The Heart of the Story

The "Parable of the Good Samaritan," as we call it by tradition, is surely among the most beloved and familiar of biblical texts.

We know how the story goes: A traveler who was headed from Jerusalem to Jericho fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and left him for dead.  A priest and a Levite passed by but neither stopped to help.  Finally, a Samaritan happened along, and he was "moved with pity."  He treated the traveler's wounds, bandaged him, conveyed him to an inn, cared for him, and covered his expenses.

Jesus tells this story in response to a question.  A lawyer, evidently troubled that he might not be living up to the command that he love his neighbor, tries to justify himself by suggesting that there is some ambiguity in the directive.  "Who is my neighbor?" the lawyer asks.

Consistent with the tradition of the great rabbis, Jesus answers the question with a story--this story.  He then asks which of the three was a "neighbor" to the traveler.  The lawyer responds, perhaps grudgingly, that it was the Samaritan, "who showed him mercy."

The story is infinitely rich.  We have an innocent victim, brutally attacked for his clothes and his money.  We have a priest and a Levite, two men that society viewed as important and righteous, passing by without a thought--except for the thought that they better move to the other side of the road so they didn't get involved.  We have a Samaritan, someone society scorned, coming to the rescue.  We have an act of extravagant generosity, the Samaritan giving up his time, his labors, his ride, and his resources.

Even the background interrogator is interesting.  We have a lawyer looking for an angle, hoping to catch Jesus in a technicality that will let the lawyer off the hook.  In this sense, the parable reminds me of a story told about the comic W.C. Fields.  Toward the end of his life, a friend discovered Fields reading a Bible, an act that seemed completely out of character.  The friend asked Fields what he was doing and he replied, "Looking for loopholes."

Ironically, Jesus plays in a rather lawyerly way with the question asked of him.  The lawyer's question puts the onus on others:  Who is my neighbor?  Who are the people worthy of my attention?  Who deserves my love?  At the end of the story, though, Jesus flips the question.  He asks: Who was the neighbor to the traveler?  In other words, Jesus says to the lawyer: "Stop worrying about who merits your compassion.  And start worrying about whether you are a neighbor to the world."

In some respects, though, the parable tells us a great deal by everything it does not say.  It is a wonderful example of what I like to call the "sacred economy" of Luke's storytelling, where the text gives us a simple and elegant narrative while leaving room for our imaginations to roam.

So, in that spirit, roam with me for a moment, if you will, and consider all the questions the text leaves unanswered.

How good was this Samaritan, anyway?  Did he do these things all the time?  Or was this his first, last, and only act of extraordinary grace?  And does that matter to us?  Is the Samaritan's act any less good if, on other days, he was less spectacularly generous?

Were the bad guys caught and punished?  Were the priest and the Levite ostracized for their indifference?  Was the Samaritan showered with honors and accolades and praise?

Or did this story play out as we know stories like this sometimes do in real life?  Did the bad guys get rich?  Did the priest and Levite enjoy even greater prestige in the community because no one knew, or cared much, about some obscure traveler that got mugged?

Did the traveler fail to display the gratitude we might expect of him?  Did he complain that the Samaritan's roadside first aid efforts left him with an infection?  Did the traveler's family protest that the Samaritan was probably just hoping for a reward?

These are realistic considerations.  I encourage my law students to do public service work.  But I also caution them that the legal needs of the poor are often intellectually uninteresting and that some of their impoverished clients will be as ungrateful as some of their wealthy ones.  But that is just it: I urge the students to do the work because of its purity, because (to use Robert Hayden's magnificent phrase) it is one of love's "austere and lonely offices."

I urge them to do it because it makes them a neighbor to the world.  That is the point.  And nothing else is the point.

By not telling us more, the Parable of the Good Samaritan tells us so much more.  It tells us that the ancillary injustices, the awards, the failures of gratefulness, the hearty congratulations, the well-intentioned ones who throw roses in our paths, and the malicious ones who bite at our ankles ... they do not matter to the heart of the story.

Because at the heart of the story is this simple truth:

When we are moved with pity and act like someone's neighbor, we write our own parable of goodness.  This does not make us perfect.  The world may treat us no better for it.  And ideal fairness and justice may not reign--at least not yet.  But none of that matters.

Jesus tells us as much at the end of his tale.  And, again, he does so mostly through the sacred economy of his instructions.  For he says, with exquisite simplicity and without any elaboration or detail:

"Go and do likewise."

Amen.

And amen.

A Prayer for Healing

A few days ago, I received the hard news that a beloved friend was just given a stage 3 cancer diagnosis.  He has good doctors, so there are reasons for hope, and he is even ornerier than I am, so he's not going anywhere without a fight.  But news like this reminds us that life is fragile and that, sooner or later, this is a battle we all lose.

As if on cue, my recent morning readings reinforced this message.  On Thursday, I read this in Psalms: "So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart."  (90:12)  On Friday, I encountered this plaintive cry in Job: "Let me alone, for my days are a breath."  (7:16)

We know these realities: that life is short and that death is certain.  In my faith, we embrace an additional reality: that death is not final.  I have great confidence in this principle.  I have seen too much evidence of grace and rebirth to believe otherwise.

But there is a psychological reality at work here, too.  I want my loved ones to stick around.  I want as many days with them in this life as I can get.

So whenever news like this comes my way--and I think I've gotten my fair share of it--I find myself earnestly and eagerly praying to God that this person I love will be healed.  I ask others to join me in this prayer.  I do it every time, and I am doing it this time.

I do it even though I have serious questions about its intellectual and theological coherence.  After all, I believe that God brought order out of chaos; that order means the universe functions according to certain laws; and that those laws sometimes play out in terrible and tragic ways.  In this sense, my prayer is a petition for a departure from the laws of nature.

I believe that God does sometimes override those laws.  Those are the things we call miracles.  But I know that God cannot offer up a miracle every time somebody wants one.  That would be a return to a kind of chaos.

In my view, miracles are the business of God and God alone and I cannot hope to understand when or why they will occur.  My petitioning is therefore either pointless (because God already has a miracle afoot) or presumptuous (because God has other plans).  So my head says: this prayer doesn't make any sense.  But my heart says: pray it anyway.

Over the years, though, this prayer has changed form.  Long ago, I prayed that my loved one would recover and would be healthy again.  But I have come to believe that this is too narrow an understanding of healing.  So, these days, my prayer sounds different.

I now pray that my loved one might know and feel the presence of God.  I believe that, on some occasions, this will mean that God will chase the illness away, my loved one will physically improve, and I will have more time with them.  I am praying and hoping for a miracle, and I have been blessed to witness more than a few of them.

But this form of healing prayer has broader implications as well.  My faith teaches me that, if someone can know and feel the presence of the living and loving God, then they are already healed.  They are healed regardless of what their test results show.  They are healed regardless of predictions and prognoses.  They are healed regardless of what else happens on this side of the door to immortality.

It is perhaps ridiculous to place rankings on blessings.  But I think that this broader sense of healing is actually more important than the miraculous sense.  After all, the miracle simply adjourns an appointment that all of us must ultimately keep--we are nowhere told that Lazarus lived forever.

In contrast, knowing and feeling the presence of God is a healing that follows us to the end of this life and into the next.  It follows us to that place where God, like the father to the Prodigal Son, runs to embrace us, to welcome us home, and to celebrate the end of all those things from which we have prayed we might be delivered and of which we have prayed we might be healed. 

It is a healing that follows us, that stays with us, forever.

And forever.

And forever.

Amen.

The Healing Place

In the fifth chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus finds a man who has been ill for thirty-eight years lying beside a pool. We all know what happens next. Jesus heals the man, who picks up his mat and strides away.


We should not, however, read past an important detail in the story. When Jesus asks the man whether he wants to be made well, he replies by complaining about how no one ever helps him get into the water and about how others cut in front of him when he tries to move there himself. The man has settled on a notion of what it would mean to experience healing: get into the pool. And, of course, Jesus has something else in mind entirely.


We tend to become fixed in our bad habits, our weaknesses, our failures of forgiveness and perpetuities of prejudice. But this story sounds a different cautionary note. It reminds us that we can also become fixed in our vision of what it would mean to be healed, to be made well, to be made whole. And it warns us not to miss the still small voice of a better way in our eagerness to get to the places in which we have firmly settled the confidence of the unknowing.

Beyond the Boundaries: On Limits, Love, and Lanyards

Scripture: Psalm 51:10; Mark 1:21-28

       I had a vision that I had passed to the next world and found myself standing before St. Peter at the gates of heaven.  Peter stood behind an ornate golden table that held two stacks of paper, one consisting of just a couple pages and the other about three feet high.  Peter said, “Well, Len, before we make any final decisions we will need to review both the strengths and the limitations that you displayed during your time on earth.”  He gestured toward the small stack as he said “strengths” and toward the very tall stack as he uttered “limitations.”

       Deeply concerned, I thought a little show of humility might help my cause, so I said “Well, why don’t we start with my limitations?”  Peter frowned at the giant pile of papers before him, shook his head, and responded, “I don’t know.  We’ve only got eternity to get through them all.”

       Victor Hugo wrote: “There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.”  Often, when we refer to the infinite capacities of the soul, we mean the immortality that frees us from the bonds of death.  But, because our faith has at its center the promise of redemption, we must believe that even in this life our soul has “prospects greater than the sky,” vast, limitless.  When the Psalmist cries out “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me,” he leaves us with only two possibilities: either we think him a fraud or a hopeless dreamer, or we take seriously his testimony that the Lord can remake us right down to our very heart and spirit. 

       Despite these assurances, however, I suspect that each of us sometimes feels that no dimension of our infinite potential is so fully realized as our potential for messing up.

       Our faith offers us abundant consolations in this respect.  But it also poses some serious challenges.  And, in this sermon, I want to suggest that one of those challenges is that our faith demands that we keep two very different thoughts in mind at the same time, all the time.

The first of these thoughts is that God loves us in a measure beyond our understanding despite all of our weaknesses and shortcomings.  The second is that God nevertheless wants us to change: to know the Father more clearly; to follow the Son more closely; to experience the Holy Spirit more completely.

       And, to complicate things still further, our faith calls upon us to use these two disparate thoughts in order to free us from our limitations, even though we often use them to facilitate our limitations.  I’ll have more to say about the freedom these two ideas can afford us in a minute.  But let’s start by noting some of the perverse and regrettable ways in which we allow these ideas to place boundaries around us.

       Let’s be honest.  Confidence that God loves us just as we are can encourage a brand of self-conciliatory complacency.  We sit mired and stuck in our angers, our jealousies, our biases, our prejudices, our judgments, our false certainties, our indifference to injustice, our inaction toward poverty and hunger and homelessness until we start to feel—oh, dreaded word!—guilty.  We ponder the possibility of change or repentance or renewed dedication.  But then we remember that God loves us—even in all our messiness and inadequacy—and we settle back comfortably into our happy inertia.

       Of course, occasionally we actually make a little progress on one or more of these fronts.  Being human, this typically prompts a bit of self-congratulation, even if spoken to ourselves silently and in the secrecy of our own hearts.  I suspect that God, who misses nothing, takes notice of our modest progress and forgives us our brief flash of pride.  But I wonder if God weeps a bit when He sees how quickly we stall out, declare that we have done what we can, and place stingy boundaries around our efforts to make His kingdom come to this tired old world.

       This past Christmas, Lisa gave me the book Aimless Love: New and Collected Poems by Billy Collins, who was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003.  I highly recommend the book, which brims with wonderful poems, including a personal favorite of mine called “The Lanyard.”  In that work, the narrator remembers attending summer camp as a child and learning how to braid a lanyard, which he gave to his mother as a gift.  The poem continues:

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that is what you did with them,but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips
set cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the archaic truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hands,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

I do not pretend to know much about God.  But I suspect that God treasures every lanyard that we offer up to Him.  Nevertheless, I think we have to ask ourselves: do we use our confidence in God’s boundless and generous love as an excuse to limit ourselves and to call things “even” when our halting work has really only just begun?

       Alas, we are capable of using the idea that God wants to change us as a limiting principle as well.  This happens in a variety of ways.  For some of us, the magnitude of the work that needs doing serves as an excuse not to try.  We read the words of Jesus and we say:  “Wait a minute.  I am supposed to turn the other cheek to the jerk who offended me, love the enemy who has done me wrong, forgive people not on seven occasions but on seventy times seven, give away my hard-earned money, refrain from judging, have faith that moves mountains, visit the sick and imprisoned, work for peace, serve the poor, and pray with humility?  I—who do not even have the self-discipline to keep my New Year’s resolution to eat fewer potato chips—I am expected to do all of this?”  We declare such a transformation impossible, which, of course, fulfills our prophecy of failure.

       Others of us, daunted by this challenging project, will turn to living life in the passive voice.  We say: “I pray that I will be given courage, strength, clarity of purpose, a generous spirit, a forgiving heart, and all the other stuff I need to do God’s work.  I pray that I will be made into the sort of person God wants me to be.  Here I am!  Use me!”  Sometimes we sound as though we have a sentimental fondness for the good old days when we were inert lumps of clay laying around waiting to be fashioned by the hand of the Lord.

       Through all of these persistent and very human habits of thought we limit ourselves.  We place boundaries around our infinite souls.  We let ourselves off the hook.  Let me be the first to confess: I have not done this seven times.  But seventy times seven.  Times seven.  Times seven.

       And this is a divine and human tragedy, because these two ideas—that God loves us as we are but wants us to change—are given to us for precisely the opposite purpose: to free us; to break our bonds; to help us do things and feel things and know things beyond our most extravagant dreams.

       That God loves us just as we are liberates us from the chains of self-loathing and self-condemnation.  It compels us to love ourselves even when we feel fully persuaded that we do not possess a single loveable characteristic.  It moves us out of the crabbed and confining space of human judgment into the vast and unbounded realm of divine promise.  Because who are we—who are we—to loath this person whom God adores and for whom God gave His very son?

       And that God wants us to change offers still greater freedom.  It assures us that the daunting project ahead does not fall entirely on our shoulders.  We will get some help.  We will get some aid from the one who fashioned the vast seas, and the vaster sky, and that most vast thing of all—our soul.

       Now, as I have suggested, we have a role in this and God’s grace and generosity do not excuse us from trying as hard as we know how.  But do not be surprised if, at some point, God steps in to give you a good, hard yank in the right direction.  This happens, and sometimes it happens despite our resisting and kicking and yanking back.

       I take that to be one of the central points of the story we read together this morning in the Gospel of Mark.  I find it a remarkable story, particularly because of a critical way in which it differs from so many of the other healing stories that appear in the New Testament.  After all, in most of those stories, we encounter someone who pleads for Jesus to heal them, to restore their sight, to let them walk, to make them well.  I am sure that all of us have, at one time or another, prayed in that voice.

       But in this story we encounter a different voice—another voice that also may sound familiar to us.  It is an obstinate, resistant, settled-in-its ways voice.  It is a voice that says: “What have you to do with me?  Why do you want to change me?  How can you hope to destroy what I fear I really am?”  Boundaries?  This man is nothing but boundaries.  And Jesus will have none of it.  He looks inside of that man and he finds the source of that voice and he says, with the power of God Himself behind it, Get out.

       Sisters and brothers in Christ, what boundless potential does Jesus see within you?  What are you doing to see the same infinite promise within yourself that He sees?  How are you helping Him to move you from that which you are to that which you might become?  Are you prepared to discover things about yourself that you never imagined?  Are you ready, like the witnesses of two thousand years ago, to be amazed?

       My friends, there is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is within you.  For it is there, Jesus tells us, that we will find the very kingdom of God.

       Praise Him that it is so.

       And the people said hallelujah.

       And the people said amen.