carthage, then to Rome where she gains the martyr’s crown under the Neronian Persecution of the late 60’s A.D. Her story is an inspiration; truly this was the woman with the chequered past who turned aside from all of that to partake of the Living Water she so desperately craved and to become one of the great of the Early Church. Personally, she is one of the saints for whom I have a particular devotion, and in her witness I find inspiration.
There are many things that Holy Photini and her story can teach us, about grace for those with a past, of the power of the Holy Spirit, that is, the Living Water that Our Lord promised both to her and to us, of spreading the Good News far and wide that God indeed has come among us to redeem us. One other thing she can teach us, but we so often miss, is the Good News of deliverance from tribalism, bigotry, and racism.
We in the United States of America are only too well aware of racism and bigotry, whether we choose to acknowledge it or try to sweep it under the rug. It is one of our besetting sins as a people, but it is not unique to us. All of the remains of the British Empire bear its infection, from the mother country, to its rebellious colonies, to its now independent dominions, each country writhes with the undying worm of fear and hatred and oppression of its aboriginal population, of the African diaspora brought in as slaves, of the foreigner. In the mother country, even otherwise privileged indigenous peoples there bear the mark of oppression; my father’s people to this day often hear the word “Taff” thrown at them, an Anglo-Saxon slur for “devil”; in more polite situations we are called “Welsh,” which literally means “foreigner,” foreigners even in our homeland. God forbid if you happen to be Irish, or worse yet, from one of the many former imperial holdings. Yet this sin is not limited to the English speaking world. It seethes through the remains of the old Spanish empire, through the sphere of former French holdings, and the nightmare of Nazi Germany. My cousin once taught English as a second language in Japan, and he assured me that Europeans have no monopoly on the bigotry market. It is a widespread and a pervasive, besetting sin.
St. Photini would likely gravely look at us, quirk her mouth in a wry expression, then tell us she gets it.
To say Samaritans and Jews had an adversarial relationship would be an understatement. Even today a small community of Samaritans live in the heart of the territory of the Israelite tribe of Ephraim, the dominant tribe of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and claim affiliation with that tribe. Their spiritual centre rests on Mt. Gerizim, which with the neighbouring Mt. Ebal and the town of Shechem, now called Nablus, in the valley between loom large in the collective memory of Israel,[1] and it had been of pre-eminent importance to the Northern Kingdom.[2] The people themselves are likely descended from those Israelites of the Northern Kingdom as they claim, who were too poor and inconsequential to be deported and who did not flood the Southern Kingdom as refugees. They intermarried with any who happened to wander into the general neighbourhood, either deliberately under Assyrian policy, or accidentally with the normal ebb and flow of human migration. They shared a devotion to the Lord, held the same Law coded in the first five books of the Old Testament, and claimed a priesthood of the tribe of Levi. In fact, even today the High Priest claims descent from Ithamar son of Aaron.[3] However, to the Jews they were anathema. They viewed them as mongrels, mixed in with the filthy goyim which the Law forbade them to marry. They viewed them as apostates, having rolled under the wave of the Assyrians, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans. To say Jews took a racist view toward Samaritans would be putting it mildly. To the Jew, Gentiles were nothing, but Samaritans were vermin.
Imagine this woman’s surprise when a Jewish rabbi not only stays seated when she approaches Jacob’s well, He actually talks to her. She is so taken aback that she exclaims, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”[4] After all, she is not ignorant, nor is she a fool. What Jesus just did simply just was not done. But He did do it, and moreover He begins to have a serious, deep conversation with her about belief, spirituality, and most radically, that worship of God will no longer be tied to Mt. Zion, nor to Mt. Gerizim, but that “true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship Him.”[5]
Our Lord in that one conversation struck down centuries of thought tying valid worship exclusively to physical location and tying divine favour to ethnicity. He Whom the Father had sent to the lost children of the house of Israel[6] brought the Good News to the Samaritan heartland, telling them the old divisions no longer mattered. He elsewhere tells the Canaanite woman that despite His mission, her faith won her God’s favour and that her prayer was answered.[7] He points out to His home town that their own tradition shows God’s favour upon non-Israelites.[8] After His Resurrection, He shows St. Peter in the memorable vision in Joppa of the unclean animals in a sheet let down from the heavens that nothing that God has cleaned should be called common or unclean, and soon after Cornelius and his household are awash with the Holy Spirit,[9] people who are not hated Samaritans but despised Romans and Greeks. St. Philip was picked up and practically dropped in the lap of an Ethiopian court official in the middle of a mission to, wait for it, Samaria.[10] All the old barriers were coming down, all the old curses were being lifted, because, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”[11]
It starts with that one conversation. It all starts with that one woman, Photini of Sychar. In that one conversation Our Lord begins the process of reversing the exclusion of the Gentiles, the division of Babel, the Curse of Ham, the murder of Abel. Everything that racists of all stripes have used to justify exclusion and oppression Our Lord Jesus strikes down in doing the unthinkable, asking this erstwhile lady of questionable life choices for a drink. Here Our Lord broke so many barriers, of gender, of ethnicity and race. The Good News is not just for the Jews. God does not restrict His call to one sex, one class, one caste, one tribe, one nation, one race, one language. The Holy Spirit does not care where you are from, just where you are going. As St. James asks of those who would stratify and segregate the household of faith, “…Do you with your acts of favouritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?”[12] He does not let them answer, but counters with, “…if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors.”[13]
In sharing the Good News with St. Photini, Our Lord breaks down the old barriers and calls us into loving fellowship with each other. We can conclude from the witness of the Holy Apostles that this means we get past and get over any such behaviour that would reassert those old barriers and set one over another. To reject that message is to reject the One Who sent that message, and that bodes ill, for in the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews concerning those who reject Him, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”[14]
What does this mean for us? It is not enough to reject that sin in ourselves. We must stand on the side of righteousness and not be quiet. There are people out there dying spiritually because of this. There also are people like Photini and Cornelius who would be shut out of the Kingdom because people deem them unworthy to hear the Good News. There are people who should be in the Kingdom but are shut out because they harbour hatred in their hearts for those not like them. People persist in Death because the Enemy is shouting the message of hatred and division loud and long in their ears to the exclusion of all else. It falls to us to model the Kingdom of God, to proclaim the fall of the barriers, and to work to undo not centuries, but millennia of division that is a byproduct of our division from God. In this, I will steal a slogan used by the HIV and LGBTQ+ activist group Act Up: “Silence = Death”
Our Lord was not silent. St. Photini was not silent. Let us not be silent.
✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.
[1] Gen. 12.16, 33.18-34.31, Deut. 11.29, 27.11-26, Jos. 21.21, 24.1-32 [2] 1 Kings 12.1, 12.25, 2 Chron. 10.1 [3] Cf. “Samaritan High Priest”, Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samaritan_High_Priest). The citation is from Sean Ireton (2003). "The Samaritans - A Jewish Sect in Israel: Strategies for Survival of an Ethno-religious Minority in the Twenty First Century", chapter 1. Anthrobase. Retrieved 2007-11-29. [4] Jn. 4.9 [5] Jn. 4.23 [6] Mt. 15.24 [7] Mt. 15.28 [8] Lk. 4.25-27 [9] Ac. 10.1-48 [10] Ac. 8.4-8, 26-40 [11] Gal. 3.28 [12] Jas. 2.1 [13] Jas. 2.9 [14] Heb. 11.31