Proper 10 C

Human beings evolved as tribal animals, and we see that tribalism asserting itself in politics and extremism in many parts of the world.  When a lawyer asked, "Who is my neighbor?"  Jesus spoke clearly and profoundly against chauvinism with the story we call the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Proper 10 C

Transcribed from a sermon given

On July 11, 2010

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Arroyo Grande CA

By the Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

Luke 10:25-37

If Jesus were living in the Middle East today he might have told that parable this way, “There was a Palestinian living on the West Bank who was driving up to Jerusalem. His car broke down going up the step hill, and when he got out to take care of his car some robbers grabbed him, jumped him, and left him lying by the side of the road. An Imam from one of the mosques nearby was driving by and ignored him and just went on his way. An American who worked for a non-governmental organization, doing good works over in that area, also was in a hurry and drove by. Then an orthodox Jew that was a settler saw the man at the side of the road, stopped his car, got out with his first aid kit, cleaned his wounds himself, helped the man into his car, took him to the hospital and because as a Palestinian he had no health insurance he paid the hospital whatever it was going to cost to take care of him.”

If you were going to tell that story in the United States you might say that there was a rancher who was driving on the road to Phoenix Arizona, and as he was driving along his truck collapsed and didn’t work. It was hot, 110 degrees, and he was thirsty. He was stuck out in the desert and no one would stop to give him water. A politician drove by in his air conditioned car and just ignored him. One of the people who was guarding the international boarder drove by, but didn’t even notice him. Then came a rickety old truck packed, filled with illegal immigrants, and they got out and they shared what water they had with him and took him to the nearest town.

The thing that is shocking about the story, the parable that Jesus told is not what the person did, not what the Samaritan did, but who he did it for. You see human beings are tribal animals. Cows and deer are herd animals. Wolves are pack animals. Human beings are tribal. In order for human beings to survive when they were evolving they needed to come together in groups. A tribe is a little larger than a family, but it has a lot of people who have the same or similar genetic code. A tribe survived by hunting together. An individual human being cannot survive. You need to have others around to help with the hunt, to protect from predators, to protect from other human beings. So human beings have tribes. It is right in our genetics because the human beings that survived were the ones who took care of their tribe and excluded others. The ones who are open to everybody, were less likely to survive.

It is true even for us who think that we are way past tribal mentality. Why do you think it is that Survivor has so many people watching it? If you have ever watched survivor, I did with my daughter once, you know it starts out with two tribes that are competing with each other. Or think about high school. I have never heard of any high school anywhere in the country in which there were no tribes. They might have been called gangs, they might have been called clicks,  but there are always the ins and the outs. There is my group and that group. And then of course we get to sports. Each town has a totem animal. This is part of tribal imagery where each tribe has an animal that represents it. We have eagles and sharks and tigers and all kinds of animals who represent our tribes, our teams. And when our sports teams compete we cheer for our tribe, from our city - and the people from that other city, who are talking about and supporting the other team, they are not as good as we are. We are the best. We’re number one. That’s tribal mentality. That’s the idea that somehow my tribe is better than other tribes. And of course the next step in this thinking is that my tribe is better than other tribes so my tribe has a right to survive and other tribes, eh, not so important. We take care of our own. It is in us. It is part of who we are.

It is very clear in the Old Testament there is a lot of tribal mentality. We read in the Old Testament that there are twelve tribes, each one descended from a supposed son of Abraham, that have become a confederation. And there is also a sense that the children of Abraham are somehow better than anybody else. They are considered to have a special relationship with God. God wants for them to own the land. Therefore, it is okay to go into the land and slaughter people and push them out because our tribe is special. Our tribe has a special relationship with God. During the settling of much of our country there was this sense that we have a special relationship with God and therefore it is okay for us to take the land. We are not immune to it in our history.

You read a lot of that in the Old Testament, but you also read in the Old Testament calls for justice, like the psalm we read today. The prophets said that it is important to take care of the weak, to take care of the widow, the orphan. So the Old Testament is not totally one sided.

But Jesus came and totally split apart that whole idea of a tribal mentality. In fact, it didn’t start Jesus, John the Baptist set the stage. When people came to him, he looked at them and he said, “You think that just because you are a descendant of Abraham you have a right relationship with God. God can make the stones into descendants of Abraham.” Just because you are part of a tribe doesn’t necessarily make you special in God’s eyes.

So the scene is set for this lawyer to come to Jesus and say, “What do I need to do to have eternal life?” What is important? What does God want?

And Jesus looks at him and says, “You’re a lawyer. You know the Law. What does it say?” And this guys says the basic premise, the basic prayer of Judaism, “We are to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and all your strength and to love your neighbors as yourself.” Jesus responds, that’s right, you got it, good. And then the lawyer asks another question. And the question is “Who is my neighbor?” Now that may not have been an irrelevant question. That’s the sort of thing that the lawyers of that time would have discussed. What is our responsibility? Where is the edge of our responsibility? For example, if I told you a story that a man was walking down the street and he saw his son bleeding on the side of the road and stopped and helped him, you’d go, “Why of course.” And if you said a man was walking down the street and his brother was on the side of the road bleeding you’d say, “Well of course he would help.” If he was walking down the street and his cousin was bleeding, well he would probably stop for that. If you said that he saw a car of somebody from his church was in trouble and he stopped to help you’d think, “Well that was nice.” It’s not the stopping to help, it’s the reaching beyond the borders. Who do I care about? Who matters?

You will notice if you read the local paper if there has been an automobile accident and a local person has died, a big banner headline reads, “One person died!” If somebody died within California you’d probably have to have five or six people die to have a banner headline. “Five people die in major accident.” Somewhere else in the United States you might need to have twenty people die, “Twenty people die in flooding!” One person dying in flooding wouldn’t make a headline. If it happens in another part of the world, you have to have a couple of hundred people die to even notice, and it still might be in the back of the newspaper. Where is the boundary of our compassion? And that is what the lawyer was asking. It is a legitimate thing to ask. I can’t take care of everybody, who do I have a responsibility to take care of? It is the sort of thing lawyers back then talked about.

And then Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan. Eugene Peterson describes parables as “time bombs.” Parables are things that may make sense and appear to be simple on the first hearing, but if you sit with them and you think about it over time, all of a sudden at some point it explodes and you realize a new insight that changes your understanding of who you are. Parables work like that.

Who is my neighbor? In Greek the word neighbor comes from the same word as close. Something that is physically close. A neighbor is a person who is close. The Samaritan was close to the person who was hurt. The neighbor is the person right there who needs help. No tribal issue at all. It doesn’t matter. Everybody is a child of God.

We are told that the law says that we are to love, but love can’t be demanded. Love is something that emerges as a response. A response that comes when we know that we are loved by God and we also know that we are no better than anyone else, that we have sinned, that we have made mistakes, that we have hurt other people, that we have fumbled along. That just because we come to church or we were baptized, or that we happen to be of whatever ethnic background or family background or tribal background that that does not make us special. When we realize that in God’s eyes we don’t deserve anything and everything we have is a gift of God’s grace. When we understand that we are loved for who we are, not what we are a part of, but that we are loved as is every other human being - passionately loved by God. When we know that Christ was willing to die for us and we feel that love how can we do anything but respond with love. And when we realize that we are loved in that way and we are all children of God then all the barriers come down because the tribe is every human being that is loved by God. And when we see from God’s eyes we see that the person on the other side of the world, we see that the person who is our enemy, we see the person who is different from us, is loved by God the same way we are. And then there are no strangers. We are all members, and we can’t help but respond with compassion and mercy.

And as you sit with this parable, and you think about who is your neighbor, perhaps consider another way to look at this parable. Perhaps, just perhaps we are the person who has been beaten up and are lying on the side of the road, and Jesus is the Samaritan.

Have you ever given your love to someone unable to receive or acknowledge it?
Have you known times when you feel dead and dry inside, and unable to feel the love that you intellectually know is there? God sows love like a foolish farmer that casts seeds on rocks and weeds as well as good soil. 
This sermon, written 18 years ago, includes some reflections on a personal loss and the constancy of God's abundant love.

Proper 10 A

Sermon given 7/13/96

at St. Alban's Epsicopal Church, Brentwood

by the Rev. Valerie Hart

Matthew 13:1-9,18-23

         As I was contemplating these readings this week I got to thinking about my Mother-In-Law. During the last few years of her life she was extremely depressed. She was deeply loved, yet seemed incapable of knowing it. Her husband, my father-in-law, was as devoted as any man could be. He cared for her, took her wherever she wanted to go, gave her whatever she wanted, and made few demands upon her. He made sure she went to the doctors, took her medicine, etc. He even took her to Hawaii, where years ago they had experienced so much love and joy, in the hope that she would cheer up. But nothing seemed to matter; she continued to feel unloved, unlovable. No matter how much love was showered upon her by her husband, she couldn’t feel it. It didn’t matter that her baby grandchild adored her, she felt unloved and useless. Nothing that any of us said or did would matter. No seed of love could take root in the hard soil of her heart. A heart that had kept hidden the hurts of childhood, a heart that had so loved her family, a heart that could not receive, yet still longed to give. In fact, in her suicide note she said that she felt we would be better off without her. How little she understood of the deep love we felt for her and the aching we would all feel with her death. How hard it was to have loved someone so deeply and to know that they were unable to feel it.

         Have you ever given your love to someone unable to receive or acknowledge it? Perhaps there was a time when your spouse was so busy with work or other concerns that he or she didn’t notice your love. Or your children may have gone through a period of time when their need to express and be in touch with their anger made it impossible for them to acknowledge your love. Or you may have found yourself caring for a parent whose illness was so severe that their pain kept them from realizing the love behind your ministrations. Or maybe you are a teacher who has known a student who was so damaged by life that they could not respond to your sincere care. We have all had times when we have felt as if our love was being thrown into a black hole, where the one we loved just didn’t respond.

         Or perhaps we have known times when we feel dead and dry inside, and unable to feel the love that we intellectually know is there. Perhaps we have felt this way because of grief, or stress on the job, or hormonal changes, or chronic illness, or mental disturbances, or we just don’t know why. These are times when we cannot respond to the care expressed by others, when no matter what is said or done we feel unloved, unlovable. When even God’s love can’t get through.

         What does this have to do with today’s readings? God is the abundant sower, perhaps even a foolish farmer, for God sows love on all. The seeds of God’s love are sown on the hard path where there was no hope of them taking root. They were sown on rocky ground that had no depth; they were sown among thorns where there was no chance of growth, in addition to being sown on good ground. What kind of farmer is so wasteful? Doesn’t the farmer choose carefully where the seeds will be planted? Why would a farmer waste all that seed? But the nature of God is abundance. Isaiah speaks of people receiving water and food without money. He describes the word of God to be like rain and snow coming down and watering the land. The rain and snow do not discriminate as to where they will land. The rain falls on the land that has been prepared and absorbs it, it falls on the hard clay that just has it run off, it falls on the streets and towns and lakes and rivers. It is indiscriminate. So it is with God’s love. God’s love is sown upon all - worthy or unworthy, rich or poor, good or bad, happy or depressed, those ready to receive and those closed off. It doesn’t matter to God, the love is just sowed everywhere.

         I remember a time when I felt spiritually dead inside. When I saw my spiritual director I told her how I was unable to feel God’s love in the way I had before, and I grieved that loss. I said that I felt dry inside. Her response surprised me. She said that many of the great mystics trusted the dry, desert times more than the times they felt filled with love, because it was often through the dry times that God’s work of transformation was most powerful. Just as a field must lie fallow sometimes in order to continue to produce healthy crops, sometimes our hearts feel dry inside so that we can fully know our need for God. Often after a period of dryness, the gift of experiencing the fullness of God’s love again is worth the pain of the dry periods. Coming out of that dry period, once again feeling filled with God’s love, I realized how central love is to all that we do. It is really very simple. Our theology does not need be complicated - it is that God loves us, and we are Christians because the way that we came to know how much God loves us is through the incredible love expressed by Christ. And our worship is also an expression of love. We sing songs of love for God, we pray in thanksgiving of God’s love, even our times of confession is an acknowledgment that we have not loved as we could. We express our love for each other at the Peace, and we conclude our worship with the Eucharist, the Holy Communion where we remember God’s expression of love through Christ, and we partake of the loving gift of his body and blood. That’s all that it is about - Love. It is really quite simple - God Loves Us and never stops loving us, whether we can feel it or not.

         God just keeps sowing those seeds of love, whether we are receptive or not, in the confidence that at some point the soil will have been prepared, the thorns removed, the rocks cleared away, the hard ground plowed, so that the seed will take root and grow and bring forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. And what marvelous grain it is, for the fruit of God’s love is our ability to love. When we have so abundantly received we are called to equally abundantly, and selflessly give. And we are called to give our love as God gives, abundantly, without concern of how it is received, with the assurance that sometimes seeds planted in the desert are just waiting for the next rain to sprout and grow.

         So we keep loving, as God keeps loving, and we keep plowing the ground, clearing out weeds, removing the stones, and trusting in the dry times that the abundant rain will return, - trusting in a love that is often not returned from others, trusting in the love from God that we are sometimes unable to feel. And trusting that God will continue to keep sowing love.

         I don’t think that God ever gives up on us. I am sure that even though my mother-in-law was closed to God and human love in this lifetime, that God has not given up on her, but continues to sow the seeds of love into what I hope and believe is now more fertile soil.

         I trust that such an extravagant farmer would never give up on an opportunity for love, that God continues to sow the seeds of love, and will continue to sow them in the hope and confidence that eventually they will fall on fertile ground.