This is the final sermon I preached to my beloved internship congregation, after spending 11 months with them in Littleton, CO. It also falls on the morning after George Zimmerman's not guilty verdict in the murder of Trayvon Martin. To say that a flurry of emotions accompany these words is a grave understatement.
Deuteronomy 30:9-14
Psalm 25:1-10
Colossians 1:1-14
It amazes me sometimes which
Gospel texts are on which Sundays—what are the odds that on my final
opportunity to preach the word to you, I’d be assigned some of the verses I think
are most important out of our entire canon? Funny how the Holy Spirit and the
lectionary conspire, sometimes.
Oh, and since this is my last
sermon here at Holy Trinity and I have so many things I want to say, I just
had to be upfront and apologize to Linda Jantzen that, like my first sermon to
y’all, it probably has three and a half main points—but it has just one theme.
Love your God and your neighbor.
There’s a sticker on my car that says it, if
you’re wondering how important I think it is. Love your neighbor. Love them
with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind. You
don’t have to listen any further if you don’t want to, because that’s all I’m
really going to say. Jesus finishes the parable by saying to go and do
likewise. So, feel free to go, now, and do.
Or stay and hear me out.
When I was in high school, we
had a weekly bible study on Tuesday nights with our youth director, Jonathan.
Jonathan was very frustrating, because any time anyone would ask a question, he
would respond with a question—I don’t think he has ever given me a straight
answer about anything. It was a sort of “stump Jonathan” game, because we
wanted to test the depth of his knowledge—which was extensive—but he was too
clever for us.
What was, in retrospect,
great about Jonathan’s tactics was that he taught me to try and figure out the
answers to my theological questions myself, and was off the hook for any time
he had no clue what the answer was, himself. I have to admit that, when I now
lead his youth in Bible Study on our summer mission trips, I employ the exact
same strategy.
In today’s Gospel, we have a
game of “stump Jesus,” in which a lawyer asks two of his best gotcha questions.
First, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”—and of course, Jesus does not
answer directly, but turns the question back onto the questioner! “What is
written in the law? What do you read there?” Jesus asks. True to form, the
lawyer answers correctly—love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with
all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and love
your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus gives the lawyer a gold star, but he’s not
done. His second gotcha question—who is my neighbor? This is the important
question with the important answer. We are all so comfortable with “love your
God and love your neighbor” because we do not know who our neighbors really
are.
It is often very easy to love
the people that live next door to us because it is likely that they are like
us. It is very easy to love the people sitting beside us in church because it
is likely that they are like us. There are a lot of people that it is very easy
to love. People we have known for a long time, our dearest friends and
family—though not always—and everyone we have surrounded ourselves with based
on the fact that it is easy to love them! They are like us and they are not
threatening and their lifestyle looks like our lifestyle and we go to the same
schools and the same grocery stores and the same bank and they have a car like
ours and a job like ours and isn’t it just so nice to have so many lovely neighbors.
But that’s not how Jesus
answers the lawyer. He tells a story of a man who is beaten nearly to death on
the side of the road, and the upstanding citizens—a priest and a Levite!—who
skip right over this man who is obviously very much in need of their love, and
the Samaritan who is moved with pity and stops.
Very rarely will you hear me
spout out the Greek words of a gospel text—because none of us are Greek
scholars, so it doesn’t do us a whole lot of good. But this story includes my
all-time favorite Greek verb. Σπλαγκνα. And “moved
with pity” is an okay phrase but what σπλαγκνα
really means is love that comes from deep within your core. Gut-love, my
undergrad Greek professor taught us to translate it. And I hope you can recall
a moment in your life where you were moved, viscerally, to gut-love for
someone. Or where you can tell that someone who cared for you did so out of σπλαγκνα.
Since you’re Greek scholars
now, you may also know the words φιλεω ερος αγαπη. These are the Greek
words for different kinds of love. These words are based on who the love is for
– family or friend, romance, divine. It’s interesting to me that σπλαγκνα never appears on this list. Maybe this is because σπλαγκνα is not to or from only a specific group. Anyone can σπλαγκνα anyone. Or maybe it’s because God does not have a gut
from which to σπλαγκνα. But this Samaritan man did, and so, in Luke’s
gospel, he σπλαγκνα’d this devastated traveler.
And that’s because σπλαγκνα is no ordinary love. It’s an extremely rarely-used
word in the New Testament. Only two other times, actually. In Matthew 20, Jesus
is “moved with compassion” for some blind people. σπλαγκνα. And in Philippians, the Apostle Paul loves the
church at Philippi because of the love of Christ…both of those “loves” are σπλαγκνα.
Jonathan, my aforementioned
youth director, didn’t take Biblical Greek, but I’m pretty sure he understood
the concept of σπλαγκνα, because while you’re probably familiar with the term
“heart to heart” conversation, Jonathan calls them “gut to guts.”
And when I studied abroad in
Türkiye, we learned a toast that is said among the dearest of friends: “cam
cam’a değil can can’a” – not glass to glass but soul to soul.
Not glass to glass but gut to gut.
This is what we’re talking
about, here. Love the Lord your God gut-to-gut. Love your neighbor around this
table not glass to glass but soul to soul.
This man from Samaria—this
man who by virtue of his birth was seen as less than human—is the only one in
this story who has known the real meaning of love, and has known just who his
neighbor really is.
But Jesus didn’t tell this
parable about a real-life Samaritan man. This story is not about somebody else.
He doesn’t tell stories for our amusement or our observation. This story is
about you, and it is about me, and it is about people we know and it is about
people we do not know. It is about every person who has ever heard it. And it
is not about being nice. The weakest interpretation of the words of Jesus is to
respond simply with niceness.
What this man from Samaria
has done for his neighbor was necessary and merciful and compassionate and more
than just nice. But, what happens when this man, upon his regular travel of
this road, notices that, each time, there is an injured man, beaten and bloody
on the side of the road. What happens when robberies continue to occur
regularly, and he continues to help these victims, and continues to pay this
innkeeper? While he’s doing necessary good, he’s perpetuating an existing,
damaging system. What happens when this man begins to ask why there are so many
robberies along this road? What happens when he begins to seek to change the
way the world around him functions? It is in the immediate interest of these
dying men to receive medical attention—this much cannot be denied. But it is in
their best interest to walk a road that is safe, where they are free from harm.
It is in the society’s best interest to address the needs of those who rob
their neighbors—what could be done to keep them from resorting to criminal
activity to provide for their families? Seeking justice for ALL your neighbors
is to truly love them.
You have heard me before
quote the words of Dr. Cornel West, an activist and professor at Union
Theological Seminary in New York, who is known for saying that “justice is what
love looks like in public.”
This parable should lead us
out into the public square to love our neighbors in broad daylight. To seek
justice for our neighbors on the steps of our capitol buildings.
Catholic social reformer
Dorothy Day has expressed this in a way that has sort of become my motto. She
says,
"Whatever I had read
as a child about the saints had thrilled me. I could see the nobility of giving
one's life for the sick, the maimed, the leper. But there was another question
in my mind. Why was so much done in remedying the evil instead of avoiding it
in the first place? Where were the saints to try to change the social order,
not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?"
The charitable work that
the church has done, historically, in the name of love has been so necessary
and so good. And Holy Trinity has been no stranger to that important work.
Five times a year, we house
and feed and transport and love families who are experiencing homelessness.
What if we sought justice for those families, by advocating for living wages
and fair housing practices, to the point where Family Promise as an
organization was no longer necessary?
During the school year, we
tutor and feed and love the Whiz Kids, who need a hand to get up to speed in
school. What if we sought justice for those kids, by advocating for equitable
school funding and teacher salaries and extra-curricular activities that
allowed them to thrive—and, alongside their education, fought for a system that
paid their parents enough to adequately feed them throughout the week?
Every few months, some of
you gather together in worship with the women of New Beginnings Church at
Denver Women’s Correctional Facility, loving those women by treating them like
the beloved children of God that they are. What if we also sought justice for
those women by advocating for a criminal justice system that does not disproportionately
sentence women of color to harsher mandatory minimums, and a correctional
system that does not dehumanize them through isolation, poor medical care, and
violent means of control—and systematically disenfranchises them forever, once they
are labeled felons?
It is time that we take the
words of Jesus seriously and make the move from mercy to justice.
It’s going to be hard.
Justice in this country is complex, and often our criminal justice system
disappoints us. Last February, in Florida, a 17-year-old unarmed black boy
named Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by a neighborhood watchman named
George Zimmerman. Last night, a jury pronounced him not guilty of murder. This
verdict does little to reflect a society where neighbors are loved or where
justice is served. The verdict itself notwithstanding for just one moment,
there is still a young boy who is dead who should not be. There is still a
neighborhood watchman whose life will never be the same. This encounter
reflects a society for whom fear has overpowered love. The tears that this
verdict brought to our eyes came from deep within our guts, deep within our
souls. As we try to put the broken pieces of our hearts back together as we
mourn Trayvon all over again, our guts are telling us, still, to seek justice.
Our guts and our God are
telling us that this must not be the way we treat each other. We must love our
neighbors, not fear our neighbors. What if we loved our neighbors so viscerally
that we took that love so far as to never be silent when it comes to the
sanctity of their lives—no matter who they are?
And so because this is the
last time I will stand in this pulpit and tell you what I think Jesus is saying
to us, please listen to me when I tell you that this is what he means when he
says to love your neighbor.
This is what I have meant
for the last 11 months when I have asked you to advocate alongside me for our
neighbors whose voices have not been loud enough to effect change on their own.
This book and the stories
like this that fill its pages are where I get those ideas and those words. You
won’t hear me saying them anymore, after today, but they will still be in this
book. And they will still be on the lips of every one of our neighbors who has
been crying out to God for justice.
When you love with all your
heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your
mind—when you do that in public—justice will roll down like waters, and
righteousness like a mighty stream.
Go and do likewise.
Amen.
