SUNDAY SERMON

July 11, 2004
Proper 10, Year C

Church of the Holy Communion
The Rev. Gary D. Jones

Gospel: Luke 10:25-37

I mentioned last Sunday that I had been away recently, first at an event in New York and then alone in Massachusetts where I was writing an adult education series for the fall which we are calling, "The Heart of Christianity."

And it was good to return home. Everything looks different after you've been away for awhile. The periodic rains and moderate weather a few weeks ago had greened things up - yards and gardens seemed a lot more lush to me. And thanks to the hard work of Maryanne Macdonald and others, the Cheney Parish Hall was looking wonderfully elegant with its new floor. And as I drove down Union Avenue and Walnut Grove, I felt as if I were seeing it all afresh.

That's when my peculiar thought process took an unexpected turn, and I imagined Jesus in the passenger seat. It was his first visit to see me in Memphis this way. Of course, he was looking forward to seeing Graceland. I had told him about Wild Bill's, the juke joint in Vollantine, and he was intrigued by the Peabody ducks.

So as we drove along toward my home and church, I motioned to Idlewilde Presbyterian Church and told him about the great work my friend Steve Montgomery was doing there. I mentioned the folks at Grace-St. Luke's Episcopal Church, just a block away and how I thought he would really like all that is going on in that great place. And then Jesus asked me what the difference was between a Presbyterian Church and an Episcopal church, and I was struggling to answer well, talking about Anglicanism and Calvinism, when he cut me off and pointed to another church, "Oh," he said, "There's another Presbyterian church, just like Idlewilde, right?"

"Well, no," I had to say. "That's a PCA Presbyterian Church, and Idlewilde is a Presbyterian Church USA."

With a slightly furrowed brow, he cautiously asked me what the difference was, probably figuring this was getting a little too complicated. So, I started trying to explain the different beliefs of the two Presbyterian churches, different understandings about the appropriate place of women in the church, about people who were gay, about …. And suddenly he cut me off again, "Wait," he said. "That one says 'Anglican.' That's an Anglican church just like yours, right?"

Well, what would you have said? I did the best I could, but I got the clear impression that Jesus was concerned that so much of our energy had gone into making distinctions about who believed what.

And that's when he told me the story of the Good Samaritan again - the story about a Samaritan who might as well have been an atheist, the person whose beliefs were not orthodox or biblical, but the person who had entered eternal life simply by showing compassion, by giving tangible aid to the half-dead stranger he found lying on the side of the road, even though he had no idea what sort of person the stranger might have been.

And although I had planned on bringing Jesus here to show him our larger than life picture of him on the dossal curtain and the new parish hall floor, it became clear that he wanted to see the new Bright Space playroom at the Salvation Army instead and then head down to Wild Bill's in Vollantine. This surprised me, particularly the Wild Bill's part, but then I remembered how people always used to say he was a glutton and a drunkard and that he hung around with the wrong people.

And one thing all of these so-called wrong people or sinful people had in common was that they had no knowledge of nor any interest in the difference between a Presbyterian Church USA and a Presbyterian Church PCA, or between an Episcopal church and an Anglican Church of Kenya. The only thing these sinful, non-church going people knew was when they were in the presence of someone who genuinely loved them. And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that this was really all that mattered to Jesus, also.

It would be easy to villainize or ridicule the lawyer in this morning's Gospel lesson who questions Jesus so pointedly about how to inherit eternal life and then very particularly asks, "Who is my neighbor?" It's not hard to make fun of him. But the prevalence of impassioned religious debates, the concern about who is orthodox and who is not, and the variety of institutional denominations today shows that we have continued to parse and dissect religious beliefs today, in the very same spirit as the lawyer in the Gospel lesson.

We're not just being dense and difficult. We want to believe the right things and stay on the right road. We want to live in harmony with God and our neighbor, and we want to do our part to make the world a better place. I believe that, generally speaking, our motives are good.

Jesus' story of the priest, the Levite and the Samaritan is not intended as a simple slam against religious people like you and me. Jesus himself was a regular in the synagogue and undoubtedly devoted to the religious traditions of his family. Instead, Jesus was pointing out that our Scripture and our religious practices were never meant to be ends in themselves. Reading the Bible, praying alone and with friends, joining in church services, … all of these practices are good and important as means to an end.

These religious practices are intended to help us learn to love better. That's all.

And when they become ends in themselves, when we become too concerned about whether or not we are reading the Bible correctly or about whether or not we are attending a true, orthodox church, then we are simply crossing to the other side of the road. But when the Bible and the church and religious beliefs and rituals are NOT ends in themselves, then they all point to the naked, robbed, half-dead man in the gutter and motivate us to compassion.

It has been said that Karen Armstrong is the foremost public intellectual who is writing and speaking about religion today. I'm happy to tell you that she has accepted our invitation to speak here at Church of the Holy Communion in April next year.

In her recent autobiography entitled, The Spiral Staircase, Armstrong tells about her encounter with a Jewish theologian who was talking about a well-known theory that Jesus might well have been at one time a student of Rabbi Hillel. Much about the school of Hillel and the school of Jesus are strikingly similar.

The Jewish theologian recounts for Armstrong a particularly poignant story from the life of Rabbi Hillel:

One day, Some pagans came to Hillel and told him that they would convert to his faith if he could recite the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg. So Hillel obligingly stood on one leg like a stork and said: "Do not do unto others as you would not have done unto you. That is the Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and learn it." (p. 235)

Armstrong is fascinated by this story. Obviously, Jesus had taught something very similar but stated more positively in the Golden Rule. But she was troubled:

"But how could Hillel say that his Golden Rule represented the whole of Jewish teaching? That everything else was just commentary?" She asked. "What about faith? What about believing in God? What were those pagans supposed to believe?"

The Jewish theologian nodded knowingly and said,

"Easy to see you were brought up Christian. … Theology is just not important in Judaism, or in any other religion, really. There's no orthodoxy …. No complicated creeds to which everybody must subscribe. No infallible pronouncements by a pope. Nobody can tell Jews what to believe. Within reason, you can believe what you like."

Armstrong can't believe this:

"No official theology?" I said stupidly. "None at all? How can you be religious without a set of ideas - about God, salvation, and so on…"

"We have orthopraxy instead of orthodoxy," he responded. "'Right practice' rather than 'right belief.' You Christians make such a fuss about theology,…. We Jews don't bother much about what we believe. We just do it instead." (p. 236)

This morning's Gospel lesson depicts well-meaning believers, from the questioning lawyer to the priest and Levite, all earnestly seeking the Kingdom of God. But it's only the non-believing or wrongly believing Samaritan who finds it.

Surely there will be no end to our theological and religious questioning. Through Bible study and prayer and involvement in church, we will always seek to be on the right road. But whatever road we find ourselves on, we will always just as surely encounter a neighbor in need. And it is here, Jesus says, not in our beliefs but here in our neighbor, that we find our invitation and even our doorway to eternal life.

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