(This sermon was preached 39 years ago. I was a college professor teaching religion in a Baptist college. Fundamentalists had chosen me as their target in that college with the intention of having me fired. Susan and I decided that we were no longer Baptists. The straw that broke the Baptist back for me was when the editor of the Kentucky Baptist paper wrote that there was no place in the Baptist denomination for anyone who didn’t believe the fundamentals of the faith (as defined by the fundamentalist movement, none of which I believed) or anyone who TOLERATED someone who didn’t believe these fundamentals. We stopped attending the local Baptist church and began to attend a United Church of Christ church in Knoxville, TN. The UCC is probably the most liberal of Protestant denominations. This congregation welcomed us warmly. In time I was asked to preach one Sunday. Below was the sermon I chose. I offer it today because in light of the nationalistic Christianity which is reemerging, such a sermon is still relevant. Just before we left Kentucky for our wilderness years in Texas, the congregation gifted us with a ceramic cup they customarily gave members who were moving. The cup has its place in my office reminding me of the grace we received in a congregation for whom love was more important than inquisition.)
The college in which I teach requires every student to take two religion courses designed to communicate biblical perspectives and values. Since all students must take these courses to graduate, you can imagine what the makeup of these classes would be. In my classes I have had the sons and daughters of very conservative ministers, deacons, and Sunday school teachers; charismatics; Moslems from the Middle East; those inclined toward Buddhism; Mormons; followers of Herbert and/or Garner Ted Armstrong; occasionally a mainline Protestant from a liberal tradition; Catholic sisters who were a godsend; lots of students who have been to church just enough to be terribly confused like the student who thought that Abraham was one of the Twelve Apostles or the coed who assumed that “Christ” was the last name of Joseph and Mary; occasional atheists who did not believe for some very good reasons; agnostics who wanted to believe but couldn’t because of all the nonsense they had heard over the years; and a lot of just plain “heathens”—students who had never been in church and who knew nothing about the Bible or “proper” theology. (Let me pause to point out that it was not I who ascribed the label “heathen” to them. They proudly applied the label to themselves. They were people to whom religious language and concepts like grace, the Kingdom of God, revelation, and redemption were not familiar and who therefore required a lot of clarification of terms.)
This last group is my favorite group to teach. Or to be more precise, I enjoy teaching a class made up of a good dose of heathens along with those 18-21-year-olds who are absolutely sure they already understand all there is to know about God, the Bible, and religion–in other words, the children of those conservative ministers, deacons, and Sunday school teachers I mentioned earlier. These heathens do three things for those who have been reared in the church. First, they require us to define our terms, and in the attempt to define terms like grace, judgment, and revelation, we discover that sometimes we really don’t know what we are talking about.
Second, these heathens keep us honest. Often Christians use religious language as a coverup for irresponsibility, concealing ulterior motives, or just plain lazy thinking. For example, there was the student who maintained that her praying for her critically ill brother had affected his recovery. She believed that her prayers, the prayers of her parents, and those of friends and church members really had made a difference and without their efforts and concern her brother would have died. At that point a social work major who has just spent a summer in the inner city of a large metropolitan area as a volunteer said the following: “I am very glad that your brother recovered, and maybe prayer had something to do with his recovery. But what about all those countless children for whom no one cares and for whom no one prays? If prayer can make a difference, is it fair for your brother to have so many to care and pray for him and for others who are no less precious according to your theology to have no one to care and pray for them? What kind of God sets up a system where recovery depends on the number of people praying for you?” The other student had never thought of that.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, these heathens, hearing the Bible for the first time, see things those who have grown up in the church have never seen. And what’s interesting is that sometimes what these heathens see is often in harmony with the best findings in biblical scholarship. Six years of teaching this kind of people have made me realize that I can read and hear a certain text over and over again and still miss the point because perhaps I think I already have that passage nailed down. Familiarity does not so much breed contempt as it does indifference and blindness.
Such was the case with the Parable of the Good Samaritan until I was asked some very pointed questions by one of the heathens. I looked into the best of current New Testament scholarship and discovered that I had probably missed the main point of this well-known story. Perhaps you have already seen the point, but I think it bears repeating (for that’s another lesson I’ve learned from these students: we in the church often don’t appreciate and fully appropriate the truth we do have). So, let’s give it a try.
I suppose this parable has been understood by most today to teach that compassion is a condition for entering the Kingdom of God. The story does center around the compassion one human shows for another, and Jesus elsewhere says that the one who will not forgive others or show compassion to others can expect none from God. And yet that sounds so cut and dry. It appears to imply that God is unwilling to forgive and show mercy and compassion to us unless we do so for our neighbors. I would suggest that such an interpretation is wrong, for the New Testament never tires of saying that in Christ God took the first step in this business of forgiveness and showing mercy and compassion—that it is God’s very nature to forgive and care profoundly So, we must not assume that God, like Ebenezer Scrooge before his transformation, demands a tit-for-tat kind of religion where God does for us what we are willing to do for others.
No, the reason why God can forgive us as we forgive others and can show mercy and compassion to us as we do the same to others is not to be found in the nature of God. It is to be found in the nature of forgiveness, mercy, and compassion—in the nature of relationships. The very word compassion means “to feel with/to suffer with.” It denotes a correspondence between the parties involved, an empathy, an understanding, a sharing, a betweenness. Terms like forgiveness, mercy, and compassion have to do with relationships, with the ways in which God and others affect us, change us, and make us whole. As long as these concepts are denied their proper sphere and are made to refer to the superficial and the external instead of the personal and the relational, then we can never understand why God cannot grant forgiveness, mercy, and compassion to the one who will not demonstrate these qualities toward others.
So, it’s not so much that one must show compassion to enter the Kingdom of God. It’s that if one does not show compassion to others, he does not know God for one cannot truly accept the compassion of God for oneself without it transforming him into one who can also “feel with” and “suffer with” another.
A second understanding of this parable centers around the term “Samaritan.” The point here is that Jesus chose as the hero of his story a man whose national and ethnic grouping was a stench in the nostrils of the Jews. For the Jewish hearers, the parable of the Good Samaritan was not a pleasant story encouraging them to love everybody in general. No! The hero of this story was someone in particular who was despised and considered inferior by the Jews.
The Good Samaritan story is pleasant reading for us precisely because the term Samaritan is a neutral one. We have never seen one and find it difficult to understand all this Jewish-Samaritan rivalry. But if Jesus were to tell this parable today, whom would he choose for the hero? For the county in which I live, it might be a Democrat. For Archie Bunker, a Polish Jew who was also a socialist. For the Grand Wizard of the KKK, a Black person. For General Westmorland of Viet Nam fame, Jane Fonda. For Jerry Falwell, a homosexual. For me, perhaps Ronald Reagan. You see, now we have hit a raw nerve. I have ceased to be a spectator and have become a participant in this parable (a move which Jesus intended for all his parables).
So, let’s go a little deeper. Without doubt, a part of the message of this parable centers around the necessity of showing compassion. But if Jesus’ main point of the story was for one to have compassion on even his despised enemy, then the roles would have been reversed. The man who fell among robbers would have been the Samaritan and the one who showed compassion would have been a Jew. And we would have “the Parable of the Good Jew.” So, what else did Jesus have in mind?
A knowledge of the teaching of the rabbis would help us here. One rabbi taught that no Jew should accept aid from a Samaritan because to do so would delay the redemption of Israel. So, what Jesus may have been asking his hearers was this: “Who among you will permit himself to be served by a Samaritan? Who among you can say the impossible: “Good and Samaritan” in the same breath?” At this point the Jewish hearers of the parable could not be merely spectators even if they wanted to. They had to become participants. They had to be active. They had to respond, for the tension was unbearable.
On the one hand, they knew the Samaritan had done the compassionate, neighborly things. What had happened was that they had been trapped by Jesus’ words. The rug had been pulled out from under them. In that instant, they knew the truth: the hero of the story was a GOOD SAMARITAN. Yet on the other hand, they had their religious training, national pride, and embedded prejudice. They had their beloved and accustomed view of the world. What happened in the hearing of Jesus’ parable was a clash of worlds: the world of their cherished tradition and the world of Jesus’ Kingdom of God. The hearers must now say the impossible: “Good Samaritan”, and they must identify with the one in the ditch who had been robbed and left for dead. In doing so, their whole world is being turned upside down as it is being brought under radical questioning.
This way of seeing the Parable of the Good Samaritan demonstrates that when the Kingdom of God breaks into our lives and consciousness, it demands the overturn of prior values, close opinions, set judgments, and established conclusions. It places our world under radical judgment. And this should be enough to convict us of the necessity of always receiving, hearing, and seeing afresh; to let the Word of God come alive as we enter into dialogue with it and let it enter into dialogue with us from wherever that Word may come–Scripture, human relations, the arts, literature, current events, or the innocence of children.
For you see, with this understanding of this parable, the point is not so much showing compassion to our neighbor or overcoming racial prejudice, The point is realizing and experiencing that as the Kingdom of God impinges upon our lives, our whole world is called into question. Not one part of it can escape an encounter with the Living God. If this is the point of the parable, then its message for the church should be clear. In fact, the research on parables by New Testament scholars over the past two decades would indicate that time after time Jesus in his teachings was forcing those who heard them to encounter the Kingdom of God with their petty religious, cultural, and political worlds and from that encounter to change; to put first this Upside Down Kingdom and its justice and to die to their old loyalties and precious convictions; to make room for the new wine by discarding the old wine skins. In short, the parables demand radical openness.
Perhaps those who gain the least from Jesus’ message are those who are not open to change and the radical calling of God’s Kingdom; those who have built a rigid system of beliefs and convictions and have set these in concrete; those who, thinking they honor God by their zeal, love dogma more than compassion, order more than justice, and laws more than people. We can easily understand why these people fall into this trap. They want security and assurance. They want a source of authority which is absolute and evident in its entirety to them. And if such does not become available naturally, they will, consciously or subconsciously, manufacture it.
I believe the great psychologist Abraham Maslow can help us understand. He suggested that there are two approaches to life. One is the fear choice, and that is the one chosen by those who are afraid of the different; who cannot cope with ambiguity and complexity; who shun creativity and freedom, authentic responsibility and unconditional love. They do so because fundamentally they experience life as a threat. They cannot accept themselves unconditionally, much less others, because they cannot believe that God loves them unconditionally. So, life is to be lived very narrowly, very carefully, lest God, whom we must above all fear, should withdraw divine love. Fear, Maslow reminds us, brings about paralysis. It inhibits growth and destroys the ability to be open to change.
But, of course, there is an alternative which I sense this church embodies. It’s more difficult than the other path, but it offers life. It gives a pilgrimage rather than a treadmill of tired, threatened, and tense religion. This path is similar to what Maslow calls the growth choice. This alternative is found by those who know that although God is their absolute authority, all that God and God’s Kingdom entail are more than we can ever completely understand and appropriate. These people celebrate the truth they have found, but they, like Paul, know that at best, we all see dimly. There is always more revelation to come and more change to undergo if they are to remain faithful witnesses to the Upside-Down Kingdom.
They know that tents rather than homesteads (much less, marble shrines) are more the symbol of God’s people as they move on and on into a fuller understanding and experience of God’s truth and way. And they love the journey because they trust the Guide and relish the company of fellow pilgrims. They have learned that growth, though at times painful, is to be preferred to fear and regression. They can choose growth over fear because they, in Paul Tillich’s marvelous words, accept the fact they have been accepted; and in that grand experience of reconciliation, they are reconciled to life, their world, and others. They have a profound belief in the final goodness of existence, and they trust God for the journey and the destination.
My wife and I are leaving a denomination where this ability to be open, to change, and to live the pilgrimage are being destroyed by those who have chosen fear over growth. This grieves us more than I can say. But this is the path Southern Baptists have chosen, and we are not welcome to stay.
The reason we started coming to a UCC church is because I have long admired the United Church of Christ for its courage in being open to change when being faithful witnesses to God’s Kingdom necessitates such change. In the months we have been with you, we have admired your commitment to be relevant and to be open to truth. I commend you for this, but I would also challenge you to consider that such openness cannot be taken for granted. It must be cultivated, nurtured, and highly prized. Such an attitude must be practiced rigorously. Fundamental assumptions must be re-examined. We must experience over and over again this clash of worlds to which the parables of Jesus lead us, and in that clash always choose God’s Kingdom afresh. For God does not call us to be good first century, sixteenth century, or nineteenth century Christians. We are called to be God’s people in our time and place as we face the challenges and opportunities, the crises and decisions which are uniquely ours.
So, what I wish for you, my wife, and myself is a brave journey!
Luke 10:25-37 (NRSV)
25 An expert in the law stood up to test Jesus.[a] “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” 27 He answered, “You shall 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 your neighbor as yourself.” 28 And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”
29 But wanting to vindicate himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” 30 Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and took off, leaving him half dead. 31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. 32 So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan while traveling came upon him, and when he saw him he was moved with compassion. 34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, treating them with oil and wine. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him, and when I come back I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ 36 Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” 37 He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
