Spring training has begun, and hope springs eternal. The Red Sox won the World Series last year after 86 years of hoping. Maybe this is the year of the Rangers. Maybe not. I love that little song, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” right up to the end. Right up to the “three strikes you’re out” part. I remember striking out. When I was 9 years old and playing for the YMCA team with mostly older players. I stuck out most of the year. I got so tired of it. I remember one game when it was my turn to bat. The bases were loaded. I turned to the coach and suggested that he let another kid pinch-hit for me. He was the smallest kid on the team and usually drew a walk when he batted, since the strike zone was so small. The coach shook his head and let the other kid bat. It was humiliating, the whole thing, realizing I didn’t even want to try lest I strike out again.

It’s hard to bat when you get behind in the count. Even for major-leaguers, the chances of getting a hit goes down dramatically when you bat with two strikes. The pitcher has the advantage and won’t give you anything good to lay your bat on. So the worse the count against you, the less likely you are to succeed.

Like the Samaritan woman Jesus met at the well one day. She had three strikes against her. She was a strikeout queen. How do we know?

She was a Samaritan, first of all. STRIKE ONE. Jesus had deliberately led his disciples on the direct route from Galilee to Jerusalem through Samaritan country. Most Jews took the Samaritan bypass to avoid the riff-raff. Jews looked down upon Samaritans, even though they were blood-related. In a day when blood meant identity, and pure blood meant higher value, Jews lived on Park Avenue and Samaritans in Hoboken. Samaritans had intermarried with Syrians after the fall of the Northern Kingdom to Assyrian in 722 BC. Jews thought they diluted the commonwealth of God. Never mind that today we know that the gene pool is strengthened, not weakened, by mixing races and ethnicities. We still bear those prejudices, don’t we?

If you want a spiritual excuse to go to the movies, go see Hotel Rwanda. One of my pastor colleagues, Brian McLaren, believes it is possibly more important for Christians to see than The Passion of the Christ. He wonders, “What Would Jesus See?” (Guess that’s another bracelet.) The movie is a tragic and yet heroic depiction of the genocide of Hutus against Tutsis in 1994 that killed nearly 800,000 people. And what was the root of it all? Ethnic identity that had made each think themselves superior over time to the other, each think they had the right to rule the other. But, as Congolese professor George Izangola claimed in a 1996 interview, In Rwanda, the Tutsi and the Hutu are the same people. They are all [one] people—large groupings or communities which go from seven regions of Cameroon to Uganda—all the way to South Africa, in the same culture. People used to be Tutsi or Hutu, depending on the proximity to the king. If you are close to the king, you owned wealth, you owned a lot of cattle, you are a Tutsi. If you are far away from the king, you are a cultivator, you don’t own much cattle, you are a Hutu. Sadly, it was the Western colonialist Belgians that made the final distinction between the two, preferring Tutsis to Hutus and making them carry identity cards to distinguish them. Tutsis were taller and leaner, more like Europeans, so therefore somehow better than the more native Hutus. The insult built up over time until Hutus started thinking of Tutsis as cockroaches that had to be fumigated out of their land. A rampage of violence ensued.

Look all over the globe and see how this nonsense gets played out. Jews and Arabs are both Semitic peoples: they come from the same blood roots. And yet they can’t imagine that they are the same under the skin. Nor can they imagine living peaceably under the same sky on the same real estate.

Religion sometimes plays a part, too. Oddly, in this case, Hutus and Tutsi are both mainly Christians, mainly Roman Catholic. But common faith has divided them rather than united them. But then most whites and blacks in South Africa during Apartheid days worshiped in separate Christian churches. The Jew-Muslim and the Christian-Muslim divide are greater, of course. And we have seen both sides use religion as a justification for their violence. Christian Orthodox Serbs couched their slaughter of Bosnian Muslims in religious terms. And radical Muslims like Bin Laden are doing the same against Jews and Christians today.

Jesus broke through the ethnic and religious prejudice of his own people against Samaritans just to talk to the woman. The Samaritan did the same with Jesus. The business about what mountain one should worship on was cut down by Jesus’ statement that true worshipers of God worship in spirit and truth. To be of the wrong ethnicity or religion is one strike against you in the world. And yet our Lord Jesus was a different kind of umpire. He didn’t see that as a strike against anyone. He spoke to this Samaritan as he would any child of God.

This is the way we must witness to others. We do not begin by deciding who they are from the point of view of skin color or culture or language or religion. We begin in spirit and truth, knowing that identity is not superficial: who we are has to do with our relation to God, not with our relation to other people.

Well, the Samaritan at the well was also a woman. STRIKE TWO. Jewish men were taught to pray every morning, O Lord, I thank they that I was not born a Gentile, a woman, or a boar. That’s boar as in wild pig. But what a boor to pray such a prayer at all!

A man addressing a woman in such personal way as Jesus did violated cultural mores. It might have even suggested something sexual. The woman herself feels the double inappropriateness when she says: How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?

Part of what that meant, however, was that Jesus would have had to share the cup of water with her. A common cup, don’t you know?! A hint to us of communion with bread and wine, maybe. A sense perhaps that the church has to be willing to see men and women together at the Table of the Lord. With women able to serve alongside men! Gratefully that is so in this church, but we must continue to pray for and long for this to be true in all churches everywhere.

We have a problem with Baptist seminaries accepting many women as students who feel called to ministry, many of them to the pastorate. Yet when they graduate, churches do not even consider them out of fear that some might object or they will lose members or money over the fallout. Well, they are already hurting their churches by allowing God-called and Christ-anointed and Holy Spirit-gifted women to be left in the dugout. The church has to lead the world by putting all God-gifted players on the field; we must not reflect the world’s prejudices by excluding them.

The Samaritan woman was also socially disreputable, if not sexually sinful. STRIKE THREE. We cannot say for sure that this woman was considered, what shall we say, “loose”? She had had five husbands, and the man she was with at that time was not her husband. Could have been a string of bad luck. We shouldn’t jump to conclusions. We do not know her story.

But we often do jump to conclusions, don’t we? And how often do we really know the stories behind the social arrangements of people’s lives? It’s easy to say “divorced,” “gay,” “living together,” whatever. It’s harder to do the harder work of knowing the person. And even if you do know the story and find the person’s behavior immoral, what then? What should our attitude be toward them? Do we invite them to church? How much cleaning up do they have to do to be welcome with us?

I visited Alice and her daughter Alexis in the hospital this week. Good friends from San Antonio asked me to look in on them. They were concerned about this terribly ill grandbaby. Alice’s partner was not in the room when I visited. They are new to Dallas and have felt very alone as their one-year-old little girl was going through a critical stretch of illness. Alice was so grateful for the visit. Both parents grew up in the church and confess belief in Jesus, so the visit was spiritually welcome. Alice asked me to pray for Alexis but also for one of her doctors. Seems things went badly in a procedure and they reacted with anxiety like any parents would have. The doctor turned on them and said he was going to tell all Alexis’s doctors that these people were trouble. They didn’t know if he was just having a bad day or acting out of his prejudices against this kind of couple. Either way, there is this little girl who hasn’t asked for any of this. I can only hope they felt the spirit of Jesus and tasted a sip of living water from a common cup with us as a church where they would be welcome.

If all the sins of the congregation were exposed for all to see the way God can see them, how many of us would welcome each other to church according to the standards we often set? Notice what happens after the woman comes to believe in Jesus on the basis of his incredibly non-judgmental, radical, grace-filled encounter with her? She starts telling people about this Jesus. She becomes a witness in the city to him. She has gone from being at the well in the noonday heat—signifying her avoidance of the respectable women, who would only have gone in the cool of the day—to an evangelist in the city, proclaiming the salvation of Jesus the Christ. And many, it is said, believed on account of her testimony.

How many converts to Christ are missed because we miss reaching out to those who are socially, morally, and spiritually sidelined? Want to see people come to Christ? Want to see the church grow? Why not start with those around you who are already on the fringes of respectability? Befriend them. Tell them about Jesus. Invite them to church and put us on trial. We’ll fail some, but maybe we’ll grow some, too. But by all means, do invite people to church. How long has it been since you have?

And what if we all remembered our own unworthiness before God before we decided how to treat others? What if we could still feel what it is like to strike out?

Dostoyevsky’s first novel is called Poor Folk. In a telling scene, a master confronts a poor peasant.  Having made a small careless mistake in his work, the peasant expects a beating or worse.  He is embarrassed by his appearance in such lowly rags.  Yet his master, seeing the peasant in such a lowly condition, is conscience-stricken. He gives the peasant a hundred-ruble note instead.  The shocked peasant tries to offer thanks and fumbles to kiss his master’s hand, but instead his master offers him a handshake.  The master shakes the peasant’s hand as if he were a decorated general.  It wasn’t the money the peasant remembered, Dostoyevsky says; it was the handshake that made the difference.

It’s one thing to do charity work with people down and out; it’s another to offer them the right hand of Christian fellowship. Kindness is one thing; communion is another. Wouldn’t it be great if we were known as the church where relationship to Christ were the only thing that mattered? What if they changed the words to the song and sang “Take me out to the church” and it were to end, “For it’s one, two, three strikes, you’re IN”? Let’s make it so!