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Sunday, July 11, 2010

The Seventh Sunday of Pentecost

Do Likewise

Amos 7:7-17; Luke 10:25-37

Reverend Richard E. Allen, Jr.

Recently I watched a man use a tool unlike any I had ever seen: a long straight level, with a ruler placed at a right angle into one end.  I don’t know its name, but this man knelt on the floor of the beautiful old house, using it with a facility that evidenced years of use.  “It’s sagging alright:  About four inches or so; but I think we can fix it.  It won’t be easy.  But it can be done.”  To me, “It wont’ be easy” meant “It won’t be cheap.”  So I asked,  “Exactly what’s wrong with the floor?”   “To use a technical term,” he said, “it’s crooked.”

The prophet Amos uses a similar image, to similar effect.  He reminds his own people that the Lord has higher standards for each of them individually, and for all of them together.  Amos even reminds the King of God’s holy standards.  Using a builder’s tool, a mason’s plumb line, Amos holds it out in front of him, and them, and saying “Here’s your problem.  You’re out of line, out of plumb with God and with your own beliefs.  You’re crooked.”  (Amos 7:7-9, New Revised Standard Version.)

Of course, one of the earliest messages of our faith our crookedness, our brokenness, our sinfulness.  The Hebrew scripture, still the largest part of our own Bible, reminds us that we are fallen, broken, wounded, and, yes, sinful. We want to do right, and good.  We hope to be holy.  We call on God to guide, keep, support, and sustain us.  But the God who comes to our support gives us a hard word:  We, too, are crooked.  Amos’ message to ancient Israel remains God’s message to post-modern America.  In spite of our best efforts at self-help, exercise, and even reducing our carbon footprint, we are selfish, greedy, and narcissistic.  In a word, we are crooked.  

Nor can we dismiss this message by shifting our focus to Jesus.  In today’s lesson, he is prophetic, too, holding up not a plumb line, but a story.  In some way’s it’s THE story of our faith, a story whose title has become synonymous with the ideals of both our faith and our culture:  the Good Samaritan.  Jesus, on his way to Jerusalem and an appointment with a Roman governor and a Roman cross, is asked to distill his teaching into a simple ethical imperative.  “Teacher,” he’s asked, “What must I do … [to live?]”  The questioner already knows the answer, one that our church carries as our mission:  Love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength; and love our neighbors as we love ourselves.  But that begs the follow up question, immediately posed to Jesus:  “But who IS my neighbor?”  The real question, of course, is only implied:  “Who is NOT my neighbor.”

In answer, Jesus tells this beloved story of a wounded man helped by an outcast, a story we remember well, even though it’s told only by Luke. We know the story’s summary:  a traveler is mugged, wounded, left for dead, and ignored by the identifiably religious. Eventually he is seen and cared for by a traveler who is despised in their culture, but so generous that we name him “good”.  Against this Samaritan, then, Jesus measures all of us who say we follow him, respect him, learn from him, or even love him.  Another preacher comments on both the Amos text and the parable:  “To those of us among the Chosen who know full well ‘what is written in the law,’ it is highly insulting to have a Samaritan shoved in our faces as an example of someone we should emulate. … [And, in the Amos lesson],” this preacher continues, “A plumb line is being held up against us.  We know what is written, we are credentialed as priests and Levites, and yet our behavior is a scandal to what we profess.”  (Bishop William H. Willimon, blog for Sunday, July 7, 2007; see http://theolog.org/2007/07/blogging-toward-sunday_09.html.)

The lessons for today challenge us not merely to profess our belief in Christ, because believing in Christ is more that proclaiming a creed.  And the lessons challenge us to more than belief itself, accepting without reservation a the established teachings; we’re called to more than accepting the faith in our hearts; we’re called to more than professing faith in a skeptical world; and we’re called to more than witnessing to our faith by keeping ourselves pure or holy in a world of sin.

Rather, we’re called to accept our own acceptance by God as a gift, and having been loved by God without reservation, love our neighbors with similar abandon.  I’m a Methodist, not a Lutheran, but Martin Luther helps me to get to the core of today’s lessons. We interpret the parable as a call to help others in need, which it is, of course.  And we therefore see ourselves as the “heroes” of the story.  But Luther taught that we, the church, are the wounded man, and the Samaritan is Christ himself, sent to do for us what we could not do for ourselves…get us out of the ditch of our sin.

For me, that’s the place to start, at least.  In the parable itself, Samaritan is not called “good,” but “compassionate.”  He understands the pain of the man in the ditch, because he has been in the ditch of rejection all his life.  Having been restored to the road, he sees others who need a similar restoration.  At its best, the church is the same:  having been loved by Christ, while we are yet sinners, we are called to share that same generous love with our neighbors.  And who are our neighbors:  any in need, regardless of their history, their belief, or even their sin.  Friends and foes alike are our neighbors.  Democrats, Republicans, or evenTea-party-ers and “tax-an-spend” knee-jerk liberals are our neighbors. Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Iraqis, Iranians, and North Koreans are our neighbors.  The addicted are our neighbors, and so are their dealers – not in what they do, but in who they are.  The poor of the Gulf of Mexico are our neighbors, easy enough; but so are the so-called masters of Wall Street, as difficult as it is for me to say that, much less to believe it. Because the God who loves us in spite our ourselves invites us to love others in the very same way.  As challenging an assignment, as rigorous a ‘plumb line’ as that may be, that is our calling as the people of God, because, when God holds God’s plumb line, we’re all crooked:  all of us, and each of us.

We who follow Christ know that we are loved, because we know that Jesus continues down the road to Jerusalem for the likes of us, the crooked.  Christ the outcast accepts his Roman cross because he trusts that his doing so is somehow, mysteriously, the road to healing for a crooked humanity in the ditch.  Christ’s love is that full, that expansive, that generous, that free, and that available to us.  It’s therefore available to our neighbors:  All of them; all the time; everywhere.

Let me end by telling you about Shane Claiborne, who was interviewed recently on “Speaking of Faith.”  When he was 21 – about 10 years ago – Claiborne and others founded a small Christian community in a row house in a poor neighborhood in Philadelphia.  They called it “The Simple Way,” and there they sought to put into practice the heart of Christ’s teachings.  A generation of young Christians are beginning to call Claiborne “the coolest Christian ever.”  Just hearing about him and his community gives me a new sense of hope for our faith and our church.  Listen to how he describes the vision of this new venture:  “We are trying to raise up an army, not simply of street activists but of lovers – a community of people who have fallen desperately in love with God and with suffering people, and who allow those relationships to disturb and transform them.”  (Speaking of Faith, July 1, 2010, transcript of the broadcast, and quoting Caliborne’s book, The Irrestistible Revolution:  Living as an Ordinary Radical.)  If you’re interested in a contemporary holy “plumb line” for our faith, you could hardly do better than that.  I believe that Amos would appreciate Claiborne, the people of The Simple Way, and the faith they seek to live.

This kind of faith in Christ – a faith that engages the world because God has already loved us – will change our world, if for no other reason than it changes us. 

Mamaroneck United Methodist, July 11, 2010. SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1

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