Sermon on July 11, 2010
Sermon for the Episcopal Church of St John the Baptist, Capitola,
given by Rev. Steve Ellis
The Episcopal Church of Saint John the Baptist welcomes all to worship God and to share Christ's love in the world. We are a parish family committed to provide liturgy, Bible study, music, counseling, and Christian education for children, youth, and adults, and to equip all our members for life and for service to others.
O Lord, mercifully receive the prayers of your people who call upon you, and grant that they may know and understand what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Old Testament Lesson
Moses said to the people of Israel, "The LORD your God will make you abundantly prosperous in all your undertakings, in the fruit of your body, in the fruit of your livestock, and in the fruit of your soil. For the LORD will again take delight in prospering you, just as he delighted in prospering your ancestors, when you obey the LORD your God by observing his commandments and decrees that are written in this book of the law, because you turn to the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
"Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, 'Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?' Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?' No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe."
Deuteronomy 30:9-14
Psalm
1 To you, O LORD, I lift up my soul;
my God, I put my trust in you; *
let me not be humiliated,
nor let my enemies triumph over me.
2 Let none who look to you be put to shame; *
let the treacherous be disappointed in their schemes.
3 Show me your ways, O LORD, *
and teach me your paths.
4 Lead me in your truth and teach me, *
for you are the God of my salvation;
in you have I trusted all the day long.
5 Remember, O LORD, your compassion and love, *
for they are from everlasting.
6 Remember not the sins of my youth and my transgressions; *
remember me according to your love
and for the sake of your goodness, O LORD.
7 Gracious and upright is the LORD; *
therefore he teaches sinners in his way.
8 He guides the humble in doing right *
and teaches his way to the lowly.
9 All the paths of the LORD are love and faithfulness *
to those who keep his covenant and his testimonies.
Psalm 25:1-10 Page 614, BCP
New Testament Lesson
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother,
To the saints and faithful brothers and sisters in Christ in Colossae:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father.
In our prayers for you we always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, for we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. You have heard of this hope before in the word of the truth, the gospel that has come to you. Just as it is bearing fruit and growing in the whole world, so it has been bearing fruit among yourselves from the day you heard it and truly comprehended the grace of God. This you learned from Epaphras, our beloved fellow servant. He is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf, and he has made known to us your love in the Spirit.
Colossians 1:1-14
Gospel
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
Sermon: How Can A Samaritan Be Good?
A friend of mine summed up this passage from Colossians with this chorus: “We’ve been delivered from the dominion of darkness, into the kingdom of light.” I think today’s gospel illuminates exactly what that looks like, in a most remarkable parable.
This lawyer, this expert in the law of Moses asks Jesus, in order “to test him”, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” We are given to understand that this is insincere, an attempt to discredit Jesus. But what seems awfully interesting to me is that Jesus doesn’t treat him like an adversary, but like a person searching for understanding and salvation. So he asks the man “you are an expert in the law, what do you think is the best answer to your question? Asks him to risk something himself, to have a little skin in the game. And Jesus likes his answer, as far as it goes, and tosses it right back with a challenge, asking the scholar if he is prepared to live this answer. And suddenly the scholar wants to put on the brakes, to define carefully, to have boundaries, to limit his obligations under the law to something that is comfortable and well-defined. He’s not only a student of the law with his mind, he’s a legalist in his living, wanting an exact command, so that he knows where his obligations end.
How do I know this? Because I’m completely in sympathy with this guy. Jesus’ challenge frightens me. What leap of faith does he want from me? How far does he want my sympathies to go? How far does he want my kindness to go? When can I stop? Do I ever get to rest? If Jesus is going to challenge me to live my values well, how do I balance that with the command to keep the Sabbath and have rest and balance in my life? How do I balance it with the desire to provide for my family’s future? Does this make sense to you?
But when I’m still putting the question like this, I haven’t caught how far ahead of me Jesus is, and how different his perspective than mine. And to break open the question, as usual, to wake us to God’s vision, Jesus tells a story.
Now there are emotional realities, political realities, in this story, that I don’t think we begin to realize, and that background looms very large in the way Jesus tells the parable. First, the road from Jerusalem to Jericho was a very dangerous road to travel in those days and everybody knew it. Second, Jews and Samaritans, as a rule, despised one another in Jesus’ day, and this had religious and political roots; and the lawyer, who is trying to publically discredit Jesus, does so as a member of a powerful party, and those of his party despise Samaritans as political and religious traitors, so it is very provocative of Jesus to tell a story with a Samaritan as a good guy and then ask the lawyer to name him as the good example, as one the lawyer himself should emulate, in going beyond the demands of the law, since the lawyer himself has just called loving God and neighbor the heart of the law, the key to salvation.
So Jesus takes this scholar seriously, as a seeker, not an opponent, and tells him a story. Let me try to do the same:
One day one of us from St. John’s decided to take a long walk after church, from St. John’s to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. It might have been me, because I’m walking a lot these days, or it might have been Chris . . . And when he got down to beach flats, he was mugged, and beaten, and left on the street for dead. Now a priest was driving by, and he saw the guy, and decided he was probably just sleeping something off and kept going. And a member of the vestry of a church drove by, and saw the guy lying there, but thinking what a dangerous neighborhood it was he just kept going. Somebody would make the call.
And then a family of illegal immigrants walked by. They weren’t rich, they were staying at one of the motels in the neighborhood, they didn’t know much about the area, they were on their way to the Boardwalk. But they did know something about people lying by the road, and when they saw this guy, they had pity on him. At home in Iraq, they had seen lots of people lying by the side of the road. So they found someone who would call an ambulance, and they waited with him until it came, even though they were now very afraid of the neighborhood, and even though they didn’t want to be questioned, because they didn’t want to leave him alone.
Now, was it the priest, the vestry member, or the immigrant family? Who acted as a neighbor?
Jesus is asking the lawyer whether the priest and the vestry member were justified to pass by – because the law said they should keep undefiled for their duties. They had an out. And, Jesus is asking whether a member of a despised minority can, by virtue of simple human solidarity, be a good example to a fine upstanding citizen like this scholar of the law of Moses.
It would have been very difficult for the lawyer, with his cronies standing around hoping he could discredit Jesus, so its very courageous for him to have answered the way he did. The law justified the first two, and Jesus was showing him that his answer, the law of love, went way beyond the Moses’s demands.
To his credit, the lawyer stuck to his convictions and said the one who showed mercy was the real neighbor.
Jesus showed him that eternal life requires not only definitions, but actions, and that those actions often come in the guise of foreigners, outcasts, enemies, and people who confuse us because they won’t fit our picture of what is good or familiar or safe.
Colossians says that, in Jesus, God has delivered us from the dominion of darkness into the kingdom of light. Sometimes that light is too bright for us. Sometimes it seems blinding, and we look for definitions to dim it, to narrow it, to make it tolerable. I think St. Paul would tell us – and we know Jesus constantly tells us – that we should instead, stay in the light
and let our eyes adjust,
let our hearts adjust,
let our minds adjust,
until we can see clearly,
in the blinding, joyful light of his forgiveness –
see how we are free now
to view others
with the eyes of love.