Sermons from the Pulpit

Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the sixth Sunday after Pentecost, July 15, 2001, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

Amos 7:7-15; Colossians 1:1-6; Luke 10:25-37

Amos, what do you see?
    -Amos 7:8
What is written in the law? What do you read there?
    -Luke 10:26

     Let's talk about that priest and that Levite, that pair of loathsome toads, those privileged selfish swine. Don't you just love to hate them? The Bible has some very satisfying villains whom God must have placed there in order to help us feel good about ourselves. People so vile that we look like saints by comparison. People like these two, or like those other two from the first reading, Amaziah and Jeroboam.

     Now I know that you don't think that I really think that that's what God is trying to get across in the parable of the Good Samaritan. On the contrary. I agree with whoever it was who said that whenever we start identifying with the hero and distancing ourselves from the villain in a Bible story, we are probably missing the point of the story.

     So what about this priest and this Levite? A priest was of course an important person in the religious establishment, and a Levite was very similar. Think of them as a minister and a deacon and you won't be far off. And a despicable priest and a despicable Levite would therefore serve as proof and illustration for the proposition that being religious doesn't always improve a person, and it can actually contribute to the development of a real stinker.

     But when that happens, where do you put the blame: on the person or on the religion? On the religion, of course. At least, that seems to be the rule to follow whenever the religion in question is Islam. And it's certainly the rule in Northern Ireland, where the label of Catholic or Protestant tells you all you need to know about anyone.

     Therefore the priest and the Levite are bad because they belong to a bad religion: they're Jews. When you hear me say that you want to distance yourself from me, don't you? And so do I! But that's exactly the way our beloved Christian church has read this parable for most of its history.

     Which is not only appalling, but also nonsense because, as Jane and I are always reminding you until you're sick of hearing it, Jesus and his disciples were themselves Jews moving through their own thoroughly Jewish environment on a pilgrimage to the Jewish holy city of Jerusalem. So it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to interpret the parable as a screed against Jews or Judaism. It makes more sense to take this priest and Levite as bad examples of a good religion, or more precisely bad keepers of good commandments. A bad keeper of a good commandment is a renegade to his own value system, whereas a good keeper of a bad commandment is like those Germans who became known oxymoronically as "good" Germans because they dutifully obeyed Nazi orders.

     Jesus is telling this story to whom? A lawyer, it says, which is very misleading, since there was nothing in early Christian times that remotely resembled the class of persons we call lawyers. This lawyer was a whole nother kind of critter: a scholar of the Torah, the Law of Moses, the Law of God, the Jewish Law. An expert on what is holy and what is profane and how you tell the difference.

     An expert, therefore, on the ins and outs of what is appropriate, expected behavior for the purveyors of holiness in that society, namely the priests and the Levites! And as such, he can see just as well as Jesus that this priest and this Levite are not behaving the way their own moral system requires them to behave. They are bad keepers of a good commandment. For heaven's sake, you don't need to be told, any more than Jesus or his disciples or this lawyer needed to be told, that the God of Moses and Amos and Isaiah and Jeremiah is not a god who passes by on the other side of the road or who places any value on passing by on the other side of the road.

     But what about all those chapters in the Hebrew Bible that lay out special rules for religious officials? It does say, for example, in Leviticus that a priest or a Levite who comes in contact with a dead body becomes unclean and is not allowed to enter the sacred spaces of the Temple and perform his own responsibilities until he has been through an elaborate and extended process of cleansing. Well, this poor robbery victim lying in the ditch could have been dead, couldn't he? So the priest and the Levite had to stay away from him. They had an overriding duty to God. The rules are different for people like that. If I get stopped for speeding on my way to do your funeral, I not only won't get a ticket, I'll get a police escort, and I know that you, as the guest of honor, would approve of that.

     I haven't actually given that one a try, and the scenario is kind of improbable since I do live next door to the church, but if the situation ever came along I'd play it for all it's worth. And you know what? If I got away with it, that would be wrong! And the priest and the Levite were in the wrong too, and all the purity regulations in Leviticus could never put them in the right.

     There is no such thing as a duty to God that overrides duty to neighbor. What we owe to God and what we owe to neighbor are the same thing, they're the two sides of one coin. This is such a simple notion, and it's all through Scripture, and we have contrived so many ways of complicating it and perverting it and misunderstanding it and avoiding it. Showing mercy to someone who's been robbed and stripped and left for dead is never beyond the call and never contra-indicated, it's a no-brainer in any moral universe I can imagine. That's one plumb line that always points in the same direction.

     There's a huge difference between ritual correctness and moral goodness. They're not the same thing at all. If you violate the moral code you're doing something unethical, you're committing a sin, you're making a wrong choice. But a person who touches a dead body isn't sinning; in fact, if the dead person is important to you, it's your God-given duty and privilege to prepare the body for burial. It's what the women did for Jesus when he was taken down from the cross. It was the right thing to do, but it made them unclean.

     If I shovel the snow off the front steps of the church on a Sunday morning and put down sand, I'm doing the right thing, but I'd better wash my hands and change my shirt before I stand up in the pulpit. It's a matter of showing respect for God and for you, and letting you know who I am and whom I serve and where I find my delight and my center, or where they find me. Sarah is doing the same thing when she carefully chooses the stops and the phrasing on the organ. It's what we all do when we all show up here at the same time on Sunday morning. We all do it all the time, and don't ever underestimate it; it's the glue that holds us together. It's like the water of baptism.

     And that's why it's important that the hero in this parable is one of the unglued, a Samaritan. That's where Jesus pulled a gotcha on that lawyer and everyone else who was listening. The priest and the Levite passing by on the other side, that's exactly what his audience would have expected — stuck-up highfalutin snobs, too good to bother with us common folk. So the audience is all primed for an ordinary Joe or Jane like themselves to come along next and be the hero, and they do get their hero but he's all wrong.

     It's like that wonderful scene in the Mel Brooks movie, Blazing Saddles, where the townspeople have prepared a huge brass-band Sunday dress-up red-white-and-blue bunting welcome for the new sheriff who's been appointed by the governor to save them from the outlaw gang that has turned their frontier community into a living hell, and the new sheriff comes riding tall, handsome and competent down Main Street on his pretty, high-stepping horse with his tin star shining and it's like Jesus riding his donkey into Jerusalem only better and noisier, and then one by one we watch them all realize that he's black. By the time he gets to the bandstand nobody is moving and you can hear a pin drop.

     That's who the Samaritan is: the person who's out of place, the person who doesn't understand us and we don't understand him or her and what's more we don't care to try because what's the point? We're like oil and water with people like that. We don't speak the same language. We're not on the same page. There's nothing to bring us together with them. All our ritual behaviors actually reinforce our separateness from them, and theirs vice versa.

     Do you know any Samaritans? Sure you do. You have some living in your neighborhood. There may be some in your family, most likely among your in-laws. They're everywhere. They're even in this room. Well, here's some good news: Jesus doesn't expect you to pretend you have a whole lot in common with them or shared experiences and behaviors that make you feel close to them. He just wants to remind you via this parable that they have the same plumbing as you do, and if you treat any of them as less than a neighbor, then you've lost the point of being in community and forgotten that Jesus himself was always out of place. That's how he managed to find us lying battered by the side of the road, and had mercy, and mended us.

     Amen