July 14, 2013 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

When I Needed a Neighbor

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 82
Luke 10:25–37

“Which of these . . . was a neighbor to the man?”
Luke 10:36 (NRSV)

When I come in the guise
of the needy, the helpless,
the cold and hungry,
the stranger, the lonely,
will you look away?

What will you do?
What will you say?

When I come close to home
in the need of your neighbor,
at times inconvenient,
in places and faces
that mask and conceal me . . .

What will you do?
What will you say?

Kenneth Carveley

I made a very grave mistake last Sunday by scheduling myself to preach that day: I entered the pulpit here at Fourth Church at exactly the same time as Andy Murray walked onto the center court at Wimbledon. And there, after seventy-seven years, he became the first British man to win the men’s singles title at Wimbledon. And he’s a Scot, for goodness’ sake! And so I bring a word of hope from the pulpit this morning, a word for hope for all you Cubs fans who think there’s no end to the drought. It can happen, I assure you. Andy Murray is the living proof. I’ll just and try and not schedule myself for preaching if the Cubs reach the World Series. Probably won’t be this year, but there’s always next year, of course.

I am a great fan of sports, and being brought up in Glasgow, of course football—soccer—was the game of choice. There are two main teams in my hometown of Glasgow, and there is a great rivalry between them: Glasgow Rangers, who were the team traditionally supported by the Protestants in Glasgow, and Glasgow Celtic, the team traditionally supported by Catholics. Glasgow, in the west of Scotland, is an area with a long history of there being tension between those two Christian communities, the Catholics and the Protestants. I remembered as I was preparing my sermon for this morning of a time when we would be in youth group or Sunday School and we were doing the story of the Good Samaritan and we thought, well, let’s do it as a play. That’s a good idea. We do that quite a lot here at Sunday School and in youth group. So, we put on a play, and as you may remember, the Samaritans were people who were hated by the Jews of Jesus’ day. And so the question was, how do we update the story of the Good Samaritan? The answer was that the man who was robbed was wearing a Rangers uniform and the Samaritan was wearing a Celtic strip. Hold on to that thought as we reflect on this reading this morning.

The Good Samaritan, the story is called, although the word good doesn’t appear in the text. The Good Samaritan is a classic of a story within a story, the story of Jesus’ encounter with a lawyer. A lawyer in this context means an interpreter of scripture, because the law was in the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible. The lawyer asks Jesus two questions. First, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus points him to the scriptures, and the lawyer gives the correct answer. But he doesn’t stop there. He asks a second question: “If I have to love my neighbor, who is my neighbor?”

This concept of a story within a story is an often used and ancient literary device. In 2 Samuel, after King David has taken Bathsheba, he arranges for her husband to be killed in battle. The prophet Nathan approaches the king, and he tells him a story about a wealthy man who steals his neighbor’s only ewe lamb to prepare for a meal for a guest. David is outraged at the actions of the man, and Nathan, the prophet, famously says to David the king, “You are the man.” A story within a story.

One Thousand and One Nights is another ancient example. In order to keep alive, Scheherazade tells the king stories. He weaves stories within stories that fascinate the king and keep his interest and thus are literally life-giving to Scheherazade. Another variant on this concept is found in Shakespeare, famously when Hamlet decides to put on a play within the play, a play in which he hopes to prove that Claudius had killed his father, the old king. Remember the famous line? “The play’s the thing / wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.”

We might paraphrase Shakespeare this morning and say in our text that the story is the thing wherein Jesus captures the conscience of the lawyer.

Whenever we read a parable, we have to remember that parables are simple stories, but they are not simplistic stories, and there’s an important distinction between simple and simplistic. They’re simple in that they’re everyday tales of everyday things and easily understandable on face value, but the point of the parables is they kind of take us in and force us to look in new ways at what Jesus is saying. In the story of the Samaritan, it would be wrong to take this as a simplistic story of simply doing good. In this story Jesus is confronting a pillar of the religious establishment of the day with a story that upends the assumptions and the prejudices of that religion.

For the Jews of Jesus’ day, the Samaritan was the other, an outcast, unclean. Presbyterian minister and author Cynthia Jarvis, in a commentary on this passage, uses a concept from the author Paul Layman in which she reflects on the difference between law as the gospel and the gospel as law. She writes this: “Those for whom the law comes first, for whom the law is gospel, seek refuge in rules, glorify boundaries, enumerate norms, and codify discipleship.” And that’s what the lawyer represents in this story. That’s what is behind the question who is my neighbor? The lawyer is asking Jesus, “What are the limits to my love?”

The priest and Levite in the story of the Good Samaritan are also following law as gospel when they pass by, because they were doing what is right; as servants in the temple they were not allowed to go near a dead body. They themselves would become unclean.

Let me tell you another story that might illustrate this concept. It comes from the Hasidic tradition of Judaism, and it’s a story about one of the most famous rabbis in that tradition, the Baal Shem.

Among the Jews, the observance of the Sabbath, the day of the Lord, was originally a thing of joy, but too many rabbis kept issuing one injunction after another on how exactly it was to be observed, what sort of activity was to be allowed. The Baal Shem gave much thought on this matter. One night he had a dream: an angel took him up to heaven and showed him two thrones placed far above all others. “For whom are these reserved?” he asked. “For you” was the answer, “if you make use of your intelligence, and the other is for a man whose name and address is now being written down and given to you.” He was then, in his dream, taken to the deepest spot in hell and shown two vacant seats. “For whom are these prepared?” he asked. “For you,” the answer came, “if you do not make use of your intelligence. And the other for the man whose name and address are being written down for you.”

In his dream Baal Shem visited the man who was to be his companion in paradise. He found him living among Gentiles, non-Jews; he was a man quite ignorant of Jewish customs. On the Sabbath he would give a banquet at which there was a lot of merrymaking and to which all his Gentile neighbors where invited. When Baal Shem asked him why he held this banquet, the man replied, “I recalled that in my childhood my parents taught me that the Sabbath was a day of rest and for rejoicing, so on Saturdays my mother made the most succulent meals at which we sang and danced and made merry. I do the same today.”

Baal Shem, the rabbi, attempted to instruct the man in the ways of his religion, for the man had clearly been born a Je, but was evidently quite ignorant of all the rabbinical prescriptions. But Baal Shem was struck dumb when he realized that the man’s joy in the Sabbath would be marred if he were made aware of his shortcomings. And then Baal Shem, still in his dream, went to the home of his companion in hell. He found the man to be a strict observer of the law, always apprehensive lest his conduct should not be correct. The poor man spent each Sabbath day in a scrupulous tension as if he were sitting on hot coals. When Baal Shem attempted to upbraid him for his slavery to the law, the power of speech was taken from him as he realized that the man would never understand that he could do wrong by fulfilling religious injunctions.

You could say that about the priest and the Levite in the story. Clearly they are doing wrong by fulfilling the religious injunction of the day. Religion can be a dangerous thing. Fleming Rutledge is a noted Episcopal priest. She preached here some years ago, famously preached for forty-five minutes from this pulpit and did that twice that morning. She once delivered a lovely sermon on this topic. She says, “It can come as quite a shock to discover from the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments that God is not interested in religion.”

God is not interested in religion. You can find it in multiple places throughout the scriptures. Certainly not in religion that seeks to exclude and implies racism and bigotry. Certainly not in religion that seeks to make outcasts of people due to their history or their skin color or their denomination or their sexual orientation. These are important current issues for us in these days, as we all know from following the tragic Trayvon Martin case.

Now remember that the answer to the question “Who is my neighbor?” is not the man who needed help but, rather, it was the man who showed mercy. Or in the new English translation, the one who showed kindness—such an important virtue. As Micah 6: Do justice and love kindness and walk humbly with your God.

The Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall, in reflecting on interfaith relations, asks this question: “What if in every interfaith encounter our residual human capacity for compassion were prodded by a transcendent voice whispering in our would-be believers ears, ‘For God’s sake, Christian, be kind’?”

From the Hindu tradition is the account of a guru who asked his disciples how they could tell when the night had ended and the day begun. One said, “When you see an animal in the distance and can tell whether it is a cow or a horse.” “No,” said the guru. “When you look at a tree in the distance and can tell if it is a neem tree or a mango tree,” said one. “Wrong again,” said the guru. “Well then, what is it?” asked his disciples. “When you look into the face of any man and recognize your brother in him. When you look into the face of any woman and recognize in her your sister. If you cannot do this, no matter what time it is by the sun it is still night.”

In the end, it is that deep empathy and humanity that we find in the act of stopping and helping, in that act of kindness that Jesus lifts us up as the exemplar of living not the law as gospel but the gospel as law. The gospel of love. The good news of love. God’s love for us and our love for our neighbor. It’s in the question that Sydney Carter writes in his hymn:

When I needed a neighbor were you there? Were you there?
When I needed a neighbor were you there?
And the creed and the color and the race don’t matter.
Were you there?

Amen.