Competing For Holiness

It’s that time of the year again. Can you smell the competitiveness in the air? Teams are gathering, game plans are being made, and leaders are coming up with motivational speeches. I imagine at this point you believe that I am talking about the SEC preparing for the start of another exciting college football season, but that’s not the competition to which I am referring. While August still stands as the start of the South’s favorite sport, this is also the time when churches begin battling for new members who are just getting back into the swing of things at the start of the school year.

Christians in the South love to get into it a little bit with our one another. We might be brothers and sisters in Christ, but we don’t have to withhold our snide comments about one another. Everyone loves a good joke about our Methodist friends or our Baptist neighbors. I am certainly not above this, as my favorite one is the following:
Me: Do you know why you have to take two Baptists fishing?
You: No, why?
Me: Because if you take just one he will drink all your beer!

Haha! We love joking the differences between the different mainline denominations. We enjoy saying that Presbyterians cannot possibly believe in Predestination. Or that Church of Christ folks are so strict with their beliefs. In general we just love drawing lines in the proverbial sand. Yet, when we start hear that some other church is growing fast, or that some other megachurch is “cherry picking” members from other churches, or that some pastor is claiming that only his denomination is getting into Heaven we tend not just to joke, but to outright criticize other denominations. We have a hard time letting go of competition.

We might believe that today’s gospel begins with a statement that supposedly supports spiritual competitiveness: the Pharisees heard that Jesus was baptizing more than Jesus. Jesus was outperforming John; the Messiah was beating the prophet; the Word of God was leading the Voice Crying in the Wilderness on the baptismal scoreboard. Yet, the gospel writer recorded this not so that we might boast about how Jesus was better than John, but rather this moment marked a transitional time for Jesus and his disciples. No longer were they avoiding the Pharisees’ attention, instead now the religious elite shifted their persecution upon Jesus and his followers.

As Jesus circumnavigates the Pharisees’ wrath, he finds himself tired and thirsty in Samaria. Here he converses with a woman at the well exemplifying that God wants to cross human-imposed boundaries, rather than continue to compete and struggle against one another. Jesus and the Samaritan woman exchange some witty remarks, and eventually end up wondering, “Where does God’s holiness reside?” The Samaritans claimed their holy place was on top of a mountain, the Jews believed their site of holiness was in Jerusalem. The two could have argued vehemently for who was right and where God was truly present in this world. Yet, Jesus comes not to settle arguments, but to show that He is the source of holiness.

We have a hard time in our polarized, black-or-white culture to even acknowledge that grey area exists. We want to cheer for our kids, our school, our team, our political party, our country, our church, our denomination, and our religion. We cannot easily see the spark of Christ that exists even within our supposed enemies. Yet, Jesus modeled having conversations, like this one with the Samaritan woman, across our made up divisions. Jesus urges us to understand that it is not about where holiness does or does not reside, but it is about having a relationship with him who comes to reconcile all of us to God. We can continue to compete over who is walking through our doors, whose worship is the best, who is winning church wars, or we can say together, Jesus, give us some of that living water, we all need a drink of that!