When Jesus Came to the Discernment Committee

         It was the first meeting of a discernment committee at a faraway parish in our diocese. As a member of the Commission on Ministry, I had been asked to come and do an orientation for a group of Episcopalians who were there to help a fellow parishioner figure out a possible call to ordained ministry. Six committed lay leaders and I all sat in a circle on folding chairs, wearing serious faces. We had just prayed for the Holy Spirit to guide our minds and hearts as we prepared to talk about what it means to hear Christ’s call and to engage in ministry.

        All of a sudden, Jesus walked through the wall of the room and stood just outside our circle. At least he said that he was Jesus. He did walk through the wall. But you never know. He didn’t quite look like Jesus, either. He had on jeans, and he didn’t smell so good. And well, his eyebrows were thick and bushy, and his eyes were squinty. Jesus is supposed to have such big, beautiful eyes.

          If this guy were really Jesus, I was ready to be pretty impressed that Jesus would show up to our little discernment committee meeting. How cool would that be! Even more helpful than that ethereal Holy Spirit that we had just prayed for!

The chair of the committee, a professor by trade, stood up to offer the man a seat and cleared his throat in a scholarly way:
          “Well, ‘Jesus,’ tell us: Our churches are a mess. Attendance is down everywhere …What do we Episcopalians need to do to have new life?”

         “Good,” I thought, looking at my watch. “If this guy gives us some crazy answer, then we’ll know that he’s not Jesus, and I can get rid of him, and we can get on with our meeting. It’s late.”

         But the man in blue jeans didn’t answer the question. He did sit down, though. And then he turned the question around on us! “Uh oh. That’s the kind of thing that Jesus would do,” I thought.

        “What does the Bible say?” Jesus asked.

         The professor spoke up again, clearly proud to be the first one with the answer: “It says that we’re supposed to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves,” he recited. “If you attended the 8 a.m. Rite I service, you would hear that every week,” he said smugly to the others.

         “Good answer!” said Jesus. The professor beamed. Everyone else looked a little jealous. Trying to impress Jesus, the senior warden added:

         “Don’t we also promise in our baptismal covenant to ‘seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves?’”
          “That’s right,” I added, not to be outdone by lay folks, “and we promise to strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being.”

         Suddenly, it was as if everyone forgot that they had asked this squinty-eyed Jesus a question. They all started in on each other:

         “The dignity of every human being. Hear that, you liberals? That means no abortion. Right, Jesus?” called out one.

         “No, it means no death penalty, you crazy conservative. And it says “peace,” so that means war is wrong. Right Jesus?” bellowed another.

        “And to love our neighbor, that surely doesn’t mean that we have to love everyone the same, does it, Jesus? Who is our neighbor after all? Surely we can scratch off the Taliban from our list? Or some crazy member of the KKK? Or even any person on the other side of the world whom I’ve never even met? Neighbors have to be close-by, right, Jesus, like the people in my neighborhood?”

         “No, no, no,” I thought, with an air of superiority. “Don’t they remember the parable of the Good Samaritan?! That parable says that everyone is our neighbor, that we are supposed to be nice like the Samaritan man and help out whoever is in the ditch. That what Jesus wants.”

         As if he could read my thoughts, Jesus held up his hand for quiet. Shaking his head, Jesus turned to the woman who was thinking about ordination. “What are the four orders of ministry in your church?” he asked her.
         “Lay persons, bishops, priests, and deacons,” she answered tentatively.

         “OK then,” continued Jesus, “a lay person is going over to St. Georges’ from the Cathedral on foot, when gang members jump her, rob her, and leave her unconscious and bleeding in an alley off of West Muhammed Ali. A bishop drives by on his way to an important meeting, sees a body in the alleyway and tries to call 911. His cell phone is dead, though, and he doesn’t have time to stop, so he keeps going. Then a car carrying a priest and a deacon comes by on the way to the hospital. They see the body in the alley, but a wealthy and influential parishioner is dying at Norton Hospital, and they don’t want to make the family mad by getting there too late for annointing. Besides, it is getting dark, and the alley looks kind of dangerous. They are in a bad part of town, after all.”
          (At this point, I noticed that all of the people on the committee were smiling. They knew what was coming next. They knew that a lay person like them was going to be the one who stops and takes care of the hurt Episcopalian. It’s obvious. The story has already mentioned the other orders, and they failed. The laity is the most important order, after all!)

         So Jesus continued as the lay listeners smiled: “Next, a serial rapist and child molester, high on drugs and just escaped from the city jail, lurches his way through the alley. He sees the bloody and naked Episcopalian lying in a pile of refuse and takes pity on her. He stops and gives her first aid, including mouth to mouth resuscitation, and then wraps her in his own shirt and carries her all the way to a shelter, risking a return to prison by showing his face in a public place.”

         The committee members and I had stopped smiling. In fact, we found ourselves sprawled on the floor in a most undignified fashion, our nice folding chairs vanished into thin air.

         “What do you think?” asked Jesus, as we lay on our backs and looked up at him, dazed. “Which of these became a neighbor to the Episcopalian attacked by the gang members?
          “The one who treated her kindly,” we all whispered. “The … the …. rapist.”

          “Go home and do the same,” answered Jesus.

          At first, nobody moved. As I lay there on my back, looking up at Jesus in his jeans and with his squinty eyes, I knew that I was the generic Episcopalian in the alleyway, broken and beaten and clinging to life by a thread. I saw the kind of person I most feared, the kind of person I most judged and despised, holding out his hand to me, offering to lift me up, to pour life back into me. I didn’t want to take his help. It was such a hard choice, such a hard decision. I had to swallow revulsion, pride, fifty years of moral judgments, and most of all, fear …. But as soon as I took that hand, the hand of the rapist—of my neighbor, of God’s beloved child—I saw that it was Jesus’ hand that I was grasping, the hand of the crucified criminal from Galilee, the hand of the one who said that we would find him in the prisoner, the hungry, the thirsty, and the naked. The hand of our merciful God.

         Jesus might not walk through walls into our meetings, but his words do. Parables are powerful, dangerous tools of transformation. The parable of the Good Samaritan, as scholars point out again and again, is not a tame story about choosing to be a nice neighbor.[1] It is about choosing whether or not to take the mercy offered to us as we lie on the ground, beaten and bloodied by the perils of our humanity. Is our church ready for salvation, in whatever form it comes to us? Are we? Can we love enough to recognize the One who is Neighbor to us all?

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[1] Special inspiration comes from interpretations of the parable found in a sermon by Richard Lischer, Duke University Chapel, January 16, 2011, found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bYzQhOr-o0&feature=youtu.be, and in a sermon by Thomas Long, “The Lawyer’s Second Question,” found at http://www.candler.emory.edu/news/connection/winter2013/index.cfm.