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September 26 - 18th Sunday after Pentecost
Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15
I hope you won’t think that by preaching on our Old Testament lesson instead of the story of Lazarus and the rich man I’m trying to avoid something, though perhaps I am! It’s just that the Gospel parable is sort of self-interpreting, whereas our Jeremiah passage is not. And, in fact, what I especially like about our Old Testament reading is that, on the surface, it seems like nothing but a boring land transaction; but within its context, it’s actually one of the most beautiful and important passages in the book of Jeremiah.
By way of some brief background, the prophet Jeremiah lived and wrote in the 6th century BC and was especially known for the dour content of his prophecies (the word “jeremiad,” which we use as a generic term for a screed or rant, comes from Jeremiah). He was one of the major prophets of Israel – there are “major” and “minor” prophets, mostly distinguished by the length of their books and the importance of the subjects they address - and what ranks Jeremiah among the major prophets is that he predicted the capture of Jerusalem by the Babylonians.
In my Old Testament class in divinity school there were only two dates we had to memorize: 722, the fall of the northern part of Israel to the Assyrians, and 586, the final fall of the southern part, or Jerusalem, to the Babylonians. And Jeremiah preached about this second, very catastrophic event in which the Babylonians invaded Jerusalem and carried off its wealthy and intellectual classes (including Jeremiah) to Babylon for a prolonged exile.
You can’t really overstate the importance of this event for Jews. It’s been referred to famously as the “saddest day in Jewish history.” Now granted, they’ve seen a lot of sad days, but this one really shaped their identity in some important ways - perhaps like we would say, more recently, of the holocaust and the way it has shaped modern Jewish consciousness.
All of which is not to bore you, I hope, but to set the context for our odd but lovely passage for today. Like all the prophets, Jeremiah did a lot of sign-acts to make some sort of point about God’s relationship to Israel. And this was one of them: he purchased a plot of land at one of the lowest point in Jerusalem’s history, just when it couldn’t have seemed more worthless, in order to express his (and God’s) belief that life would most past even this calamity.
There’s a little story that’s been attributed to St. Francis, to Martin Luther, probably to the Buddha, Ghandi, and who knows who else. But according to it, someone asked (we’ll say Luther) what he would do today if someone told him the world were ending tomorrow, and he replied, “I’d go plant a tree.” Which is how I think of Jeremiah’s purchase of this now worthless land: it’s a tangible and brave investment in hope, even as the world he knew was coming to an end.
I was also reminded here of something I recently read in a memoir by the writer Gail Caldwell. Her memoir was about her friendship with a fellow writer, Caroline Knapp, who died at 42 of a really vicious lung cancer. In the summer of 2001, a few years before Knapp was diagnosed, Caldwell bought her dream home in Cambridge Mass, and thus unfortunately found herself in the absurd position of considering paint samples on the week after 9/11.
So she called her friend Caroline to confess her guilt over this, and here’s part of the paragraph describing this conversation: “One day I told her I felt ashamed for thinking about my house with the world in tatters, and she put her hand on my shoulder and gave a small shrug: ‘Paint chips … Osama bin Laden,’ she said, using her hands to plot the entire range of human experience. ‘This is what life turns out to be.’”
Jeremiah’s gesture of investing in worthless land seems much grander, perhaps, than choosing paint for one’s walls or planting a tree. But in a way they’re all just ordinary acts that, when faithfully carried out in the face of tragedies (large and small), can be the most profound things we do in life.
So … I haven’t heard that the world is falling apart tomorrow, but if you do, or if it does for you, just remember to do something heroic – like go plant a tree.
September 12, 2010 - Pentecost 17 + Holy Baptism
Nine years ago, I didn’t imagine I’d spend a September 11 weekend doing a wedding and a baptism, two of the happier events in a couple or a family’s life. In fact, several people asked me whether it was appropriate to do a wedding on September 11, and I replied that I couldn’t think of anything more appropriate than to celebrate the love of two people on that day – and the same goes for the baptism of little Paul Stasaitis.
I don’t know if this directly relates, but I thought here of an essay I recently read from Wendell Berry, an writer and poet, who said that sometimes, while walking around the fields near his home in Kentucky, he likes to think about all the wonderful things that will happen on the same day he’s laid in the ground: the flowers that will open, the babies that will be born, the new discoveries made and people who will fall in love. Which is perhaps to say, it’s good to remember that love always manages to outlive and triumph over our tragedies, both personal or corporate. And isn’t this what Christian resurrection is all about? So what two better symbols of that could we ask for than marriage and baptism on a weekend like this.
Changing gears for a moment, before we move to the baptism, let me just say a few very brief words about our two parables for today, the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin. To summarize, in the first parable, a shepherd loses one of his sheep, and so, leaving the other 99 behind, he goes out in search of the one until he finds it. Similarly, in the parable of the coin, a woman loses one of her coins and searches every last nook of her house until she finds it.
These are such beautiful parables, and I’m well aware that talking about them puts me at risk of fulfilling Wordsworth’s warning: “Our meddling intellect mars the beauteous form of things.” But still, meddle I will (that’s what priests do!), and I hope you’ll forgive me.
Most good parables contain some small problem - something that doesn’t quite add up – and these are no exception. With the parable of the shepherd, one of the things that’s hard to explain is why the shepherd would leave ninety-nine good sheep just to seek out the one – a problem even more pronounced when you consider that the Greek word here for “wilderness” (where he leaves those other sheep) implies a place of real danger and vulnerability.
Similarly, in the case of the parable of the coin, the question that usually comes up is Why would Jesus hold up as an example this woman who upends her home and wastes a day rooting around for one coin when she has nine others – particularly in light of his teachings elsewhere about not worrying about money?
I found it interesting to learn this past week that some have tried to get around these problems by actually placing a value on the things that the people go in such desperate search of. For instance, in the 2nd century Gospel of Thomas, one of the Gospels that didn’t make it into our Bible, Thomas adds to his version of the parable that the lost sheep was the largest of all the sheep, and thus the one of most value. That’s why the shepherd would take such a risk. With the parable of the coin, some commentators will suggest that the lost coin was worth an entire dowry; or that the woman was poor and that her coins amounted to a lifetime of wages. In fact, the Greek is probably more likely something like a day’s wages – not enough to seem to warrant such a frantic search.
I suppose this just goes to show that tidying up the parables is a sort of silly endeavor, and, moreover, one that risks missing the very point they’re trying to make – in this case, that God seeks out those things and people that are of the least value in the world’s eyes, not the greatest. If anything, a better explanation might even devalue these sought after items.
As we baptize little Paul and he begins his long journey in the Christian faith, one of the most important lessons we can help teach him is to value what God values - and that’s not the largest sheep in the bunch or the biggest coin in the stack, it’s not the toughest guy in the room, the smartest or best looking person in the class. It’s the humblest, the weakest, the poorest and the most vulnerable.
And when he’s one of them, as we all are at some point in our lives, may also he understand the joy of being sought out and found by God. And you know what? When that time comes, for him and for us, it doesn’t really matter if all of this makes sense. In fact, we’re grateful that it doesn’t.
September 5, 2010
After reading our Old Testament passage, in which God commands Jeremiah to go down to the potter’s house to watch him work, I was inspired to go over to Polly’s (our neighborhood potter) and take my first-ever pottery lesson. Prior to that, I’m afraid to say my only exposure to a potter’s wheel was by watching Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore in the movie Ghost (and I wasn’t exactly focused on the mechanics of pottery making).
Which is inexcusable in any case, but especially because the metaphor of God as a potter occurs at lot in the Bible and a decent priest should be at least somewhat familiar with it. It even starts the Bible off. At the very beginning with the book of Genesis, God molds Adam out of the dust – or clay – of the earth like a potter. The Psalmist, too, makes several references to God shaping us out of the elements or the miry bog, which is thought to be a reference to or perhaps another version of the Genesis story.
We also get the image a lot in the prophet Isaiah, Jeremiah (as we saw today), and even the New Testament, where Paul compares us to perishable vessels made of clay.
Of course, in the Biblical world, clay was much more a part of people’s everyday life than it is now. Clay was used for storage of food and valuable items, for serving and warming food, for things like lamps, children’s toys, and writing materials – basically it was a cheaper alternative to more expensive materials like metal or glass ware. So you would expect such an everyday image to appear so often in Scripture. But it was also popular, no doubt, because there are so many great spiritual lessons in this image, as I learned from my pottery class this week.
One lesson is that clay has to be pliant in order to work with it at all. When attempting to make my first pot, I was surprised by how wet you have to keep the clay lest it gets too dry and catches on your hands while it’s spinning on the wheel. I couldn’t seem to remember to moisten the clay until it was too late, so Polly taught me the cheater’s method of putting a sponge in one hand so I had the water nearby. This helped me understand one reason the Bible likens people to clay: like clay, we have to be supple and pliant in order for God to shape us into something useful and beautiful. I imagine that means not rushing to judgment, listening to new ideas and points of views, not letting our despair about the world harden us.
I also learned, with every new beginner, that a lump of clay has to be centered in order to even begin the process of shaping a vessel. I had read previously that one of the harder things about throwing a pot is this process of centering it at the beginning, which involves spinning the wheel really fast and applying a lot of pressure to the clay so it finds its balance. For me, it was the most time consuming part of the process; but until that clay stops wobbling you simply can’t do anything with it.
Maybe something like this is meant by the Christian idea of getting yourself centered – of cutting out the things that throw us off balance. And I’ll just add here that, while it’s a lot of work, it’s also a wonderful feeling when the clay suddenly goes from a stubborn wobbly lump to a smooth, perfectly balanced sphere.
Another lesson I liked in this passage, though not directly related to the craft of pottery, is how God speaks through everyday work. We tend to think that the prophets received their messages from God in sacred or remote spaces like Temples or mountaintops – and sometimes they did. But more often, God spoke to them as they walked through the streets, shopped in the marketplace, chatted at their version of coffee hour – or, in this case, as they watched people go about their everyday work. I wonder how often we look for God to speak in churches or in our time apart from the rush of everyday life, when God speaks to us more in our encounters outside of church or our fortresses of solitude - even (and especially) our everyday work.
Finally, I liked how the potter in this passage responds to his collapsed pot, not fretting over his failure but simply reworking it into another vessel “as seemed good to him.” During our lesson, Polly explained to me that everybody has a shape – some way their pot tends to turn out, whether it’s a lip that curves outward, inward, or is top-heavy. My recurring “shape” was a thin, weak band about 3/4 of the way up the side of the pot, and what happens when you have a weak spot like that is that the top of the pot collapses in at some point and you have to start over. The first time this happened, we just tossed that whole lump aside for later use; but the second time, sort of like the potter here, Polly just cut off the collapsed portion and helped me make with what remained a respectable little bowl - not what we’d planned to make starting out, but lovely all the same.
This also put me in mind of a trip Andrew and I took last week to the Noguchi Museum in Queens. Isamu Noguchi was a Japanese-American sculptor who worked a lot with these large heavy stones, which he would often partially cut and sculpt, leaving parts of the stone sculpture in their original rough-hewn condition, and other parts polished and carefully sculpted. A lot of his work was inspired by the Japanese idea of “wabi-sabi,” which incorporates ideas like impermanence and incompleteness into what it means for something to be beautiful.
Along the way, we watched a video about Noguchi’s life and work, and I was struck by one part in which his assistant (now himself an old man) said that, sometimes, Noguchi would make a wrong cut into a big stone – these solid stones being, of course, much less forgiving than supple clay. And instead of trying to fix it, since that was impossible anyway, he would put the stone out in his garden or in his studio and then return to it months, sometimes years, later, once he saw in it something different – a new sculpture, or perhaps a sculpture in what it was after years of rain and sleet had slowly transformed it. (He referred to this as the stone “healing” itself.)
That emphasis on improvisation and fluidity in one’s work and life is, I think, something that comes through in Jeremiah’s encounter with the potter (even if that’s not exactly the lesson Jeremiah draws from it!). And that’s an important spiritual lesson, as well. We can seldom anticipate where something will end once we’ve begun – our work, our relationships, our children. But when things take a turn we didn’t plan or want, perhaps God calls us to see it not as failure but as part of the work of one’s life. It’s a fluid wabi-sabi approach to life, and it says hold loosely to your plans, for tomorrow they may change. And probably for the better.
9 o’clock service
Since the kids will be performing their Vacation Bible school play during the 10 o’clock homily today, I’m just going to say a few words about this past week in lieu of a full homily.
The week’s theme was the creation story in the book of Genesis, and when it started out, I was nervous about the kids thinking that these Bible stories were somehow in conflict with what they’re learning in their science class about the way the world came into being.
As you probably know, Episcopalians are especially open-minded about the relationship between science and religion. That’s largely because our theology doesn’t start with revelation from above that then shapes how we understand the world, but rather with the world itself and what we observe in it, which then shapes our theology – a more bottoms-up sort of approach that makes us particularly open to new scientific discoveries. It’s not surprising that a lot of scientists, past and present, have also been Episcopalians.
I didn’t bring all that up with the kids, of course, but it was important to me that I somehow bring that spirit of our tradition into our lessons.
So, when we talked about God creating the light on the first day, we talked about the Big Bang, and the sudden explosion of light and matter that scientists think started off our universe. When we talked about the separation of the dry land from the waters on the second day, we talked about Pangaea – the theory that our continents used to be one big continent that then split apart in what scientists called the continental drift. When we talked about God creating the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth day, we looked at some pictures from the Hubble telescope of stars just coming into being.
I knew the kids were really getting the drift of it when I brought in a picture by the 16th century artist Heironmous Bosch of the dome that God placed over the earth on day two, and the kids started to talk about the big hole in the ozone layer and how people were ruining the atmosphere.
Basically, the kids didn’t miss a beat, and perhaps the takeaway for me was that the fear of science and religion seeming in conflict with each other was more an adult worry that kids, with their larger imaginations and curiosity, don’t share.
To be sure, there are a lot of things that kids need to grow out of, which were on full display this week – their narcissism, their short fuses, their occasional cruelty to each other. But their ability to integrate these two stories – the Bible and science – and to find that both can be true at the same time but in different ways, was one thing I hope they don’t lose as they get older.
In a few minutes we’re going to say Eucharistic Prayer C, as we’ve been doing all month. Prayer C is the only prayer to be written since the scientific discoveries of the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and most of the 20th century, and - especially fitting for today - it does such a great job of integrating science and the Bible. A kid could have written it – or at least an adult that remembered what it was like to see the world like a kid. And it’s a great testament to the Episcopal Church’s longstanding belief that science doesn’t threaten, but only enhances, faith.
Vacation Bible School - 2010
Vacation Bible School 2010
August 1, 2010
In looking back over our summer readings this past week, I noticed we’ve had quite a lot of parables - the parable of the Prodigal Son early on, the Good Samaritan, last week’s persistent neighbor knocking at the door, and now today’s parable of the foolish farmer. It’s hard to imagine our Gospels being half as compelling without the parables, and so it’s always nice when we get a string of them like this.
Today’s parable, like I said, is called the parable of the foolish (or rich) farmer, and it follows a common set-up of parables in Luke’s Gospel: someone emerges from the crowd, asks Jesus a question, to which Jesus gives a slightly evasive answer in the form of a parable. So, following that structure, in this story a man appears from the crowd, asks Jesus whether he’ll arbitrate in a family inheritance dispute, to which Jesus responds with a resounding No followed by a parable: A man comes into a harvest too large for his small barns to hold. So he builds bigger barns to store his harvest in, and then decides that he’s going to live the rest of his days off this trove. Unfortunately, no sooner is he settled and comfortable than God comes to tell him that his life is nearly over.
There aren’t right or wrong ways of reading parables, and that’s part of their beauty. But even so, I was struck by how my initial reaction to the farmer seemed far from what Jesus intended. After all, to me, this farmer seemed fairly put together. He didn’t look at this lucrative harvest and decide he needed another one like it next year – and then the next and the next. Amassing more and more was less a concern of his than just enjoying what he had.
At the same time, I thought of all the examples of excess out there – the impossibly high bonuses in the corporate world that we’re constantly hearing about in the news. The salaries of our athletes, who, not content with just a few million a year, then barter for still higher salaries. I even read a piece this past week about some of the insanely high directors’ salaries in the not-for-profit world. (Which reminded me of another piece a couple years ago about a minister in NYC who was making over 600,000 a year!)
It just seems like we don’t know how or where to stop, and at least the man in our parable was able to exit the rat race and just enjoy his life after just one good harvest. What’s so wrong with that?
That was my reaction to this parable, anyway. But I’m guessing Jesus’ hearers would have had a different first impression of the story – not only because they didn’t have my (or our) point of reference culturally, but also because they probably caught some Scriptural allusions in this story that aren’t as obvious to us.
One is the story of their patriarch, Joseph (of the multi-colored coat). After being sold into slavery by his brothers, Joseph wound up serving the king of Egypt as head of his granaries. Part of his role was to prepare Egypt for famine, so he built huge barns in which he stored grain to take them through the lean years. When the famine finally came, he used that grain to help (particularly) the poor who were suffering the most – in fact, touchingly, some of those poor were his very brothers, with whom he was reunited when they came to collect their share of the king’s grain.
If Jesus’ hearers missed that possible reference, then maybe they heard an allusion to the Old Testament commandment to give back (or tithe) ten percent of everything we have to God. And if they missed that one, then the parable might have brought to mind the Old Testament tradition of gleaning in the fields. One of the many agricultural laws in the book of Leviticus stipulates that farmers should leave part of their grain in the field for poor people to glean. In fact, there’s a passage in the Gospels in which Jesus and his disciples are those poor people gleaning one day in the fields when the Pharisees criticize them for violating the rule to rest on the Sabbath.
Which is all just to say that it was probably evident that what the rich farmer in this parable failed to do was take the needy into account.
Whatever our means, that’s a message the Gospel directs at all of us: from the widow with nothing but a few cents to give, to those of us who have much more. Perhaps late summer, as we look forward to the crisp new start of fall, is a good time to think about how much we’re really giving to others. Because until God comes for us - and may it not be as soon as it was for this poor farmer! - it’s never too late to start being more generous.
Pentecost 8 - July 18, 2010
I trust you won’t fault me for refusing to go anywhere near that reading from the Old Testament book of Amos – or even the Psalm, for that matter – especially since we have as our Gospel reading this lovely story of Martha & Mary.
Martha and Mary were sisters who lived in the village of Bethany, whose house Jesus visited a lot during his travels. And as we just heard, our story begins when Martha invites Jesus into her home, only to grow frustrated when her sister, Mary, doesn’t help with the preparation but opts instead to sit at Jesus’ feet listening to his teaching. So Martha charges in the room – or so I imagine – and complains to Jesus that Mary isn’t helping; to which Jesus responds by taking the side of Mary.
I used to think that, to fully appreciate this story, you had to have a difficult relationship with a sister. (I won’t tell you whether I’m Mary or Martha in my family, but if you met my sister, believe me you’d know.) But actually, the passage has been applied and interpreted in all sorts of ways having nothing to do with sibling rivalry, and I thought I’d start off by sharing just a few of the ways it has been interpreted over the years.
Most recently, the Mary figure became a sort of hero among the first wave of women to be ordained as priests back in the 70s. A common reading of the passage at the time said that Mary, by sitting at Christ’s feet and listening to him teaching, instead of taking her place quietly in the kitchen, was assuming a role only reserved in her culture for the men – and in fact, this was proof that she was also one of the disciples. And so you’ll often hear those first women priests say that Mary empowered them to leave their lives at home – their lives as Marthas - and become Marys by pursuing a profession in the church.
Kind of humorously, I read one commentary by a women who said that the story would be perfect if only some of the men got up and helped Martha with the cooking!
Another famous interpretation of this story dates back to the 16th Century Protestant Reformation. As you know, Protestants were very keen on making sure everyone could hear or read the Bible in their own language because they believed that the Bible was the most important document in the church – not church doctrines, canon laws, dogmas, buildings, or authorities like priests and bishops. So in their reading, Mary became the model student of the Scriptures because she sat at Christ’s feet and listened to his words, while the Martha character was a metaphor for someone who was distracted by all that unimportant stuff the church had come to offer.
Just one last one. Even further back than that, the passage was popular among monks and nuns in the Middle Ages because they read in this passage an affirmation of the contemplative life. So in this reading, the Marys whom Christ approves of were the monks and nuns squirreled away in their prayer chapels all day, and the Marthas were either those monks who led more active lives out in the world, or everyday people who chose not to live the monastic life at all.
And if I could say just one more thing about this, sort of parenthetically, it’s interesting how rarely we expect an over-active person to justify themselves, especially in America where we tend to equate a frenetic life with productivity and purpose. But contemplative people accomplish a lot, too (maybe more), and it’s a shame the burden of explaining themselves tends to fall on them. You can see how this story about Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet helped generations of contemplatives explain their lives to others, and is no less useful for this purpose today.
But anyway, as I said, those are just some of the interesting ways this story has been interpreted over the years. And all that said, I want to shift gears and just briefly share with you something in this story that leapt out to me for the first time this week, and it comes from Jesus’ response to Martha about halfway through the passage.
After Martha complains to Jesus that Mary isn’t helping her, Jesus replies: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.”
In the past, I’d always taken that line to mean All you need is one thing: to be like Mary and contemplate at my feet. That’s the way almost all of the commentaries on this story interpret his remarks. But that never quite made sense to me, basically telling someone You Need only One Thing: to completely change your personality. I mean, that should count for at least five!
Then, for some reason this week I heard it differently, more simply: Martha, you need only one thing … for this meal. You don’t need the mutton and the veal and the brisket – just the mutton is enough. In other words, rather than Jesus saying “Martha, you’re totally off base,” he’s saying “Martha, what you’re doing is OK, but just ease up a little bit. You only need one thing.”
In fact, I did discover that this was often how they interpreted it in the early church, and I couldn’t figure out why and when the interpretation shifted away from this simpler explanation of this line. The grammar, the context – there’s nothing really to argue one reading of it over the other.
I did find that a lot of art of this scene seems to follow the early Christian assumption that Jesus is referring to the meal. For instance, there’s a common depiction of this scene in which Martha stands in the foreground with this absurdly massive spread around her (like the one I put on your programs). In this example she looks triumphant or at least serene, but in other versions like this, she’s almost frantic, like she’s lost her mind in her frenzy to prepare all this food perfectly. It almost makes you want scream at her “Martha you need only one thing!”
And if that is the meaning, then this passage leaves us with an important reminder of simplicity. Carry that line around with you this week - You need only One Thing - and think about where it applies in your life. Maybe to your home and your possessions. Maybe to your entertaining habits. Maybe to what you want for your kids.
Maybe you even sit here some Sundays, look around and think “This church has only one thing. But it needs this, and this, and this” Obviously, that’s what I do! Don’t get me wrong: It does need a few things, but probably far less than we think.
And so too in all sorts of areas of our lives. As Jesus said earlier in Luke’s Gospel, the lilies of the field don’t need much, and neither do we. Usually just one thing is enough.
Pentecost 7 - July 11, 2010
Today we read the parable of the Good Samaritan, without which Christianity would hardly seem to exist. In fact, this parable is in only one Gospel, Luke’s, and it’s hard to believe that such an important parable is only narrowly in our Bible.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is also considered one of the most trustworthy parables of the Bible by the sort of people who sit around and ask questions like Did Jesus really say this, and, if so, how true is the story to its original form? And so on. Mind you, it’s all highly subjective, but for those who ask these sorts of questions, this is considered one of the best-preserved stories that Jesus told.
The story is prompted by a conversation Jesus has with a lawyer, who approaches him and asks him what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus turns the question back on him (that’s another thing that makes scholars think this is authentic, because not directly answering questions seems to have been a favored tactic of Jesus’ – as we read not just in the Gospels but in other parts of the New Testament). So Jesus turns the question on him, and recites back to Jesus two Jewish teachings: love God and love your neighbor. But then the lawyer presses the question, asking a good questions about the scope of one’s moral responsibility: “But who, exactly, is my neighbor?”
And that’s when Jesus tells his story, averting (again) direct answers. A man is walking along the road from Jerusalem to Jericho when he’s beaten, robbed, and left to die. A priest approaches on the road, moves to the other side of the street, and passes right on by. Then a Levite – another member of the religious leadership – does the same. Finally, a Samaritan – someone from an ethnic group not highly regarded by Jews (and vice versa) – walks by and, setting aside tribal concerns and prejudices, simply helps the man.
One of the things that is often discussed with this parable is why the first two men passed right on by without helping. Was it that they were in a hurry to conduct their religious services? Were they afraid of breaking Jewish purity laws by touching an ailing or possibly dead man? Were they just plain uncompassionate people? Were they mostly good people just having a bad day? And so on.
In thinking about this question myself this past week, I came across a speech by Martin Luther King Jr (and I’m probably the last one in this room to know that he built his last speech before he was assassinated around this parable). The speech was given in Memphis on the occasion of a strike of the city’s sanitation workers, and he had already received some death threats prior to arriving in Memphis, which he mentions later on in his speech. In the part I’m going to read, King explores the different explanations about why the first two men passed by, and then he comes up with a third: that they didn’t stop because they were afraid.
So let me read this and then just make some quick closing remarks because it speaks for itself.
Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness. One day a man came to Jesus; and he wanted to raise some questions about some vital matters in life. At points, he wanted to trick Jesus, and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew, and throw him off base.
Now that question could have easily ended up in a philosophical and theological debate. But Jesus immediately pulled that question from mid-air, and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho. And he talked about a certain man, who fell among thieves. You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side. They didn’t stop to help him. And finally a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But he got down with him, administering first aid, and helped the man in need.
Jesus ended up saying, this was the good man, this was the great man, because he had the capacity to project the “I” into the “thou,” and to be concerned about his brother.
Now you know, we use our imagination a great deal to try to determine why the priest and the Levite didn’t stop. At times we say they were busy going to a church meeting - an ecclesiastical gathering - and they had to get on down to Jerusalem so they wouldn’t be late for their meeting. At other times we would speculate that there was a religious law that “One who was engaged in religious ceremonials was not to touch a human body twenty-four hours before the ceremony.”
And every now and then we begin to wonder whether maybe they were not going down to Jerusalem, or down to Jericho, rather to organize a “Jericho Road Improvement Association.” That’s a possibility. Maybe they felt that it was better to deal with the problem from the causal root, rather than to get bogged down with an individual effort. But I’m going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It’s possible that those men were afraid. You see, the Jericho road is a dangerous road. I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. As soon as we go on that road, I said to my wife, “I can see why Jesus used this as the setting for his parable.” It’s a winding, meandering road. It’s really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about 1,200 feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you’re about 2,200 feet below sea level. That’s a dangerous road. In the days of Jesus it came to be known as the “Bloody Pass.” And you know, it’s possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it’s possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for a quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the Levite asked was, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
That’s the question before you tonight.
It’s such a powerful speech that one hardly wants to follow up with anything, but let me just repeat that first line I read: “Now let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.” Dangerous unselfishness. Of course, we’re probably not facing death threats like King was, or probably like some of those sanitation workers he spoke to that night. But we still use fear as an excuse to pass by the people and situations we should be helping.
We don’t give enough to others because we’re not financially as secure as we’d like to be ourselves. We withhold emotional support because we’re afraid other people’s situations might weigh us down too much and do us harm. All too often, we think giving needs to come from a position of safety and security, whether it’s financial or emotional. But dire needs present themselves whether or not our emotional wells are full, or our bank accounts exactly – or even close to – where we want them.
Or to get back to the parable, the roads we walk on are never safe enough; at some point we just have to cultivate what King calls “dangerous unselfishness” so we stop passing others by, and start stooping down more to help.
Today’s Gospel reading about Jesus sending out the seventy two-by-two brought to mind the view from our rental apartment in Harlem, which is directly across the street from an apartment that must belong to the Jehovah’s Witnesses because it’s always packed full of them. In fact, from the view out our window, it sometimes seems like up to seventy young men are jammed into that tiny space (and since they’re Scriptural literalists, that might actually be the case)!
But seriously, that’s the sort of Christian I imagine would be interested in passages like this one, in which Jesus instructs his followers to go from house to house spreading the Gospel. Which may be why I’ve tended to avoid them in the past.
The sending out of the seventy disciples is actually a variation of an earlier passage in Luke’s Gospel in which Jesus sends out the twelve two-by-two with many of the same instructions he gives them here. The number seventy might be reminiscent of the seventy elders that Moses appointed to help him with his work in the Old Testament book of Exodus; or it might be a symbol of the seventy nations that Christianity would spread out to (which would make it a sort of supplement to the sending of the twelve disciples in the earlier passage – twelve standing just for the twelve tribes of Israel, but seventy standing for all the Gentile Christians, too).
In any case, the passage gives us a glimpse into how Christianity spread so quickly in that first century. Christians probably did knock on doors and even started house churches in some of those very homes they converted – some of these are the same house churches we read about in the New Testament book of Acts or Paul’s letters.
But unless you’re a Jehovah’s Witness, our reading can seem to carry little more than historical interest.
On the other hand, you can also read this passage not so much as an advice manual for door-to-door evangelism, but as advice for life’s journey as a Christian, whether we chose to make knocking on doors a part of that journey or not (and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that Episcopalians generally do not!).
I’ve taken lately to driving past the Presbyterian Church up on route 9D to read the sermon title for the coming Sunday, which the Rev. Lindsay Borden always has out by Monday afternoon (I can’t even think of a sermon title by Sunday after the sermon’s preached, much less by Monday a week before!).
Her sermon title for this week, which I especially liked, is “Tough Talk” named for the pretty hard things Jesus says to his would-be followers in this passage. Biblical scholars count these among what they call the “hard sayings” of Jesus, because the demands Jesus makes are so steep. But “hard sayings” doesn’t do it nearly as much justice as “tough talk.”
So, I’m also going to say a few words about Jesus’ “tough talk” here and particularly the context in which he says it, which is, I think where the real lesson lies.
Roof Celebration Picnic - June 2010
Pentecost Sunday, May 23, 2010
Parish Work Day - May 15, 2010
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