Other sermons   

            On the main highway, a man is stripped, beaten and left for dead. Who is this man? It doesn’t matter who he is, because it happens every day. Who are the bodies that turn up each morning in Baghdad? Sunni, Shi’ite, Christian? Often no one can tell because they are so badly mutilated. All we can say is that this man was last night’s unlucky victim. Now comes a priest, and then a Levite. A priest is one of high religious rank, and a Levite is a lay assistant, a temple functionary. When they each see the man, they cross the road and continue on their way. Why? Jesus doesn’t say. One could speculate. Maybe they were late for worship. Maybe they didn’t want to be made unclean by coming near a dead body, or nearly dead one. Maybe they were disgusted and had to look away. Maybe they muttered, “Oh, not again!” Maybe they were even heart-broken for the man. Maybe they realized they didn’t have any first-aid training. Maybe they plan to notify the rescue squad when they get to work. Maybe they just had other things on their minds. We don’t know, and it really doesn’t matter. Why? Because each of them had his reason, and it was good enough for him. What is Jesus showing us here? Whatever their reasons, whatever their feelings, whatever their intentions, whatever their priorities, whatever their compelling duties, whatever may have been distracting them, all these are irrelevant to the point that they actually did nothing at all to help. Whatever was going on with them, they showed no compassion.

            I visited Bob Marston when he was just recently in the hospital, and we had, as always, an interesting conversation. He said look at life this way. It’s like life or God, or whatever, every now and then just tosses something in front of us, something unexpected, and then says, “Just wanted to see how you deal with it.” You and I have our plans, our routines, our ways, and we do our best to live by them. But then God, life, fate, or whatever, just lobs something right at you. So how are you going to deal with this situation that you really hadn’t expected, don’t have time for, and don’t really want to deal with? Maybe you are on your way to the Temple, thinking great thoughts, maybe even great thoughts about God, and…oops. Uh-uh. Where’d that guy come from? Now what? One of my most vivid childhood memories is of when our family was riding home late at night from dinner in downtown Columbus, Ohio. And my father suddenly stopped the car and left us locked in it, as he went to try and revive a man, probably a drunk, who was lying, covered with blood, in an alley. I saw a huge rat scamper by, as I watched my father struggle to stir the man. We didn’t leave until the ambulance came. My dad didn’t always get compassion right, but that time he did.

            Now how are you going to deal with this? Those are the defining life moments - those times in which you have to decide right then. Am I going to follow Christ in this moment? What is the compassionate thing that I must do right now?

            The priest and the Levite are gone. Now comes a Samaritan. Who was he? A religious renegade, a half-breed cross between Jew and Assyrian. He practiced odd religious rites and used a strange version of the Torah. To a good Jew, a Samaritan was a kind of twisted human being. What would he be today? Just fill in the blank for “someone who totally turns you off, and for really good reasons.” – one of those (perhaps few) people you really do feel genuinely entitled not to love. That’s a Samaritan. And when the Samaritan saw the man, Jesus says, he was moved by pity. That’s it. He saw and he connected. He pitied and he cared. Compassion. And everything that happened after that – everything – tending the man’s wounds, carrying him to the inn on his own animal, caring for him, leaving money with the innkeeper (that’s risky), and promising to return. All of this grew out of this pity, this compassion. All in that moment. It has been said that the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference. The opposite of compassion is not ill-will, it is being oblivious. How was it that the Samaritan acted with compassion and the priest and Levite did not?

            Karen Armstrong writes that compassion was one of the defining qualities of the axial age, those centuries before the Common Era which marked the emergence of the world’s great religions. Why did compassion arise then, and what causes compassion to arise now? What humankind began to understand was that when we confront our own suffering, look inward on our own personal pain, our own hurts and disappointments, and begin to honor them, appreciate them, and take them seriously - when we do this, compassion begins to dawn in us. We see others in a new light. We connect as real people who have suffered ourselves and know what others are going through. Somehow the life experience of the priest and the Levite was to keep the awareness of suffering out of their hearts; their own suffering and the suffering of others. Perhaps their religion was one that promised happiness, comfort, and control. Perhaps they were focused on doing good to earn rewards. Today we might describe the Samaritan as a member of a “marginalized” group. He had no doubt been kicked around, abused, spat upon, and maybe even beaten up himself and left for dead, and ignored. When he saw the man by the side of the road, maybe he saw himself lying there. Maybe it brought it all back to him, brought his own suffering back upon him. And he felt pity. He connected to the man by reconnecting with his own pain. That’s what we who are not among the marginalized, in any age, can learn from those who are. When we cross by on the other side, we are fleeing from our own very real pain, our own strangeness, our own otherness. By not connecting with someone suffering before us, we not only disconnect from him or her, we disconnect from ourselves.

            I read a review of a remarkable new biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Then I heard an interview with a historian who had studied the fireside chats of FDR. He was talking about his skill as an orator, his canny ability to use the medium of radio, and so forth. How remarkable it was, he said, that a man born of such wealth and privilege could communicate so well with the depression-era common person; especially the working class, the poor, the destitute. What was especially amazing was the sincerity of his compassion. It wasn’t fake. It was real. And it broke right through the barriers of class and ethnicity. What he said and the recovery programs he envisioned seemed grounded in compassion. Where did that come from? FDR’s battle with polio left him debilitated for most of his adult life. Yes, for political reasons we know he kept this hidden from public view most of the time. Yet, we learn now that whenever the president visited soldiers who had been severely wounded, with loss of limbs or paralysis, he made sure that his own shriveled legs were always fully on view. He didn’t have to say that he knew how they felt. Their mutual suffering connected them. Our congregation has known many such wounded healers, whose compassion was deeply linked with their pain; people like Marcia Haggard and Joey Noble, to name just two.

            I remember many years ago in Norwich, Vermont, it was laity Sunday, and the preacher was Sally Gerstenberger. She and her husband Harry were the closest people I have ever known to being Old Testament prophets. Coming out of the co-operative movement of the thirties, for them Christian faith meant social justice. And that morning Sally preached on the Parable of the Good Samaritan. And her main point was this. Yes, the compassion that the Samaritan showed to the man who had fallen among robbers was good and right. But, she went on, we can’t let it stop there. If we have the compassion of the Good Samaritan, we must not only take care of the victims, we must organize to clean-up crime along the Jericho Road; we must organize to get at the roots of violence, which are poverty and neglect. We must organize to build understanding between Jews and Samaritans. We must develop programs to change the oppressive structures of religion and society. In other words, compassion which is true compassion, must always issue forth in movements of social justice. And I remember thinking, “She’s absolutely right.”  God says to the Prophet Amos, “Behold, I am setting a plumb line in your midst.” Yes, this plumb line is justice. But, it seems to me, that in a powerful, and perhaps deeper way, the plumb line is compassion. For if movements for social justice lose their grounding in compassion, they simply become ugly power struggles. Yes, every prophet of social justice is angry at one time or another, but the true prophet’s anger grows out of compassion and stays connected with compassion. If our anger becomes detached from our original and motivating compassion, then we are simply angry for our own ego-driven reasons. Then God’s righteousness decays into our self-righteousness. Great revolutionary movements so often begin in compassion and end in terror.

            After some years of sporadic engagement in a few of Silver Spring’s struggles for justice, I think I can say that I’ve been blessed to know many people who have brought profound compassion to a range of important issues – issues like homelessness, racism, immigration, economic and cultural inclusion. And I’ve also known those people who brought all kinds of other motives, too – political ambition, greed, zealous self-righteousness, fear, even paranoia. But those whose efforts will, I believe, bear the most lasting fruit are those organizers and advocates and government servants, who didn’t lose the connection between their activism and their compassion, their engagement and their love.

            Jesus ends his story with a question. “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” The lawyer says, “The one who showed him mercy.” This lawyer of the Jewish law began all this by asking how you gain eternal life. And in a process of true rabbinic back and forth, argumentation and story-telling, Jesus led him to the realization that we find eternal life by being neighbor to those who suffer exclusion, for whatever reason, from the common community; in risking deeds of compassion. What is love? Our UCC motto is a kind of summation of Jesus’ teaching in this parable: to love is to care, and to care is to do.

            What prompted the lawyer’s question in the first place? He wanted to know about eternal life. We seek meaning in our lives. We want our lives to take off, to soar, to be like birds lifted by the Spirit, to be happy in the deepest possible sense. And Jesus says that you find that by loving, and caring, and doing. The story he told was a dramatic example, as were the examples I have given; those moments when choice is inescapable. But I believe that it is urgent for us to recognize and seize those small, fleeting, yet equally important opportunities to make the right choice; those moments that fill our day and so often go overlooked and ignored. It is in those everyday moments that we are given chance to make our souls soar. The wonderful spiritual teacher you’ve heard me often quote, George Macdonald puts it this way:

                        The sole way to put flight into the wing,
                        To preen its feathers, and to make them grow,
                        Is to heed humbly every smallest thing
                        With which the Christ in us has aught to do.
                        …and so
                        Sweet holy change will turn all our old things to new.

                                                                                                AMEN.

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