A sermon on Romans 5:1-11 & John 4:5-42 by Nathan Nettleton

There was a huge story in the news this past week. At the Vatican last Monday, Australian billionaire, Andrew Forrest, “launched the Global Freedom Network – a new organisation led by the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Grand Imam of al-Azhar in Egypt. The network aims to free the world’s estimated 30 million slaves, and has set itself specific, ambitious targets to achieve this.” It is not often we hear of major Christian and Islamic leaders agreeing to cooperate in creative action to make the world a better place, and perhaps even less often do we hear of such an agreement also including billionaire business magnates. I found the story to be hugely encouraging, but there were also many things I learned from it that were very sobering. One of them was the complicity of religious traditions in the problem of slavery. Andrew Forrest said that wherever he went in the world in his campaign, he came up against the issue that the holy texts of the world’s religions are all ambiguous on the issue of slavery, and that the slave traders hide behind this ambiguity. I guess we’ve known that, because the battles against slavery in Australia and America in previous centuries were hampered by the same problem. But hearing that it is still part of the problem was a timely reminder of how much work we still have to do on how the Bible is understood, interpreted and used.

Another sobering cause for reflection was that at a lunch of executives of major corporations last year, Andrew Forrest managed to get most of them to admit that there is slavery in their supply chains. I don’t think this was a group hand-picked because of their likely links to slavery. This was just a general representation of the world’s major corporations, and most of them conceded that their businesses were, at some point in the chain, linked to slavery. Now that implicates us all. Because every time we open the fridge or reach for the phone or drive a car or turn the page of a book, we will be using products that were either manufactured by major corporations or which utilised materials manufactured or supplied by major corporations with links to slavery. Which means that we are all inescapably ensnared in systems that enslave and destroy the lives of millions of people around the world. We can make ethical purchasing decisions about the ones that we can readily research and know about, but unfortunately, they are only the tip of the iceberg. For obvious reasons, these slavery-riddled supply chains do their utmost to conceal the truth, and none of us have any hope of keeping ourselves pure and uncompromised.

According to our reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans, it was while we were enemies of God that we were reconciled to God through the death of Jesus and saved by his life. Most of us have trouble relating to those words, because we don’t really have a sense of there having been a time when we were really set against God and all that God was doing such that we could reasonably be called God’s enemies. But if you think about the situation of a war, which is the context in which we best understand what it means to be an enemy, we don’t usually reserve the term “our enemies” for only those who are making the decisions or firing the guns. We usually refer to an entire nation or people group as “the enemy”, because everyone is involved in the supply chains. The bullets the soldiers fire and the food they eat and the uniforms they wear and the vocal support or complicit silence given to the political leaders have all come via the hands of ordinary decent people like us who probably have no desire for war but who are all inescapably ensnared in systems that create and perpetuate it. So to those on the other side, they are all collectively “the enemy”.

So if God has, as demonstrated in the suffering and death of Jesus, sided unequivocally with the victims of the violent and oppressive systems of our world, the systems that are enslaving and destroying the lives of some thirty million people at the present time, and we are inescapably ensnared in the supply chains and the consumption chains of those horrific systems, then it makes perfect sense to label us all, collectively, as the enemies of God. God is working to bring about a world where all people are treated with love and care and respect, and we are participants in systems that directly undermine that and destroy people’s lives.

Now that all sounds thoroughly depressing, and it could easily be cause for self-condemnation and despair. I did warn you that Lent was a season for some tough challenges and bracing reality checks, and with our longer than usual confessions of sin and the like, it can be a pretty heavy few weeks. But the point that the Apostle Paul wants to get through to us by reminding us that we have been found to be among God’s enemies is anything but cause for depression and despair. Quite the opposite in fact.

You see, if our place in the love and care of God depended on successfully extricating ourselves from all connections to anything linked to evil and sin — in becoming entirely pure and uncompromised — then we’d never have any chance of knowing ourselves securely loved. Because any confidence we might ever have would be constantly at risk of being crushed by the next disclosure that the fair trade, free range, organic, recycled, non-phosphate, pedal powered, biodegradable, anti-whaling sticker that we just put on the back of our electric car was printed by a company owned by a man who owns shares in a brothel in Asia. The point is that the world we live in is so riddled with corruption that, until it is entirely remade in the image of God, even the most ethically scrupulous of us will only ever be fractionally less compromised than everybody else, but that none of this makes the slightest bit of difference to God’s love for us and God’s desire to be reconciled to us and befriend us. That is the Apostle’s point. God does not require us to measure up first. Instead, it was while we were still helplessly entangled in sin that Jesus died for us, and while we were still enemies of God that we were reconciled to God through the death of Jesus and saved by his life, and while we were still unwittingly supporting the industries of slavery and death that God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit to satisfy our deep thirst for love and hope.

What the Apostle Paul is describing in theory, you can see being played out in practice in the gospel reading we heard. There are sermon-loads of other things going on in this story too, but part of it is that this woman at the well has everything stacked against her if Jesus was only going to offer anything to the worthy and the pure. And she knows it. She expresses astonishment that Jesus would even speak to her. She’s a Samaritan, and they’re the sworn enemies of the Jews, especially the religious Jews. She was a woman, and in those days, respectable religious men would not risk their reputations by talking to a woman outside of safe company. And while she might not have expected him to have guessed at her tattered reputation after a string of broken marriages, the fact that she was sneaking out to the well at midday instead of at the times when everyone else went out there was a bit of a give away. None of these things are things she can do anything about, any more than we can confidently know the ethical credentials of the supply chains of everything we purchase. But Jesus is clearly utterly unconcerned about any of this, and openly engages in some playful, almost flirtatious, banter with her about his willingness to satisfy the deep thirst that she feels only too acutely, and that she shares with all who thirst for love and security and forgiveness and hope. Not only does Jesus give of himself generously in this conversation, treating this troubled and downtrodden woman as the most important person in his world for that time, but by the end of the story she is, in effect, an apostle to her town, carrying his message to her townsfolk and bringing them back to him that all might similarly drink of this living water that is offered even to the enemies of God.

And thus it is that though we are impossibly entangled in the systems and patterns that are destroying God’s world and enslaving God’s people, though we are enemies and outcasts with histories of chronic failure, we are nevertheless met by the crucified and risen Jesus who comes with a welcome so warm it evaporates our fear, and who playfully promises us the water of life that will satisfy our deepest thirsts. But it doesn’t stop there, because Jesus is not just on about satisfying each individual’s guilt-parched soul. Jesus is on about the salvation of the whole sick and broken world, corrupt systems and all. He is on about the creation of a whole new world order in which there will be no more slavery and no more exploitation and no more hunger or thirst or hostility or killing or war. And Jesus offers us and all his enemies the bread of life and the flowing wine of forgiveness and the living water of God’s love poured into our thirsty hearts so that we might partner with him in creating this new world, this new culture of love and hope and freedom.

The key to that new world is not sorting out our supply chains and our purchasing patterns, although I applaud every step in that direction and I too try to purchase ethically as best I can. The key is in following Jesus’ example of loving our enemies, long before and regardless of whether they ever do anything to justify that love. The key is in following his example of offering our love and our lives freely to all that even the most scarred and barren souls might taste the living water of new life and hope for a world of freedom. A little later in this letter (Romans 12:20), Paul quotes from the book of Proverbs (25:21) saying that if your enemies are thirsty, give them a drink of water, and it will heap burning coals on their heads. And so it may, but that is never why Jesus treats his enemies with love. It would always be his prayer that any coals of burning shame they may feel might quickly pass leaving them all the more desperately ready to quench their thirst with the living water of God’s love that he offers us. For the new world is not a culture of shame, but a culture of love. I applaud what Andrew Forrest and his Global Freedom Network are setting out to do, and I am hugely encouraged by the emergence of such a creative partnership between Christianity, Islam and big business working for real change and genuine good in the world. But while I expect and pray that they will have some very real success, their dependence on trying to make slavery bad for profits will ultimately leave intact the financial values that produced slavery in the first place. So let us pray even more for the role in the partnership of the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Grand Imam of al-Azhar that they might lead their followers to see the unmistakable trajectory of God’s love in their holy scriptures and to offer themselves as agents of that love, treating all people, even enemies, with love and care and respect until the contagious spread of such genuine and gratuitous love reaches such a critical mass that the oppressive systems crumble under the weight of love and all of us are set free and the culture of God is realised in all its fullness. For the coming of that day on this, we work and pray.