Overcoming Prejudice

When I entered junior high I quickly set two goals for my seventh grade year: First, to get Kacey Gire to kiss me; and Second, to keep my friend Eric Green and myself out of the hospital. Every morning as Eric and I walked to the Rosemore Junior High School we were forced to walk past a group of guys that we called �Hoods.� They were big, they were scary, they did drugs, and unfortunately they outnumbered us most mornings 20 to 2. I had the unfortunate problem of being an athlete that lived in a nice house. Eric had the unfortunate problem of being an athlete and black. Some days we ran. Some days we fought. Most days we came home petrified. But not a day went by in all of seventh grade when my friend Eric wasn�t called a �nigger.� At the end of the school year Eric and his mom moved to Cincinnati. I lost my best friend that summer.
In John chapter four Jesus encountered someone like Eric that had not one, but two strikes against her. When Jesus asked her for a cup of water, she replied in verse 9, �You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?� In her culture, that was a pretty simple question. Jews didn�t hang out with Samaritans and Jewish men didn�t talk to women in public. But Jesus willingly did both. That�s why I like the title that New Testament scholar James Dunn gives Jesus-�The Boundary Breaker.�
When others saw skin pigmentation and chromosomal differences, Jesus saw the person�s soul. Jesus saw her for what she could become. And as a result, this kicked out, put-down, beaten-up woman encountered the creator of all life. In an instant she was changed. She ran back to the people in her village and said in verse 29, �Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did.� And as a result John�s gospel tells us in verse 39, �Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman�s testimony.�
Not only did Jesus break boundaries himself, but he calls us to do the same. One of the earliest memories I have as a pre-school child is sitting at a table, coloring and cutting paper, and listening in on a conversation three women were having. �I think they have different jaws,� one of the women said. �Yeah, I think they should date their own kind,� chimed in another. �If God wanted the races to be mixed he would have said so,� the last one remarked. What strikes me about that conversation is not what they said. Unfortunately I�ve heard such comments many different times. What marked me that day was that the conversation took place in a Sunday School class I was visiting. Isn�t it amazing the things kids remember from growing up in church?
What will our children remember?