When Jesus Comes to the Protest Planning Meeting

Proper 10C

Luke 10:25-37

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.

Today, it would be so easy to preach about the goodness of the Samaritan. Our Lights for Liberty vigil on Friday was an amazing success, with a large crowd of compassionate and like-minded neighbors gathered in front of our church. And there I was, wearing my collar and standing proudly with my poster, quoting the Bible, no less: “You shall love the stranger as yourself,” it read.

It felt good to shout about what is right. “So there, all you heathens who don’t agree. I’m not that priest crossing the road to avoid the suffering of the marginalized. I know who my neighbor is. I know what God wants. The good Samaritan stopped to help. He came close to suffering. He didn’t hurry on his way, bustling with business as usual. He made himself vulnerable. See, I can be good like that! Look at me, doing what Jesus said to do.”

Ahh, but Jesus’ words are never all that simple. How deep down does my goodness really reach? What about the time that I walked right by a hungry man, even though I was holding a huge bag of bagels? That day, I didn't stand for a cause. I was visiting my grown children in New York City. My goal was to walk a few blocks from my hotel on the Upper West Side to buy bagels. I was supposed to bring them, on the subway, to Brooklyn, where my daughter lived. By the time I found the store, I was running late. As I approached, I saw a huge line ahead of me, snaking all the way down the sidewalk. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a bedraggled man standing on the curb right outside the bagel store.

“I’m hungry,” he called out to passers-by.

“I’m hungry,” he called out to me. No one seemed to be stopping to give him anything. I thought to myself, “This is easy. I can be a good neighbor! I’ll just get some extra bagels and give them to that man.” But then I began to waver, “What if he grabs my purse or yells at me? Does he really even want bagels? Should I even approach him? Should I do this, or not?”

Before long, other worries crowded out all thoughts of the hungry man: “What kind of bagels did my kids say to get? How much cream cheese do we need? How many people will be there and how many bagels will they eat? Now, which subway lines am I supposed to take?” Worry after worry passed through my mind as I waited in line. Finally, late and bagels in hand, I came out of the store to see him still standing there and calling out for food. I gasped. I had forgotten the simple act of getting extra bagels. But I wasn’t about to get back in that long line again to get some more. Afraid not to have enough if I shared, I scurried quickly by, eyes on the pavement. I crossed the street and was gone.

Lucky for me, and for all of us, today’s parable is about more than the goodness of the Samaritan. Let’s see if I can modernize it for us a bit.

Let’s say that some Episcopalians were planning a protest rally against detention camps.  The committee, made up of multi-ethnic, progressive-minded parishioners, was meeting beforehand to iron out the details. All of a sudden, in the middle of their deliberations, Jesus appeared in their midst! They blinked and rubbed their eyes. Yes, it was Jesus alright!

The chair of the committee, a professor by trade, stood up to offer Jesus a seat in their circle. He cleared his throat in a scholarly way:
          “Welcome, Jesus. Tell us: Our churches are shrinking and our country seems to have lost its way. What can we do to have new life?”

“What does the Bible say?” asked Jesus.

The professor spoke up again,  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.

“Good answer!” said Jesus. The professor beamed. Everyone else looked a little jealous. Trying to impress Jesus, a woman chimed in:

 “Don’t we also promise in our baptismal covenant to ‘seek and serve Christ in all persons … and to respect the dignity of every human being? That's what our rally's all about, right?’” Before Jesus could answer, everyone seemed to forget that they had asked him a question.

“That’s right!” they shouted loudly. “God welcomes the stranger! No to the camps! Abolish ICE!” they chanted.

Jesus held up his hand for quiet. “Let me tell you a story,” he suggested:

“A devout Episcopalian is going to one of your protest rallies, held at the cathedral. She’s walking from the parking lot, when a thief hits her over the head, grabs her purse, and leaves her unconscious, without ID in the dark alleyway. While she is lying there, the bishop’s car zooms by. He’s late for his flight to an important meeting in New York. He’s fretting about missing his plane. He doesn’t even notice the woman in the shadows and passes her right by.

Next, a car carrying a priest and a deacon comes by. They see the body in the alley, but don't stop to look closely. A wealthy and influential parishioner is dying at the hospital, and they don’t want to make the family mad by getting there too late. They text the parish secretary, hoping that she’ll get the message and help the injured person. They rush away.”  

When Jesus stopped speaking, everyone on the committee was smiling and nodding their heads. They could see that clergy might need to get taken down a peg or two. They knew that a lay person like one of them was going to be the hero, the one who stops and takes care of the hurt Episcopalian. It’s obvious. After all, they were spending their evening planning a whole rally about loving their neighbors!

Jesus continued: “Next, a burly ICE agent, coming from a raid on an undocumented household, is heading toward the cathedral. He’s on his way to harass the protestors at the rally. He’s driving a big, gas-guzzling SUV with a “Honk if you love Jesus” bumper sticker. He sees the bloody Episcopalian lying on the pavement and takes pity on her. He stops and goes over to her. He gives her first aid, including mouth to mouth resuscitation, and then wraps her in his own shirt. He lays her bloody head on the leather backseat of his SUV and drives her all the way to the hospital. He gives them his own credit card to pay the bill, since her insurance card was in the stolen purse.”

        The committee members had stopped smiling. In fact, they found themselves sprawled on the floor in a most undignified fashion, their chairs vanished into thin air.  
        “What do you think?” asked Jesus, as they lay on their backs and looked up at him, dazed. “Which of these was a neighbor to the injured Episcopalian?
          “The … the one who opened his heart to her,” they all stammered.
         “Go home and do the same,” answered Jesus.

At first, nobody moved. They lay there on their backs, looking up at Jesus. It dawned on them that they were the Episcopalian in the alleyway, broken and lost and clinging to life by a thread. They pictured the kind of person they most judged and despised, holding out his hand, offering to lift them up, to pour life back into them. They didn’t want to take his help. They had to swallow fear, pride, years of moral judgments …. But as soon as they took that hand, their hearts too were opened. They saw that it was actually Jesus’ hand that they were grasping, the life-giving hand of our merciful God.

Jesus might not walk 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 good neighbor. It’s about choosing whether or not to take the mercy offered to us as we lie on the ground, beaten and broken by the perils of our common humanity. Even as we stand with the marginalized, may we reach up for the boundary-breaking, healing hand of the Holy One, who makes us all neighbors.

When the Spirit Plays with Legos

 Pentecost Year C

Genesis 11:1-9 and Acts 2:1-21

Almighty God, on this day you opened the way of eternal life to every race and nation by the promised gift of your Holy Spirit: Shed abroad this gift throughout the world by the preaching of the Gospel, that it may reach to the ends of the earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. 

Every year, I try the same lesson at school. And every year, it fails. When the small group of 10-year-olds have read the story of the Tower of Babel, I haul out my big bin of classic Legos. The students can’t believe their eyes. “We get to play with Legos in class?!” they gasp in wonder.
          “Yes,” I explain. “You are going to work together for 10 minutes to build the tallest, most amazing tower that you can. But here’s the catch: There will be no talking! You may make noises. You may gesture. You may even speak a language that others don’t know, but you may NOT speak one word of English. I want you to feel like those folks in Babel who have to work together while no longer understanding one another's speech.”

          After some grumbling, the wide-eyed students dig into the blocks. Here’s what happens:

Invariably, they start out working together, using gibberish and directing one another with pokes and pantomime.

Invariably, half of the students quickly give up. They find more pleasure in pulling out interesting bits of Lego than in trying to communicate with the others. Instead of a common tower rising high in the air, several small, individual creations start to pop up around the table.

Invariably, one or two of the students decide that this won’t do. Not allowed to talk, the self-appointed leaders start using physical violence to convince their classmates to cooperate. They try to smash the individual creations, or slap away wayward hands, or snatch all of the pieces. And then I have to intervene.

This part of the assignment works as expected. Lack of communication has confounded the unity of the group. I snap a photo of their work.

          Then I move on to the counterexample. “That was hard, wasn’t it?” I affirm. We’re going to build again, but this time you are going to be able to talk to one another,” I explain. The students cheer and wiggle with excitement. “Let’s see what happens. Ready, set, go!”

          This part of the lesson fails every time.

          Invariably, they start out working together, talking merrily and planning great things.

          Invariably, half of the students get distracted, mining for cool pieces in the pile of Legos and doing their own thing.

          Invariably, the self-appointed leaders get annoyed. They try to gain the attention and obedience of the creative-types. They cajole and insult in turn. When their wayward classmates don’t listen, they abandon words and start to grab, destroy, and snatch. And then I have to intervene. When I snap a photo of the second “tower,” it is not much higher or grander than the first one.

          Every year, the children prove that the Tower of Babel story is not as simple as we often make it out to be. It is about more than language.

God has told humankind after the Flood to spread out and start over with a new kind of world. “Scatter, multiply, fill the empty land with my beloved children. Create, plant, harvest, care for my land,” God cries. And instead, what do the people do? They stop in the land of Shinar and settle there. They stop exploring. They stop listening to God’s desire for them. Unity becomes an excuse for the powerful to take control. “Make those bricks, or else,” the strong ones bellow like the Egyptian lords to their Hebrew slaves. “More straw, more bricks, faster, faster! Babel must be Number One.”  Like a teacher watching her lesson plan go awry, God has to intervene.  God confuses and scatters the proud in their conceit. God sends the cautious and fearful sprawling over the face of all the earth, ready or not.

            Our Christian Pentecost is often cast as the undoing of the scattering and confusion at Babel. If so, it too must be about more than language, about more than showing off how many foreign tongues we know. All of those Judeans gathered in Jerusalem for the Jewish festival of Pentecost were Jews. They might have been born—or had ancestors who were born—in far-flung regions of the Mediterranean world. But they already shared a common identity—and language. Like the disciples, many of them likely understood both Aramaic and Greek. Aramaic and Greek were common languages learned throughout the region for the purpose of trade and commerce. Gathered on Pentecost in Jerusalem, the disciples could have just spoken Aramaic to the crowd, and all of those Phrygians and Cappadocians would have understood them--no big deal. If the problem that day were one of mere comprehension, there was no need for a miracle.

 While they could understand Greek, these Jews would also have had “birth languages” that they spoke at home with family and friends. It is these “birth languages” that they heard coming from the lips of the disciples. My daughter learned about the importance of “birth languages" when she spent her junior year abroad in Senegal. She went over there thinking that everyone would be speaking French, the “official language” imposed by the French colonizers and inscribed on the brochures. What she learned was that, while many people understood French, they hated speaking it. To them, French rang out in tones of oppression and fear. In order to join the conversation, my daughter had to quickly learn Wolof, the birth language of the people in her region. Only in Wolof would the people share their deepest identity and bare their souls.

When the Judeans in Jerusalem began to hear and to speak God’s word in all of their various birth languages, God was speaking to their inmost being. God didn’t act like the many Christian missionaries who went over to Africa saying, “You had better learn our language and follow our cultural patterns if you want to know God.” Instead, the Holy Spirit was bringing the Good News to each small group, celebrating and amplifying their diversity by using their birth languages. After the miracle at Pentecost, the identity of Parthians, Arabs, and Cappadocians did not depend on their ability to speak Greek or to share one culture; instead it was based on the Spirit gathering them as a diverse Christian people under the Lordship of Jesus.

What matters at Pentecost then is the spiritual transformation. What matters are changed hearts and emboldened souls: hearts and souls ready to go out to spread the hope and promise of new life to all the nations of the earth. Suddenly, Jesus’ fearful disciples are no longer hiding in an upper room for fear of persecution. Suddenly, they are empowered to shout the Good News of hope and freedom in Christ. Suddenly, the downtrodden Judeans are no longer unified only as a conquered people speaking an imposed tongue. Now they are free to hear the Good News in their God-given diversity.

An interesting fact in our lesson from Acts is that Luke’s list is not historically accurate. The Medes and Elamites no longer existed as nations in Luke’s day. They were ancient peoples of the region, gone way before Jesus was even born. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit cannot be bound by time or place, Luke shows us. If Luke could place the long-ago past in the presence of the Spirit, couldn’t present-day Episcopalians, present-day St. Andreans, be there, too?

We, too, live in and among a great deal of fear and trembling these days. The Powers and Principalities that oppress and control seem to grow bolder every day. Our common language is interwoven with lies and threats. Some birth languages are ridiculed and denied. Social media carves us into small groups that don’t understand one another. Even the Church shrinks and huddles, too afraid of dying truly to live.

But today, yes, today and every day, the Holy Spirit takes a giant bucket of Hope and Promise and pours it out in our huddled midst like Legos on a table. “Whoosh,” fall the pieces, bouncing and crashing and stirring up dust. Flames flicker and bulletins rattle and little children shout, “Hurray!”

 “Build,” God says, “build my Kingdom of Love! Carry it out into the world and scatter it among all people.” The Spirit whispers to me, to you, in our birth languages, encouraging the diversity of our gifts. “It’s OK to paw through here to find the pieces that speak to your heart,” She encourages. “Find them and hold them up for all to see. Don’t hoard them. Build with them. Join them with what others have found. Go on—I am with you. The power of Love holds you up on all sides.”

“What does this mean?” we ask with the perplexed Judeans. "What does this mean?" we ask with my amazed students. But we must answer. Will we build together? Or will some withdraw, while others try to maintain control? Are we ready to join together in dreaming God’s active dream of Love for the whole world? The Spirit is stubborn. Like my lesson plan, the question will just keep coming, again and again.