So here is my sermon from two weeks ago. It went over very well, with certain exceptions. (There were some angry e-mails. Apparently, my honeymoon stage has ended at the internship. Several people have caught on to the fact that I am somewhere to the left of Cuba on the political/theological spectrum. Bless their hearts.) However, the vast majority of the congregation loved it, and they even applauded! Spontaneously! Awwww.
I should tell you, my favorite part of this sermon is that I manage to work Sam Waterston and the pope in there at the same time. I feel proud.
Text is Luke, the Good Samaritan story.
Lawyers are an interesting group of people. They have a pretty ambivalent reputation in our society, which frequently veers into the negative. Lawyer jokes are frequent, and much-laughed at. There’s that Shakespeare quote from Henry VI that’s quoted in times of strife—First thing we’ll do, let’s kill all the lawyers. Lawyers are popularly seen as the source of much bureaucratic red-tape and mischief in our society today, and somewhat akin to politicians on the scale of “people that cause great annoyance, but we should probably put up with anyway.”
However.
Have you noticed that the Law and Order franchise of shows enjoys unprecedented success? I have lost count of how many Law and Order shows that are now getting made, except that I know that they film all of them on the grounds of my seminary, and the guy who plays the District Attorney is now the chief spokesman for our fundraising campaign. (Yes, Sam Waterston is an Episcopalian! Who knew?)
As many shows as run on prime-time television, more and more of them seem to be about crimes committed and people solving them, according to the Rule of Law. Lawyers stepping in! Triumph of the legal process! CSI! The Closer! Boston Legal! The Practice! All those Law and Order shows! Sit for a minute and think about all those crime shows you can name—Matlock, Columbo, Murder She wrote, etc etc etc. We love these shows. Even more so now. In those shows, if you follow the rules, then the bad guys (easily identifiable!) are defeated and caught by the good guys. Who play by the rules. Because they are good.
So scoff as we might about lawyers, and tell as many lawyer jokes as we might, there’s a solid reason that TNT will show a 24 hour marathon of Law and Order reruns. There’s something about us, our culture, that thrives on the idea of order. The idea of boundaries. There is a way in which we are all lawyers—we all strive after that ideal of perfect order.
In our gospel story today, Jesus gets accosted by a lawyer concerned about…..the law. It makes sense. He would like to know, please, how to inherit eternal life. What should he do, exactly, in order to succeed at this game of life? What’s the secret?
Jesus answers, here in Luke, with an excellent summary of the Jewish Law. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.
That’s it.
But, this doesn’t quite cut it for our friend, the lawyer. He keeps going after Jesus. He wants to clarify the language, he wants footnotes, addendums, he wants add-ons. He wants specifics. He’s a good lawyer,it sounds like.
Tell me, exactly, please, If I am to gain this valuable thing, known herein as eternal life, by loving an entity known as ‘my neighbor,’ then who, exactly, please, is ‘my neighbor’?
He’s sure there must be a trap in there somewhere and he wants to find it. It sounds entirely too broad a Rule of Life to be practical—Love God, Love your neighbor, and that’s it.
So it is in response to this questioning that Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is a familiar story to us now. Most of us, probably, could recite the basics of this story blindfolded, upside down and underwater, so familiar are we with the characters and the plot. But many times, that familiarity can obscure what’s actually going on in the story itself.
In the story, we hear about a man who goes on a journey and ends up in trouble. Beaten and left for dead. Unable to help himself. He’s lying there, on a dangerous, desert road, where few people ever go, all bloody and broken, and he looks half dead.
Into this picture come a few ‘stock characters’, almost. A priest, and a Levite. They, like the lawyer!, know the law. They can recite it backwards, forwards, and in several different languages, and have devoted their entire lives to keeping it…which is precisely why they cross on the other side of the road.
Because, according to Mosaic law, to touch a dead body is to be defiled, and would require a lengthy process of cleansing. To come in contact with another person’s blood is extremely bad—blood symbolizes life itself, which only God has control over, and messing with someone else’s blood has extreme consequences. So touching blood is unclean. Is not done. So the priest and the Levite, both of whom know the finer points of the law, as does our lawyer friend, pass by, so as not to be defiled. They look, and they see a dead body, and the priest and the Levite follow the law.
But the Samaritan—who is not Jewish, who is part of a religious sect so hated by the Jewish people that the lawyer at the end of the story won’t even repeat his title—is not knowledgeable of the law. He doesn’t know any of this. So he wanders up, and discovers something that the other two never did. What they had taken for dead was, in fact, alive. And he fulfills the law as well, the law to love your neighbor as yourself.
There is an essential irony in the story of the Good Samaritan. The people we expect to do the right thing, to solve the problem, to catch the bad guys, to bring forth justice, don’t. The specifics fail. The loopholes let us down. The Law and Order method doesn’t work here. As much as the lawyer, and we, want the priest and the levite, the stereotypical Good Guys, to save the robbed man by virtue of the minutae of the law, it doesn’t happen. Instead, a bumbling Samaritan does. One of the other guys. And this makes us uncomfortable.
Because we liked those specifics so much. We like our boundaries and our boxes. We like the details, and all the little rules. It makes us more comfortable, because then we can tell at a glance who’s who. Who’s in and who’s out. Who’s one of us, and who’s not. When Jesus tells us that all we have to do for the reign of God is to love God and love our neighbor, that’s not always comforting. We are left without a sense of what EXACTLY we’re supposed to do. And it can be frightening.
If we are just to love God, how EXACTLY do we do that?
If we are just to love our neighbor, how EXACTLY do we do that?
We’re used to dealing with definitions, with boundaries. And we define things by opposing them to other things. We know what black is because it isn’t white—it’s the opposite. We know what the shore is because it isn’t the ocean. We know who we are because we do things differently from that other group.
When we are told that all we have to do is love, and everything else important will follow after…..all our precious, safe boundaries evaporate, and then where are we left?
The point here is not that our boundaries are bad. It is just that they are human-made. They are secondary. They are fallible. And when we forget that, and we hold them as divine, they hold us back from Jesus’s offer of eternal life. Life all around us. Life more abundant.
They restrict us from seeing the image of God in the other creatures of God that we encounter. They restrict us from seeing the image of God in ourselves. The priest and the Levite missed the life that was still in the man lying in the road. The Samaritan didn’t.
This past week, as I’m sure many of you know, Pope Benedict XVI issued a document that, in his words, reinterprets one of the major documents of Vatican II. I have been thinking a lot about this for the past few days, because the document states quite explicitly that the Roman Catholic Church is the only true church, and that other churches cannot be called so, in the eyes of Rome. Our bishops, our priests are not valid, and so, our church is not valid, says the pope.
This is deeply troubling—not only to be told, in public, by a generally respected leader of a huge worldwide church that your beloved church doesn’t really exist, even if you don’t agree, but for me, because of my host of Catholic relatives, whom I love dearly, and who have always supported me without question in my journey toward the priesthood.
I don’t quite know what the proper response is—it would be easy to dismiss it as a typical pronouncement of a hierarchical church that has just gotten worse and worse. But I know too many faithful, generous, heartfelt Catholics to be able to do that. And to go down that path would be to make the same mistake as the priest and the Levite on that desert road to Jericho. The same mistake that I think the Pope has made—to not see the life of God still present in another, despite all our categories and warnings. And think of all the life liable to be missed in this little church alone, not to mention our countless other sisters and brothers of other confessions!
We are called to see beyond boundaries. We are called to see outside of boxes. We are called to see the frailty and faultiness of human categories. We are sent to the other side of the road, to find the life still hidden in the dust. So let’s get going! Amen.
