Is anyone here a
rule breaker?
I won’t tell the
teacher on you if you say yes.
There are plenty
of people who like the thrill, or the
result, of breaking the rules –especially when you don’t get caught. People who never color within the lines.
And then there
are the rule-followers.
Most of the
time, that’s me. It’s how you make
the teacher happy and avoid traffic tickets, and it usually makes life run more
smoothly.
And many of us
live in between.
In today’s
gospel story a rule-follower, a “lawyer,” a student of the Bible, is trying to
learn from Jesus about the promise of eternal life.
He knows the
rules:
Love the Lord
your God with all your heart…and your neighbor as yourself.
I bet you know
those rules, too.
This lawyer
takes them very seriously. So, to make absolutely sure he’s going to live as
God wants him to live, he asks Jesus more about his neighbor.
And Jesus tells
a story.
A traveler is
beaten, robbed, and left to die.
Other travelers come along – two whom all of Jesus’ hearers would know
as holy people, the best of “us,” people who represent “our” faithful community
– people you can count on for a good example.
Both of them
cross the road.
And then comes a
Samaritan.
If you were
Jesus’ congregation, you’d have reacted to that with hostility or a
creepy-crawly feeling on your skin – so imagine the Samaritan as whoever makes
you feel like that.
And this
outsider, the icky person, is the one who stops. Helps. Takes care of the
victim with open generosity.
Now, there are lots of morals to this story.
Prejudice is
bad.
It’s everybody’s job to take care of those
in need.
Don’t trust
those self-centered priests.
And probably
more that you’ve heard preached or taught.
But I suspect
that what Jesus is trying to teach this lawyer, this man who works hard to live
according to God’s teaching, is to do the wrong thing.
To live outside
the rules.
Not necessarily
always, but sometimes.
It was
undoubtedly the wrong thing, in first century Israel, to embrace a Samaritan as
a friend, a neighbor. Someone you’d
invite over to your house.
And that’s what
this lawyer learns to do. He identifies the Samaritan in the story as his
neighbor, and Jesus tells him to go and live like that.
To do the wrong
thing, instead of only the right thing.
Now, you and I
hear this story, and loving your neighbor – even if your neighbor is an icky,
strange Samaritan – probably sounds like the right thing to do.
But is it the right thing to break your
community’s identity?
To create apparently
unholy relationships that your family and friends are going to have to deal
with?
This isn’t about
rules like no right turn on red; these are rules about who belongs, and who we are – rules with a deeper grip on our
lives.
At Calvary we
might welcome Samaritans. But what
about welcoming – as real Calvarians! – a group of people who insist that
Christians can’t party, relax, laugh, or have fun? That would break our
rules.
Think about
young men who brought home boyfriends thirty years ago – when AIDS was all
about immorality, about drug users and men who had “forbidden” sex. If you welcome that boyfriend publicly to
your family, then you become dangerous to the neighborhood, and to moral
Christians around you.
Think about a
young white woman bringing home a black boyfriend in the early 1950s, when
their marriage would have been illegal in most of this country. Imagine them buying a house in a
“white” neighborhood.
In our
lifetimes, these “rules” have changed – gay and lesbian or interracial families
are just plain families, in many places.
But they haven’t changed completely. Tax law and Cheerios commercials demonstrate that.
And breaking
those rules used to destroy families, and break communities. Still does, in
some places.
Is it the
“right” thing, to do that?
Or is it wrong
to break your mother’s heart?
So many people, for so
long, wrestled with the challenges and did the “wrong” thing, because the wrong
thing was holy, and right.
And so our
“neighborhoods” have become a little bigger, and welcomed new kinds of
Samaritans.
There are decisions,
great and small, in all of our lives where this matters, where the “right”
thing to do might also be wrong.
We face decisions about
independence and support for our children – and then for our parents.
We face decisions as a
country about whether it’s right to frack natural gas to produce electricity to
avoid using smoggy coal or gasoline.
Decisions this week
about how to respond – emotionally, actively – to uproar about a frightened man
with a gun, and a dead teen with a pocket full of Skittles.
Sometimes even what’s
for dinner can involve rights and wrongs about care for God’s creation,
generous hospitality, moral commitments, finances and more.
Or, more often, the
trade off between “easy” and “healthy.”
In a complex, busy
world, it’s sometimes hard to tell if there’s a right thing to do.
But Jesus gives us one
more clue about how and when to do the thing that might also be wrong.
It’s mercy.
That long-ago lawyer
learned to break the community rules and welcome a Samaritan as a neighbor by
considering that the Samaritan showed him mercy.
(Yes, I think we’re
meant to hear that story as though we were the ones dying on the side of the road.)
Mercy isn’t the
same as pity.
In this case,
and in God’s case, it’s a generous, healing love. Mercy goes above and beyond justice or fairness or simple
kindness, and gives of oneself to make another whole.
And when you receive that mercy, sometimes that’s a
holy call to break the rules, to welcome unwelcome neighbors.
Young men and
women who have experienced “forbidden” relationships that made them strong and
whole and loved have taught the rest of us not to be afraid.
Leaders who have
received God’s mercy in the midst of oppression – Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks,
Martin Luther King –have overturned the rules and customs that kept the
powerful safe and have made us all a little more free.
Who shows you mercy?
Who shows mercy
to the community you belong to?
Where do you
find unexpected, generous love in the news stories we react to, in the daily realities
of life in a diverse nation?
This morning, if your morning news and Facebook feed, like mine, were full of reaction to the Zimmerman trial, you might ask yourself: who shows mercy to the man with the gun?
And who shows
mercy to the young man with dark skin apparently in the “wrong” neighborhood?
And from those answers, respond to the news.
I can’t tell you
when it’s right in your daily life to break the rules, to do the wrong thing, but
Jesus can.
It might not
help with dinner,
but it could
help with relationships, family, and big decisions at work or at home.
It’s all about
receiving mercy. When being loved,
and healed, and made strong and whole, call you to break the rules, to
challenge community norms, then it’s time to color outside the lines.
Because in the
kingdom of God, all the rules come from mercy. From generous, healing love that doesn’t hold back.
Eternal life –
the question that started this whole story - is far beyond our rules,
and the way to
life is all about how we respond to love.
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