Do the "Wrong" Thing

Luke 10:25-37

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.

A Cycle of Grace

2 Kings 5:1-14

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past week or so with doctors and prescriptions as I get ready to go to Africa, and I’ve noticed that our American health care system has gotten so complicated and specialized that you practically need a translator and a guide just for the travel immunizations. 

I’ve been immersed in incomprehensible vocabulary, trying to translate and coordinate a primary and a travel doctor, stuck full of needles, and informed of a tidal wave of symptoms and contingencies to track over the next month. I’ve sometimes felt frustrated or confused, or even helpless.

And that’s while I’m perfectly healthy.

So I imagine vividly what it must be like for Naaman. And if you’ve ever been under emergency care, or managed a major disease, you don’t have to exercise much imagination at all.

You see, Naaman has leprosy.

It’s an incurable degenerative disease, and it’s visible on his skin, ugly, and everyone avoids him, if they can.

Now, Naaman is a powerful man.  He’s strong and in charge; a winner. The world accommodates him, not the other way around.

But things change when you get leprosy.

You feel your body betraying you. People start to tell you no. No, there is no cure.  No, you can’t do anything, and you can’t come in here, now, either.  He can’t command or summon anyone or anything that will help him.

And then a slave girl speaks up.

This is an Israelite child captured in one of Naaman’s victories, a girl from a defeated nation, mostly ignored by everyone around her. But she speaks up, and from her own experience of God, announces that God’s prophet in Israel could cure the General.

It’s almost beyond belief that General Naaman hears of this, and listens to her, and acts on her word.  It’s like the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs seeking medical or military advice from the immigrant doing housekeeping at his hotel.

And the whole story cascades from there.  There’s some politics and comedy with kings and messages and treasure,

and Naaman finds himself in a foreign land, at the door of a foreign prophet – who then won’t even see him face to face – as though the only specialist in the country just phones in a prescription.

And that prescription – the unlikely and ridiculous-sounding instruction to wash seven times in the Jordan – leaves Naaman feeling baffled and more helpless than ever.

Think for a minute about times when you have felt helpless.  When you are face to face with a world you can’t control, when your friends and allies can’t help.

Maybe you, too, had a medical crisis.

Maybe it’s the seventeenth time you’re put on hold, waiting for someone else to come on the line and tell you that, no, you can’t do what the last person told you to do to get things sorted out, and you’ll have to start all over.
Maybe it happens to you all the time, at work.  Or as a parent, or with your parents.

And maybe you’re lucky enough, like Naaman, that this experience is rare, and brief.

Where are those places in your life?

Who are the people in our world, or in our country, who live in that vulnerable place?

Think about that, and you’ll feel the place that Naaman was in, when he stood outside the prophet’s door, still sick, brushed off with a message and a ridiculous instruction.

But that’s also the place where that young slave girl lived, all the time.

It’s the place where Naaman’s staff, his servants and chariot drivers, lived, often.

It’s the place a lot of people live in our world, today.

And in Naaman’s story, healing and grace depend dramatically on those powerless people. 

Healing and grace depend on that powerless, kidnapped child speaking up with her testimony of faith and possibility. Healing and grace depend on Naaman’s servants who create a safe space for their powerful master to try something nonsensical, even silly.

And because the powerless people in Naaman’s story take that risk - - speak up, and tell their truth, even protect and watch out for someone who wouldn’t seem to need it,

Naaman is healed.

He’s whole, and strong, and restored. And he finds God.

It’s not just the powerless speaking up that counts.

Naaman could so easily have ignored the slave girl and the servants, even punished them for discounting his dignity and authority.

But he stopped. And listened. And acted.

He let go of, or gave away some of his power, created a place for the powerless to be heard. And found grace, and healing, and inspiration, all unlooked for.

Think now for a minute about the times and places where you have power.  Where you feel strong, competent, safe and capable.  Where you don’t have to worry, at least for a while.

Maybe your home is a haven, a place where you can keep things right and secure.

Maybe you have authority at work, or in a volunteer role,

whether you chose it or not.

Maybe you know your way through the medical system from experience or training, and you can guide and assist someone else.

Maybe it’s subtle, like the power to get shoes or appliances to appear at your door, with the help of your credit card.

Many of us have power, whether we planned for it or not.

Think about those places in your life.

And think about the people in our world, who have power, official or informal.

Feel yourself there, for a moment, because in our world, in God’s world, just like in Naaman’s story, healing and inspiration and grace depend on the powerful to listen, and make room, and even give away their power. 
It’s the flip side of the powerless speaking up, and you can’t have one without the other.

And it flows, one to the other. Eric Law, a leader and teacher in the church’s multicultural work, calls this the “gospel cycle,” the ongoing, flowing exchange that gives power to the vulnerable or oppressed, and receives it from the dominant and strong.

Jesus just calls it the Kingdom of God.

Sometimes we go through that cycle of power and vulnerability ourselves, in a day, or an hour, or a year. 

Sometimes we’re called to start it for someone else, giving away power, or speaking up, to make space for wisdom and healing, inspiration and wholeness.

And whether you’re a slave girl or the king, we can start that cycle anytime, drawing ourselves, and all around us, into the kingdom of God.

So, when you’re secure and confident, remember Naaman, and make time to stop, and listen, and give your power away, so the helpless can be whole.  When you’re feeling vulnerable, remember his servants, and the slave girl, and speak up, or even make safe space for the powerful to be vulnerable.

It’s a cycle of grace. 

And it’s got to keep moving, like the living water of the Jordan,

to heal our world,

to make us all whole, and strong, and well.

Out of Your Comfort Zone

Genesis 11:1-9, Acts 2:1-21  

I never wear my clergy collar on airplanes.

Even so, I sometimes have chatty seatmates who find out what I do, and then want to spend the rest of the flight talking to me about what churches do wrong, their own specific interpretation of the Bible, or sexuality and religion.

Now, some of those conversations have turned out to be pretty interesting and fun, but once I’m “out” as a pastor, I wonder if people will judge me differently if I take my shoes off, or read a racy romance novel.  Or if it will seem like another rejection by the church (or the decadent failure of the church) if I say “I just don’t want to talk about Leviticus and sex today.”

The thing is, for that hour or four, stuck in a metal tube hurtling through the sky, I am the church for my seatmate, for good or for ill.

But I’m a cradle Episcopalian, and I don’t get on planes to evangelize.

Neither did the disciples.

Leaving aside the question of planes, the hundred and twenty of Jesus’ followers who gathered in Jerusalem during the spring harvest festival were no more interested in evangelism than me in seat 21A.

They were still disturbed and uncertain about this death and resurrection thing Jesus had done, and were probably too nervous to go out in the streets where people might ask them about that dead rabbi they had followed.

And then the Holy Spirit comes to them,

like a stormy wind and fierce fire,

and they find themselves out on the street, preaching the gospel to all comers in languages they’ve never spoken in their lives.

I’ve always tended to imagine that evangelism would be easier that way, set on fire by the Spirit. That if you’re caught up in the Holy Spirit, all the anxiety and embarrassment and awkwardness would disappear; that you’d be confident and convincing without having to figure it out, and that people would believe right away.

It is a great idea, but I’m willing to bet that if we could get inside the heads of those disciples, they would be full of questions instead of tidy triumph. I’m willing to bet that on that day, those disciples in Jerusalem were wildly conscious of being far outside their comfort zone.

Because God does that to us.  The Holy Spirit is a big fan of pushing us out of our comfort zones into new and unfamiliar places. 

I learned that from Calvary’s Vestry, by the way.  In our Vestry Bible Study at last week’s meeting, we read today’s Genesis story about the tower, and language, and babble. And right away, someone noted that God takes one look at the people building the city and pushes them out of their comfort zone.

In fact, God does for them exactly what they were trying to avoid by building their big, strong city and tower: scatters the people over the face of the earth.

And that happens so that the story can go on.

If there’s no diversity among us, if we stay in one safe fortified place, we lose the wonder of discovery, the inspiration for change and invention, and – most of all – the need and desire for a relationship with God that transforms lives.

That’s what Pentecost is about.

That’s the gift of the Holy Spirit to the church.

Not something as simple and spectacular as a miracle of language,

but the stormy, fierce Spirit that keeps on pushing us out of safe places, out of our comfort zones, so that God’s story can go on.

If that little community of disciples – a congregation the size of Calvary on a good Sunday – had stayed in their safe room, wondering and talking amongst themselves, the story of resurrection and redemption would have faded and died,

and you and I wouldn’t be here today.

We wouldn’t be here, praying and living our relationship with God, taking the chance on being inspired to tell God’s story somewhere way the heck out of your comfort zone.

Lillian Daniel, a popular Christian writer and a UCC pastor next door to us in Glen Ellyn, talks about the times when one of us church folk is in a place with others who don’t know much about church, don’t feel confident about their relationship with God, and suddenly wonder.*

Say you’re in a hospital room with a friend or family member who’s never seemed interested in religion, but suddenly asks if you believe in heaven.

Or a friend tells you about a personal tragedy, and wonders out loud how God can let bad things happen.

Or your niece, or your daughter’s boyfriend, asks how you can go to church when Christians are so judgmental.

All of a sudden,

like a pastor on an airplane,

you stand for the church.  The whole church.

And you kind of stand for Jesus, too.

You make the church real in that time and place, for better or worse.

These things don’t happen to you everyday.  But they do happen, or something like them, and usually when we are least prepared to talk Bible or Doctrine.

And Lillian Daniel points out that in fact, that’s not what we need to do.

You don’t need to quote scripture.  You don’t need to know how to preach the gospel.  What matters in those moments is just that you tell your own story.

Your beliefs, your hopes, and your own questions about heaven, whatever they may be.

The time you, too, wondered if God was mad at you, or didn’t exist, because you were drowning in tragedy…and how you survived, still believing in God, or at least in your friends from church.

Or just taking the time to listen to the one who thinks the church is judging them unfairly.

When we stand for the church, it’s not a polished, convincing sermon that matters.  It’s taking a chance on telling your own story, offering your testimony that God has something to do with you, even if you couldn’t exactly explain what that is.

It’s letting the Holy Spirit nudge you out of your comfort zone to tell your own story, so that God’s story can go on.

I’ll bet that when those disciples found themselves on the Jerusalem streets speaking languages they didn’t know, it wasn’t a creed, or a smart, well-crafted sermon that they offered. 

I’ll bet they stammered a bit and lost their train of thought occasionally, as they told their own personal stories.

Stories about being healed, or loved, or found.  About a rabbi whose words changed them. Stories told way out of their comfort zone, unpracticed, untaught, and unplanned,

and that day three thousand people were baptized, and God’s story could go on.

Pentecost isn’t just a holiday to remember. Pentecost keeps happening, over and over.

And the Holy Spirit doesn’t necessarily make it easy, but she does make it happen.

When God is ready, the Spirit makes those times when someone is ready to listen, and invites you out of your comfort zone,

to tell a story,  or act with love, so that one more time, God’s story can go on.

*"The Stand-In Church", in When "Spiritual But Not Religious" Is Not Enough" Jericho Books, 2013