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Imagine yourself sitting
on a hillside in first-century Judea. You and a crowd of other Jews
are listening to Jesus. He and a lawyer in the crowd are talking
about the ancient commandment to love thy neighbor. The lawyer
wants to pin Jesus down, so he asks “and who is my neighbor?”
Jesus answers with a story about a guy robbed and left for dead on
the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. He’s been stripped of his
clothing, so there’s no way to tell what tribe he belongs to. Two
high officials of the Jewish religious establishment come along.
Both see the victim lying there. Both pass on by. Then comes a
traveler from nearby Samaria. He too sees the victim lying there.
And now, Jesus delivers a shocker, declaring that the Samaritan had
compassion for the victim. Your mind is rebelling at this turn in
the story. You and all other Jews despise the Samaritans as worse
than heretics – as turncoats who sided repeatedly with the
oppressors of Israel. You have never heard the word “good” connected
with the word “Samaritan.”
The story continues. By taking charge of the bleeding victim, the
Samaritan makes himself a risky, slow-moving target for attackers.
He expends his scarce wine and oil tending the victim’s wounds. He
takes him to Jericho, prepays for lodging, and promises to return
and pay all additional expenses.
As you listen to the story, you look for a character you can
identify with. Obviously it can’t be the robbers. The church
officials are out -- they walked on by. You’d like to identify with
the generous rescuer, . . . but he’s a Samaritan. You definitely
don’t want to see yourself as the victim. But it seems to come
down to either him or the Samaritan. You feel very conflicted.
Jesus has given you a startling answer to the question “who is my
neighbor?” He challenges you to be compassionate to an enemy. But
that’s not the half of it. The storyteller is suggesting that
you may be the one in the ditch. And you know Jesus isn’t just
talking about physical jeopardy. His point is that you are in great
spiritual jeopardy. Help is on the way, he’s saying. And
it’s coming in the form of someone you despise. Imagine that. Oh,
sweet irony.
The Good Samaritan parable is an echo, in story form, of what Jesus
said in the Sermon on the Mount. In that sermon, he declared, “You
have heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your
enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who
persecute you.”
The Jewish people were repeatedly victimized by enemy
occupations. Imagine how it hit their ears to be told to be
generous to these . . . imperialists. Or worse yet, that their
enemies would rescue them from spiritual jeopardy. Why did Jesus
say such a thing?
His purpose was to challenge his people’s conventional notion of
generosity. This challenge is as radical today as it was then. Our
modern definition of generosity is simply “liberality in giving”.
The synonyms for this word include “magnanimity and largesse.” So
our notion of generosity is closely tied to abundance. But if
generosity requires abundance, then when someone is generous, he is
only giving away his surplus -- things that don’t really matter
much. So the people to whom he is giving don’t matter much either.
And how undemocratic is this notion of generosity! It allows only
those who are well-off to be generous.
Occasionally, we see someone act outside of this abundance-oriented
conception of generosity. Recently a friend of mine was on her way
to soccer practice, running late. She came to a green light just in
time to make a left turn before an oncoming car reached the
intersection. She never saw the two women in the crosswalk, until
they slammed onto the hood of her car. She jumped out and ran to
them – and then called an ambulance. Someone else stopped and was
helping the injured pedestrians.
My friend sat there on the curb, numbed by what had happened, not
knowing what to do except wait for the ambulance. Then she looked
over at the two injured women, and saw one of them looking back at
her with the kindest and most forgiving smile. Think back to how
you felt toward another driver who even just ran into your car.
There she lay, with what turned out to be a broken pelvis, one of
the most painful injuries a person can suffer, and managed to
smile. As if to say, “I know you didn’t mean it. I know you are a
good person and you just made a mistake. I forgive you.” The
accident victim was not well-off – quite the contrary. All she had
to give was a look of forgiveness for a negligent stranger. But
that look meant everything to my friend. That smile was radical
generosity.
In addition to being linked to abundance, our usual way of thinking
about generosity is also tied up with altruism. The generous actor
is seen as having nobly sacrificed his own self-interest for the
sake of another. Altruistic generosity is seen as above and beyond
the call of any duty. And in this way of thinking, it’s natural for
the giver to feel entitled to judge who is and is not a worthy
recipient.
Occasionally, we see someone reach out to another in a way that goes
far beyond this altruistic, discretionary notion of generosity. In
an urban church, strangers often ring the doorbell and ask to speak
with a minister. One day when I was the intern minister at the
Portland, Oregon UU church, two people came into the church office,
introducing themselves as husband and wife.
Her voice cracking with distress, the wife said that they had been
sleeping on the streets for over a week. She had a huge backpack on
an aluminum frame, with a bedroll and other belongings tied to it.
Their clothes were ragged and dirty. The husband looked sick and
hardly spoke. The wife explained how they got to Portland and what
had happened to them. She asked for $130 for bus tickets back to
Texas, where they hoped to get help.
I tried to tell her that the church did not have money to distribute
in situations like this. But the wife pleaded with me to see if
something could be done. I agreed to check with others in the
office and asked the two strangers to wait there.
Another visitor, also from outside the church, had been sitting
nearby during this conversation. I found out later that she was an
accountant, waiting to begin a meeting about church financial
reports. She followed me down the hall. Her pocketbook opened, and
her checkbook came out. She said she wanted to help.
While the church bookkeeper cashed her $130 check, I thanked her for
her generosity. She shrugged her shoulders and said “This is what
God put me here to do.” We had a short but fascinating conversation
about that remark. I asked about her church, and she
identified a fundamentalist Christian one. We walked back out with
the cash. The relieved, elated couple hugged us and then headed
down the street to the bus station with their huge backpack.
This giver’s generosity was not altruistic. There was no sense of
sacrifice in it, no inflated self-nobility. She was matter-of-fact
about it. She talked about it the way a person might talk about
exercising regularly or eating healthy food – something that had to
do with her own well-being as much as that of the people she
was reaching out to. And there was no judgment about the worthiness
of these two strangers. The giver could not even be sure their need
was genuine. But clearly, in her mind, the possibility of extending
a helping hand to strangers in need easily outweighed any worry
about the possibility of being conned.
Returning to my office, I pondered her generosity. And I wondered
about my own attitude toward her and her people – fundamentalist
Christians. My mind ran over the huge gulf between the perspectives
of my people and her people on so many of the big moral issues of
the day. I knew I would find her church strange if I went there.
From the perspective of my values, some of her church’s values
looked very strange indeed. I asked myself whether I could be as
generous to her as she was to these two strangers. Of course, I was
a mere trainee then. Now that I have graduated from seminary I am
fully evolved, and never have any deficit of generosity.
There was nothing saintly about the generous actors in these
stories. The Samaritan traveler, the auto accident victim, the
accountant in the church office – they were regular folks. What
moved them to do what they did? They were able to step beyond
conventional generosity, which is based on differences
between people, on being a person of abundance who has leftovers and
is sharing them with people who don’t have enough. Instead,
their generosity was based on the sameness of people, on
kinship.
It’s easy to see this kinship, of course, in the familiar people
around us. And it’s no small thing to be kind even to our
own kind. But sometimes, with those we already recognize as
our own kind, this turns out to be basically one hand washing the
other.
When we reach out to a stranger or an enemy, though, the meaning of
our actions is pretty unmistakable: an expression of the love in
our hearts. In recognizing someone as our kind or kin, we see
ourselves in that other person. We see that person for the truth he
really is – for his basic humanity. This is the foundation for love
of another person. Love expressed in action is the real meaning of
generosity. And to express love in action toward a stranger or
enemy, to treat that
person as kin, I say is radical generosity. Love behind enemy
lines.
I think the generous actors in this morning’s stories saw themselves
in the strangers they encountered. These unusual encounters brought
something transformative, even if only for a brief time – an
experience of wholeness and completion. This explains the
perplexing claim conveyed by the parable of the Good Samaritan --
that the stranger or enemy is our spiritual rescuer. Somewhere deep
in our hearts, I believe we know that all people are
one kind, even as we honor our transient differences. Affirming
this truth by our actions is a critical step toward spiritual
wholeness, which is not an individual matter, but rather, an
inherently collective one. If you go through life without
expressing the radical generosity that is waiting in your heart, if
you harden your heart to the stranger or enemy, you will miss the
chance for spiritual wholeness.
We are living in a time of lines drawn in the sand between so many
“usses” and "thems". Hearts have hardened so much that we find our
very neighbors being treated as enemies. This “otherizing” of
people right next to us is happening now in Virginia, in the form of
a referendum being placed on the November ballot designed to
stigmatize gay people, and make them less than citizens. It is
called the “marriage amendment” to the Virginia constitution.
We can’t expect to have spiritual wholeness in a society that tries
to make laws about love – about who shall love whom, and how, and
how much, and by what name. In the sight of God there is nothing
strange about any two people loving each other and making a
commitment to grow with and care for each other. We have to be
allies with the targets of the love laws. We have to stand on the
side of love.
But we have to be more than the gallant rescuer in the poem by Neal
Bowers that Jennifer read this morning. We have to show compassion
both for those who are targets of such laws, and for those
who are working to enact them. We can’t let our compassion for the
targeted people turn into fear and hatred of those doing the
targeting.
Now, I’ve been saying “we” about this ballot referendum. Who do I
mean when I say “we”? Let’s be honest: Unitarian Universalists are
not unanimously supportive of same-sex marriage. Can I be a
religious leader of deep conviction on this vital issue and still
hang onto my respect and compassion for fellow UUs who disagree? The
path of radical generosity is wonderfully enlivening, . . . but
steep. We can walk that path only if we stay connected to the
realization that our own spiritual wholeness depends on it.
The generous actors in this morning’s stories experienced a flash of
that realization – enough to fuel at least a single, dramatic
gesture of radical generosity. To sustain this loving
attitude, though, each of us needs help—from other people who also
cherish the value of radical generosity, and who need help too. All
such people need a place in which to practice this mutual support –
a sanctuary of open-minded and open-hearted values in a world grown
hardened, angry, and fearful.
My name for such a place is church. Our church declares to the
world that we need not wait for experiences of spiritual wholeness
to happen to us now and then, like bolts out of the blue. Our
church is based on a conviction that such experiences can be
cultivated in an intentional religious community. As a vehicle for
this mission, the sanctuary in which we are sitting this morning is
a precious and fragile thing. It is worthy of our compelling
commitment; worthy of all we can do to nurture and sustain it, so
that, in turn, it may nurture and sustain each of us in our pursuit
of spiritual wholeness.
When Jesus answered the question, “who is my neighbor,” he
challenged his audience to broaden the kind of people to whom they
showed kindness and from whom they accepted kindness.
The parable continues to deliver this challenge today. If we can’t
meet it, all the mass movements for peace and justice won’t make any
lasting difference.
We can broaden what we call “our kind” further than we think. We
can include the one who is a stranger; the one who has been labelled
an enemy. Even after thousands of years of paying so dearly for our
small, tribal view of generosity, it is not too late to do this. It
is not too late to answer this challenge, given on a hillside in
ancient Judea, by a man who knew the meaning of spiritual wholeness;
a man who loved deeply, and was willing to act radically.
Amen.
PLEASE PRAY WITH ME.
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