The Right Answer

will you pray with me come Holy Ghost our souls inspire and lighten us with your celestial fire for if you are with us then nothing else matters and if you are not with us then nothing else matters be with us we pray in the name of your beloved amen grace to you and peace in the name of God's beloved and thank you for your warm welcome to Riverside Church I have not been hugged so much in a long time I've been here many times through the years sitting where you are now and I have received a blessing every time so today it is my turn to try and find some good news you can use in the text before us which sounds very different the morning after last night full disclosure I am an Episcopalian we preach very short sermons so if you have not had enough when I am done you raise your hand and I'll start all over again [Applause] most of you know the story you just heard again so well that you can tell it by heart because it is heartwarming and tender and true that we are all called to help the hurt stranger in the ditch that we are all called to assist God in the healing of this world the problem is that anyone who loves this story has probably misunderstood it that's easy to do since it is sometimes told as a self-congratulatory tale about people like us Christians I mean who knew the right answer to the question Jesus asked the lawyer even before Jesus told the story to back it up which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers answer the one who showed him mercy we have gotten the lesson of the Good Samaritan so well that we have named hospitals after him neighborhood clinics relief agencies job centers nursing homes and credit unions completely forgetting that he never was and never will be one of us he was the enemy he belonged to the other side shortly before Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan Luke says he was refused lodging in a Samaritan village his disciples had gone ahead of him to find a room for the night and came back to tell him that they would all have to keep walking because Samaritans did not like Jews any better than Jews liked Samaritans the two groups had enough in common to disagree about who was right about God they both followed Torah though not the same version they both worshiped in a temple though not the same one they both claimed to be God's chosen people though neither would admit that God might have chosen more than one chosen people each group viewed the other as a bunch of vile imposters unclean in the eyes of God a Samaritan did not want a Jew sleeping in his bed any more than a Jew wanted a Samaritan sleeping in his bed so it's unlikely that Jesus was surprised when his disciples asked his permission to call down fire from the sky to burn that village up they were that angry with the Samaritans but Jesus told them to get over themselves that's not how you deal with rejection the way he dealt with it was to tell a story in which the Samaritan was a hero a neighbor the one who showed mercy first he reversed the circumstances putting the Samaritan in Jewish territory where it might have been hard for him to find a bed for the night then Jesus made the Samaritan the good guy the foreigner who saved the life of a man whose own people had let him down maybe it was wishful thinking on Jesus part or maybe he just wanted to remind himself and everyone who heard him that you never really know what is inside another person you may think you know based on how your people and their people have treated each other in the past but you do not always know we are all capable of surprising each other every single day a single act of kindness has the power to call a whole history of against nests into question by inventing a story in which that happened Jesus put good and Samaritan together in his hearers Minds for the first time he knew that sometimes you have to start telling a different kind of story before a different kind of future can unfold AJ Levine a Jewish professor of New Testament at Vanderbilt says that if Jesus had been a Samaritan he would have told the parable of the good Jew the best way to recover the punch of the parable she says is to imagine the hero as the last person in the world you want to call good try moving it to the West Bank she says since that is where the ancient kingdom of Samaria was make the man in the ditch an Israeli Jew after a rabbi and a member of the Israeli Knesset have passed him by she says imagine a Muslim member of Hamas bending down to bind the man's wounds and bathe him and make sure he is taken care of if that scenario could be imagined by anyone in the Middle East Levine concludes perhaps there might be more hope for peace if that scenario could have been imagined by anyone in the state of Florida perhaps there might have been more hope for peace I don't know where the story needs to happen for you but you do who is the last person in the world you would want to give you CPR the kind of person you would hate to thank for saving your life that is your good fill in the blank so there's one teaching from this story the good news is only good once you have given up your ideas about who is good and who is bad the quickest way to do this apparently is to get beaten up and robbed because from that perspective the perspective of the ditch anyone who stops to help you I mean anyone is your new best friend or your neighbor to use the same language Jesus used who is your neighbor not the one who looks like you or thinks like you or worships like you but the one who shows you mercy when you are most in of it this points to another teaching in the story that is easy to miss at least partly because it is as troubling as the first Jesus does not care what the Samaritan believes it's only what the man does that matters so he reads a different scripture so he goes to a different temple so he follows a different path so what Jesus is focused on the man's actions not his beliefs this can be upsetting to Christians who have been taught that it is our faith and not our works that matter but there you have it Jesus was not a very good Protestant he was a Jew who knew that right belief does not put a cup of water in the hands of a thirsty person or bandage a wound or offer a traveler a bed right beliefs don't change a thing unless they lead to right actions even the lawyer who questions Jesus knows that what must I do to inherit eternal life he asks or as we say in North Georgia what must I do to be saved Luke says the lawyer did not really want to know the answer to the question that he was just testing Jesus but the lawyers question is a good one it's not a bad thing to test people who claim to be speaking for God that makes the lawyers question very appropriate what must I do to inherit eternal life if the preacher says open your wallet and give me all your money you might want to think twice about that answer or if the preacher says look deep into my eyes and repeat after me I'd think about that one too but Jesus did not say either of those things instead he answered the lawyer's question with another question what is written in the law he asked the lawyer what do you read there Woody Allen favorite son of this city tells the story of a man who asked his rabbi why does a rabbi always answer a question with another question the rabbi thought a moment and said why shouldn't a rabbi answer a question with another question it may be frustrating for people who want canned answers but it's also a very good way to teach by bouncing the lawyers question back at him Jesus not only made the man think for himself he also found out what the man believed you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart soul strength and mind the lawyer answered and your neighbor as yourself some of you know this as the great commandment a combination of verses from Leviticus and Deuteronomy and you probably thought that Jesus said it didn't you that's because he did in Matthew and Mark but Luke for some reason put the words in the lawyers mouth in sted maybe as a kind of reminder that just because a person knows the right answer and can say it out loud does not mean that he has ever actually gotten behind the wheel and taken it for a test drive you have given the right answer Jesus says to the lawyer do this and you will live so there it is again it's not what the Samaritan believes but what he does that matters right answers aren't worth the breath it takes to say them unless they take on flesh at some point leading the person who knows them to live the right kind of life I hate that don't you I went to school for a really long time to learn the right answers so I could become known for knowing them and so I could help other people come to know the right answers to I learned how to read the scriptures in Hebrew and Greek I learned how to tell the difference between the early letters of Paul and the later ones I learned how to explain the dual nature of Christ the gifts of the Holy Spirit and how the three persons of the Trinity relate to one another sometimes when my professors gave me some really hard reading to do I would go down to the basement of the Divinity School library and read the passage over and over again getting slightly drunk from the fumes of my yellow highlighter until the sea of words parted and I could see the miracle in them and when I could see how absolutely splendidly they expressed some truth that had never been put into words so well before I would shout out loud since there was nobody in the basement to bother I get it I understand this thing then I would close the book and carry it upstairs expecting everything to look different because of my new understanding but nothing had changed the trees in the quadrangle were right where they had been and my classmates looked as stressed as ever my enlightenment it didn't do a thing for them until I found some way to put it to work it was all in my head you've given the right answer do this and you will live I don't know how you were brought up in the Christian faith but I became a Christian in my 20s and I was always taught to get my beliefs in order before I did things before I went out with a boy I should be sure I knew it I believed about right relationships between boys and girls before I engage someone of another faith in conversation I should be sure I knew what I believed about that person's salvation before I spent my paycheck I should make sure I knew what I believed about giving back to God and in many ways that was great advice but based on the story of the Good Samaritan I wonder if things don't work the other way around maybe our lives are designed to upset our beliefs not to reinforce them maybe it is a better idea to let our lives teach us what to believe instead of making our lives conform to our beliefs because if you had asked the man in the ditch what he believed about who would help him the clergyman and the deacon or the despised foreigner he would have gotten it all wrong he would have given the wrong answer it was not until later when he was lying in a clean bed at an end down the with his bill paid in advance that he had time to revise his answer updating his beliefs to match his experience a Samaritan who would have thought maybe the only belief any of us really needs is that compassion is the way of life or love if you prefer though not a feeling love as action love as the way God acts toward us love as the way God calls us to act toward one another with power to change the world one ditch at a time I do not know how you're gonna pull that off in New York City but you'll think of something because given the choice between passing by on the other side and being moved by pity the answer is as clear as a bell do love and you will live amen [Applause] [Music] you you

Channel: The Riverside Church

Views: 75,295

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Id: wds3OxzHNAI

Length: 16min 8sec (968 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 16 2013