A Loathsome Stranger's Mercy (Proper 10C; Good Samaritan)

Rembrandt, The Good Samaritan

  A  Loathsome Stranger’s Mercy
Homily delivered Seventh Sunday of Pentecost (Proper 10; Year C RCL)
11 July 2010; 10:00 a.m. Morning Prayer Said
Congregation of the Good Shepherd
Beijing, China
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 my wife and I lived in West Africa several years ago, one Sunday morning we were running of the beach.  She got ahead of me, as she usually does when we’re running.  I heard her start screaming in terror and hurried to catch up with her.  There beside us, in sand at the high tide mark, was what used to be a human being, now bloated in the heat 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 about 25 miles up the coast, and returned it properly covered to his grieving family.  It was not the only corpse I saw in Africa.  Once, 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 often would rob anyone who has the misfortune of having to stop their car. 

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

A lawyer asks Jesus a question of Jewish Law: “Master, of all the 615 commandments in the Torah, 365 'Thou shalt not's' and 248 'Thou shalt's,” what is the essential that I need to do to please God? “ 

Luke says the lawyer is asking Jesus the question trying to test him (10:25).  Jesus is cautious, and asks the lawyer what he thinks the Law establishes as its core (10:26). 

The Lawyer replies in these words: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart” (Deut. 6:4) and then “Love your neighbor as yourself (Lev. 19:18). 

This epitome of the Law is probably Jesus’ own.  Matthew and Mark place it on the lips of Jesus himself as he replies to a lawyer or a scribe (Matt. 22:37-40; Mark 12:29-31).  The first of these commandments is part of the Shema, the basic creed of Judaism that every practicing Jewish male recites during morning prayer (Deut. 6:4); the second is a commandment found in Leviticus 19:18, part of dozens of rules enumerated in the  Leviticus Holiness Code (Lev. 17-26).

“Love God, then love your neighbor.”  Jesus agrees:  “That’s exactly right.  If you do that, you won’t have any problem pleasing God.” 

Then the story gets complicated.  The lawyer follows up with another question of law, seeking, as lawyers are wont to do, clear definitions of terms of law and the scope of their applicability.  “And who, rabbi, exactly is my neighbor?” 

Luke tells us that the lawyer asked the question in order to justify himself.  The point is clear.  The lawyer 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.  

Clearly other people had asked the same question about the Holiness Code’s commandment to love our neighbors.  The Holiness Code prescribes rules for God’s people living in God’s land, including special ones for God’s priests and their assistants in the Temple (Lev. 21-22).  It also gives rules regarding aliens living in the midst of God’s people, both how to treat them and what is expected of them.   It seems to distinguish between “Israelites" or “your people” from “aliens living in your midst” as well as “your neighbors.”  It is not completely obvious from the text whether “neighbors” includes only fellow Israelites, all resident aliens also, or only aliens who keep the rules.  One text, however, clearly also says “The alien who reside with you shall be to you as the citizens among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.” (Lev. 19:34).  

So the legal question “who is my neighbor” was a point of discussion, and different people gave different answers to it. In the inter-testamental Book of Sirach, we read, “give to the devout, but do not help the sinner” (Sir. 12:1-7).   Here the distinction between your fellow countryman and a neighbor is whether one keeps the Law or has the reputation of being religious.  In the Manual of Discipline in the Dead Sea Scrolls, we read, “… seek God with all your heart and all your soul, . . . love all the sons of light, and hate all the sons of darkness” (1QS 1.1-3, 9-10).  Here, even fellow Jews, if they do not accept the legal interpretations of the Dead Sea Scroll sect, are considered beyond the pale of being “neighbors.”   On the other hand, the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria two centuries before the common era wrote, “God asks ... [us] to love him . . . and serve him with . . .[our] whole soul” (Spec. Leg. 1.299-300) and says that this is a “duty to God as shown by piety and holiness, and a duty to men as shown by humanity and justice” (Spec. Leg. 2.63).   Neighbors here appear to be all fellow human beings. 

Jesus’ reply to the question is a story that turns many expectations of that time and place totally on their head.

 Dundee Parish Church (St. Mary's, Church of Scotland) 

Parable of the Good Samaritan

A man goes down the dangerous road from Jerusalem to Jericho.  Remember Jerusalem is 2700 feet above sea level while Jericho is 800 feet below it.  With only 17 miles between, it means there is a 200 foot drop every mile.  There are lots of switchbacks in the steep road where many nooks and crannies can easily hide crooks and baddies. 

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 example of doing the right thing—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.  

Now we mustn’t think too ill of the Priest or the Levite.  The Law of Moses stipulated that Priests and Levites had to be ritually pure for their service in the Temple, and also clearly stated that any contact with a corpse contaminated and brought with it ritual impurity.  

It is probably just about at this point in the story that Jesus’ listeners realized that the fact that the man looked dead might in reality cause his actual death through lack of care, and all because of religious people scrupulously trying to follow the commandments of God. 

To be sure, the Law did provide over-ride clauses where saving someone’s life or even helping them save their ox from the mire took precedence over purity requirements.  But even here, such acts of mercy and human sympathy did not get rid of the pollution thus incurred. 

Like good storytellers in any culture, Jesus here follows the rule of three.  We often hear jokes about an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scot, or other ones about a Rabbi, a Catholic Priest, and a Baptist Preacher.  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 on his way is not a Judean.  It is a Samaritan.

Now to Jesus’ Jewish audience, having a Priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan being the three is like someone today telling story and having the three be the Pope, the Dalai Lama, and Usama bin Laden, or maybe Billy Graham, Mother Teresa, and the head of the Mafia.   

Samaritans were seen as contemptible half-breeds, heretics and blasphemers, allies with the foreign occupiers, and immoral.  They themselves were considered by Jews to be 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 particular about who he can accept help from.  Better unclean and alive and than unclean because you’re dead. 

When this Samaritan sees the wounded man, he stops, is moved to mercy, takes good care of him, and even provides for him as if he were a family member.  

Note that the Samaritans also had their own version of the Torah, and the same basic rules about corpses were found there.  But this Samaritan risks contamination by his own lights and helps the half-dead person on the side of the road. 

Jesus closes his story answering the Lawyer’s question “who is my neighbor?” by saying, “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. 

This answer by Jesus places him squarely on one side of a major division within the Biblical tradition. 

Walther Bruggemann, in his magisterial Theology of the Old Testament, points out that throughout the Hebrew scriptures, one finds two great thematic threads. On the one side, there is the striving for purity and ritual holiness, for being special and set aside for God’s service.  “You shall be holy for I am holy,” we read in Leviticus, and there follows hundreds of detailed rules setting boundaries and defining categories to help achieve holiness.  On the other side there is striving for justice, for treating people, especially the marginalized, decently and fairly. 

The two themes often seem in opposition.  The priests and the Law tend to talk a lot about purity and holiness.  The prophets tend to talk about dealing with others justly, especially those most in need.  For Samuel, Amos, Isaiah, Micah and others God says things like:  “I expect obedience, not sacrifice.” “I hate your sacrifices because you mistreat the widow and the orphan.”    “All I really ask of you is to treat the poor fairly, and to walk humbly with me.”  For the priests and teachers of halachic law, however, God say things like, “You will be Holy for I am Holy, says the Lord.”  “You shall not pollute the land with impurity, or I will destroy you.”  “You shall drive out pollution from among your midst and separate yourself from uncleanness.” 

Bruggemann says that the two traditions are both important and mutually corrective. The boundaries established by the Law are what define and preserve the People of God, and allow ethical monotheism to flourish.  But if holiness is not tempered with the call for social justice, it becomes empty ritual, a mode of oppression, and dies.  On the other hand, calls for social justice in the absence of an authentic call to holiness rapidly degenerate into the most obvious self-serving form of interest-group politics.  That’s why it’s love God first, and then love one’s neighbor.  

It is very important to note that in the Gospels, whenever social justice is placed in conflict with ritual purity and Jesus is asked to decide between them, in every single case he opts for social justice.  For him, justice trumps purity and holiness in this sense every time.  

It has to do with his understanding of God as the God of everyone, not just of the Jewish nation, or righteous people.  “God makes the sun shine and the rain fall on both the righteous and the wicked,” he says (Matt. 5:45).  “You have heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbors and hate your enemies, but I say, love your enemies’,” he says (Matt. 5:43). Thus his answer about “who is my neighbor?”  

Jesus sees that the Lawyer’s question has framed the world wrong.  The commandments to love God and to love neighbor are, above all else, commandments to love. When the lawyer tries to interpret them by asking in essence “and who exactly is it that I don’t have to love,” Jesus throws a parable at him.  The intent is to shake his world view.  Like a Zen koan, the parable is meant to shock the lawyer into a new way of feeling and perceiving. 

Professor Klyne Snodgrass in his recently published master work on the parables Stories with Intent says this:  “This parable is evidence of what is obvious elsewhere:  Jesus will not allow boundaries to be set so that people may feel they have completed their obligation to God.  Love does not have a boundary where we can say we have loved enough, nor does it permit us to choose those we will love, those who are ‘our kind.’ With this parable, Jesus in effect says, ‘You should know already from Lev. 19:34 that the love commandment extends to the stranger (or traveler) in your midst.’’” 

Love knows no boundaries, and, in the words of St. Paul, “love never ends.” 

All of us have our ways, like the lawyer, of seeking to justify ourselves and say to the God who calls us to love, “Enough, already!”  We all too often use boundaries as a means to do this, whether national, ethnic, political, gender, or even what we consider to be moral boundaries. 

We do this because it is easy.  It is, in fact, too easy, since we know that we as creatures live and die by boundaries.  We need definitions and limits, or our lives are chaotic and unordered.  Boundaries are generally good, and something we all need.   And this is the case whether we are talking moral boundaries, legal boundaries, or personal space and autonomy boundaries.  We need them because without them we are messes. 

But we must never let boundaries become a strait-jacket that makes us unable to reach out our arms in love to those in need.  

Good fences may indeed help make good neighbors, but not if we do not chat across the fences, and as needed reach over them. 

I challenge each of us this week to look at ourselves.  Take 10 or 15 minutes during your prayer time or meditation time, or even exercise time, and ask these questions:  1) Where am I transgressing boundaries with resulting harm to myself or others? 2) Where am I using boundaries as an excuse to not do the right thing?

Once you have some answers, then look again at this story. 

Remember that lawyer and his self-justifying question.  And then really think about the story of that loathsome stranger doing kindness to a fellow human being, no matter how different, no matter how alien.

And go and do likewise. 

In the name of God,  Amen. 

Set Free to Love (Proper 8 Year C; epistle)

Set Free to Love

Homily delivered Fifth Sunday of Pentecost (Proper 8; Year C RCL)
27th June 2010; 8:00 a.m. Said Eucharist
Parish Church of St. John the Baptist, Seattle Washington
Readings: 2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14; Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20;
or 1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21; Psalm 16;
Galatians 5:1, 13-25; Luke 9:51-62

For freedom Christ has set us free.  Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery...     For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.
Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. (Gal. 5:1, 13-25)

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

In today’s epistle reading from his letter to the Galatians, Paul uses the image of liberation, or setting free from captivity or slavery, to describe what Jesus Christ has done for us. “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”

He is defending what he calls the “freedom we have in Christ” from co-religionists who argue that those who claim to follow God should follow God’s commandments found in Holy Scripture.   Today I won’t go into the whole sorry story of the Judaizers and their conflict with Paul.   Suffice it to say that Paul’s opponents want his gentile converts to follow the commandments of God as found in the only Bible they or Paul knew, the Hebrew Scriptures.   For them, following God meant following the Law, or at least making the effort.   They have told people Paul has brought into the Church that what he has told them about Christ and living in the Spirit isn’t enough.  They need a fuller view of God’s plans for them, and they need to do more. 

It is an understandable position: how can people claim to join a religion and then flaunt its basic boundary markers?   And how can people claim that they are getting close to God when they are unwilling to submit to the clear rules God has given? 

Clearly, the people in Galatia just want to do the right thing.   The appeal to “do more” and “get with the true program” of the Church is one that is with us in every age.   When our spiritual life gets a bit stale, we feel the need to do something more to get some of the fire back, to recapture the excitement and thrill of when God first spoke to us individually.  Haven’t we all wanted on occasion to be just a little closer to God through some technique or discipline that some religious authority has pointed out to us? 

That’s actually what religion is all about.  The Latin word, “religio” comes from the root “to rebind,” or “to bind tightly.”  It is from the same root where get the word "ligatures."  It also related to the root of the Latin word for Law, “lex, legis” where we also get our word "legislature."  Religion is all about rules, about limiting freedom so that we can be closer to God.  It’s about following rules so we can feel closer to God, right?

To judge from the way the verses were selected for today’s Lectionary, you might think that Paul is arguing a similar position.  Immediately after the phrase “for freedom Christ has set us free; do not then fall back into slavery,” the lectionary skips several verses and then has “only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence . . . ,” and sins like “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. . . those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God” (Gal. 5:20-21).  

That skip in the Lectionary gives the impression that Paul is arguing against a relapse into the slavery of sinful behavior.    And to be quite honest, it is not a bad impression to have.  Most sin does have the character of addiction or compulsion about it.  If we persist in it, we become enslaved to it.  We lose our free will in regards to it.  That’s just the nature of sin. 

Such experience of slavery is the reason that Twelve Step recovery programs take as their starting point the need for an admission of powerlessness against the addiction, whatever it is.  An addict, whether it be to alcohol, drugs, overeating, sexual compulsions, or vicious behavior, has lost his or her freedom.  Step One, “we admitted we were powerless over (fill in the blank) and that our lives had become unmanageable” is the starting point in recovery. 

But Paul’s argument about freedom and the need to not relapse into slavery is not about relapse into sinful behavior.   It’s about relapse into religion.  It’s about trying to make yourself feel better about yourself by piling on new behavioral standards that we think will make us right before God.   It’s about mistaking rules for God, and mistaking the feeling of closeness to God we get from keeping rules with actually being close to God. 

In the verses the Lectionary skipped over, we find the heart of Paul’s argument.  Let me paraphrase it here generic terms apart from the specifics of the circumcision debate:

Again I declare to everyone who wants to sign up for religious rules, that they then must keep all of the rules, all the time. When you try in this way to prove to yourself, to others, or to God that you’re a good person, you have by that very fact alienated yourself from Christ; you have fallen away from his grace.  But in contrast to this, it is by faith or trusting in God that we Christians eagerly await through the Spirit the righteousness for which we hope. For when it comes to Jesus Christ, keeping rules or breaking them is irrelevant. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love. (Gal. 5: 3-6)

Paul’s argument lies behind much of the theology of Saint Augustine.  It later was a turning point for Martin Luther, and thus became the major point of argument in the Protestant reformation, prompting Rome at one point to formally define that it was St. Peter, and not St. Peter and St. Paul together, who led the Church after Jesus’ death.  As a result of this later way Paul has been used, we often read St. Paul as if “faith” and “belief” are themselves acts of following religious rules, and lose the whole import of Paul’s meaning.

Near the beginning of his letter, he says to the Galatians who have been persuaded by this desire for more, “I am astonished that you are so deserting quickly me, the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to some other gospel—no that’s not right, because what you are turning to is not really a gospel—it’s not ‘good news’—at all” (Gal 1:6-7). 

The tone throughout the letter is shrill.  Like an email written all in capital letters, he is fairly shouting.  (In fact, near the end of the letter, he even takes up the scribe’s pen and says, “SEE HOW LARGE LETTERS I AM WRITING THIS IN,WITH MY OWN HAND?”) 

He is arguing here passionately what he cautiously and rationally develops in the more leisurely letter to the Romans.  He contrasts right conceived as obeying rules (the Law) with right conceived as a loving response to overwhelming and unmerited love (grace).  He says Law condemns while grace approves.  Law hardens hearts while grace brings the Spirit.  Law kills, the Spirit gives life.  Law points out our failings, grace gives us the power to change. 

The freedom Paul talks about is not the absence of compulsion, but rather the ability to do what God wants us to do, and to do what our heart truly desires—our true heart, the heart God intended when he created us. 

He is talking from personal experience, as he notes in the opening of the letter (Gal. 1:11-24; cf. Acts 7:58; 9:1-19).  He had been a deeply religious man who tried to keep all the rules and spent a lot of time arguing about what the rules were.  He persecuted his co-religionists who had gone after the Jesus doctrine because they were too lax when it came to keeping the rules. 

Conversion of St. Paul

But in a wholly unexpected turn of events, Jesus found him, and loved him despite all.  And so he realized that this Jesus had indeed been raised by God from the dead.  In his life, death, and coming forth, he had freed us from the hopelessness of chasing after rules, of finding ourselves addicted, of being unable to be the kind of people we want to be.   He heard stories about Jesus’ deliberately breaking purity laws in order to help others, of deliberately seeking out the sinners, drunks, traitors, and prostitutes.  He heard stories about Jesus saying God’s feast was for all people, not just for law-abiding Jews.  And so he realized that God had acted in a new way, and gone beyond nation, beyond rules of good and bad, beyond religion.    Overwhelmed by the love of the one who had sought him out and changed his heart, he became a messenger to the gentiles he had previously seen as beyond God’s grace.  He preached to them the story of grace, calling it his “good news.”  

So he was very, very upset when some of the people he had shared this grace with started talking about “getting a little extra” into their religious lives by following an added discipline that would set them apart as God’s own.  That is why he writes the letter to the Galatians.

In the process, he ends up turning many images from Hebrew Scriptures on their heads.  For him, a gentile Christian accepting circumcision is a relapse into slavery like that of paganism, not entry into the chosen people once freed by the Exodus (Gal. 5:1).  For him, the slave Hagar in the Abraham story represents the Jewish people while Sarah represents Gentile Christians who have not become Jews (Gal. 4:21-31). 

He says that freedom in Christ is in fact like slavery in one sense.  Because it is based in love, it involves constraints, though these are not reducible to mere rules. "In love, be like slaves to one another," he says (Gal. 5:13). 

Francoise Sagan, author of Bonjour Tristesse

Francoise Sagan, the French novelist, was brutally honest about how love limits freedom in an interview she gave to Le Monde.  She said she was satisfied with the way she had lived her life and had no regrets.  The interviewer said, “ Then you have had the freedom you wanted.”  Sagan replied: “Yes… I was obviously less free when I was in love with someone . . . But one’s not in love all the time.  Apart from that, … I’m free.” 

For Paul, love by definition places constraints on our freedom, and involves risk.  That’s why he says we must be like slaves in our love to each other.  Paul knows that love is risk, and that love is costly.  That is why he argues against not only those who make rules of right and wrong into a god, but also against those who ignore right and wrong when they they make their own wills, passions and drives into a god.

Paul contrasts the disordered works of the self-absorbed with what his calls the “the fruit of the Spirit”: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.  

With a sly smile, he adds, “there are no rules against these things.” 

For St. Paul, it all boils down to this:  Jesus died on the Cross to save us from everything that enslaves us.   The Spirit is his gift that empowers us to actually be the kind of people God wants us to be.  Maybe not right now completely, but enough of a taste so that we have hope for what is in store. 

Let us not heed the siren call of trying to feel better about ourselves by keeping rules.   Let us keep our faith firmly rooted in the Love of Christ as shone on the cross.  We need to respond in gratitude, nailing to his cross our selfishness and persistent desire to find anything other than God to make us feel better about ourselves.

In the name of God,  Amen.