Seeing Lazarus (4th Sunday of Lent; Luke 16:19-31; March 26, 2017)

Seeing Lazarus

4th Sunday of Lent
Luke 16:19-31
March 26, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

They didn't have zoning ordinances in the ancient world. The various social classes were pretty mixed up. Every class was found everywhere, even in the "better neighborhoods." In fact, we what we might call a "house" in the ancient Greco-Roman city was really a whole complex that included spaces for the family, their slaves, and their clients (and sometimes their clients' clients). They all lived in what was more or less the same building. Wealthy families were in frequent contact with slaves, freeborn folk, and those who had been slaves but had been freed at some point. They were all bound together by laws and conventions.

But then, of course, once beyond the gates, rich people were confronted with an unregulated mass. There were other people's slaves and clients. There were the destitute, people with so little to offer that even selling themselves into slavery wasn't an option. There were day laborers, beggars, and, in most cities, an unsavory element of runaway slaves and thieves. The ones with a little money might live in the tenements that cursed every city with odors of garbage and sewage and the miasma of disease. This general picture would have been true even in the small cities of Roman Palestine.

So, without proper zoning ordinances to keep the undesirables out of sight, it's no surprise that the rich man in our story had to trip over Lazarus every time he left the house, every time he went to visit his friends, every time he left to attend the town assembly. Every time he came home late at night there was Lazarus, lying on the sidewalk.

Still, even without zoning ordinances or anti-vagrancy laws, the rich man had another and really a rather brilliant way of not having to deal with Lazarus: he simply stopped seeing him.

I know exactly what this is about. I grew up in a suburb of Rochester, NY. In those days downtown was still a place people went to shop. The main public library was downtown. So was the largest bookstore in the county. I was drawn to these like a moth to a flame. Saturday would often find me taking a city bus downtown for the day. I wasn't the only one. A slice of the city was there, too. Some worked in the stores, some were there to shop. There was a lot of bustling going on downtown. I have never been much of a bustler myself, but I do like to watch it.

In this way I was first exposed to beggars, men almost all of them, the wreckage of humanity who had fared badly in life's storms and had washed up on the sidewalks and alleyways of the center of the city. They would ask me for money to buy food. I didn’t know what to do. My Dad told me that he used to offer to buy them lunch. This sorted out the people who were wanting to buy alcohol and only once had it resulted in his actually buying a man lunch. But that sounded pretty scary to me as a twelve year old. When a beggar asked me for money it put me in a very uncomfortable place. On the one hand I was a nice kid who was raised to be kind. On the other hand, I just couldn't see myself responding as my Dad. So I simply learned to non-see them.

Oh, their images appeared on the retinas of my eyes, but not in the visual cortex of my brain. They took up space and sometimes they made noise that, if I concentrated on it, I could make out as speech. But I saw them only as physical objects. I learned not to make eye contact with them. Otherwise my defenses would have failed. I learned to non-see them.

That's what the unnamed rich man learned to do, too. He may have had more practice than I did in non-seeing people, but he had a disadvantage, too. Did you notice in the story? Lazarus was not some nameless derelict. This man knew him. I wonder, where did he know him from? It's not as if they went to same parties.

I’m thinking maybe their relationship must have been business. Lazarus could have been a tenant farmer, renting a small plot of land from the rich man, where he grew a little barley, maybe, or a few grapes or olives. It was hard work and hardly produced a living. It wasn’t the sort of work that anyone aspired to. Little boys when asked what they wanted to be when they grew up didn’t answer, “I want to be a tenant farmer just like my Dad!" Peasants got to be tenant farmers when they lost their own land and had to rent land instead. In good years tenant farming was barely a living. The landlord got a portion of the harvest and, no matter how careful Lazarus was to hide as much of it as he could, he gave up more than he could spare. That was in good years.

In bad years, Lazarus would have to go to his landlord to get the money to buy seeds. At the end of that year he would owe his rent plus the interest on the loan. Sooner or later the tenant farmer would find himself owing everything he could grow. A year’s work and nothing to show for it— out on the street with the tunic on his back and nothing else. If Lazarus had a family, it was at this point that he lost it. If he was lucky he found places for his sons and daughters, otherwise he would have had to sell them into slavery or simply shove them out the front door. If he was lucky his wife’s family would take her back, although, really, why would they?

So maybe the rich man watched all this happen, watched Lazarus get further and further behind until he was finally broken--or broke, as we usually put it.

Then Lazarus’s choices became desperate. He could work as a day laborer for a while. (We read about those folks in the gospels.) They earned—when they were working— just enough to stay alive. Maybe the rich man gave him some work, when he had any to give, of course.

But he didn’t always have work to give, so Lazarus didn’t work every day. Which meant that he didn’t eat every day. He grew weaker. He got sick easily. He suffered from the diseases of malnutrition, so, among other things, cuts, scrapes and bruises didn’t heal very well, sometimes not at all.

Finally the day came when Lazarus was too sick to work. The only thing he could do then was beg. Begging, he was no longer dying slowly. He dragged himself to his landlord’s gate and there he hoped to shame the rich man into showing mercy. But the rich man wouldn't show mercy to a man he had decided he could not see. As Lazarus grew weaker he could no longer even defend himself from the street dogs.

Jesus doesn’t give all this detail in his story because his first hearers didn’t need it. Neither did Luke’s readers. They watched this happen all the time. It could have happened to friends or relatives. It might even have happened to one of them. Did you know that in the early church congregations raised funds to buy the freedom of their members who had had to sell themselves into slavery? It's true.

Anyway, I suspect that the rich man watched it happen to Lazarus.

Maybe that’s how the rich man knew Lazarus’s name when he himself died. I’m sure he couldn’t understand what had happened. One minute he was laughing with his friends, the next he was choking on a bone from a roast peacock. Everything went dark for a minute and then he awoke to discover that he himself was roasting.

In case you are disturbed by the disturbing picture painted of the afterlife, please remember that the notion that the righteous poor would experience the good life (if we can use that word), while the wicked rich would be punished with flames, was one of a number of ideas current in those days about what awaited people after they died, not something that Jesus made up. Jesus simply took a theme that he found lying around and wove into his story. I wouldn't set a lot of store by Jesus' description.

Anyway, the rich man knew Lazarus. And, apparently, they had a zoning ordinance in Hades, because, while he could see Lazarus, he couldn’t get to him. There was a barrier, a “crevasse” Abraham calls it, that separated them. I think it was there for Lazarus’ protection, to keep the rich man from thinking that he could still order him around. “Abraham, tell Lazarus to fetch me some water!” “Abraham, tell Lazarus to go warn my brothers!” Old habits die hard, I guess. Just who in Hades did he think he was, anyway? Do you notice that now it's the rich man who is doing all the begging?

I guess the rich man's strategy for dealing with Lazarus didn't work out so well. Non-seeing Lazarus while at the same time stepping over his emaciated body hardly gave him the excuse that he needed. He could hardly say, “Gee, Abraham, I had no idea that things had gotten that bad for Lazarus. I knew things were tough. He’d come around looking for work and then he didn’t come around any more. I didn’t know what had happened to him. It’s too bad, rotten luck, but I didn’t know.” He had no excuse.

This could all have ended much differently for the rich man and it would have cost him so little in the big scheme of things. The leftovers from his table would have fed him better than he had eaten even during the good years. Giving Lazarus a corner in a third-story room so that he could sleep in safety would have cost him nothing at all. But first the rich man would have had to see Lazarus, and this he refused to do.

I think his text has haunted us.
In fact, I suspect that, whether consciously or not, our response to poverty has been shaped by this little parable.

We’ve listened to the story of the rich man and Lazarus. We’ve seen that the rich man had some covenant obligation to the man he knew by name dying on his doorstep. Without thinking it through, we’ve concluded that we can avoid that obligation by getting the destitute out of sight and making sure that we don’t know any of them personally.

We spend a lot of money, both public and private, on various issues around poverty, but I notice that it’s just enough money to salve our national conscience, but not enough to really change the situation for the poor. As Shane Claiborne observes, we are managing poverty, not ending it. And lately I've noticed there is a lot of anger toward poor people. They are blamed not only for their own poverty, but even for the uneasy consciences of those are lucky enough not to be poor.

We have certainly put a good deal of energy into rendering destitution invisible. We don't see many homeless folks in Decorah because this isn't a good place to live if you are homeless. There are no soup kitchens and no shelters. There is no place to get your clothes washed, no place to get warm, no place to stay dry, no place that the cops mostly leave alone where you can sleep if you can scrounge a cardboard box. We don't see them because they are not here.

In the cities where they do live, they aren't seen either, but that's because people see past and through them. And that is how they come to lose their humanity. We all need to be seen, to be noticed in our particularity and in our shared identity as human. We need to be seen. To be seen is to be real. Without it we start to fade away. If we are unseen long enough we will disappear.

But notice what happens in the story. The man with all the advantages, the rich man, the one who thinks that he can throw his weight around even in Hades, the one who refuses to see the human being at his own doorstep, is a man who has no name. He is simply called "the rich man." Oh, in some versions of this story he is called "Dives." Dives is not a name; it's a Latin word that means: rich man. The man who refuses to see loses his own name, his own identity. He becomes a function, an object. And he did it to himself, everyday. Every time he non-saw Lazarus. Every time he stepped over him on the way out of his gate to go and see his rich friends. Every time he didn't hear Lazarus beg for a scrap of bread or a denarius. Each time, he dwindled and became less until finally he was no one at all.

Lazarus on the other hand found himself in bosom of Abraham. I don't know what that means exactly, but it must be good.

So now, what do we do? Well, for one thing, I'm not twelve years old anymore. I don't have to be scared of beggars. So when I'm in the city as I am sometimes, I can learn to see the people I've non-seen for years. We can all learn to do that. We can learn to see the invisible people behind the counters, the one's who ring up our purchases and take our lunch orders. We can learn to see poverty where we've tried to ignore it. We could even start seeing the towns around us as part of our community, places like Protovin and Freeport, places without which Decorah would not exist populated by people without whom Decorah would not run. We can open our eyes. We can open our hearts.

And someday we too will find ourselves in the bosom of Abraham. I don't know what that means exactly, but it must be good.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

Irresponsible Discipleship (3rd Sunday in Lent; Luke 15:1-32; March 19, 2017)

Irresponsible Discipleship

3^rd Sunday in Lent
Luke 15:1-32
March 19, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Jesus had this amazing way of crossing people’s expectations. He behaved, if the Word of God is anything to go by, in ways that ran counter to the way prudent people were supposed to behave. Jesus didn’t seem to have any view of the larger picture, no view of the greater good. For Jesus the old Vulcan saying--"The good of the many outweighs the good of the one."--made no sense at all.

Imagine a suburban pastor who, when the Staff-Parish Relations Committee met, was nowhere to be found. Instead, it was discovered a couple of days later, she had spent the evening passing out blankets to homeless folks down by the river and, when she ran out of blankets, she decided to sit and talk for a while and somehow it had turned into a worship service, complete with communion. And, yes, they even used real wine.

Or imagine if, when the Special Funds Treasurer gave his report, it was found that he had taken money intended for re-roofing the building and instead had used it to hire crews to bring the homes of poor people up to code in the towns around Decorah.

This was the sort of stuff that Jesus did. It baffled his friends and infuriated his enemies. Or maybe it infuriated his friends and baffled his enemies. His friends couldn't explain what Jesus was up to or why it made any sense. His enemies used the things he did in an attempt to discredit him. And Jesus got tired of it, so he told three stories. They are called, incorrectly in my view, the parables of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the Prodigal Son. They should be called the parables of the Crazy Shepherd, the Crazy Matron, and the Crazy Father. But, whatever they are called, they added up to a really long reading. I'm only going to preach on the first two and I will leave third to you as an exercise.

So we have before us two stories: the story of a crazy shepherd and the story of the crazy mistress of a household. And in these two cases, what makes these stories work is that they raise the deep theological question, "Say what?"

First we have the story of the shepherd who abandons his flock and leaves them to the mercy of thieves and predators to go look for the one sheep who has wandered off. Let’s simply say that when sheep are grazed in open country where they can wander off and where there are wolves or wild dogs or bandits, the story Jesus tells is very unlikely. “Which one of you,” he asks, “does not abandon the ninety-nine?” And the answer is, “None of us! Do you think we’re stupid?”

Finding lost sheep is the work, not of shepherds, but of the shepherd’s dogs. It would be stupid, irresponsible and any other word you can think of for a shepherd to abandon the whole flock for the sake of one sheep. That shepherd is crazy.

But Jesus tells this story to justify the way he behaves.

The next story tells of the mistress of a household who searches for a lost coin. The story tells us that she had ten coins. These were drachmas, silver coins like the one pictured on the cover of the bulletin. Ten drachmas would have amounted to a thousand or perhaps twelve hundred dollars in purchasing power. A woman who had a thousand dollars in cash laying about the house was not the sort of woman who would have been at all familiar with the operating end of a broom. A woman who owned ten drachmas had slaves to do the sweeping. And anyway if a woman like that had lost a drachma, her first assumption would have been that one of the slaves had stolen it and she would have called for a whip, not a broom. Women of that standing did not do housework. She would have considered herself very much above that sort of work. So, when the matron in our story picked up a broom and swept the house there can be only one conclusion: that matron was crazy.

But Jesus tells this story to justify the way he behaves. Before he acts for someone’s welfare—to heal or deliver, or simply to bless with his presence—Jesus doesn’t stop to figure out whether or not he’s supposed to be associating with the person he’s trying to help. He never stops to consider the big picture, which means of course that Jesus was crazy, too.

He’s the pastor who shows up a half-hour late for a staff meeting, leaving the other highly paid staff members twiddling their thumbs—well, no one twiddles their thumbs any more, but you get what I mean. Jesus is the chef who lets every dish burn but gets the salad just right.

Jesus doesn’t go for the percentages. He’s the gambler who draws to an inside straight. He’s the investor about to retire who puts his entire portfolio into an initial public offer. He’s the golfer who hits her ball through the tree instead of around it.

Jesus puts his efforts into the hard cases, the long-shots, the unlikely. That’s crazy. Jesus spends his time with tax collectors and sinners, people who were poles apart from the sort of life he was calling people to live.

While he was doing that there were already a lot of pretty good people around him—people like us—people who, with a little help here and little push there, could become really good people. This would have been the safe bet. It would have gotten the biggest bang for the buck. It would have been a good investment; it would have made good business sense.

But that wasn’t Jesus’ way. He invested his time with those who were too poor to be peasants even, with the social outcasts and the despised.

I guess he never heard that church should be run like a business. He never heard that we need to be careful not to offend. He never heard that we need to take care of our limited resources. He never heard that we need to be wary about new ventures and new ministries. We have to analyze the costs and the benefits and the possible risks if things don’t turn out the way we hope. He never heard that we’re supposed to be very cautious. Like I said, Jesus is crazy.

We seem to be hard-wired against risk-taking, in the name, of course, of being good stewards. When we use the word stewardship in our committee meetings we usually mean something like “careful and prudent management.” In that sense at least, Jesus knows nothing and cares even less for “stewardship.” He was the sort of person who would risk social disgrace to pick up a broom and sweep his own floor in search of a lost coin. He was the sort of person who would leave ninety-nine sheep and go off in search of that one lost sheep.

Jesus justifies foolish risk-taking in the name of healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and welcoming the stranger. In a few chapters, in fact, Jesus will take the biggest risk of all: he will walk unarmed into Jerusalem and demand—in God’s name—an end to business as usual.

Right now, in this service in this reading, Jesus challenges us with these stories to join him in behaving in these foolish and imprudent and even crazy ways.

It’s unlikely that we’ll will do that. Or, at least, I wouldn’t bet a great deal on it: it wouldn’t be the safe bet. We’ll go home and be careful. We’ll be careful in our spending. We’ll be careful in our public behavior. We’ll be careful at work.

But in and around our prudent decisions, our careful spending, our cautious actions, that crazy Jesus whispers in our ears. He tells a couple of stories. One is a story about a shepherd who abandons his flock and the other is a story about a rich woman who picks up a broom. He asks the question, “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until you find it?”

And maybe, in the chorus of voices answering insider our heads, “Why, none of us! Do you think we’re stupid?” there’ll be one or two voices that answer, “Maybe it isn’t a smart idea, maybe it’s foolish and fiscally irresponsible, but I think I would. I would go looking for the lost sheep. Because I’d rather follow Jesus and be foolish than be smart and prudent and cautious and careful and miss that chance.”

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem (2nd Sunday in Lent; Luke 13:1-9, 31-35; March 12, 2017)

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem

2nd Sunday in Lent
Luke 13:1-9, 31-35
March 12, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

There is nothing in the Bible that is so consistently misunderstood and misused as the prophetic material. No parts of the Bible are so consistently sliced apart, yanked out of context, rearranged, and made to say what they do not say as the prophetic parts.

We begin to veer off the road before we've even begun to look at the texts themselves. We start by imagining that a prophet is someone who can tell the future. We place prophets and biblical prophecy in the same category as astrology, the I Ching, Ouija boards, Tarot, and the Magic 8 Ball. "If I ask Laurie to the spring ball, will she say yes?" "Yes." "No." "Try again later."

For as long as I've paid attention, since the days of Hal Lindsay's Late, Great Planet Earth, the Bible has been subjected to a strip mining operation the likes of which even eastern Kentucky has never seen. Television huckster and mega-church preachers have mined the biblical text for snippets that they can use to prove that God sends hurricanes because we see the grace of God in gay people, or that we have to support the nation of Israel even when they engage in apartheid and a slow-motion genocide. When these strip miners leave the Bible behind, all that is left are slag heaps and ponds of poison leaching into the earth.

It is time and past time for Christians to say, "Enough of this desecration!" The Bible does not belong to the fundamentalists, the Dominionists, and the huckster. It is time and past time for Christians to reclaim the Bible. In places it is an unsuitable text, but it is our unsuitable text and we shouldn't let anyone take it away from us.

So let's start with what prophecy is and isn't. Prophecy isn't a form of divination that lets us predict the movements of the stock market or whether this year's harvest will be plentiful. It is not a way of sketching out the events that lead to the end of the world. Prophecy in the Bible was not given so that people two thousand years later would have useful information. Prophecy is not spoken by people who have been taken over by God's Spirit and made to say things they don't understand to people who did not understand what was being said but who nonetheless wrote it down word for word so that it could become part of a sacred text that was not understood by the people who read it but was nevertheless copied and passed along to other people who didn't understand either until it got to us and suddenly it all makes sense to me and I tell you what it means and won't you keep this ministry going so that others can finally hear what this otherwise senseless book says, no donation too small. God will bless you for it.

No, that's not what prophecy is. Prophecy is what happens when someone looks deeply into the present through what they discern of God's vision and then tells what they have seen. Sometimes when that happens what the prophets sees and tells has to do with a potential future that is contained in the present, and that, of course, is where the confusion comes in. Even when that happens, the meaning of the present is the purpose of the prophecy, not the events of even the immediate future let alone the distant future.

The more deeply into the present the prophet is able to look, the more clearly they understand God's purposes, and the more fluently they express this insight, the better the prophecy will be. Prophecy boils down to telling God's truth about how things are. Prophecy--not in the spooky, Nostradamus sort of way, but in this truth-telling way--is a core mission of the Church at all times and in all places. As an aside I will say that it is my belief that the reason there are so many charlatans and huckster is that the Church has largely neglected its prophetic ministry and mission and left the field open for the charismatic self-promoters.

So this is the first thing we need to know about the prophets and the bits of prophetic speaking that are sprinkled all through the Bible: Prophecy has to do with the present and what it means as far God's dream is concerned.

The second thing that we need to understand is how Jesus does what he does when he acts as a prophet. Christians have long affirmed the divinity of Christ. And for good reason. In the birth, life, ministry, preaching, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth we have and continue to see the nature of God revealed in its fullness. And further, the God whom we have met in the birth, life, ministry, preaching, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is not an almost-God, but the God who really is God. That is the Nicene creed in a nutshell, translated as best I can do it into modern categories and ways of thinking. Christians have affirmed these things for centuries.

The Church has also affirmed that this revealing of the nature of God took place and takes place in and through the humanity of Jesus. As a modern theologian put the matter: "The divinity of God is revealed in the humanity of Christ." (I think it was Karl Barth, but I can't find the reference. If it was someone else, well, good for them. If I'm the one who came up with it, good for me!) "The divinity of God is revealed in the humanity of Christ."

That means that from the point of view of Christian theology, Jesus was--and needed to be--fully human. He got tired. He got hungry and thirsty. He had a mind like ours, with only a limited grasp on the universe. He believed that the world was flat, had edges, and was supported on pillars. He did not understand radar. He had no special powers or knowledge.

In particular when he spoke prophetic words he did that in the same way that every other prophet did it: he looked deeply into the present through the perspective of God's dream and told what he saw about the meaning of the present and the potential future that it contained. He did it really well, but he did it in the same way that Elijah, the Isaiahs, Jeremiah, and Hannah did it.

How did he see his own present? That's what is laid out for us in this morning's reading.

He looked at Jerusalem and he saw a fig tree that had gone too long without giving any figs. He saw it living on borrowed time only because of God's forbearance. The gardener was about to cut his losses. Jerusalem was the place where God's Temple was, the place where David had reigned, the place where (according to some traditions) Jacob had dreamed of a ladder reaching up into the heavens. Jerusalem was the place of God's covenant. If you had a question about the Torah, Jerusalem was the place to go. There were people there who knew and they would tell you. You would think that such a city, such a place, would welcome those who could look deeply into the present through the lens of God's dream and tell what they had seen in convincing ways. You would think so, but you would be wrong.

When Jesus saw Jerusalem he saw the city where prophets go to die. He saw a place where those who had been sent to do the same work he was doing were stoned to death. He saw the place where he himself would die. It took no divine knowledge, no direct revelation from God, to see this, torn as the city was between those who would do anything (including killing a prophet) to keep the peace with the occupiers and those who with the slightest movement of a hair-trigger would explode into murderous rage. Neither side could tolerate an announcement of the meaning of the present from God's perspective.

He saw Jerusalem and wept with compassion for the city that he would have embraced and protected, the city that refused the refuge that he offered. Blessed is the parent who has never known a moment like that when a beloved child rejects the values they were raised to value and stands poised on the edge of an abyss of self-destruction. Blessed is the patriot who has never wept for their country that has failed its promise and calls that failure its greatness. Blessed is the teacher who has never seen a brilliant student lay waste to their own potential.

Jesus saw deeply into Jerusalem's present. He saw it through eyes that had been trained both by God's call to do justice and by God's compassion. He bore in his own body the tension of the contradiction between Jerusalem's possibility and its reality. Would I be off the mark if I said that in its pain this moment is comparable only to the crucifixion itself?

The life of a prophet is a life both of exaltation, of suffering, and of frustration. Exaltation from being allowed to see God's dream. Suffering from being forced to see the reality that is being chosen instead of God's dream. And frustration that, no matter how eloquent, no matter how powerful, no matter how persuasive, none of the prophet's words are ever adequate. This is the agony of prophetic ministry. And Jesus suffered this agony fully.

The Church no longer uses stones to kill prophets, but it still exerts itself mightily to silence them. The Church does not want prophets: it wants entrepreneurs and charismatic leaders; it wants care-takers and program developers; it wants success stories of new members received and apportionments paid. And who can blame the Church? Prophets are hard to live with. They ask all the wrong questions. They demand, not restructuring of organizations, but deep repentance. They offer, not plans or strategies, but warnings. They are not optimistic. They are sad. They weep too much.

The Church doesn't want prophets, especially those who turn their gaze toward the Church itself. It's okay to cry "O Washington, Washington," but when they cry "O Nashville, Nashville," it's not fun any more. And the thought that the Church itself might find itself under God's judgment is unbearable.

And yet that does not mean that prophets have no hope to offer. Jesus lamented over Jerusalem, but that did not stop him from demonstrating in its streets, its Temple, its governmental courtyards, and its place of execution what God's dream looked like and how little the peaceful justice of God's dream resembled the reality that the priests had blessed in Yahweh's name or the chaos that the zealots would bring as an alternative, also in Yahweh's name.

The hope of the prophet is the hope of a reality no longer taken for granted as the only possibility. It is the ability to tell a different story than the ones told by politicians, pundits, and purveyors of the latest gadget. The hope of the prophet lies in the certainty that when all the voices have said every word they have to say, when they've run out of things to tweet, when even kittens and puppies have lost their ability to distract us from the nightmare the human race has substituted for God's dream, there is yet another Voice to speak and when it speaks its word, all things will be made new, even Jerusalem, even Washington, even Nashville, even Decorah.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

Wounded Neighbor (1st Sunday of Lent; Luke 10:25-37; March 5, 2017)

Wounded Neighbor

1st Sunday of Lent
Luke 10:25-37
March 5, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

One of the reasons that I made the decision a couple of years ago to use a different lectionary--the Narrative Lectionary-- was that I had been through the other lectionary enough times that it no longer held many surprises. I had preached these texts many, many times. I wanted to cover some unfamiliar parts of the Bible and the Narrative Lectionary seemed to offer me that.

For the most part, I've been happy with the decision. It's been a good experience. It's been fun to have new texts to challenge me.

Of course there are Sundays like today when the text is so completely familiar. What then? There aren't really any surprises here. There is nothing new to see. Biblical scholars have no light to shine on the text in such a way that it suddenly appears as a strange and wonderful landscape. There is just the same uncomfortable story with its pointed questions and its refusal of our easy answers.

The story is set within a controversy story. A "legal expert" has a question for Jesus. (Were the translators afraid of calling the man a lawyer?) He wants to know what he has to do in order to secure eternal life for himself. It's a serious question but he doesn't ask because he wants to know the answer. He asks Jesus in order to test him. This conversation is a contest.

Teachers in the ancient world were expected to be able to win contests like this one. Wisdom contained the notion of cleverness and mental agility. The "legal expert" has put Jesus on the spot.

Jesus answers him in a conventional way: "What does the Torah say?" Well, in reality, the Torah says a lot about a lot of things. People from one end of the theological spectrum to the other use the Torah to support their positions. In answering a question with this question, Jesus puts the matter back in the expert's hands. "How do you interpret it?" Jesus asks. And that, we've found, is an important question. "How do you read [it]?" is a much better question than "What does it say?" How will the lawyer answer?

He could cite the Ten Commandments. That would certainly be an acceptable and common answer to the question Jesus asked. If it had been me, I would have said that the center of the Torah is the statement "Justice, justice, you shall seek!" In the answer to Jesus' question the lawyer will reveal himself as much as the content of the Torah.

"You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself" is what he answered. Interesting. He makes love the center of the Torah. Well, done! (In my own defense "justice is what love looks like in public," to quote Cornel West, so I'm not going to abandon my answer.)

Jesus approves: "You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live." What's the score at this point? Tied, I think.

So does the legal expert. And for him tied isn't good enough. He wants to win, so he asks a follow-up question: "And who is my neighbor?" I'm pretty sure that was really a version of the question, "Who isn't my neighbor?" "Who don't I have to love as myself" is what I think he really wanted to know.

We get what he's implying. I hear it all the time. Someone says, "You know, there are people who go to the Food Pantry who don't really need the food. They only go there because they've spent their money on something else." Loving our neighbors as ourselves is a scary idea. We can foresee that, if we take that demand seriously, we can be entirely depleted and have nothing left to meet our own needs. If we can limit the idea of "neighbor" only to those who live near us and perhaps to a few "deserving" others, then we can imagine that we can keep this commandment and not end up sucked dry.

So what will Jesus say in reply? How can he avoid the dilemma that the lawyer has posed? If we know the Jesus of the gospels we're not surprised that he answers with a story. In this way he is able to turn the legal expert's question inside out.

The story concerns a man who is traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho. It wasn't far, but it was a dangerous piece of road, infested with robbers. And, sure enough, he was beaten unconscious, robbed of his money and of anything else that could be sold--including his outer clothing. The presence of this victim lying in the ditch poses a question to anyone who sees him, just as a homeless beggar poses a question to the people who walk by her on a city street. How do we respond? What do we do? What does the law require of us? Not the criminal code, but the law of the covenant that we have with God, or perhaps even the implicit covenant we have with all human beings?

Two people answered this question by deciding that they did not have a duty to the man in the ditch: a priest and a Levite. They were both religious professionals, officially engaged in service to the God of the covenant. They both decided that they were not bound to help. They may have had very good reasons, reasons that reflected well on them. I know that, whenever I walk by a beggar, I always have good reasons for not helping. But Jesus doesn't tell us anything about their reasons. At least in the story their reasons don't matter. All that matters is that they went on their way as if they hadn't seen the man or heard his groans. All that matters is that the man went uncared for.

Then came the Samaritan traveler. We don't know what he thought either. We don't know if he consulted any list of rules or duties that were imposed on him by his not-quite-Jewish culture. All we know is that, when this man saw the wounded man in the ditch, he was moved by compassion. Well, compassion is the word in our translation, because we don't have an easy way of translating the Greek word into English. The closest I can come is, "he felt a connection to the man in his gut." So, he stopped, tended the man's wounds, put him on his own donkey, took him to the nearest hotel, put him up in a room, watched over him during the night, paid the innkeeper an advance on whatever the injured man needed, and left the next day with a promise to return and pay whatever extra charges there might be. He paid everything with no co-payments and no deductibles.

Not only did the Samaritan do all of this, but he did it without regard for who the man in the ditch was. We aren't told whether the victim in this case was Jewish or not. That's because it doesn't matter. It didn't matter to the two whose idea of loving their neighbors as themselves was perfectly compatible with letting a man die in a ditch as they walked on. It didn't matter to the Samaritan. The Samaritan felt compassion and he acted. He treated the wounded man as anyone might want to be treated, simply because his gut told him to do it.

"Which one acted as a neighbor?" Jesus asked. And, defeated, the expert replied, "The one who showed mercy." Exactly. Two Jews walked by the wounded man and felt and did nothing. The ones who knew the Torah best found reasons to ignore its demands. It was the one who showed mercy who acted as a neighbor. It was the one who showed mercy who fulfilled the Torah. It was the Samaritan who acted like a Jew.

"Go. Do what he did!" said Jesus, using his rhetorical victory to offer the legal expert life.

I don't have anything brilliant to offer beyond what Jesus said. I am better than I need to be at coming up with excuses for not showing mercy. I know all the doubts that we have about the value of charity. I suffer from compassion-fatigue right along with the best and worst of them. I have no magic solution for the dilemma the legal expert posed.

I only know that, in finding reasons for not showing mercy to those to whom we are connected, we cut ourselves off from a part of us that makes us human. We disconnect ourselves from our "gut" as well as our neighbors. To our own destruction we use our theologies and our moral reasoning to tell us why it's okay not to show mercy when it is in our power to do so. And there is no life in that path, not for our world and certainly not for us.

So let us go and do as the fellow did who didn't know the Torah but was in touch with his own sense of compassion and who let nothing stand in the way of showing mercy when he had the chance to show it.

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