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Psalm 82 and Luke 10:25-37
In the cut from Luke we have today, perhaps one of our more famous chunks of the Bible, the parable of the Good Samaritan, the opening line is, “Just then a lawyer stood up…” and it is clear that Jesus is talking to more than just the disciples here. This lawyer comes from the crowd that is following Jesus. He’s one of them. He’s an insider asking the teacher a serious question, not a “pharisee” trying to catch Jesus. He really wants to know – what must I do? Maybe several others nod their heads, as we do now, wondering what it is that we must do to help stop the madness that we see all around us, to make our world a better place. The lawyer asks what he must do to inherit…well, the term here is most often translated “eternal life”, but that is a loaded phrase. We think of pearly gates and angel bands, of “Some Glad Morning” or the promised land. But the Greek says simply this – life beyond this age, beyond this era. What it more clearly means is “lasting”. How can I have my life last…maybe even beyond me, whatever “me” is? How can “we” create something that is bigger and better than just us?
Jesus, in good teacher mode, answers his question with a question – what does the law say? And the lawyer answers, correctly, with part of the primary prayer of Judaism, the Shema: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Good, Jesus tells him – do this and abundant life follows…eternal life…life beyond just what we can see, beyond just our own life, but life for all.
We’re never satisfied with that answer as human beings, are we? We’re never content with “be kind” or “love your neighbor”, we have to have some qualifications. After all, Jesus can’t mean Frank, can he? I can love the rest of my neighbors, but Frank is just awful. The lawyer is no different. He wants to know who his neighbor is, and this parable is a response to that direct question.
Jesus, by the way, avoids answering the question. Did you notice? This parable makes the hero of the story a Samaritan, a person from another tribe, hated by any good, socially-conditioned Jew in Palestine. It has nothing to do with who your neighbor should be, otherwise the Samaritan would be in the ditch and the lawyer would be faced with having to love his enemy, to help his foe…a challenging enough assertion. But no, this is something else. It is about what we should do, and how the kind of response that God wants from us can be found in anyone…to anyone. Everyone always makes a big deal about how this is a Samaritan, the hated foe of the Israelite, but that was a two-way street. Samaritans had their own slang terms for the Israelites, they had their own prejudices. And surely this Samaritan was just as immersed in such bigotry growing up where he did. What Jesus praises is the journey he took when faced with another human being’s suffering. It’s a parable – not a set of instructions. It makes us think about who we are, and who we want to be.
Friday morning I sat on my front porch awaiting the impending storm. I watched the radar on my phone, I heard the frequent interruptions on NPR, the familiar and harsh three-toned alert followed by the mechanical voice from the weather service…and I could see the sky and feel the breeze shift. I knew the storm was coming. It seemed a metaphor for the news of the week – with violence raining down upon us like a thunderstorm. In the wake of Baton Rouge, St. Paul and Dallas, what is to be known but broken hearts and troubled minds? It may seem like the whole world is getting ready to collapse. It may feel like that storm is already here, and the hail is smashing our windows, the wind tearing down our trees, the rain flooding our homes.
In fact, it may feel like that storm has been around a long time. The song you heard part of just before the sermon was written almost 20 years ago by Bruce Springsteen in response to the shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed 23 year-old immigrant from Guinea who was shot by New York policeman in the vestibule of his apartment building as he reached for his wallet. He was shot 41 times.
And in the shadow of last week’s events, I chose this song to remind us that this is a indeed a long, deep shadow…the history of human beings and violence, humankind’s capacity for inhumanity to one another. And I want you to hear and read, the lyrics are in the bulletin, that Springsteen wrestles with the complexity of the issue…the verse echoing “the talk” that a black mother gives her black son, the chorus imaging the challenge that a police officer faces when confronting a potential threat and wanting to end his or her shift alive. It is a complicated issue, saturated with violent potential and fraught with impossible decisions.
As we hear this familiar parable again I wonder something myself, perhaps an echo of the lawyer’s question – What does it mean to ponder eternal life when some among us live in constant threat of their “regular” lives? What good is a heaven down the road if it is hell right here and now? The lawyer wants to know what he must do, not what he must believe, or have faith in, or pray for, or protest. There is something askew in the very core, at the very foundation of our moral lives together…some kind of sin that marks us, it seems to me. It is times like these where I am glad that we have a God of grace and love, not of judgment, for we surely are worthy of some judgment right now. We cannot get our act together enough to even see one another’s suffering. We cannot stop hashtagging our outrage long enough to see who is lying in the ditch of our own hearts. We cannot stop arguing for our rights from each other long enough to understand our responsibilities to each other. If there were ever a time for, “Rise up, O God, judge the earth; for all the nations belong to you”, this is it.
But I don’t believe in a God like that. Even in the midst of my anger I don’t really believe in a God like that, I just want a God like that to bring down such judgment, though such desire always presupposes that God is going to judge just how I would…just who I would. And there is one thing I do know…that wouldn’t happen. We all have a part in this world. We all contribute to the best and the worst and if we affirm what Gandhi once taught, that we should “be the change we wish to see in the world”, then we surely need to get real about our introspection. As we experience our world, and it breaks our hearts again and again, I am reminded of the poet Mary Oliver, who once wrote about experiencing such deep sadness, saying…
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.
For if we choose at this crucial time in our history together, to close our hearts off to one another, or to accept the apparently easy road of vengeance, or to select once more the false premise of redemptive violence, then we will only feed that impending storm, as surely as the summer humidity raises up the thunderclouds today. When we have our questions about who counts, we have to have places to ask them. When we wonder how it is that we got to this place in our world, we need safe space to wonder how and to imagine what we could do to change it. And when our hearts get broken, as they will again, we need a place to tend to them. For if we can learn to live with our broken hearts, to have them broken open, then our capacity for love and compassion can grow…rather than dying off. It is a mighty task…a task as simple as “love your neighbor as yourself”…a task as impossible as “lover your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” I’m often quite certain that I’m not up to the task.
Yet I have chosen to follow this wandering preacher from Nazareth and I am reminded as I stand next to the temptation to retreat into my own bubble…that the Bible tells us Jesus was not a self-help guru, or a metaphysical therapist…he was an activist who cared deeply about the social causes around him. And when the question about whose lives mattered came up, as it did in this parable and so many other times in our gospels…
Instead of saying all lives matter, Jesus said, “Samaritan lives matter.”
Instead of saying all lives matter, Jesus said, “Children’s lives matter.”
Instead of saying all lives matter, Jesus said, “Gentile lives matter.”
Instead of saying all lives matter, Jesus said, “Jewish lives matter.”
Instead of saying all lives matter, Jesus said, “Women’s lives matter.”
Instead of saying all lives matter, Jesus said, “Lepers’ lives matter.”
Time and time again when Jesus is asked if all lives matter, he picks the most vulnerable around him and demonstrates that their lives matter to God, as if to say that we know best what makes for life and for what matters by caring for anyone who needs our care, no matter the tribe or label. We must know that someone else’s suffering is our suffering. We must unlearn some of the values that have been laid as the foundations of our culture. We must take them out of the systems we have created. And we must, first and foremost, understand our own hearts.
I’ve probably preached on this passage a dozen times, read it more, referred to it in articles and letters to the editor, in pleas to the legislature…but it has never seemed more poignant than right now. And that phrase that stands out to me today is this – what must I do? What must we do? For our prayers and thoughts are a good start, our hashtags and posts are a nice beginning…but something must change. First in us. So, what do we do?
Do we:
- Join our denomination, The United Church of Christ, which has committed itself to the process of having an ongoing Sacred Conversation on Race? Do we engage their curriculum on white privilege which is being developed by the national office and should be available later this summer? Do we engage ourselves in a serious conversation on race and privilege?
- Take our 5th Sunday this month…the Sunday we always do “alternative” worship, and do something really alternative, like go to church at First Baptist North, instead of here, rekindling that relationship that we used to have…beginning the dialogue?
- Send lunch or flowers or cookies to not only a police department near you, but also a community center in North Tulsa or to the Hispanic business association to let everyone involved in what we often polarize know that we are with everyone who also seeks the peace and wellbeing of everyone?
- Commit ourselves to growing our understanding at the Greenwood Cultural Center, to building our networks by attending public forums and events, to listening instead of talking, to “stay woke” at a time and in a place where we have gone to sleep on one another.
I think that Jesus would, of course, say yes. But more than this, before this even, I think he’d remind us of the importance of the seemingly insignificant, of the value of being kind…to whomever you see in a ditch. For our unity begins with our ability to be sorrowful with and for one another – every. single. other. Being kind is more than just a nice thing, or a way to make our world more pleasant. It is a choice about how we will be…about who, and whose, we are. Naomi Shihab Nye, a Palestinian-American woman who knows something of injustice, of sorrow, of violence and the shadow…wrote this poem:
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
AMEN.