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Proper 10, Year C

Luke 10:25-37 - link to NRSV text

I'm going to build this week on what I said three years ago about "The Parable of the Good Samaritan."

The people who pass by the injured man are NOT portrayed by Jesus as the heartless jerks a lot of people today make them out to be. The priest and the Levite were on their way to serve in the Temple. It was service commanded by God, and touching a corpse (which, for all they knew, is what the injured man was) would have rendered them unclean and therefore unable to serve. And since being a priest or Levite was a function of bloodline, not of choice, it's not like they could have just had some random person fill in for them.

Before we point to them as nasty hypocrites, we ought to think long and hard about the roles we embrace (voluntarily, even) that obligate us to particular sets of people in ways that leave us less flexible to respond to the needs of others. If a mother with two-year-old twins in the car pulled over and got out of the car to see whether a man lying at the side of the road needed help was a robber (or worse) faking it, would we say that she was a "Good Samaritan," or a foolish person? If a father of young children decided that he couldn't give any more than a tenth, say, of his gross income to feed poor children elsewhere lest he not have enough to save for his family's "rainy day," would we say that he was refusing to be a "Good Samaritan," or that he was refusing to be a bad parent?

The point of our gospel for this Sunday is not that Samaritans can be nice and priests and Levites can be jerks. The point comes as Jesus turns the lawyer's query ("Who is my neighbor?" -- i.e., "To whom am I obligated?") on its head. Jesus asks, "Who was a neighbor to the injured person?" -- a question that they lawyer can't answer without putting himself in the place of the penniless, naked, and half-dead guy in the ditch. The question as the lawyer asks it is one that seeks the limits of compassion: "Whom am I obligated to help?" The question that Jesus invites him to ask himself is one that seeks actively to expand or erase those limits. If I or someone I loved needed CPR, who would be "good enough" for me to want them to administer it? Absolutely anyone who knew how to give it. Absolutely anyone I'd want to give CPR if s/he were able and came upon me or someone I loved in need of it is my neighbor, the person God invites me to love as I love myself.

"Invites"? Is that the word I mean? I think so. The lawyer's question is about obligations, and it's perfectly legitimate to say that our gospel for this Sunday teaches that we are obligated to love as we love ourselves anyone whose CPR would be good enough if s/he could give it and we needed it. But I really do view it as an invitation, and an exciting one.

People who know me well or have been reading this blog a while know that I love the Gospel According to Luke, and I particularly love what Luke does with the story of the calling of the first disciples. Jesus meets some people fishing. They're not fishing for recreation; they're doing backbreaking daily labor hoping beyond hope that somehow they'll catch enough fish to be able to pay all of the fees required, mend the nets, have a boat to go out in the next day, and still have enough to feed themselves and their families for the day. It's a precarious existence, asking yourself every dawn, "Will I catch enough fish today to feed my family?" It's a cruel world to live in.

Jesus introduces those who hear his call to another world. When fishers meet Jesus, they encounter such abundance that it literally threatens to swamp the boat. In that moment, the fishers' most urgent need becomes the need to find partners -- anyone with a boat who will respond. In that moment, the crucial and constant question of "Will I catch enough fish today to get by?" becomes, "Can I gather enough people to take in this day's abundance?" In that moment, they become fishers of people.

I live in the wealthiest nation on the planet, and still I know a great many people who are exhausted and anxious almost constantly. They spend countless hours working, commuting to work, and worrying about work so they can provide everything our culture defines as a material need -- including a house and/or tuition that are far more than they can afford, but that will allow their kids to go to the "right" schools. They spend hours shuttling their kids around to the zillions of activities our culture says kids need to be healthy and successful. They feel constantly overextended, and with all of their hard work, they toss and turn at night with waking nightmares about being one paycheck, one illness, one layoff, one rotten stroke of luck away from disaster. And perhaps the saddest thing is that as they take on all of these other obligations so they can meet what they feel are their obligations to their children, they pass along to their children all of that anxiety, all of that feeling overextended, put upon, and trapped.

What a cruel world to live in! What an awful world in which to raise a child! No wonder that few people living in a world like that sigh when some preacher stands up to tell them that their obligations go even further.

The Good News is that we don't have to live in a world like that. We can live in the rein of God that broke through into this world in Jesus' ministry.

That's the invitation God issues to us, this Sunday and every hour of every day. That's the world we experience when we accept God's invitation. We can embrace the mission of a God who is not exhausted, put upon, and looking for reasons to cut back on the number of people to bless and love, but is fully alive, moving, and active, blessing in limitless abundance, and loving with more power in the world for every person in the world with whom God's love is shared. When we align our way of living with God's love and God's mission, that's what we experience. When we live in an active search for opportunities to extend mercy and compassion, we experience more fully the reality that this world and every one of us was created by the God of mercy and compassion. Parents, isn't that the world you want your children to grow up in? Isn't that the world we all want to live in?

So this Sunday, as we read a parable of great need being met with surprising compassion, let's think of at least one way we can try out that way of life, that we can look actively for opportunities to extend mercy when and where it's needed.

Commuters, see what it feels like to spend one week of commutes looking actively for opportunities to let in someone who needs to switch lanes -- even or especially if it's someone driving on the shoulder to try to get ahead. It's really very stressful to try to shave every fraction of a second possible from commute time, and to try to stay safe while making sure that nobody driving "unrighteously" prospers by it -- and in my experience, it's actually kind of fun as well as much more relaxing if while stuck in traffic you drop the taxing tasks of monitoring everyone else's driving for infractions and devote that energy to looking actively for opportunities to exercise compassion. A similar dynamic comes into play when we stop calculating how much we have to give to avoid feeling guilty and start thinking and praying about how we can express with our time, our compassionate listening, our energy, and our material resources just how abundantly and recklessly God blesses the world God made and loves.

That works in part because, as Robert Maurer writes in One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way, of how our brains work, how we're made. When we ask ourselves a particular question repeatedly every day, our mind becomes accustomed to gathering that information all the time so it's there when we call for it. When we repeatedly remind ourselves of scarcity and ask ourselves how we can get more, our mind becomes conditioned for anxiety, gathering constantly as a "background process" (to use a metaphor drawn from computers) any information that could suggest scarcity, danger, ways in which we are or could be wronged. The more we worry, the more we see cause to worry. I often think that's why so many people think that the state of the world gets worse and worse -- not because the gross or net evil done or challenges faced are that much greater, but because we carefully tune our attention with years of effort toward the information most likely to make us feel miserable.

Does that describe you? Then change it! Decide that you're going to use something that occurs every day -- stepping in the shower, eating a meal, stopping at a red light -- as a prompt to ask yourself what you're grateful for, how God has blessed you. I particularly like using the red light or pressing the car brakes as a cue for a blessings inventory; over time, it changes the habitual question in that moment from "how late am I running?" to things more like "is it a nice day out?" and "how lucky am I to be loved by this person?" What if we took balancing the checkbook as an opportunity to inventory not what disasters could happen and how little we have to shield ourselves, but how much we have and ask ourselves whether we can share more? What if we took every time we pull out our wallet as that kind of opportunity -- a chance to say (as I often do in sermons like this), "Wow -- I've got enough to get gourmet coffee -- do I have more than I think to hasten the end of poverty? How cool would that be?"

The more intentionally and deeply we look for opportunities to express gratitude for God's blessing by extending that to others, the more deeply we experience that blessing. The Good News is that the Creator of the universe set it up so that every good gift shared is "the gift that keeps on giving." The world God made isn't a vicious circle but an arc toward justice and wholeness. Forward my mail there, because I'm moving in!

Thanks be to God!

July 13, 2007 in Call Narratives, Discipleship, Evangelism, Luke, ONE campaign/Millennium Development Goals, Ordinary Time, Parables, Year C | Permalink

Comments

this is great. thanks, sarah.

Posted by: paul at soupablog | Jul 14, 2007 11:20:26 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.

 
Dylan's lectionary blog: Proper 10, Year C

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Proper 10, Year C

Luke 10:25-37 - link to NRSV text

I'm going to build this week on what I said three years ago about "The Parable of the Good Samaritan."

The people who pass by the injured man are NOT portrayed by Jesus as the heartless jerks a lot of people today make them out to be. The priest and the Levite were on their way to serve in the Temple. It was service commanded by God, and touching a corpse (which, for all they knew, is what the injured man was) would have rendered them unclean and therefore unable to serve. And since being a priest or Levite was a function of bloodline, not of choice, it's not like they could have just had some random person fill in for them.

Before we point to them as nasty hypocrites, we ought to think long and hard about the roles we embrace (voluntarily, even) that obligate us to particular sets of people in ways that leave us less flexible to respond to the needs of others. If a mother with two-year-old twins in the car pulled over and got out of the car to see whether a man lying at the side of the road needed help was a robber (or worse) faking it, would we say that she was a "Good Samaritan," or a foolish person? If a father of young children decided that he couldn't give any more than a tenth, say, of his gross income to feed poor children elsewhere lest he not have enough to save for his family's "rainy day," would we say that he was refusing to be a "Good Samaritan," or that he was refusing to be a bad parent?

The point of our gospel for this Sunday is not that Samaritans can be nice and priests and Levites can be jerks. The point comes as Jesus turns the lawyer's query ("Who is my neighbor?" -- i.e., "To whom am I obligated?") on its head. Jesus asks, "Who was a neighbor to the injured person?" -- a question that they lawyer can't answer without putting himself in the place of the penniless, naked, and half-dead guy in the ditch. The question as the lawyer asks it is one that seeks the limits of compassion: "Whom am I obligated to help?" The question that Jesus invites him to ask himself is one that seeks actively to expand or erase those limits. If I or someone I loved needed CPR, who would be "good enough" for me to want them to administer it? Absolutely anyone who knew how to give it. Absolutely anyone I'd want to give CPR if s/he were able and came upon me or someone I loved in need of it is my neighbor, the person God invites me to love as I love myself.

"Invites"? Is that the word I mean? I think so. The lawyer's question is about obligations, and it's perfectly legitimate to say that our gospel for this Sunday teaches that we are obligated to love as we love ourselves anyone whose CPR would be good enough if s/he could give it and we needed it. But I really do view it as an invitation, and an exciting one.

People who know me well or have been reading this blog a while know that I love the Gospel According to Luke, and I particularly love what Luke does with the story of the calling of the first disciples. Jesus meets some people fishing. They're not fishing for recreation; they're doing backbreaking daily labor hoping beyond hope that somehow they'll catch enough fish to be able to pay all of the fees required, mend the nets, have a boat to go out in the next day, and still have enough to feed themselves and their families for the day. It's a precarious existence, asking yourself every dawn, "Will I catch enough fish today to feed my family?" It's a cruel world to live in.

Jesus introduces those who hear his call to another world. When fishers meet Jesus, they encounter such abundance that it literally threatens to swamp the boat. In that moment, the fishers' most urgent need becomes the need to find partners -- anyone with a boat who will respond. In that moment, the crucial and constant question of "Will I catch enough fish today to get by?" becomes, "Can I gather enough people to take in this day's abundance?" In that moment, they become fishers of people.

I live in the wealthiest nation on the planet, and still I know a great many people who are exhausted and anxious almost constantly. They spend countless hours working, commuting to work, and worrying about work so they can provide everything our culture defines as a material need -- including a house and/or tuition that are far more than they can afford, but that will allow their kids to go to the "right" schools. They spend hours shuttling their kids around to the zillions of activities our culture says kids need to be healthy and successful. They feel constantly overextended, and with all of their hard work, they toss and turn at night with waking nightmares about being one paycheck, one illness, one layoff, one rotten stroke of luck away from disaster. And perhaps the saddest thing is that as they take on all of these other obligations so they can meet what they feel are their obligations to their children, they pass along to their children all of that anxiety, all of that feeling overextended, put upon, and trapped.

What a cruel world to live in! What an awful world in which to raise a child! No wonder that few people living in a world like that sigh when some preacher stands up to tell them that their obligations go even further.

The Good News is that we don't have to live in a world like that. We can live in the rein of God that broke through into this world in Jesus' ministry.

That's the invitation God issues to us, this Sunday and every hour of every day. That's the world we experience when we accept God's invitation. We can embrace the mission of a God who is not exhausted, put upon, and looking for reasons to cut back on the number of people to bless and love, but is fully alive, moving, and active, blessing in limitless abundance, and loving with more power in the world for every person in the world with whom God's love is shared. When we align our way of living with God's love and God's mission, that's what we experience. When we live in an active search for opportunities to extend mercy and compassion, we experience more fully the reality that this world and every one of us was created by the God of mercy and compassion. Parents, isn't that the world you want your children to grow up in? Isn't that the world we all want to live in?

So this Sunday, as we read a parable of great need being met with surprising compassion, let's think of at least one way we can try out that way of life, that we can look actively for opportunities to extend mercy when and where it's needed.

Commuters, see what it feels like to spend one week of commutes looking actively for opportunities to let in someone who needs to switch lanes -- even or especially if it's someone driving on the shoulder to try to get ahead. It's really very stressful to try to shave every fraction of a second possible from commute time, and to try to stay safe while making sure that nobody driving "unrighteously" prospers by it -- and in my experience, it's actually kind of fun as well as much more relaxing if while stuck in traffic you drop the taxing tasks of monitoring everyone else's driving for infractions and devote that energy to looking actively for opportunities to exercise compassion. A similar dynamic comes into play when we stop calculating how much we have to give to avoid feeling guilty and start thinking and praying about how we can express with our time, our compassionate listening, our energy, and our material resources just how abundantly and recklessly God blesses the world God made and loves.

That works in part because, as Robert Maurer writes in One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way, of how our brains work, how we're made. When we ask ourselves a particular question repeatedly every day, our mind becomes accustomed to gathering that information all the time so it's there when we call for it. When we repeatedly remind ourselves of scarcity and ask ourselves how we can get more, our mind becomes conditioned for anxiety, gathering constantly as a "background process" (to use a metaphor drawn from computers) any information that could suggest scarcity, danger, ways in which we are or could be wronged. The more we worry, the more we see cause to worry. I often think that's why so many people think that the state of the world gets worse and worse -- not because the gross or net evil done or challenges faced are that much greater, but because we carefully tune our attention with years of effort toward the information most likely to make us feel miserable.

Does that describe you? Then change it! Decide that you're going to use something that occurs every day -- stepping in the shower, eating a meal, stopping at a red light -- as a prompt to ask yourself what you're grateful for, how God has blessed you. I particularly like using the red light or pressing the car brakes as a cue for a blessings inventory; over time, it changes the habitual question in that moment from "how late am I running?" to things more like "is it a nice day out?" and "how lucky am I to be loved by this person?" What if we took balancing the checkbook as an opportunity to inventory not what disasters could happen and how little we have to shield ourselves, but how much we have and ask ourselves whether we can share more? What if we took every time we pull out our wallet as that kind of opportunity -- a chance to say (as I often do in sermons like this), "Wow -- I've got enough to get gourmet coffee -- do I have more than I think to hasten the end of poverty? How cool would that be?"

The more intentionally and deeply we look for opportunities to express gratitude for God's blessing by extending that to others, the more deeply we experience that blessing. The Good News is that the Creator of the universe set it up so that every good gift shared is "the gift that keeps on giving." The world God made isn't a vicious circle but an arc toward justice and wholeness. Forward my mail there, because I'm moving in!

Thanks be to God!

July 13, 2007 in Call Narratives, Discipleship, Evangelism, Luke, ONE campaign/Millennium Development Goals, Ordinary Time, Parables, Year C | Permalink

Comments

The comments to this entry are closed.