An Elliptical Glory: From the Heart (Proper 10C)

From the Heart
Homily delivered the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 10; Year C RCL)
10 July 2016; 8:00 a.m. said, 10:00 a.m. sung Eucharist
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
Readings: Amos 7:7-17 and Psalm 82 or Deuteronomy 30:9-14 and Psalm 25:1-9; Colossians 1:1-14; Luke 10:25-37

God, take away our hearts of stone
and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Finding a dead body lying out in the open is a very disturbing experience. When Elena and I lived in West Africa, one Sunday morning we were running on the beach. She got ahead of me, as she usually did when we ran. I heard her start screaming for help and hurried to catch up with her. There beside us in the sand was what used to be a human being, now bloated and already a meal for the crabs. We ran to get the port authorities, who recovered the body, identified it as a fisherman who had fallen from his boat a week earlier a few miles up the coast, and returned it to his grieving family. Another time, on a trip into Lagos Nigeria, I spotted a body lying along side the road. My driver refused to stop to try to get help, since the area was notoriously known as the haunt of criminal gangs who would rob anyone who had the misfortune of stopping their car.

Today’s Gospel reading is a parable that describes just such a disturbing scene.

A lawyer, to test Jesus, asks Jesus a question of Jewish Law: “Master, of all the commandments in the Torah, what is the essential that I need to do to please God?” Jesus cautiously asks him what he thinks is the heart of the Law.

He replies, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart” (Deut. 6:4) and “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18). Jesus agrees: “That’s right. If you do that, you won’t have any problem pleasing God.”

But then the lawyer asks another question, seeking, as lawyers are wont, clear definitions of terms. “And who, rabbi, exactly is my neighbor?” He wants to know the exact scope of his obligation to love others so that he can have a clear idea of who it is that he is not obligated to love.

Different people of that age gave different answers to the question. Some said it was fellow observant Jews (Sir. 12:1-7), others, members of their own little Jewish sect (1QS 1.1-3, 9-10), others, the broader scope of humanity (Philo, Spec. Leg. 2.63).

Jesus answers the question not with a definition but with a story.

A man goes down the steep, dangerous road from Jerusalem to Jericho. He meets up with robbers, is beaten unconscious, stripped of all his clothing, and left for dead. But then by chance someone comes by. It is a Priest, commuting between his home in Jericho and his intermittent work in the Temple in Jerusalem. Surely a priest—a religious person and an exemplar—will help a fellow countryman who is almost dead, right?   But when he sees the man, he hurries to the other side of the road, and walks on. Then another religious leader, a temple assistant called a Levite, also comes along.   He too avoids what appears to be the naked corpse on the side of the road.

The Priest and Levite had reasons for not stopping. The Law of Moses stipulated that Priests and Levites said they must be ritually pure for their service in the Temple; any contact with a corpse brought with it ritual impurity.

At this point in the story, Jesus’ listeners realize that the man might actually die because he looks dead, because religious people won’t help him because they are scrupulously trying to follow the commandments of God. To be sure, the Law provided over-ride clauses where saving someone’s life or even helping them save their ox from the mire took precedence over various commandments. But such acts of mercy did not prevent or get rid of the ritual pollution.

Like good storytellers everywhere, Jesus here follows the rule of three: “an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scot, or perhaps a Rabbi, a Priest, and a Baptist Preacher walk into a bar.” Here is it a Priest, a Levite, and a…   Jesus’ audience knows it will be a normal resident of that part of the country, a Judean. He won’t be constrained by the heavier purity concerns and he’ll save our poor victim, right?

No. The third traveler is not a Judean. It is a Samaritan. Now to Jesus’ audience, a Priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan is like someone today telling story about Pope Francis, the Dalai Lama, and Usama bin Laden.

Samaritans were seen as contemptible half-breeds and heretics, immoral, ritually unclean, and contaminating.   The poor Jewish man who is about to die himself will be ritually polluted by accepting anything from the Samaritan. But at this point, he isn’t being particular.

When this Samaritan sees the wounded man, he stops, is moved to compassion, takes good care of him, and even provides for him.

Jesus closes his story, “Who do you think acted like a neighbor to that unfortunate man?”

The lawyer can’t even bring himself to say, “The Samaritan.” He replies abashedly, “the one who showed him compassion.”

“Go and do likewise. Be like that Samaritan,” is Jesus’ reply.

For Jesus, the lawyer has got it all wrong. The commandments to love God and to love neighbor are, above all else, commandments to love. When the lawyer asks in essence “and who exactly is it that I don’t have to love,” Jesus throws the parable at him to shake his worldview. Like a Zen koan, the parable is meant to shock us into a new way of feeling and perceiving.

We tend to take faith and religion as an outward set of rules and propositions about the world. You see it in the other scripture readings today: the passage from Deuteronomy says if you follow God’s rules, God will bless you; if you don’t you’ll suffer. That’s the difference between God’s own and the great unwashed. Us and them, divided by conformity to rules. The Psalm says it too: there are the righteous and the wicked. Help me, God, one of the righteous, to never suffer humiliation. Punish those who persecute me! Us and them, the righteous vs. the wicked. Me vs. my enemies. Colossians says it too: the saints, the children of light, vs. the wicked and those outside. May God bless you and make you one of the elect.

Yet even in passages that make this dichotomy and externalize faith, there are repeated reminders that what really matters is the heart. In Deuteronomy today: “the law is not far out there, but it is in your heart.”

Jesus taught repeatedly that life is not about us vs. them: we are all in this together. The sun and rain are gifts from God both for the godly and the wicked. Sinners who yearn for God are closer to the Kingdom than the religiously observant. It’s not about dividing the world into us vs. them by religion or ethnic observance: nothing that you eat defiles, but what you say, what comes from your heart, is what defiles or makes holy. Don’t ask “why did this bad thing happen to this person, what punishment God is meting out. Instead, ask what you can do to help.

“Who is my neighbor and who isn’t?” For Jesus, this is a line of identity group politics, profoundly immoral at its core. Because the question is not who is worthy or not of my compassion. The question is how can I show compassion to others, how can I treat as neighbors those beside me and before me.

This week was hard. On Tuesday, white police officers in Louisiana killed African American male Alton Sterling. No reasonable rule of use of deadly force could justify what happened. On Wednesday, it was the slaying in Minnesota of Philando Castile, a gentle elementary school educator who politely tried to follow the rules and instructions of the officer challenging him over a broken headlight. Both are grim reminders of how little progress we’ve made since Michael Brown was killed by a white police officer in Ferguson Missouri nearly two years ago, the event that launched the #BlackLivesMatter movement seeking to call the agents of state power in our society to common decency and fairness. Then on Thursday evening, five white Dallas police officers—Brent Thompson, Patrick Zamarripa, Michael Krol, Michael Smith, and Lorne Ahrens—were killed by a black sniper in what appears to be a profoundly misguided act to even the score. Violence has begotten violence. Hatred, in its incessant, hidden face of smiling white privilege, and in its brutal form of legally authorized violence against the underprivileged, has begotten hatred. Us vs. them. The right ones and the wrong ones.

These sad events have made many of us weep. After 9/11, Fred Rogers, known to most of us as Mr. Rogers, said this, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of ‘disaster,’ I remember my mother's words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.” Those who act from the heart and show compassion are present in almost all of these sad scenes. And that should give us hope.

Near the end of the week, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry made a statement about Black Lives Matter. He said when a house is on fire, you call 911. You do not say "all houses need to be cared for." You report the crisis at hand. When we say black lives matter we are not saying other lives don't. We are simply bringing attention to a crisis. We have a problem in this country. And we should not avoid it by speaking in generalities or looking at other needs.

This koan of Jesus asks, “what if we behaved as if there were no groups, as if there were no privilege or disadvantage, but simply all of us together, sharing a common humanity and caring for each other? Imagine a world were we help those in need simply because they need, not because of rules or boundaries.” Jesus did not say we need to pretend oppression is not there. His compassion is not a generic: “all lives matter.” It is always specific, especially toward the oppressed or marginalized: Samaritan lives matter, tax collectors matter, sinners, drunks, prostitutes, lepers, insane people—their lives all matter. This parable suggests that we never going to make any real progress in our efforts for justice and fairness unless we first start making compassion for those who are different from us as a basic rule of life.

Righteousness, says Jesus, comes from compassion. Justice comes from compassion. And compassion comes not from rules and group boundaries, but from the human heart.

In the name of Christ, Amen.

A Prayer for our Nation in Time of Trouble

All nurturing God, you have made of one blood all the peoples of the earth and created with great diversity and beauty each human being in your own image. Help us to see this your image in all your children, especially those who differ from us in any way. Grant that your holy and life-giving Spirit may so move every human heart and especially the hearts of the people of this land, that barriers which divide us may crumble, suspicions disappear, and hatreds cease; that our divisions being healed, we may live in justice and peace. You have bound us together in a common life. Help us, in the midst of our struggles for justice and truth, to communicate with each other without hatred, bitterness, or violence, and to work together with mutual forbearance and respect. Heavenly Father, in your Word you have given us a vision of that holy City to which all the peoples of the world bring their glory: Behold and visit, we pray, the cities of the earth, and especially of this our land. Renew the ties of mutual regard which form our civic life. Help us choose honest and able leaders. Enable us to eliminate poverty, prejudice, and oppression, that peace may prevail with righteousness, and justice with order, and that men and women of differing backgrounds and gifts may find with one another the fulfillment of their humanity; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.