A Sermon on the Good Samaritan

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

                                                            Luke 10:25-37 NRSV

 I found it difficult to resist putting two sermons on this Gospel passage in the same volume.

Shortly before he died last March, Pope Francis had a rather interesting exchange of ideas with Vice-President J.D. Vance.  The vice-president, like me, is a convert to Catholicism.  Unlike me, the vice-president was not theologically trained prior to his conversion.  I believe it is easy for persons in any Christian tradition to pontificate (pardon the pun) on things which they are not skilled enough to correctly opine upon.

Vance was speaking about the Catholic principle of ordo amoris, the order of love.  He said the order of love was like moving out from the center of a concentric circle, starting with family and friends and then moving to those geographically near you and finally, what love is left over goes to those farthest from you.

The pope was nonplussed about this.  Francis’ reply was that if you want to understand ordo amoris, look at the Good Samaritan.

The whole point of Jesus’ telling this story is to answer a question.  When speaking of the two great commandments, to love God with all our hearts, and to love our neighbor as ourselves, Jesus is asked “And who is my neighbor?”

Now I have preached before that we are the man left on the road to die and Jesus is the Good Samaritan who comes along and finds us and nurtures and cares for us and brings us back to health.  I do believe that is an appropriate interpretation of the parable.

But there are other ways to look at it.  One of the areas where I believe this story can be helpful is as a confessing church bears witness in response to the apostasy known as Christian nationalism. 

Jesus gives us these two great commandments:

First, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind.

Second, love your neighbor as yourself.

In telling the story, Jesus chooses a character most Jews of his time would have found cringeworthy, as the person who brings God’s grace and love to the person in need.  I think that is something we need to ponder.

The neighbor is the one unlike us!

The misguided idea of ordo amoris which Vance offered misses the point and I believe that is why Francis pointed us toward the Good Samaritan as the way to understand how God orders love.  I believe if Jesus would tell this story in 21^st century  America, it would sound very different from how Luke records it for us here.

The Samaritan would be a woman. The Samaritan would be a person of color. The Samaritan would be trans. The Samaritan would be gay or lesbian or bisexual. The Samaritan would be an immigrant, probably an undocumented immigrant. The Samaritan would be an addict. The Samaritan would be someone who is living with someone but is not married to them. The Samaritan would be disabled. The Samaritan would be on welfare. The Samaritan would have a bunch of tattoos and piercings. Maybe the Samaritan would be in a motorcycle club. The Samaritan would not be a Christian. It would take those kinds of descriptions for the story to have the impact on American hearers that the Samaritan had at the time Jesus told the story.

Instead of seeing love as beginning at the center of the circle, what happens if we see it as beginning at the periphery and luring us to the center?  I think of how Jesus spoke of the king who sent his servants to the highways and byways to bring people to the Feast.  What if, coming from the center, God’s love reaches all the way to the farthest point and draws people along as that love moves back to the center. In Psalm 139, the Psalmist speaks of God’s hand finding us even if we settle at the farthest end of the sea.

Quaker writers like Douglas Steere and Thomas Kelly speak of living life from the center.  That center is the place where the human encounters the divine.  That is the place where God finds us and draws us into intimate communion with the holy.  It is also the place where we find our commission to go into all the world.  Kelly spoke of how God takes love of the world out of us and then hurls love for the world into our hearts.  We are in many ways the bread God casts upon the waters.  It will return to God again.

But here is an important piece, God is trying to bring everyone along.  We do not always cooperate.  I am not confident in the idea of universal salvation for the simple reason that God is love, and love gives people freedom to make choices, and love respects those choices, even when doing so is painful.  I think at best we need to be agnostic about universal salvation because I do not think it makes sense that God would not overpower or coerce us into faith in this life, but will do so in eternity.  If someone would choose not to be with God, I cannot imagine God overriding that choice.

Nonetheless, God is trying to bring everyone along.  That means the Samaritan, the one God uses to reach me, to reach you as well, may be the one most unlike us.  God’s love starts on the periphery and draws us to the center.

By Their Fruits: A Sermon

 

You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.

Matthew 7:16-18 New Revised Standard Version 

Evangelical Christianity recently lost two of its stalwart figures, John MacArthur and James Dobson.  My evangelical background is one in which I would have at one time looked to each of them as an authority figure.  As I have grown older I have come to the place where I no longer think of myself as an evangelical. My move from Baptist evangelicalism to Quakerism (and I still think of myself as a Quaker) to Catholicism (and I also think of myself as a Catholic) was driven by a hunger for the truth as Jesus taught it, to the best of my ability to learn.  The decision to become Catholic was a result of a desire for the faith of the early church.  I believe our friends in the Orthodox Churches also have that apostolic faith, which I find in Catholicism.  I believe other movements in the history of Christianity, including Baptists, anabaptists, and Quakers, have been known for apostolic zeal, and have been a blessing to the world.  But for me, as Catholic converts call it, “swimming the Tiber” has brought me to a level of spiritual depth I have never before found.

I think part of this is a desire to go deep in history.  John  Henry Cardinal Newman, an Anglican bishop before becoming Roman Catholic, said, “to go deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.”  For me, crossing the Tiber meant I found something I have looked for my entire life.

I am under no illusion that the Catholic church is perfect. It has its saints and sinners just like every church.  I am openly critical of the church in many ways.  I do not believe in Just War.  I do believe in separation of church and state.  I want the Catholic church to open its sacramental life, including marriage and ordination, the sacraments of commitment, to everyone, regardless of gender or sexual orientation.

In my book A BRIEF PROCESS PERSPECTIVE ON NATURAL LAW, I have argued that natural law is a helpful and useful tool in Christian theology.  I believe nature does tell us something about how God wants us to live.  The problem is we know so much more about nature than Thomas Aquinas did 750 years ago, or Aristotle, 1600 years before that.  Nature includes some things which people did not know previously it includes.  There is scientific reason to believe gender and sexual orientation are not waffles placed in neat boxes, but spaghetti strung together in a complex and tangled way.  We have reason to believe that neither sexual orientation nor gender are actually binary. 

If science proves contradictory to our theology, I think we need to keep the science and change our theology.  I do not believe there is any virtue in holding on to beliefs just because they are old.  It makes as much sense, given that all humans share 99.9% of the same DNA, to deny someone marriage or ordination based on hair or eye color as it does to deny marriage or ordination based on sexual orientation or gender. 

So the Catholic church has its warts.  It has its moral failures.  I think Catholics who believe the church is never wrong are as mistaken as are the Protestant evangelicals who believe the Bible is free from error.

My own move away from evangelicalism began as I left an abusive cult group which was built around the ministry of an Indiana evangelist, Rev. Loran Helm.  The leadership of this group took it upon itself to tell its constituents where they should live, where they should go to college, and who they should marry, based on supposed revelation from the Holy Spirit.  I think they got more wrong than they got right.  I wrote about the ten years I spent in this group in my book, THE WILDERNESS I LEFT BEHIND.

Many of these marriages ended in divorce.  In my case, I was told that I was not suitable for marriage or to be a pastor because I have cerebral palsy.  There were a number of young men the leaders told they were called to the ministry, but not any of that actually worked out.  In the end, what was left was a string of carnage. 

I was eventually ordained by one of their churches before I became a Quaker minister.  I remember the week before my wedding (I just asked my wife of 40 years to marry me, and she said “Yes,” even though the leader told me I was not to ever get married to anyone without his personal approval—and when I got married I got blacklisted) I got in a lot of hot water, because I encouraged a young wife to separate from her abusive husband.  I still think I did the right thing, but people told me I should have told her to submit and endure.

That kind of thing, encouraging women to stay in abusive marriages, was a common complaint against both MacArthur and Dobson.  In Dobson’s case, there was also the complaint that his approach to discipline was one which gave a green light to physical abuse by parents. In the group I was in, the teaching was to spank, and to keep striking the child repeatedly until they repent for what they did.

Now, I want to say, nobody gets everything right, and maybe nobody gets everything wrong.  I have become a liberal, social justice preacher and Christian, but I have no illusions that progressive Christianity does not have its own faults.

Having said that, I want to plant this seed for people to consider.  If these ministries, Helm, Dobson, and MacArthur, were what they claimed to be, I do not believe they would have left the aftermath of pain and abuse they did.  I do not believe the spiritual wounds these men inflicted on people would be there, if their ministries had been good fruit from good trees.

The Second Isaiah said of the coming Messiah, that a bruised wick he would not put out.  I think that the leaders I am describing here caused many more bruises than they healed, and that is said.  I called my book THE WILDERNESS I LEFT BEHIND because Loran Helm, likening himself to John the Baptist, called his memoir A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS.  It eventually dawned on me that he had led so many people into a wilderness instead of out of one, and sadly, left them there.

Again, none of us gets it all right, and none of us gets it all wrong. But as I am reading, in light of the deaths of MacArthur and Dobson, the painful accounts of those bruised, I cannot believe their work was good fruit from a good tree, and I know much of the fruit of where I came from was not.