Sermon: The One Who Showed Mercy

Grace Presbyterian Church

July 10, 2022, Pentecost 5C

Luke 10:25-37

The One Who Showed Mercy

It is such a familiar story, what’s a pastor to do with it? 

It is maybe the most well-known parable Jesus told, rivaled only by the parable of the prodigal son. It’s a full-fledged story, with plot and development and conflict and all the good stuff that makes a story compelling enough to hear. 

Well, one thing we can do is back up and remind ourselves that the story didn’t just come out of thin air; Jesus is – cue the dramatic music – being interrogated. By a lawyer. 

The lawyer is, as Luke tells the story, testing Jesus. Throughout the different gospels different parties at different times do just that, trying to trap Jesus in some kind of bind that would either set him up to be found in error theologically or cause him to fall out of favor with the people. The lawyer (not the kind of lawyer we think of nowadays but an interpreter of the law) seems to be probing Jesus for some kind of theological misstep about the commandments. 

Instead, Jesus (as he so often does) turns the question on his interrogator, who could hardly get away with declining to answer – it was his job to answer questions about the law. So, he answered, and did so appropriately, turning to words from Deuteronomy 6 (with the "mind" added to the heart and soul and might - here given as "strength" - found in that passage). That's the part of the scripture reading covered in that first hymn we sang, and it also shows up in different contexts in the gospels of Matthew and Mark. 

In this case, with the famous parable coming right after it, it's easy to overlook this summation of the "greatest commandment," but we shouldn't. While here it is quoted by Jesus's interrogator, in those other gospel context Jesus himself states it as "the greatest commandment" and "one like unto it," to use the King James style of speech. If you were seeking to summarize the faith in as few words as possible, this isn't your worst possibility. 

Jesus more or less congratulated him and invited him to go his way in peace and security. This of course left the lawyer stewing in the same kind of humiliation that Jesus’s would-be interlocutors typically endured; their questioning turned against them, their duplicity exposed. 

But in this case the interrogator can’t leave well enough alone, and – using a long-favored legal tactic – tries to recover himself by questioning the terminology in the answer: “And who is my neighbor?” 

The novelist and Presbyterian pastor Frederick Buechner offers this take on the lawyer and his question:

He presumably wanted something on the order of: "A neighbor (hereinafter referred to as the party of the first part) is to be construed as meaning a person of Jewish descent whose legal residence is within a radius of no more than three statute miles from one's own legal residence unless there is another person of Jewish descent (hereinafter to be referred to as the party of the second part) living closer to the party of the first part than one is oneself, in which case the party of the second part is to be construed as neighbor to the party of the first part and one is oneself relieved of all responsibility of any sort or kind whatsoever."

Instead Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan, the point of which seems to be that your neighbor is to be construed as meaning anybody who needs you. The lawyer's response is left unrecorded.

Well, not that I want to be in the position of questioning a Pulitzer Prize nominee like Buechner, but one small part of the lawyer’s response actually is recorded for us. And it’s a pretty revealing answer. 

Upon finishing the parable, Jesus again turns on his would-be interrogator. Having told the story in which a Samaritan steps up, above and beyond the call of duty, to aid a badly wounded man who had been passed over by members of the religious elite, he again questions the lawyer, asking him to identify which of the three travelers in the story had been a neighbor to the wounded traveler. Do pay attention to the lawyer’s response:

“The one who showed him mercy.”

On one level, of course, the lawyer has answered rightly. Now the way the Greek is constructed in this particular sentence, a more literal translation would read something like “the one who did mercy to him.” That’s actually a theologically superior way to put it, if not so wonderful grammatically. “Mercy”, like so many of the loaded theological words we use, is active. It’s not a feeling or emotion or empathetic reaction. Mercy is, even if English doesn’t quite capture it, something you do. And this traveler had indeed “done mercy” to the wounded man, unmistakably so. And Jesus’s answer to the lawyer acknowledges this, as he leaves him with the command “Go and do likewise.”

But notice the lawyer’s answer again, even in the theologically superior but grammatically awkward version:

“The one who did mercy to him.”

The three passing travelers in this story didn’t get names, but they did get pretty clear identifiers that Jesus’s listeners would have immediately recognized. One was a priest, a religious authority, and the second was a Levite, a member of that tribe set apart since Moses’s time for service in the Temple. Two figures to whom would be attributed qualities of righteousness as a part of their standing among the people.

The third man was a Samaritan. And the lawyer couldn’t even say the word.

In the time of Elijah and Elisha, the prophets who figured into the scriptures and sermons the past three weeks, Samaria was simply a region of Israel, the northern of the two kingdoms that had resulted from the machinations of those who succeeded Solomon as king after his death (the other kingdom was Judah, which was centered in Jerusalem). The city of Samaria sometimes served as the seat of government of that northern kingdom, and a lot of Elijah's activity was concentrated there. By the time of today’s story, though, all of the region is simply lumped into a larger Roman province called Palestine. Yet over the centuries a virulent schism had erupted between those Jews (whose worship was centered on the Temple in Jerusalem) and the Samaritans, who were, technically, Jews, but whose practice had evolved to worship on Mount Gerizim in their own territory. That site was, they claimed, the original holy place in Israel, dating to the time of Joshua, as opposed to Jerusalem, which only became prominent during the era of King David. In short, a disagreement over what might seem to outsiders an arcane theological point had become a hard-and-fast schism, with Jerusalem Jews literally going out of their way to avoid even passing through the region of Samaria, much less actually having anything to do with Samaritans.

For Jesus to invoke the third, merciful traveler as a Samaritan no doubt provoked agitated bristling, and probably an oath or two, among his listeners. That’s if they were a well-behaved group. And let's be clear; had the parable been told in Samaria, and the identity of the third passerby been Judean, reactions would most likely have been extremely similar. Vitriol ran both ways.

It was a two-sided provocation that Jesus put before his listeners. By no means would any self-respecting Jew of what we might call the Jerusalem party even think of defiling himself by dealing with a Samaritan at all; being a neighbor to a Samaritan was out of the question. At the same time, no such self-respecting Jew would conceive of a Samaritan being a neighbor to a Jew. It would never happen, they might say, the way a plantation overseer of the 1850s might say that a member of the same skin color as the slaves he ruled over would never be President of the United States. 

Such was the vitriol that our lawyer couldn’t even vocalize that “the one who did mercy” could even possibly be a Samaritan. 

It’s easy enough for us to grasp the main point of the parable, and to apply to it Frederick Buechner’s point that a neighbor is basically anybody who needs you. But it’s not always easy or comfortable - or, frankly, desirable to us - to get Jesus’s point that “anybody” really does mean anybody. We live in a world that isn't prepared to give up our grudges, our ancient hostilities, our prejudices or superior attitudes or whatever ruses we use to divide ourselves and keep ourselves set apart from and above others. It would never happen. It can’t happen. 

I won’t let it happen.

Our society is pretty good at demeaning and dehumanizing “the other.” The world out there calls them job-stealers and threatens to build a great big wall to keep them out, never mind who’s going to pick all those tomatoes and strawberries in south Florida. Or people call them terrorists and yell "go back where you came from" even if they were born here, never mind that they are much more likely to be the ones that the actual terrorists kill first.

Or, when they get shot, people just call them thugs.

Jesus has this nasty habit of not caring one whit about our preferences or prejudices or whatnot. The world tries to respond with “but Jesus, they’re…” and Jesus cuts us off and finishes the sentence “your neighbor.” Society protests “but he’s a…” and Jesus won’t let us finish but says “the one you should imitate.” See, the kingdom of God doesn’t honor those divisions we create. The kingdom of God sees need and moves to meet it. End of discussion. If we want to claim to be part of that kingdom of God, if we call ourselves disciples, we’d better move that way.

Which one … was a neighbor to the man who fell among the thieves?

The one who did mercy to him.

Go and do likewise.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise indicated): #---, O love your God with all your heart; #707, Take Thou Our Minds, Dear Lord; #757, Today We All Are Called to Be Disciples 

Sermon: Do the Easy Thing

 Grace Presbyterian Church

July 3, 2022, Pentecost 4C

2 Kings 5:1-19a; Luke 4:21-30

 

Do the Easy Thing

 

 

We were introduced to Elisha last week, as he doggedly held on to Elijah until the very last, taking up Elijah’s prophetic mantle as well as his clothing mantle in the process. As we come to him this week he has been in that role for a while now, and aside from that angry cursing at a group of young boys who taunted him over his baldness, his prophetic term has been rather calmer than his predecessor’s. He has his quirks, to be sure; when a trio of kings came to him for an oracle in 2 Kings 3, he refused to speak until a musician was provided to play – perhaps making Elisha the first beat-poet prophet. (That scripture reading tells us that once that musician began to play, "the power of the Lord came on him." Maybe some of us preachers today ought to give that a try.)

In today’s reading from 2 Kings, Elisha remains almost a background character, only appearing in person at its close but deeply involved in events nonetheless. While a powerful army commander and multiple kings are involved in the story - people who expect to be important - some of the biggest roles in the story are played by people who are anonymous to us, utterly insignificant in the social strata of the time; the servants of the general Naaman and his wife. 

Take the young servant girl who served Naaman’s wife, for instance. She had apparently been taken captive from her home in Israel, presumably during one of many skirmishes between Israel and Aram. One might guess that she was fully homesick for the land of her birth. In this servant role she would have been well aware both of Naaman’s military prowess and of the skin condition that threatened his stature, no matter how successful he was in the field. It would have been easy for her to say nothing. It would also have been easy for her to rejoice in Naaman’s potential downfall (quietly, to be sure; no point in chancing punishment); after all, he had defeated her homeland. How the mighty hath fallen and all that, you know.

Is it possible that this servant girl remembered her first calling? Such gloating, or even simple refusal to offer help in that time of suffering, simply was not reconcilable with what she knew of Israel’s God. Yahweh was a God who heals, and she remembered the prophet of that God in her homeland who healed others. With all of this in mind, she spoke up to her mistress, telling her about that prophet in the region of Samaria, which set in motion the events of today’s story. To her, that was the right thing and the easy thing to do.

Elisha himself also shows us what it is to remember whose we are. Like any good prophet, Elisha has had a testy relationship with the monarchy so far, apparently getting along better with Jehoshaphat, then the king of Judah, than with the ruler in his own land of Israel. Nonetheless, Elisha reached out to Israel’s king at a moment when that king was apparently forgetting whose he was. By his intervention, Elisha helps avert a potential disaster between Israel and Aram, and incidentally reminds that king that there is indeed a prophet of the one true God in the land (Israel's king Jehoram was an idol-worshiper like his father Ahab). Later in the story Elisha will also demonstrate whose he really is as well, refusing Naaman’s very generous offers of reward for his healing.

For Naaman, though, first he has to learn whose he is, which goes against everything he has been taught to believe. He was a man of power and accustomed to wielding authority over others even as he also served his king. The humiliating spectre of his disease threatened that. Being so desperate as to take the advice that a foreign servant girl gave to his wife was bad enough, but to get shuffled off from the king to some prophet out in the Samarian backwoods, only to be handled by some messenger boy was too much. I am the general of a great military power, he must have thought. Who are these people, these mere Israelites, these nobodies, to treat me this way? He might well have started thinking about how to bring these insolent people down once and for all. 

Fortunately, more of those anonymous servants are there to save the day, persuading Naaman that it only made sense do the extremely simple thing that the prophet asked of him. Finally he takes his Jordan River bath and is “over-healed”, his skin being made like that of a young boy.

It seems that a lot of people overlook an important point in this story: Naaman converts! He declares his profession of faith in verse 15 – “there is no God in all the earth except in Israel.” He’s still a little confused about some things, not realizing that that same God would be with him even in Aram and wanting to take along some Israelite dirt, but it’s a start. After Elisha rebuffs his attempts to pay, Naaman confesses his dilemma; his job required him to support his master, who still worshiped that foreign non-god, even physically in that act of idol-worship. He seeks pardon of Yahweh through Elisha, who sends him on his way in peace. Whatever else he may have had to learn, Naaman had picked up one important thing: he knew whose he was, he knew the Lord who held not only his healing but his very life in his hands, and that this Lord would still be whose he was, first and foremost.

But let's not overlook this central point in the story, and just how much Naaman's pride almost undid everything. Look again at Naaman's ranting after Elisha has first given him the instruction on how to be healed. First, this one: 

"I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy?

 

Naaman was expecting a big production number, something of a spectacle to be made over a Very Important Person like himself. It's not hard to imagine that Elisha's predecessor Elijah might have given exactly that kind of spectacle if he had deigned to intervene at all. But Elisha doesn't even leave the house; he sends these instructions via messenger - another servant, in other words. How in the world could a general who could crush Israel if he so chose be expected to take instruction from a mere servant?

Then there was this bit of ranting:

"Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters in Israel? Could I not wash in them, and be clean?"

 

Here's where his Aramean nationalism is showing. Why do I have to dunk myself in this podunk river when there are great and mighty rivers back home I could immerse myself in? Who does this jerk think he is, anyway? Fortunately those servants (we have no idea if they were Aramean or were captured from some other foreign nation) talked some sense into Naaman, and he finally went to the river and obeyed the instructions he had been given.

It's worth noting that something like a kind of nationalism attaches to our gospel reading from Luke when Jesus recounts this event in his first visit to his hometown after starting his public ministry. All he has to do is mention this healing, along with Elijah's help to a widow in Sidon during a famine, and the crowd literally tries to throw him off a cliff. Elisha's intervention here might have gotten Israel out of another battle with Aram (roughly equivalent to Syria today), but it probably didn't win him a lot of fans in Israel.

Anyway, not only was Naaman healed by the time his seventh dip was done, but he was even over-healed; his flesh was cleaned "like the flesh of a young boy" which we can safely assume Naaman was not. It's enough to cut through all the pride and bluster and bring Naaman to a completely different understanding of ... well, of everything. He makes haste to return to the prophet and deliver that remarkable confession noted above. All of this comes about because a man who was looking for some great thing to do was finally talked into doing the easy thing he was given to do.

Do we fall into this trap sometimes? Does the church get obsessed with doing some big public spectacle of a thing to the detriment of carrying out the basic work God has given the church to do? 

One of the initiatives of the Presbyterian Church (USA), also taken up by the St. Augustine Presbytery of which we are a part, is the Matthew 25 Initiative, taking its inspiration from the well-known parable at the end of that chapter known as the "parable of the sheep and the goats." The three focus points developed from that scripture for this initiative are:

·      Building congregational vitality.

·      Dismantling structural racism.

·      Eradicating systemic poverty.

That sounds rather intimidating, to be sure; but go back to the source and look at those things Jesus talks about in Matthew 25:

"I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me."

 

How much of that do we already do? Not all of it, but a good bit.

There will be times when the church, or maybe some of us as individuals, are called upon to do harder things. But the first thing is to do the basic, easy things that God has set before us, some of which we do almost by reflex here. 

Sometimes the hardest thing is to do the easy thing. Naaman almost ruined everything by being unwilling to go dunk himself in a river. Let us never get so caught up in anything that would distract us so that we fail to do the most basic things God has set before us.

For the obedience to do the easy thing, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #298, Lord, You Give the Great Commission; #312, Take Us As We Are, O God; #719, Come, Labor On

 

they launched a rocket tonight

they launched a rocket tonight

seventy-four miles north of here

 

we were promised a big show

by very enthusiastic resort staff

and so

a small but notable crowd

perhaps a dozen and a half

maybe two dozen

gathered on the overlook by the beach

which promised (we were told) an excellent view

 

the numbers gathered on the overlook

while the moon

stood stalwart sentinel

slam-dunking its reflected sunlight 

onto a lightly ruffled ocean

 

a plane fooled everybody for a moment

 

but sure enough

at 9:02 p.m.

a reddening glow blossomed low on the northern horizon

from which emerged a large red spot

larger than the stars anyway

not as large as the moon

standing stalwart sentinel

 

to the delight of all 

the newly launched large red spot 

turned south 

toward us

and eventually passed right in front of us

still climbing and growing smaller

its vaguely comet-tail-like trail changing colors 

and eventually fading away 

as the rocket climbed higher and faded into the sky

on its way to disgorge forty-something satellites

 

eventually

the smallish but notable crowd drifted away 

as the rocket could no longer be seen with unaided eye

 

and yet the moon 

still stood stalwart sentinel

slam-dunking its reflected sunlight

onto a lightly ruffled ocean

Sermon afterthoughts: The Deceptiveness of Light

What came into being in him was life, and that life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

--John 1: 3-5 (NRSV) 

"Very well then, we must corrupt it. No doubt you often practice transforming into an angel of light as a parade ground exercise, now is the time to do it in the face of the Enemy."

-Screwtape to Wormwood, The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis

My sermon on John 1 today got hijacked along the way by the sentences above quoted from verses 3-5. Mostly this was because, as noted early in the sermon itself, I found myself wondering a lot about the particular ritual that closes so many Christmas Eve services involving the congregation holding up lighted candles in a darkened sanctuary. As written there, in cold hard computer-screen text, it doesn't look very impressive, does it? In practice, people tend to be transfixed. If other pastors are like me, they might worry that nothing else from the service will stay with anyone in the congregation once that's all over.

I couldn't let the sermon pass without noting how that light/dark dichotomy gets misused to treat, say, darkness of skin (or any other darkness) as tantamount to darkness of spirit or absence of light. There's a long history of that, behind justifying slavery and a whole lot of other civil rights abuses. What I didn't have time to get to, on the other hand, is the observation that the opposite can also be true; lightness of skin (or any other kind of lightness) as automatically good or perfect or right or holy. And goodness knows, that's just not true.

The quote lifted above from The Screwtape Letters riffs on Paul's admonition to the Corinthians about false teachers and deceivers. Goodness knows there's enough of that among us in the church, frankly pointing supposed followers of Christ towards all manner of falsehood and wrong theology and frankly evil-doing. We're only four days away from the anniversary of one of the most egregious and grotesque examples of such falseness in the 'Christian nationalism' that drove many participants in the attack on the Capitol.

'Christian nationalism' is particularly pernicious at the moment, but it is hardly the only false light luring people away from genuine faith, is it? The prosperity gospel has been eroding the church for decades. The strictures of "biblical manhood" and "biblical womanhood" have been breaking lives and hearts for at least as long if not longer. (Mandatory plug for Kristin Kobes du Mez's Jesus and John Wayne and Beth Allison Barr's The Making of Biblical Womanhood on those subjects.) The false lights, and the fake angels of light pushing people towards those false lights, are thick on the ground these days, and some of them are mistaken for real followers of Christ way too easily.

Light, indeed, can be deceiving, even without such false prophets and wrongdoers posing as angels of light. To bring in my favorite bit of Christmas-season public theology, A Charlie Brown Christmas, where do the brightest lights appear in that little parable? I think one might have to point to CB and Linus's journey to the Christmas tree lot, the one with all the big shiny aluminum Christmas trees. Remember the big spotlights that led the two to the spot? 

Or one might think of the brightly lit stage with all the kids dancing in lieu of rehearsing for the Christmas play:

This one stands out most in contrast to that same stage when Linus finally steps up with Luke 2 in answer to Charlie Brown's desperation:

John's seemingly simple dichotomy masks the much more demanding task of discernment that we face: which light is the true light? Seeking the "true light" as John calls it in verse 9 requires sorting out a lot of fake or artificial light. John doesn't really address that so much, outside of course of spending his entire gospel trying to portray that Light.

Maybe the difference is that the "true light" is the one that actually does shine in the darkness, that isn't unplugged or turned off so easily. The "true light" is the one that the darkness did not, could not, cannot extinguish.When other false lights have shorted out or burned away, the true light still shines. 

One of my former seminary professors, when the occasion arose, frequently (OK, almost always) pronounced a benediction that included something along the lines of this: "and may light, love's own crucified, risen, incarnate light guide each and everyone of us out of every darkness and all the way home." What does a "crucified, risen, incarnate Light" look like? Maybe more to the point: what does a "crucified, risen, incarnate Light" not look like? Perhaps in the end this is the thing that points us towards the true light and away from all the parade-ground devils practicing their transformation-tricks on gullible souls.