The Gospel scripture from Luke begins with a spiritual question and ends with a practical answer. A lawyer asks Jesus, "What shall I do to inherit eternal life?" You can define eternal life any way you wish – heaven, happiness, spiritual authenticity, true simplicity, peace of mind – whatever works for you. In response, Jesus elicits from the man a clear answer: love God, self, and neighbor, with total heart, soul, strength, and mind. Be fully and unconditionally committed to love. You have the answer already. Now do it. And the man asks Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" So now Jesus tells a story; one you know well.

Jesus, through this parable, shows us that practicing love is doing the caring thing right there in the moment. What happened with the Samaritan? He saw a man in distress. He was touched with pity. He went out of his way, and responded with practical help that was within his means to provide. Then he just let go of it and moved on. Jesus is saying, "That is love. You want eternal life? Just be like the Samaritan." And the fact that the example he gives is of one regarded as an impure, half-breed, foreigner who puts the traditional religious folk to shame, just nails down the point.

I think Jesus is saying that each of us has within us all we need for eternal life. It’s already there. It is the capacity to see, to care, and to do something about it. Bud Dennie spent all last weekend helping Steve Bisbing, who suffers chronic pain from nerve damage, pack up all this possessions, generate thirty boxes of books, and get him and his dog to the airport and on his way to California. And then figure out how to dispose of a lot of office supplies and personal gear. Jesus is saying do it like that.

But the parable is also about why all this seems so hard for us. So what was going on with those two religious guys and the lawyer as well? What blocks that innate Godly compassion? Jesus does not tell us anything about what went on inside the minds and hearts of the priest and Levite. He only shows us what they did. Were they simply oblivious to human hurt? Did they inwardly agonize over what to do? Apparently that is irrelevant. What they did is all that matters. Let us, again, assume that because they were human beings created in the image of God, they each experienced pity and compassion when they saw the man who had been beaten and robbed. But then something short-circuited that impulse. What? Biblical scholars speculate that there may have been special religious, ritual purity concerns. Maybe the man was perceived to be unclean, therefore, untouchable. Whatever. But the point is that they concluded that he was just outside the circle of their immediate concern. There was a kind of "Yes – but." "Gosh, I’d like to help, but…I’ll be late for church!" Something got in the way for the lawyer. He says to Jesus. "Love my neighbor? Right. But – but – who is my neighbor? How far, really, should the range of my concern extend?" The question itself cuts off compassion before it gets going. Then we are in a different zone. For the Samaritan the question must not have come up. Because if he had asked it, the answer had to be that this poor man, presumably a Jew, was by definition, not his neighbor.

I am convinced that the real moral questions in life are not, ultimately, about choosing between right and wrong. At some level, maybe. But, in the final analysis, the choice is always between what is compassionate and what is comfortable. That’s the real choice. Reinhold Niebuhr had it exactly right when he said that Christ came to "comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable." I think what drives us to hell is our insistence on comfort. And this insistence blinds us to our own innate predisposition toward caring, and blinds us to injustice in the world.

Justice is simply seeing and caring and acting on a bigger scale. The great exponents of justice are the prophets of Ancient Israel: people like Amos. Their universal message is quite simple: God expects justice. The prophets looked about and saw injustice in the world, specifically: the oppression of the weak by the powerful, a huge gap between the rich and poor, a small minority controlling most of the land and wealth, the corruption of systems of justice by the powerful, and trusting military might as the real source of power. And together with this we find a religious hypocrisy in the assumption that God blesses the status quo. But furthermore, the prophets just didn’t say that God objects to injustice; they said that God’s whole creation rests on justice; justice is in the very fabric of the world; justice is natural (just like personal happiness is natural). Injustice is not only wrong, it is goes against every aspect of God’s created order. If we are living lives of personal unrighteousness and uncaring, and collective lives of injustice, we are in big trouble, not simply because God will punish us sooner or later, but because we are living at odds with reality.

In the scripture from Amos, we read of the prophet’s vision of the plumb line. Absolute righteousness. Uncompromising justice. Unavoidable consequences. Now, why is it necessary that this plumb line be set among the people? It is because not only are they living lives based on personal uncaring and collective injustice; it is also because they have deluded themselves into actually believing they are righteous and just. They sincerely believe it. The priest and the Levite really believed that getting to church on time and not mussing their holy garb was doing the right thing. Living in a dream. That is what a "comfort zone" is about. We bow politely to God, have a nice church service, and believe that God is obligated to keep our comfort zone intact. Wrong. Comfort zones, particularly those of economic security, always require blinding ourselves to what should be obvious inequities. What do nations call comfort zones? Vital interests. Most Americans, I’ll wager, view it to be in our vital interest that we have enough gas to run our cars, SUV’s, etc. Without ready access to mid-East oil those vital interests are threatened. Why should we do without what we have become accustomed to?

I think we are all acquainted with many of the statistics that show how the relatively few people on the North American continent consume a huge percentage of the world’s resources. What entitles us to that? It’s unnatural and ungodly and it is going to catch up with us. It is not a pretty picture. In an election year, this is not what one would call an "upbeat, positive message." The affliction of the comfortable is usually experienced as definitely downbeat for the comfortable.

Will justice prevail? Sometimes it feels more like "right forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne." But I believe what Martin Luther King, Jr. said: "The arc of the universe is long, but is bent towards justice." I believe that because when justice happens, in ways great and small, we know in our hearts that it is right. And we have seen examples in the news. The exposure and universal disgust at the Iraq prison scandal. The Supreme Court has now ruled that the Executive Branch simply does not have the authority to hold people it says are enemy combatants, including American citizens, in jail without access to our legal system. Justice O’Conner says no president has a "blank check" to do that. The high court has also determined that all sentencing guidelines based on facts other than those presented at trial are unjust and are thrown out. The World Court of Justice in The Hague has decreed that Israel’s wall is wrong. Investigations by the 9/11 Commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee have concluded that the principle reasons for going to war in Iraq were unfounded. (I propose a National Day of Mourning, Fasting, and Repentance in which we publicly proclaim that we are guilty of shedding innocent blood. No politics. No blaming. Just sackcloth and ashes.)

We can expect God’s plumb line when we live in comfort zones sustained by delusion. And as people of faith, we need to continually confront how we may be using religion to bolster our illusions rather than face reality. One of the mistakes we make is to draw a line between the spiritual and the material. There are spiritual things (meaning other-worldly) and material things (meaning this-worldly). This duality comes out in many ways. For example, in the church we often talk about mission as helping people in a hands-on way, and social advocacy as changing the structures of society. But remember that our scripture in Luke today began with a spiritual question – "How do I get eternal life?" and provided, in the end, a practical answer: unconditional love means recognizing human need and hurt and doing something about it.

Last Sunday, I was in Buckingham, Virginia, participating on an inter-faith panel on the meaning of the term "liberation" in our respective traditions: Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, and Native-American. I tried to answer the question Christians pose when they ask, "Is liberation spiritual or material?" I did so by telling two brief stories, which I’ll close with now.

The New Testament scholar, John Dominic Crossan, famously of the Jesus Seminar, was once asked a question by a friend who was a very conservative priest. His friend said, "Now, John, considering all your learning and your radical scholarship, just tell me, yes or no, do you believe Christ is really present in the bread of the Eucharist?" And Crossan said, "Yes, I do." With a sigh of relief the priest turned to walk away, but Crossan stopped him and said, "But, it is still bread." Communion is not just a spiritual event in the life of the church. It is an enactment of how the basic resources of this world are to be shared. They are to be distributed equitably and openly and joyously to everyone. Like the manna in the wilderness, bread is not to be hoarded. No one, no matter who, is entitled to more than needed. And we all share a responsibility to not just welcome, but to seek out, those who are hungry.

Currie Burrows, the pastor over at Silver Spring Presbyterian, tells a story of when he had a small church in downtown Atlanta. The sanctuary was a daily homeless shelter with beds and a meal program. Then on Sunday mornings, the beds were pushed aside, an altar was set up and worship took place. Congregants were a mixed lot of volunteers, neighbors, and homeless people. One Sunday morning, right in the middle of communion, in the door walked a homeless man whom they had never seen, looking dirty and disheveled, and apparently mentally disturbed. He walked to the altar, picked up the unbroken loaf of bread, and started eating it with gusto. There was an involuntary gasp from the congregation. Started, the man turned and looked at them and said in a very quiet voice – "I’m sorry. I am just so hungry." Jesus said, "If any are hungry, let them come to me and eat." Let it be so. AMEN.