The Law of Nice

Sermon for July 14, 2019
Luke 10:25-37

This morning’s Gospel reading, the parable of the good Samaritan, is one of those stories we probably know too well, as a friend of mine likes to say.  We think we know it, but there’s a lot going on here.  So, let’s take a minute to unpack it.

The reading opens with “a lawyer,” an expert in Jewish law, throwing a question at Jesus to test him and put him in his place.  The question and answer are simple:  How do I inherit eternal life?  You love God and neighbor.  There are no other commandments greater than these, as Jesus says elsewhere. 

But the religious expert pushes back, asking, “And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29).  He’s trying to justify his own practice of faithfulness.  He wants to make it clear that he’s checking the boxes on God’s commandments just fine, thank you very much.  “Sure, the commandment is to love … but that doesn’t mean everybody, right?”

So, Jesus begins his parable.  First, we’ve got a man traveling between Jerusalem and Jericho who’s been attacked, robbed, and left for dead.  Other than that, we know nothing about this man; I’ll come back to that later. 

Then we’ve got the priest and the Levite, both of whom served specific roles in Temple worship.  To do their jobs, the priest and the Levite were obligated to follow the Jewish purity codes, which you can find in the books of Leviticus and Numbers – a wonderful glimpse into the history of Jewish piety and a great cure for insomnia.  

Here’s a little background.  You had to be ritually pure in order to participate in Temple worship, and out-of-the-ordinary life events would leave you ritually unclean – things like contact with certain dead animals, or childbirth, or skin diseases, or a woman having her period.  And there were special purity requirements for those leading or supporting worship – complicated and time-consuming practices to remove ritual impurity and prepare you for service in the Lord’s Temple.  

Well, one sure-fire way to lose your ritual purity was to have contact with a dead body.  Simply that action would take you out of the game for seven days (Numbers 19:11).  And if you failed to go through the rites of purification before coming back to lead worship, you would defile the Lord’s tabernacle for everyone and put yourself at risk of ostracism and possibly death (Numbers 9:13).  So, avoiding contact with a dead body was a higher-stakes situation than we might think.  And it helps explain why the priest and the Levite in the parable not only fail to help the half-dead man but go clear to the other side of the road to avoid him.

Then we have the Samaritan.  Now, you probably know that the people of Israel held the Samaritans in contempt – the kind of contempt reserved for family feuds.  The Samaritans were descended from the Northern Kingdom of Israel, which had split from the Southern Kingdom after the death of King Solomon.  The Jews, the descendants of the Southern Kingdom, saw the Samaritans as neither Jews nor Gentiles exactly – the branch of the family you avoid at all costs.   There’s no one quite so impure or unclean as someone who’s related but definitely not one of “us.”

Of course, the crux of Jesus’ story is that it’s this alien, this Samaritan of all people, who stops and cares for the half-dead man at the side of the road.  And he does that because the Samaritan sees not a problem there but a person.  Moved with compassion – which means, literally, to suffer with someone – the Samaritan treats the man’s wounds, lets him ride on his donkey, takes him to an inn, gives the innkeeper two days’ wages to pay for the man’s lodging, and promises to pay for whatever else the man’s care requires. 

So, what’s going on with this parable?  First, we might notice that Jesus very carefully doesn’t answer the religious expert’s question.  Instead, Jesus raises a much larger question:  What makes you righteous?  Is it keeping obligations? 

We might think about it in our own context, both in terms of secular law and religious observance.  Let’s say we pay our taxes, and we observe the speed limit, and we keep the trash container neatly behind the fence in our yard.  And, let’s say we’re actively part of a church community, and we pray for our own needs and the needs of others, and we give to God 10 percent of what God gives us.  How’s that, Jesus?  How are we doing at inheriting eternal life?

Now, Jesus would never have said to the religious expert, or to us, “You don’t need to bother with the requirements of the law.”  That’s what defined being part of God’s covenant community back in the day.  But Jesus certainly would have said to the expert, and to us, something like, “It’s necessary, but not sufficient.”  Following the law, keeping our obligations – that’s not what puts us in right relationship with God.  Behaving righteously is what puts us in right relationship – doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with our God (Micah 6:8).  And that requires not just knowing who counts as your neighbor but acting as a neighbor. 

And what does that take, to act as a neighbor?  I think it requires not just legal observance, and not just politeness, but love – the action of love.  If you’ve ever loved someone for real – if you’ve had a spouse or a child or a deep soul friend – you know that love involves not just action but costly action.  In Jesus’ parable, love for the half-dead man would have cost the priest or the Levite not just time but some exclusion, distance from their official roles and from the community life that gave them status.  And regardless of who stopped to help, once that investment was made, the cost just would have kept piling up – time, and supplies, and use of your vehicle, and cash to cover expenses – all for someone you don’t even know.  Is a half-dead person at the side of the road worth the investment?  On the world’s terms, Jesus would say, you’ll never know.  Love ’em anyway.

And that brings us to the person at the side of the road.  As I said, Jesus tells us nothing about him.  In the story, he’s literally no one.  So, actually, the first act of costly love in this story isn’t bandaging wounds.  It isn’t even stopping and interrupting your journey.  The first act of costly love is seeing – really seeing this person.  The priest and the Levite notice there’s a half-dead man at the side of the road.  The Samaritan sees the man with the eyes of compassion, the eyes of suffering with others.  Maybe the Samaritan knows a thing or two about being ignored.  Maybe he’s felt the slap of silence or watched others’ eyes look away.  His eyes of compassion lead the Samaritan to mercy, to love that costs him something.  That’s fulfilling God’s commandments.

I’m going to take a risk here and ask us to look at a purity code of our own, one we usually don’t think about.  It’s not the Law of Moses.  Instead, it’s the Law of Nice.  And I feel like I’m the perfect person to talk about it, because I am the apostle of nice.  Ever since seminary, people have been saying, “Oh, that John Spicer, he’s so … nice.”  Sometimes that’s a compliment; sometimes, not so much.  It’s not something I work at; it’s just how I’m wired and how I was raised.  And, you know, I think I have a lot of fellow apostles of nice sitting here this morning.  Here in Kansas City, here at St. Andrew’s … we’re really good at Midwest nice.  After all, it’s nice to be nice to the nice.

But something interesting happened here last Sunday, showing the limits of the Law of Nice.  I preached last week about Independence Day, how the vision of this nation honors human dignity and how Christian discipleship intersects with that.  Then, at the end of the sermon, it happened, at least at the 10:15 service:  People clapped.  Not everyone, of course, but enough to make it feel like a statement. 

That applause broke our purity code, the Law of Nice.  We’re not supposed to clap in church.  We probably know that; but, as with many old customs, we may not know why.  Theologically, we don’t clap because not clapping helps us remember whom we’re here to honor.  Our choir may sing an amazing piece of music and offer it with heavenly beauty; but we’re not supposed to clap because that anthem is not a performance.  It’s their offering to the God who’s worthy of all our praise and who provided the gifts that make their music possible in the first place. 

Now, what I intended with that sermon was to offer dignity as the intersecting point between Christian ethics and the American vision.  I raised up the crisis of overwhelming numbers of immigrants at the Southern border, and I said we all believe the people involved in that crisis are worthy of being treated with dignity, regardless of our political perspective.  When people applauded, I hoped that meant they were embracing that notion of dignity being at the core of our identity as Americans and as followers of Jesus.

Now, the good thing about this violation of the Law of Nice was that it encouraged several others, later, to violate it, too, by telling me a truth I might not have heard otherwise.  They said the applause made them feel excluded because they heard it as support for a political agenda they disagree with, related to immigration and other issues.  It didn’t matter what I intended about the sermon’s message; that’s how they heard the applause.  And it made them feel like the outsiders in this room, where we’re supposed to come together as family.

The truth is, I don’t know why people clapped.  What I do know is that we each brought our own meaning to the applause, and we can’t control what meaning others brought.  So, in addition to its theological merit, that purity code about not clapping for sermons has a lot of pastoral value, too, especially in divided times.

But still, like I said, there was an unintended benefit in our violation of the Law of Nice.  Just as Jesus asked the legal expert to go beyond checking the boxes of salvation and to risk even violating the Law of Moses for the sake of loving a neighbor, I think it’s good for us to go beyond the Law of Nice, and here’s how: by asking for the perspective of someone with whom we know we’ll disagree.  And then, really listen.  Really try to see that person as a neighbor.  It’s not about changing points of view, our own or the other’s.  It’s about seeing the other with the eyes of love and choosing engagement and relationship over avoidance. 

So, in these complicated times, we might each ask ourselves:  Who is the other to me?  What boundary do I need to cross?  Whom do I need to hear so I can know them in the fullness of their dignity?  That’s costly love – the love that turns “me” and “them” into “us.”

Who's on the Boat?

Sermon for Independence Day, transferred
July 7, 2019
Deuteronomy 10:17-21; Hebrews 11:8-16; Matthew 5:43-48

Today, we’re celebrating the feast of Independence Day, transferred from July 4.  That probably sounds strange, “the feast of Independence Day,” unless we’re talking about lots of hamburgers and frankfurters sizzling on the grill.  But Independence Day is one of only two secular holidays that have made it onto the Episcopal Church’s liturgical calendar (the other is Thanksgiving Day).  So, it’s good to think about why July 4 might be there:  What is it about our nation’s birthday that makes it count as a feast day in Jesus Christ’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church?

Well, I believe there is much that is good, even godly, in the dream and vision of the American nation.  In fact, there’s so much that’s good – despite all the ways our country feels broken right now – there’s so much that’s good that thousands of people still come seeking it, hoping to share in the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  In theological terms, I might even say those thousands of people still come here because the dream and vision of America is a nation that helps people grow into the full measure of who we’re created to be – each of us made in the image and likeness of the God who is Love.

That’s all well and good.  What’s hard, of course, is putting that vision into practice, especially in a culture where the separation of church and state is one of our founding tenants.  Now, that “wall of separation” has served us well; but I think we’re tempted to extend it too far, applying it not just to our government but to our own lives.  We’re tempted to think that our faith, and our Church, should have plenty to say about our individual behavior but little or nothing to say about our collective behavior. 

To be more specific:  I hear people say all the time that they don’t want preaching to be political.  I get that.  Many of you know more about government, economics, social issues, and international relations than I do.  Plus, like many of you, on the Sabbath day I also enjoy thinking about something other than our less-than-perfect Union.  So, I get it that you don’t want me telling you what to say in your letters to your representatives any more than I want you telling me what to say in mine. 

And, that being said:  How we live our lives is not just a private endeavor.  We are bound together in community – as Americans, as Midwesterners, as Kansas Citians, as the St. Andrew’s family.  And, more deeply, we are bound together through our primary identity – as beloved children of the one God who is Love.

So, as we celebrate the Church’s feast of America’s Independence Day, what might both our nation’s history and our commitment to Jesus Christ tell us about how to go about this hard work of living not just individually but in community? 

As I said maybe a couple of months ago when I stood up here and talked about abortion, I believe we have a key that helps us turn the lock of ethical living, as individuals and as a nation; and we find it in our Baptismal Covenant.  There, in the last two promises, we say that we’ll seek and serve Christ in all people, loving our neighbors as ourselves; and that we’ll strive for justice and peace.  Specifically, I believe the key that turns the lock to ethical living comes at the end of that final baptismal promise, when we pledge to “respect the dignity of every human being” (BCP 305).

To flesh this out, I want to share with you a journey I was blessed to take on vacation a couple of weeks ago.  Ann and I went to New York to see Dan and Kathryn, both of whom now live there.  Plus, you know, it’s New York, so we did some sightseeing, too.

One of our stops was the Museum of Jewish Heritage, overlooking New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty.  We were there to see a special exhibit on the experience of Jews and other persecuted groups at Auschwitz during World War II.  The exhibit told the story of the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany – posters and films telling lies that turned neighbors into subhumans; the bankrupt science of eugenics, which sought to “prove” concocted differences among people based on race; the destruction of synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses.  Maps, charts, and graphs told of millions of people taken away in cattle cars to work as slaves or to be killed immediately in the camps.

But the exhibition also personalized the Holocaust, telling the stories of victims and letting survivors speak for themselves.  And at the end, in the last room, was a montage of home movies, moments from the lives of German and Polish Jews before the war, people just doing what we all do on a beautiful summer day – playing with their kids, or going swimming, or picnicking in the park.  It was a powerful way to remember that every one of these murdered millions was a child of God, nothing more and nothing less; and that the Holocaust is what happens when people let the inherent dignity of others slip away.

The other powerful visit Ann and I made was to the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side.  The museum includes two buildings on Orchard Street that housed immigrants from all over the world from the 1840s through the 1980s – saloon owners, shop keepers, factory workers, garment workers, clothing retailers, airline pilots, a cross-section of working life.  The spaces told the stories of specific families living and working in those buildings across the decades, how they built new lives in a new land. 

What really sticks with me is the story of Kalman and Rivka Epstein – two Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust.¹  Either one of them could have been in the home movies I’d seen the day before.  Rivka was held at Bergen-Belsen, and Kalman was held at Auschwitz.  After the liberation, they met at a refugee camp in occupied Germany, where they got married.  They made their way to America in 1947, at a time when the United States was expanding refugee immigration so more people could come from devasted Europe.²  Kalman worked in the garment industry and eventually owned his uncle’s dress shop. 

The Epsteins came to the Lower East Side because of the rich Jewish community there, but they also built relationships with neighbors from many countries – especially because Kalman and Rivka owned the first TV in their building. 

They also had two daughters, Bella and Bluma.  In the daughters’ room was a record player and a 45 that Bella had played over and over – a doo-wop number by Paul Anka, whose photo hung over the record player.  Bella wanted badly to be a “real” American, and listening to Paul Anka made her feel that way.  She probably didn’t know Paul Anka was Canadian; nor did she know that he was the child of immigrants from Syria and Lebanon.  To the teenager Bella, Paul Anka’s haircut and his music were what America looked and sounded like.

Of course, as Ann and I were on our trip to New York, we all started to see news reports about immigrant children at the Southern border and the conditions in which they’re being housed.  Now, we can talk about immigration policy all day, and I’m happy to go have coffee with anybody who’d like to look at those hard questions through a theological lens.  But I imagine I’m safe in figuring that all of us think kids caught up in systems they can’t control or understand should have diapers and toothbrushes and basic medical care, no matter where they come from.  Right?  I really don’t see us disputing that, regardless of how open we believe America’s golden doors should be.

We believe people deserve the dignity of basic cleanliness and care for the same reasons that the story of the Epstein family in New York is so compelling.  First, as Americans, we believe our nation is a place of aspiration and hope for people in countries where aspiration and hope are reserved for the elite.  And second, as followers of Jesus, we believe that all people are children of God; that all people are made in God’s image and likeness; that all people are worthy of love and justice; and that each one of us, in our own way, is called to promote the dignity of others – especially when their dignity is threatened. 

Acting for the dignity of others can look many ways.  First, our most powerful act is to pray.  Beyond that, maybe it’s choosing to hire people who have a story like Kalman and Rivka Epstein.  Maybe it’s mentoring a child at one of our partner schools.  Maybe it’s giving toward the work of organizations, including Episcopal ministries, that are caring for people seeking asylum and resettlement.³  Maybe it’s working with people preparing for American citizenship, helping them learn what they need to know.  Maybe it’s writing your congressional representative, advocating for dignity as God’s starting point for all public policy, regardless of how the legislative sausage ends up. 

This is the nation we imagine as we celebrate the Fourth of July.  As the writer of Hebrews says about eternal life, so we believe about our nation’s life:  We always “desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (11:16).  And getting there requires us to act, however that looks for you.  As Jesus calls us this morning, strive “to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).

On the front of the bulletin is a photo I wanted to share with you.  This is what you see as you exit the Auschwitz exhibit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.  The view is of New York Harbor, and the little figure on the right is the Statue of Liberty.  Passing through the frame is a boat filled with passengers, which seems fitting for a harbor that holds the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.  I’m sure it’s a sightseeing boat, filled with people like you and me, taking in our nation’s history on a beautiful afternoon.  But I think it’s worth asking:  What if this were a different kind of boat?  What if the people on it came from places very different from ours?  Would their dignity matter any less?

I believe this is why we celebrate Independence Day as a feast of the Church and not simply a chance to feast on tasty grilled delights from the German cities of Hamburg and Frankfurt.  Despite the separation of church and state, we celebrate our nation’s birthday in the church because it helps us remember who we are.  For, as Americans, we are at our best when we remember that out of many, we are one; and that as one, we are called to help many grow into the fullness of whom they’re created to be – each a beloved child, made in the image and likeness of God.

1.      For more of their story, see the museum’s website, https://www.tenement.org/explore/103-orchard-street/.

2.      Beginning with an executive order by President Truman in December 1945 and continuing with the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, the U.S. government fostered the immigration of more than 400,000 “displaced persons” into the United States through 1952.  Of these, about 16 percent (about 64,000 people) were recorded as being Jewish.  See Daniels, Roger. Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. 103-112.

3.      Episcopal examples at the Southern border include Team Brownsville – Humanitarian Assistance for Asylum Seekers (https://www.teambrownsville.org/); the Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande (https://www.dioceserg.org/Ministries/asylum-seekers); and the Diocese of Texas’ partnership with Catholic Charities’ Humanitarian Respite Center in McAllen (https://bit.ly/2YecUND).