My Relationship with My God

I.

God is not my buddy. God is not my pal. God is not my chum. God is not my friend. Those are human relational functions and designations that pertain only to human beings in relationship to certain other human beings. As far as that goes, neither is God my father or my mother--though Jesus may have favored the “Daddy” metaphor when speaking to God in prayer.

God is my Creator in the sense that God created the intricate parts of the world that would evolve over long periods of time into mountains and bodies of water and plants and animals and human beings. I can buy into the notion, as did the tellers and writers of the Genesis creation stories, that God the Creator remained intimately connected to what God had created, or I can buy into the deistic notion, held by many of the founders of this nation, which holds that God did, indeed, create the earth and the skies along with plant and animal and human life, but then went away to some undisclosed location and left it up to humans to use their brains to keep the world healthy and keep it functioning.

God is spirit. Among other things, this means that God is invisible to the human eye and that God has no hands or feet or a voice audible to human ears. No one has ever seen God, except maybe for Eve and Adam who in the mind of the ancient storyteller must have seen God when God came to them to confront them for their refusal to obey the one rule of Eden and Moses who, because of a strange turn of events, was allowed to see God’s hindquarters. There were those, however, who saw God in their dreams and visions, but certainly not in the normal course of everyday life.

This biblical principal is largely ignored by Hollywood filmmakers who have occasionally made God visible and given God a voice. The Hollywood God, George Burns and Morgan Freeman and Jim Carey notwithstanding, is usually a blurred humanoid, often larger than life, who speaks audibly, typically in a voice that is louder than it needs to be, singsong quality, basso--I’ve never heard God portrayed as having a tenor voice, and is given to hyper-enunciation. “I am thy God and will surely give thee aid.”

I believe that the ancient people who first told stories about those who audibly heard God speaking and those who heard these stories knew that God wasn’t speaking audibly. Only in ages where people believed or believe that truth is captive to literalism did some of them, many of them try to literalize stories where God has distinct human qualities including a long white beard even though we have no reason to think of an eternal God as having grown to look like an older man instead of a younger man with a voice audible to the human ear. My suspicion is that if there were a time machine that took some of today’s biblical literalists back to the ancient Hebrew era, the Hebrews they’d meet would laugh at them for believing that God who is spirit actually looks like humans and speaks like humans.

Unfortunately, many folks who believe that a relationship with God is a possibility tie what they believe and what they teach others to believe to a God who has been thoroughly anthropomorphized--that is to say, humanized. This is even more complicated and dangerous when we give God human emotions and a human personality--prone to anger and revenge as some of us sadly are.

Many of you know that I taught as a guest professor at the Baptist Seminary in Switzerland a quarter of a century ago and that they asked me to join the faculty permanently. This required the approval of the Foreign Mission Board who owned the property on which the seminary sat and paid the salaries of the Americans who made up about half of the small faculty. The fundamentalists who were taking over the Southern Baptist Convention at that time and who eventually did so completely had some problems with my theology as you might well imagine, and they started throwing roadblocks to permanent appointment in our pathway. One of their tactics was to bring my wife and me back to Richmond, Virginia, where they were headquartered and require us to see the Board psychiatrist a second time. We had to see him the first time before we could go to even our one semester appointment; obviously, we passed, or we wouldn’t have been able to do the job we did in the first place. A second psychiatric review, however, might reveal some compelling reason to designate us as unfit to serve from a psychiatric point of view. That would be the easiest way for them to refuse to appoint us permanently and not have to get into a debate with the Rueschlikon faculty who’d already asked me to come back to stay and who found no problems with psyche or my theology.

The Board psychiatrist was a really nice man and a very cool guy. He said to us, “Look, the fundamentalists don’t want the bad PR in the eyes of the European Baptists who also help support the seminary so they aren’t going to tell you flat out that you can’t go back, but they are going to keep finding reasons to discourage you and slow down the process until you give up in frustration. As much as you want to go back and as much as the seminary wants you to come back, you should exercise your autonomy and reclaim your dignity and voluntarily withdraw from the appointment process. No matter what you do, they are never again going to allow a non-literalist to teach there as long as their dollars are supporting the place.”

We sadly took Dr. Holland’s advice. We took the rest of our allotted time already paid for by the Foreign Mission Board to chat with Dr. Holland, who regularly attended the River Road Church and whose aunt was the professor of missions at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. What the fundamentalists wanted by the time we came along were missionary appointees who believed the Bible literally in every respect, but who had never heard God speaking to them audibly. If they told Dr. Holland that they’d heard God speaking audibly to them, especially that God had spoken to them telling them that they were being sent to serve on a foreign mission field then they were marked off the list of possible appointees. It’s always been interesting how those who claim to believe the Bible from cover to cover still only recognize those parts of the Bible that suit their causes.

For example, biblical literalists typically suffer from hermeneutical or interpretive schizophrenia. They can affirm and preach a God whom they say loves the whole world, but at the same time can lead people into war and the both promote and applaud killing of the humans that the same Bible said that God Godself created. “This does not compute,” as the Robot from “Lost in Space” used to say.

If I say what I just said to you to a biblical literalist, she or he will say that human beings were never intended to understand the ways of God and/or that my faith in God is lacking. My trying to argue theology with a literalist is about as worthwhile as trying to get Mike Castle to endorse Christine O’Donnell for the U.S. Senate.

The fact is, however, that God doesn’t sign off on God’s work. Trying to ascertain what God has done and what has come about because of or through some other force is guesswork. God is not trying, I think, to be so tough for us to understand or to follow, that all of us are in the dark on God-matters most of the time. Still it is the nature of God, as spirit, to be out of direct view of human beings. This means that some speculating about the function and the ways of God is a required part of human experience. Living with some uncertainty about God goes with the territory for all who dare to think and wonder about God at all.

II.

God is not human, and is not static. Another frustration. We can’t get God all figured out some day and then count on God never to change or be any different from the way we understand God that day. Someone has said that God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. That is true in the sense that God is love, but how that love is expressed or lived out may be very different in a new situation, and while God isn’t going to become hatred and evil at work in the world, neither can finite self-centered humans be able to say what God is doing or going to do in every new life challenge or episode in human history.

Those who read the Bible seriously, if not literally, and take the insights of some of the writers as on target if not as certain as the behavior of a human being whose actions we have observed first-hand, can see that God is changing before our readers’ eyes. God is not static. Neither is God shaped by human preferences, demands, or wishes; although, God is affected by human choices and behavior.

At the moment, I have three major changes in how God acted during the time that what we now call Hebrew scripture was being written and compiled. One is related to God and covenants; one has to do with the lesson learned that God is not limited by space or time; and the other has to do with how God’s presence may be discerned.

One of the realizations about the God of the Hebrews once they’d settled on the idea that there is only one God--not many deities and not one dominant god or goddess in the company of numerous lesser gods and goddesses was that each clan or tribe doesn’t have its own god; there is only one God. This is the God who created the ground and the skies, the God in whom we live and move and have our being. This God is a God of covenants; this is a covenant-making God, and in these numerous covenants that God makes with numerous individuals and the Hebrew people as a whole, God makes some promises about what God will do with and for these people contingent on their faithfulness, their obedience to God.

There’s a covenant God makes with Noah. God saves Noah’s family from the great flood, the only humans to survive by God’s design. In gratitude and obedience, they are supposed to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the Earth that is nearly devoid of humans. If they do their part, and covenants are clearly conditional, then God promises never to destroy all or most of the human race by flooding. God decides to remind Godself of this covenant by having a rainbow appear in the sky after each rainfall.

God makes a covenant with Abraham, and what God will do for Abraham is to reward him with many descendants--enough, in fact, that they will all become a great nation that will inherit a Promised Land. Furthermore if everybody’s on board with honoring God, then all other other nations will be blessed through him, Abraham, and his descendants.

In the Ten Commandments, God makes a covenant with Moses and the Israelites in which they are asked to affirm monotheism. In exchange for their affirmation, God promises to be their God.

There’s a covenant when the Temple in Jerusalem is initially built. King Solomon builds the Temple, and God promises that if God’s people worship there God will establish a royal dynasty that will last forever. King David’s descendants through Solomon and beyond will form this lasting dynasty.

When one of these covenants was made it must have been written down, but by the time of the Prophet Jeremiah, God says that God will make a new covenant with all Jews and, by inference, all those who honor God. The details of this new covenant follow the covenants that preceded it, but there was one HUGE change. This covenant would be written not on papyrus scrolls or stone tablets, but only on the hearts of people seeking to know and honor God. This was also a major transition in that those seeking to understand God began to learn to look inward rather than outward. Sad to say that many people today who think they know God are transfixed on a collection of writings and a belief that God dwells outside human experience and must be sought in prayer as separated from human beings.

The Prophet Jonah believed that God was calling him to preach in Nineveh, and he flat didn’t want to go to Nineveh so he tried to run away from both God and Nineveh. What he finds out is that God is not geographically limited. God isn’t tied to a holy city, or a holy shrine, or a holy nation; rather, God comes to us and stays with us wherever we may find ourselves. We cannot run from God though we may well live as if God does not live. God lures us toward the divine love, but God does not force Godself upon us. God does take, “No,” for an answer, but God remains close at hand; in fact, as we’ve said, much of what we can know of God is God within us.

Last week, the choir sang a song whose words were penned originally in the sixteenth century, and I think this simple, though beautiful song, gets at the whereabouts of God:

God be in my head, and in my understanding

God be in mine eyes, and in my looking

God be in my mouth and in my speaking

God be in my heart, and in my thinking

God be at mine end, and at my departing.

I have always loved the story of Elijah--not that I agree with all of its theological teachings. For example, when he won a rather silly contest over the prophets of the god Baal, there was no need to have those prophets slaughtered in order to prove that he and his God were on the right side of the debate or exercise. His queen was a Baalite, and Elijah’s act of violence upon the prophets of her religion put Jezebel in the mood to bring bout some violence of her own; she sent out members of her special ops forces to find this Elijah and kill him on sight.

Once highly respected among his people, now--because of a pagan queen, he thought--a man of his stature and dignity was literally running for his life, and the King, King Ahab, who shared Elijah’s religion and not his wife’s, did nothing to try to stop her dirty work. This prophet was used to the nicer things of life, and here he was running into the wilderness as the only place he could think of where he might go undetected by Jezebel’s henchmen. In that desert, God provided water and nourishment for him, not an unusual thing for God to do according to a handful of desert stories.

Elijah eventually makes his way to a cave where his fear subsides a little bit; it doesn’t completely go away. In that somewhat more protected space, in compared to the wide open desert, Elijah begins to sulk and feel sorry for himself. He found out what Jonah wouldn’t discover until many years after Elijah; he’d outrun Jezebel’s would-be killers, but he hadn’t been able to outrun God.

God comes to Elijah in that cave and asks him what is already evident: why is he there? Well, Elijah talks about all he’d done for God and God’s people and, thus, how unfair it was for him to have to live in fear of a pagan queen when God could put a stop to Jezebel and her evil in a heartbeat. Then, Elijah talks about how to find God during those times when God hasn’t sought you out, and in one of the most stirring of all the monologues attributed to God in Hebrew scripture, God gives Elijah some profound advice. In answer to Elijah’s questioning about how one is supposed to know where to find God, God says to Elijah:

“Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.

That is such a powerful reality. We want God in the drama, in our big lotto winnings, and at the war room desks when our enemies are formally giving up their attacks and calling us the winners. You’re looking in the wrong places entirely if that is where you’re looking, God said to Elijah. Try the silent, barely noticeable, places in your life, the places where there is no fanfare and no spectator. There, in the sheer silence, you may well find God.

III.

Jesus invested in brief public ministry, his ministerial career, trying to get across two points to religious seekers. 1) God is love, and God’s love is unconditional. 2) A connection to God is not about rules, but about relationship. Keeping all the rules doesn’t get us to God or keep us near God. Keeping all the rules doesn’t acquaint us with God. True religion is about, not rules, but a relationship.

Some of you scoff at how anthropomorphic that sounds, as if to undo all else I’ve said today. Well that is certainly not my intent or my belief. “Relationship” is another one of those words that we are pushed to use metaphorically because the Mystery that is God cannot be fully known or apprehended. But “relationship” signifies that it is possible to have a connection with this Creator God who is unconditional love.

When I talk about a relationship with God, I’m not talking about God as your buddy or God as your genie. God is not the private possession of any one of us or any one religion. Pam Cummings gave me a bumper sticker that she’d kindly had mounted on fiberboard since she was pretty sure I wouldn’t actually put it on my car. She was right about that, but even though I shy away from bumper stickers this one might have found its way to my car. It reads: “God Is Too Big for One Religion.” Yes, indeed! Too big to be owned by any individual. Too big for any nation or any religious group.

I believe there are ways to be connected to God, in relationship with this God, but this does not mean there’s a special inside track for some people while others are left out. A relationship with God is not a reward for those who keep the rules. Let me stay with that metaphor, “relationship,” for a few minutes, and I want to begin these reflections by saying what a relationship with God is not:

A relationship with God is not in any way appeasement. Our connection to God doesn’t buy God off, doesn’t keep life’s crises away from us, or ridiculous and dangers political candidates off our ballots. God isn’t out to get us if we fail and so does not need to be appeased. So much about the ancient Hebrew religion was precisely about appeasement, trying to keep God happy so God won’t allow bad things to happen to us even when we’ve done wrong. Trying to appease God is as pagan as you can get. Yet, sadly, even after the sacrificial system ended officially, there have remained those monotheists who live and act as if the primary reason to seek to be related to God is to appease God--to store up brownie points in case we really botch it one of these days.

If we have a connection to God it’s not because we’re more special than any other human being. We are privileged to have that connection and privileged to have had fellow seekers in our lives who helped us find our way there, but connection or not God doesn’t extend God’s love more to some people and less to others.

A relationship to God is not a way of earning or guaranteeing material and spiritual rewards in the here and the hereafter. If you were at home right now watching a television preacher instead of here listening to me, you’d be hearing a sermon proclaiming the opposite of what I’m telling you. You’d be hearing sermons that were saying, point blank, to be in good with God is your way to wealth and prestige. Rev. Ike was the first blatantly prosperity gospel preacher I ever heard. A young preacher in the making, I didn’t realize that there were gospels preached away from the Beaver Dam Baptist Church in Halls Crossroads that were any different from what we were hearing in our church so I’d listen in my youthful ignorance and not catch the conflict with how my pastor preached and how Rev. Ike preached. Ike used to have his Ike’ettes sing, “You can’t lose with the stuff I use; you can’t miss with stuff like this!” Then Ike would preach his visualization gospel. “If you need a car, visualize that car, but don’t visualize a Pinto; visualize a Cadillac. Our God wants God’s people to have the best.” Ike was all wrong, my friends. The maxim may have gotten overused a few years ago, but the truth behind it isn’t dated at all. There really are those out there somewhere who are choosing to live simply so that others may simply live.

A relationship to God is not a direct connection to the divine voice for instant directions like the GPS with a digitized voice telling us every move to make. “Turn left in 7.3 miles onto Harmony Road. Now bear to your right on South Happiness Drive.” There are certainly those who live as if they have God in their hip pockets or in their cellular devices so they can get a direct word from God any time a potentially important decision has to be made such as what shade of lipstick should be chosen or which car to buy. There are those who live like this despite what God told Jeremiah: “Stay focused on sheer silence if you want find me.” And seeking answers to life’s questions that really matter can take us years or a lifetime to find.

Now, a few words about what a relationship with God is.

A relationship with God, a connection to God, is a personal and perhaps communal search for life’s truths. Most of life’s questions that matter are the big ones, the tough ones, and we find ourselves searching all our lives for answers to these questions. We may take on that challenge by ourselves or with a group, such as a church. But what we find very well may be more complex than we anticipated, or much larger than we thought. There may be more than one correct answer to these heavy questions.

A relationship with God is an affirmation of the reality that God is love, and this leads us, hopefully, to self love and love of others--the kind of love that is not nearly so concerned with emotions as with acting out our belief in such love regardless of how we may feel about what love drives us to do.

Closely connected to what I’ve just said, a relationship with God is a way of communing with God as Jesus did in search of inner peace and a sense of whether or not we are using our gifts to their fullest extent to make our world a better place. Some of our members will be walking today in the Delaware AIDS Walk. All of those who walk hope for a cure for this horrid disease, but what makes them care, what allows them to care, what promotes their selflessness, who knows. Some will be out there because of their relationship to God, their love for God.

A relationship with God is a way of sharing God’s kind of life in this world and, if one so chooses, in the next realm as well.

O Love that wilt not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.

O light that followest all my way,
I yield my flickering torch to thee;
My heart restores its borrowed ray,
That in thy sunshine’s blaze its day
May brighter, fairer be.

O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be.

Amen.

My Relationship with My Spiritual Advisor

I.

A spiritual advisor can function in that role in several ways--from a formally trained spiritual director who meets with clients in ways not unlike a therapist does to a trusted friend who has consistently on target spiritual insights and freely engages in informal conversation about those kinds of issues. There are some religious traditions that expect those among them most serious about spiritual development and growth to have a regular spiritual director with whom they meet regularly to assess how they are doing in the spiritual growth department. Some denominational groups essentially require their professionals, such as clergy, to see a spiritual director on a set schedule.

Most all of us would benefit from the right spiritual director though not all of us would be comfortable with set formal meetings to discuss our prayer lives and how we’re doing with other spiritual disciplines. Many regular synagogue and church goers, and I’d assume this would also be true of mosque goers, regard their rabbi or pastor or priest or imam as their spiritual advisor. In Christian tradition, the very fact that people come to listen to sermons on a regular basis is an indication that they are seeking spiritual advice at some level, and if they need something more from the pastor in that regard, a personal conversation is arranged.

The pastor who is willing to serve as a spiritual advisor, especially in a one-to-one arrangement, has to be very careful not to try to become a mental health therapist. It is shallow and destructive to tell someone who has a clinical depression that all she or he needs to do is to beef up the prayer life or to get more involved in social ministry to those in need. The uncredentialed clergyperson who attempts to function as a licensed mental health professional can do more harm than good and may, in fact, be guilty of malpractice in the eyes of the law.

Ministers should limit their advice to clearly spiritual matters and refer parishioners who would be better treated by a licensed mental health professional to that person. Spiritual antidotes will not solve every problem that comes along.

There are a few churches around town that always seem to be running a contest to see who can put the most trite, cornball slogan about faith or spirituality on their sign boards. I think you can subscribe to these services that provide you these slogans. To me, they’re offensive. My least favorite shows up on several boards from time to time; I first saw it over in Claymont years ago when we first moved to Wilmington. It read: “Too Blessed to Be Depressed.” Having had parishioners with debilitating clinical depression through the years and some family members with various degrees of depression to deal with, that message just burned me up because of its utter ignorance and the insensitivity of it. The implication is that if you’ll just focus on all God has done for you, you can’t possibly be depressed; and the clinically depressed person may well know all about life’s blessings that have come to her or him and still be overtaken by this insidious mental illness.

Some of you know that I pulled off the road at once and called that church and left a message on their voice mail telling them that their message was rude and insensitive and that it hurt all the churches trying to work with real people with real problems like depression--often in concert with a mental health professional. I told them if they wanted to hear more about my concerns to call me, that my name was Bishop Martin Luther and that my church was on Reformation Boulevard.

Just kidding. I told them who I was and what the name of my church is. Carson said he’d never be able to show his face in Claymont again, and some of you here decided you had a nutcase on your hands. And you’ve still got him!

Dear friends, all the prayer in the world isn’t likely to cure clinical depression. It surely may help, but more is needed. So a spiritual advisor would encourage someone who was clinically depressed to see a physician who could prescribe anti-depressants to help the person get on her or his way back to life without darkness and emotional loads too heavy to bear. The spiritual advisor would encourage the person to pray if possible; those who are clinically depressed often can’t pray or do much of anything else that requires mental or emotional energy. The depression has depleted all of that. In the extreme, that person can’t even get out of bed so sending her or him off with a challenge to pray more is ill-informed and potentially dangerous.

It is dangerous to promise that God will heal those who pray and do whatever else the spiritual advisor suggests as curative. When those don’t work, the depressed person may be thrown into even greater despair; life becomes no longer worth living. We are never too blessed to be depressed, and we are never too depressed to be blessed--though we may not be able to feel the blessings at all, even if we had sensed them all our lives up to the point that the depression moved in and began trying to destroy the healthy emotional part of who we are.

In general, we in our tradition, if we have a tradition, don’t have nearly as many spiritual exercises to toss out to people seeking a stronger spiritual life as do some groups who have strongly emphasized spiritual disciplines and may have a whole list of options for you, ranging from acts of penitence, to walking the mandala, to praying the rosary, to daily attendance at mass.

A pastor like me has many fewer options to offer. I hope the sermons always have some measure of sound spiritual advice in them--even if the advice that week is to ponder an answer to complex religious question. I may be able to say that the approach to spirituality I see in the person’s life who seeks my counsel typically doesn’t work for progressives. I may suggest prayer and/or meditation. I may suggest regularly gathering with the community. If I’d had a chance to belong to a church like Silverside many years before I met Silverside, no one would have to have told me to make attending there a priority in my life.

As the pastor, I could remind a seeker how much I care about and value her or him and how naturally it is to be embraced in this community. None of us looks forward to the difficult times in life, but when they come this community will surround you. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, and you younger folk who are the Silverside Church of tomorrow, you need to learn from the old hands what they have done so faithfully to support a brother or sister in this family when life brings pain. Food may be a part of the picture; flowers may be too. A handwritten letter of concern or sympathy has carried many of our members through tough times, and I’m sorry young techies, a quick text on your cell or a one-liner on someone’s Facebook Wall just isn’t the same, not by the stretch of any imagination.

Silverside folk have always had at least a core crew who happily gave the gift of personal presence with those who were struggling or hurting or sick or depressed or afraid. When the guard changes, and someday we know it will have to, I do not want that kind of careful concern to disappear.

Sometimes, someone having a spiritual struggle doesn’t need to pray or up her or his pledge; sometimes, the most healing action a pastor can suggest is to do something for someone who is hurting--not necessarily someone they may know in the church, but rather a stranger in need who may not welcome your efforts to lighten that stranger’s load.

Dr. Wayne Oates, the great pastoral counselor, wrote a book, one of many, and the one I have in mind at the moment carried the title, When Religion Gets Sick. This is what Dr. Oates had to say about that in summary fashion:

When I use the word “sick,” I am referring to a specific functional breakdown. When religion is sick, it massively hinders the basic functions of life. Malfunction, then, is the criterion of sickness. In other words, the word “sick,” is not used in some global, vague, or moralistic sense here. It refers to specific situations in which particular people suffer major failures of functioning in the conduct of their lives because of religious preoccupations and stumbling blocks.

If you are blocked or sick spiritually, a spiritual advisor might be able to help you. It’s at least worth the effort to see.

II.

In determining who will be your spiritual advisor, there are three requirements.

• That prospective spiritual advisor needs to be fully sane. Sanity is difficult to assess at times. What the spiritually engaged, spiritually mature advisor may tell you could be precisely what you need to do to move along on your spiritual journey, but it could sound like something nutty to you. For example, think about how the rich young ruler felt when he came to Jesus to find out how to move toward greater spiritual maturity, and Jesus skipped right over all the rigid Jewish laws that he thought he was supposed to keep to a tee and, instead, said, “The solution is easy. Go and sell everything you have that makes you rich and give it to the poor. You’ll become one of the most spiritually mature people in Judaism.” The man said to Jesus, “This makes me very sad. I’m a ruler. If I give up my money, I give up the basis of my prestige and power. This is money I inherited from my father. There’s no way I can just give it all away.” Jesus said, “I understand your attachment, but you asked me how to grow spiritually, and I told you. If you can’t bring yourself to do it, you won’t progress at this time. Not all rich folk love their money more than they love God, but you do; and as long as you love it and trust it more than you love and trust God, you’re stuck.” That sounded INsane to the rich young ruler, and he left the conversation more sad than when he came. That advice wasn’t acceptable to him. To him, sanity meant taking care of the money that had been entrusted to him and, perhaps, sharing some of it along the way; but giving it all away was out of the question.
• Your prospective spiritual advisor should be part of a spiritual movement known to be a healthy one, and not every Christian denomination or movement, large or small, is healthy or sane by any means. She or he shouldn’t be a cult leader, but rather an experienced fellow seeker; otherwise, one day she or he may tell you that if you wish to be truly spiritual you need to drink poison Koolaid or start taking elementary school aged children as your sex partners.
• With all due respect to the often positive and insightful Indigenous American approaches to a healthy spirituality, I’d say you should be looking for someone who will give you advice about how to boost your spiritual life that doesn’t involve the use of any substance such as peyote. You also don’t want to try to emulate a spiritual exercise with which you are unfamiliar; if you don’t know what to do when there’s not enough oxygen in the sweat lodge, then you shouldn’t go in there to begin with.

One thing you should not worry about is the potential spiritual advisor’s presumed level of achievement or accomplishment by the standards of a materialistic world. The advisor with the best advice for you might not be the doctorally trained pastor at your city’s most prominent church; instead, she might be an older women without many of this world’s goods, living in an assisted living apartment in a retirement community. You may be much more advanced and prominent in the eyes of the world that the best person available for offering you advice about your spirituality. The spiritual advisor for you may not have written a slew of books or even a single book, but instead might be a chaplain in a small hospital who preaches to a small congregation of twenty or so people on the Sundays she or he is not on call at the hospital.

Your spiritual advisor, the right one for you, probably doesn’t charge you a fee for sharing insights and hunches with you, and that is what they are, hunches. There is no one size fits all approach to spiritual health and maturity...and no guarantees.

Sometimes a spiritual advisor can’t do us any good at all while we are keeping someone or some habit or some self-defeating attitude in our lives. There are people and situations that will poison us until we have no health at any level and no chance of finding our way to health as long as that person or situation remains. The core people we keep in our lives have to want health and wholeness for us as much as we want them for ourselves. The responsibilities to which we commit ourselves have to enhance rather than tear down our efforts at spiritual growth if we want it.

An honest willingness to keep growing as long as we live on this earth is a prerequisite to this whole undertaking; otherwise, there’s not much point in worrying about or even contemplating the possibility of a healthier spirituality.

King Nebuchadnezzar, not a follower of the God of Israel, had several young Israelites in his prison. The King began to have very troubling dreams, and the royal dream interpreters on his staff weren’t offering interpretations to his dreams that made any sense to him. He grew more and more troubled because he had a sense that the dreams were trying to get an ominous message through to him that he just couldn’t comprehend.

He heard from one of his advisors that there was an Israelite in prison, a YOUNG man at that, who’d been interpreting dreams for some of the prison staff that were right on target every time. The King could have said, “I’m not listening to any Israelite and a kid at that!” Ultimately, that is not what he said. In time, he called for Daniel and, more or less, humbled himself by baring his soul to a man he kept locked away from freedom for no real reason other than his ethnicity. But Daniel was able to interpret the King’s dreams. There was good news and bad news, but perhaps the dream would help the King prepare for tough times to come and be drawn to the God of the Israelites who was concerned enough about the polytheistic king to warn him of impending trouble through a dream. The King could have missed out all together had he said, “I will only talk with someone who has graduated from the Royal Dream Interpretation Academy,” even though their graduates already on his staff hadn’t been able to help him a whip stitch.

The National Catholic Reporter has reported that President Obama has what amounts to a “spiritual cabinet.” The person with whom he has the most frequent contact on matters spiritual is Joshua DuBois, who heads the President’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives and Neighborhood Partnerships.

DuBois sends daily devotionals to Obama's Blackberry--often a Bible verse or an excerpt from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, or a snippet from the works of theologians Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr, particular favorites of the president.

He attends worship services most frequently at the chapel near Camp David, and he hears there the sermons of Chaplain Carey Cash, the nephew of the late Johnny Cash. They have little contact apart from seeing each other at church.

When the President wants someone with whom he can pray, this same news source reported that Obama will usually call fundamentalist Florida mega church pastor, Joel Hunter, or Sharon Watkins, President of the Disciples of Christ denomination, a denomination with liberal leanings to be sure. So, there’s a real balance there--female/male, liberal/conservative. Maybe it does him good to hear prayers from both perspectives even though if the prayers were actually bringing about change by persuading God to act in this way or that, the prayers of those two clergypersons would cancel each other out. Maybe not on every issue, but on many issues, what one of those people would want the other would be against; and the both of them would hope that God saw things the way she, Watkins, or he, Hunter, saw them.

Our President is a powerful leader with heavy burdens on his shoulders every waking moment. His background has taught him to seek out spiritual support in the challenging times, and he does.

III.

One of the most compelling stories about someone seeking the counsel of a spiritual advisor in the Bible tells us how the Ethiopian eunuch conversing with Philip quite by coincidence about how to find his way into the group of people who were devoted to the teachings of Jesus. This moving story is told in the book of Acts, which is concerned to show how the spirit of God is actively involved in the lives of individuals and groups, leading them and directing them.

Last week we talked about the Good Samaritan and how the man who was beaten up and left to die by the side of the road experienced this unfortunate act of violence at least in part because he went down from Jerusalem toward Jericho alone; it was a dangerous road, and attacks and robberies evidently weren’t uncommon. That was the route he chose to take, probably going home after worshipping at the great Temple in Jerusalem.

This week, coincidentally, someone else is going down from Jerusalem following another wilderness road; this one led to Gaza. As I mentioned last week, any time a faithful Jew was going to Jerusalem, she or he spoke of going UP to Jerusalem, and any time someone spoke of leaving Jerusalem, she or he was always going DOWN. So the writer of Acts tells us that a messenger from God gave minister Phillip the word that God wanted him to head down that specific wilderness road, the one moving down from Jerusalem as it reached finally for Gaza.

There is no indication that he knew why God wanted him to head out in that direction; he simply trusted that if God led him to move in the direction, God must have some responsibility waiting for him, Phillip, and he’d know soon enough what it was.

God has often and long been understood in Jewish and Christian tradition as working in precisely in this manner. When God led Abraham to head out in search of the Promised Land, the biblical writer makes a point of saying that he, Abraham, went out and began to travel, not knowing where he was going.

I think holy hunches are huge parts of how we find our way along the spiritual pathway we follow. I don’t buy much into the idea that God sends some sensitive soul down a road expressly because a person in need is going to be on that road, and unless we take that particular route we will miss helping the person in need standing somewhere along the road.

I’m more inclined to think that God lures or the power of God’s love is so stirring that we’re drawn to join up with a group already doing some ministry that appeals to us, and we kinda know if we join in we’re going to get to help some of the people who are struggling with whatever issue the group we join specializes in trying to ease or alleviate.

Phillip in our story feels compelled to start traveling the road toward Gaza, and when he does he comes upon a high official from the courts of the Ethiopian Queen Candace. The writer of the book of Acts makes a point of telling readers that the official was a eunuch. Often kings had men who would be attending the queen castrated so that there could be no funny business between the queen and her male servants. Why a female sovereign would castrate a male in service to her, if indeed she’s the one who ordered it, could be so that she never had to worry about any potential sexual overtones or involvement in her relationship with the men who served in her cabinet. This official was in charge of the treasury of the whole nation of Ethiopia; he was obviously trusted a great deal.

He had been to Jerusalem to worship at the Temple. He was not a Jew, but he was drawn to the Hebrew religion and, evidently, to Christianity that had grown out of it. He was reading from the prophet Isaiah, but not understanding what he was reading. Phillip walked up to him even though he was a VIP and asked if he could help in any way. The leader said that he’d be pleased to have some help understanding the prophet Isaiah. He said that he wasn’t getting much of anything from what he was reading.

Here we have a short-term opportunity for some spiritual advising to take place. The man was eager to learn, and Phillip was more than available to help in the specific way he was asked.

The initial request was for help understanding the message of the prophet.

The eunuch ironically had come upon a passage in the prophecy of Isaiah. In its original context, the passage referred to Israel itself. It was not uncommon for writers in what became Hebrew scripture to refer to their nation as an individual human being as was the case in what the eunuch read:

Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter,
and like a lamb silent before its shearer,
so he does not open his mouth.
In his humiliation justice was denied him.
Who can describe his generation?
For his life is taken away from the earth.

Some in the early Christian community said that this sounded like Jesus’ own experience in that he was executed, and along the way various people involved in his execution had attempted to humiliate him.

I have a sense that the eunuch was stuck on that word “humiliation” because of his physical condition. Eunuchs might have highly responsible professional positions, but the mutilation to their bodies made them personally, in the minds of more than a few of their fellow citizens--whether they were Ethiopian or Jewish--freaks. And even though most eunuchs were castrated against their will--many of them when they were children--there was still some measure of humiliation they carried with them for life.

The eunuch wanted Phillip to help him understand the importance of someone in the Jewish religion who, though humiliated, still was loved by God and remembered respectfully by those who came after him and even wrote about him. I gather that led to a rather long conversation during which time they began to ride together in the chariot. I’d suspect that a high ranking official wouldn’t drive himself but would have had a driver, and by the time they passed by a rare body of water along that wilderness road , the eunuch said, “If I’m truly acceptable in the community that follows Jesus, baptize me in this water.” Phillip was more than ready to do so.

Sometimes we come upon someone who, right under our noses, is struggling to get some spiritual advice; and if we have some sound advice to offer, we can become short-term spiritual advisors.

In the case of the eunuch, he only needed some information and clarification. He was already on some kind of spiritual journey and had learned to read Hebrew--maybe originally for business, maybe not--and was reading scripture when Phillip found him. The fact that he was in possession of his own scroll shows that he was a person of means because the typical person, even the typical Jew, couldn’t afford her or his own biblical scrolls.

The eunuch represents anyone and everyone who needs the support, presence, and involvement of a spiritual advisor in her or his life--whether short or long term. Phillip represents the person clearly on the spiritual journey who is both capable and willing to offer spiritual advice. At various times in our lives, we who are on a seeker’s journey are both of these men since, regardless, of how mature or far along we are, we need the encouragement of a spiritual advisor too.

I’ve been at this task of spiritual seeking a long time, and as a pastor I’ve been offering spiritual advice for quite a while as well; but I’ve never outgrown my need FOR spiritual advice and spiritual support. The person with a word of spiritual advice could show up unexpectedly and out of nowhere, as Phillip did for the eunuch, or I might seek out spiritual advice and support when I’m stuck or isolated. In a church like ours, we’ll accept any seekers as they are, answer questions if we can, but we’ll without a doubt ride along with you in your chariot, even if there are those who won’t, and celebrate with you your own spiritual insights and growth.

Amen.

My Relationship to My Neighbor: The Good Samaritan Meets the Golden Rule

I.

On September 11, which was yesterday, we can’t help recall the tragedies of 9/11/2001 and the emotional aftershock of those attacks by Muslim extremists. Many still feel the pain of that fiasco, let’s say those who lost loved ones in one of the attacks, as if the attacks were yesterday. It’s important for us as a nation to remember those who died needlessly at the hands of enemies of our country, and it’s also important to realize that our own land is not immune from attack by those who hate us. I think, rather than making us trigger-happy, this fact should redouble our diplomatic efforts around the world.

I’m not one to criticize victims of any violent individual or group attack, and we were absolutely the unsuspecting victims on that day. In our case, we didn’t know what was going on; we didn’t know if there would be more, similar attacks. We wanted to protect ourselves and our loved ones, if more attacks were coming; in the mean time, those closest to the three attack sites were challenged to do all they could to help any victims who might still be living at the three attack sites.

At some point, we, collectively, wanted to know who had done this to us so that we could know how to protect ourselves from any further attacks and to hold the aggressors accountable if not to retaliate against them at once. When we found out that some Muslim extremists were behind the well-orchestrated and carefully planned collection of attacks, we wanted to go after the Muslims. The problem from that point until today is related to a problem in many cultures and countries around the world shown in their understanding of other groups in the world--from mysterious neighbors to those who live opposite us on the globe. I’m talking about generalization--the lumping of all people in a racial group or a religious group or a socioeconomic group together and assuming that every person in that group is exactly like every person in that group.

The first Europeans to encounter Indigenous Americans on this continent assumed they were all alike, and in return most of the Native Americans thought all the European visitors and invaders were alike. The white folks in the old south thought all black people, slaves or not, were alike. Even in the information age where we have so much data available to us to prove wrong those generalized assumptions, they persist. So immediately, after 9/11 plenty of US Americans wanted to kill as many Muslims and those whom they took to look like Muslims as they could--those who lived in the predominantly Islamic countries as well as those who lived down the street.

That glaringly and dangerously incorrect assumption has led to nearly a decade of wrong responses based on generalizations that continue to this moment. As it turns out, not all Muslims are alike, and not all Christians are alike. Not all Iraqis are alike, and not all US Americans are alike. Not all educated people are alike, and not all uneducated people are alike. Not all white people are alike, and not all Black people are alike.

Not all Christians interpret Christian scripture the way all other Christians interpret it, and not all Muslims interpret the Quran the way all other Muslims interpret the Quran. Not all Jews interpret Hebrew scripture the way all other Jews interpret Hebrew scripture.

The truth is, in most cases there is substantial diversity among any ethnic or religious group. There are Christians who through the ages and into the present believe that they are supposed kill those whom they take to be enemies of their faith or the country in which they happen to live, and there have been and are those who believe in absolute pacifism. There are extremist Muslims who believe it is their duty to kill off any group whom they perceive to be non-Muslim. There are Muslims who are pacifists, and by the way there were Muslim Americans who were killed in the attack on the World Trade Center; there were plenty of non-Americans killed in those horrendous attacks.

For those US Americans who didn’t take any time to learn more about Islam in the last 9 years, shame on them. In the wars in the homelands of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, even though we officially only wanted to take out Taliban and al-Qaeda types, much more was involved. Naturally, they fought back with a vengeance. This didn’t help with the national perception of Muslims by US Americans.

The United States though founded by some people who were Christian--many of them in a deistic, unitarianish kind of way--is not a Christian nation. No allegiance to God in any general or particular way was required in any draft of the Constitution, and certainly not in the final draft. To the contrary, a wall of separation between synagogue/church/mosque and state was written into the final version of the Constitution. Christians will be valued as much as atheists, but when we say, “Christian,” or, “atheist,” we have to keep in mind that there are many varieties of each.

The President of the United is not required by the Constitution to be a Christian--though the whopping 30 percent of citizens who manage to make it to the polls to vote in this democracy of ours have favored someone with at least a verbal connection to Christianity even if in practice Christianity had never been a significant part of a candidate’s life. It turns out that Barak Obama is a Christian, a longtime active member of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, but if he were a Muslim as so many claim these days--some in true ignorance and others who know better but who claim that publicly because such a tag would hurt him in some way--that would be perfectly all right with the Constitution.

Voltaire, brilliant French writer and crusader for religious toleration during the Enlightenment, creates many confused characters--though plenty of them were dogmatic in their confusion--in his brilliant and widely read novella, Candide, in which dares to have a Muslim articulate the most sensible philosophy of life in the book. How dare he! Why didn’t he let his Christian characters clear everything up at the end of the book? Well, one reason is that he had met few Christians in his lifetime whom he perceived to be truly concerned about the well-being of the world as a whole. Another reason was that Christianity hadn’t been very kind to him. As proof that such disdain for him lasted until the end of his earthly life and beyond, when he died in 1778, the Roman Catholic Church to which he was officially connected but that he vehemently criticized as one source of religious INtoleration, would not allow his body to be buried in a Catholic Church cemetery. Eventually, a dissenting Catholic abbey in Champagne agreed to allow his body to be interred in its cemetery until, some years later, in 1791, his casket would be carried to a mausoleum in the Pantheon in Paris where many of France’s great writers and others of note were laid to rest.

So, Candide is plagued with associates who want to philosophize their way through life, and they deal with all the strange turns through which they have lived by continuing to philosophize all the more. Candide, the inquisitive main character, has been through so much danger and nonsense by the end of the tale that he’s mentally and emotionally exhausted with life. He happens to meet this older Muslim gentleman who tells him that the secret of life is to be found not in relentless philosophizing but rather in learning to be content where you are with what you have. This advice from the old Muslim motivates Candide to distance himself from those who dealt with even life’s tragedies with more philosophizing; he politely told them to hush, that their happiness would be found in tending their own garden--the lesson he believed he learned from the Muslim.

In Leonard Berstein’s operatic adaptation of the story, near the end of the opera, the principles are singing about what Candide had gotten from the old Muslim:

Let dreamers dream

What worlds they please

Those Edens can't be found.

The sweetest flowers,

The fairest trees

Are grown in solid ground.

We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good

We'll do the best we know.

We'll build our house and chop our wood

And make our garden grow.

And make our garden grow!

II.

In 1922, the US Post Office burned 500 copies of James Joyce’s book, Ulysses, largely because it was taken by some to have sexually objectionable content. The burning of books is a hateful act, usually intended to demonstrate the superiority of one group over another. In the case of the James Joyce book right here in our democracy, the Post Office thought its morals were superior to those of the Irish novelist.

But holy books are something else. Burning the sacred literature of a faith group is especially hateful and apt to cause retaliation.

In 168 BCE, the Seleucid king, Antiochus IV, ordered copies of the Jewish Torah found in Jerusalem to be torn to bits and burned. This was one of several persecutions that would lead the Jews to revolt against Antiochus.

About the year 50, a Roman soldier somehow got hold of a Torah scroll and, “with abusive and mocking language,” burned it in public. This incident almost brought on a general Jewish revolt against Roman rule; however, a Roman procurator, Cumanus, appeased the Jews by beheading the soldier.

Christian books by decree of Roman Emperor Diocletian in 303 were to be burned. This was one part of his intended increased persecution of Christians. At that time, the governor of Valencia offered a Christian man who happened to be a deacon the chance to have his life spared if he would give up his copy of Christian scripture. This deacon would eventually become known as Saint Vincent of Saragossa. He refused the offer and was executed instead of giving up scripture to be burned.

After the Church declared Arias a heretic at the Council of Nicea in 325, his fellow Roman Catholics burned whatever they could find of what he had written. Similarly, in 383, a Christian theologian, Priscillian of Avila, was called a heretic, and he has, I believe, the doubly dubious distinction of being the first person killed by fellow Christians on grounds of heresy. His books were also burned.

Given the circumstances of how the Quran was recorded--with Muhammad speaking presumably verbatim what the angel Gabriel was giving to him directly from God even though over a period of several years--I don’t understand how there could have ended up being copies of the Quran showing up with varying words and word orders. This was not supposed to have been the case even with hand-copying involved. The first men to be called califs in Islam were those who were the heads of the growing religion after Muhammad’s death. The Third Calif--that is the third man to lead Islam after Muhammad’s death--Uthman--appointed a committee in 656 to establish the correct version of the Quran. Once that was accomplished, he had all other copies of the Quran burned.

On March 23, 1984, orthodox Jews in Jerusalem burned several hundred copies of the New Testament. But Terry Jones could never have claimed to hear God telling him to burn copies of Hebrew scripture because, by a strange turn of events, the Hebrew Bible ended up being inseparably connected to Christian scripture so that both comprise what Christians call the Bible.

Though things have changed by the minute for six or so weeks, what I read when I awaked yesterday, a news story written by Daphne Duret, eased my mind by explaining that there would be no burning of Qurans:

Despite Pastor Terry Jones' revelation that he will not burn copies of the Quran today or at any point in the future, police and protestors still have plans to be at his church today. Jones, whose now-canceled plans to torch copies of the Islamic text sparked an international outcry, arrived in New York on Friday and told NBC's “Today Show” that his threats for the burn in commemoration of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks had accomplished his goal of bringing attention to radical elements of Islam. “We're not going to go back and do it, it is totally cancelled,” Jones said this morning, later adding: “I can absolutely guarantee that, yes.” Locally, meanwhile, those commemorating the ninth anniversary of the attacks said the controversy surrounding Jones had tainted the day. Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said both the day and Friday’s Muslim holiday marking the end of Ramadan carried the shadow.

Did Jones have the legal right to burn copies of the Quran? Yes, he did. Should he have done it? No, he should not have done it, and I hope by the time I’m preaching this sermon he didn’t have a change of heart.

It’s the beginning of the term at seminary, and in my second-level preaching seminar Thursday evening, we talked at length about those preachers who believe every thought that comes into their consciousness was put there by God so they attribute all their thoughts and actions to God. They themselves, therefore, come to believe that they are infallible in what they think and above reproach for anything they do. Human beings just don’t achieve perfection. It has nothing to do with sin; sin is conscious rebellion against God. Being human means being imperfect for all sorts of reasons--many having nothing whatsoever to do with moral or ethical norms.

Though I don’t believe in a god who communicates conversationally, I do believe in a God with whom people may commune and, therein, be drawn to greater love, acts of compassion, peace, and self-affirmation. I realize when I say that, that some folks may see those kinds of leanings coming to human beings who comprehend truths about what makes sense for healthy individuals and societies without the involvement of any God. I think it’s a safe bet that if God does communicate through any means God will not be leading any person or group to bring harm to any other person or group.

If God has been waffling back and forth in what God has been telling Pastor Terry Jones, then God needs to learn not to be so wishy washy. Of course, what was going on with Jones had nothing to do with God. He may have some mental problems, and/or he may desperately have wanted mega media attention, which he has gotten. The media in this country keeps teaching lunatics and violent people how easy it is for them to become famous: threaten to do something ludicrous or hurt somebody. Reporters will write about you and talk about you on television til the cows come home.

Do the Muslims who want to build a center a couple of blocks from Ground Zero have the right to build it? If they are citizens or immigrants who get the proper permits, they surely do. Should they? Naturally, that depends on point of view. If we realize that many Muslims lost at what is now Ground Zero exactly what large numbers of Christians and atheists also lost there, and they want to build something nearby to offer opportunities for good near a site where unspeakable evil was done, I can find no problem with that. This is a country of freedom of and freedom from religion; in order for the Muslims to be prohibited from building the mosque near the site of the attack we’d have to become a country that did not practice or allow for freedom of religion.

Is building the mosque in that location the best idea right now? To answer that question, one has to determine if holding back on doing something that is legal and most appropriate in the minds of some, but that will cause protests and attack from those who don’t want it done is worth going through. Sometimes, it’s worth biting the bullet and facing the opposition; and other times, keeping the peace is the preferable way to go. Changing one’s mind or going a different direction is not a sign of cowardice or lack of conviction. Living in a diverse society, yeah a diverse world, making SOME compromise goes with the territory.

Sadly, this conflict comes on the tail end of the Swiss decision to ban the erecting of minarets in Switzerland. They did not say Muslims or mosques were unwelcome there, but rather that the prayer towers, the minarets, cannot be built. Swiss citizens overwhelmingly agreed to this in a referendum. There are four minarets in small Switzerland, and the citizens say, “Four and no more.”

That might seem unfair to you freedom lovers, but shortly before the issue became an issue there, the Turkish Prime Minister had said that mosques were barracks in the Muslim mind, and minarets their bayonets. I have no idea what all that means, but I can’t find anything at all positive or hopeful or conciliatory about it.

III.

The big religious tension with which Jesus dealt was not so much the conflict between powerful, polytheistic Rome and subjugated, monotheistic Judaism. It was the tension between Jews and Samaritans who had a common heritage; it parallels the tension between some Christians and some Muslims today--two religions that also share parts of a common heritage. By that, I mean all three monotheistic religions share the development of monotheistic thought through Jewish experience.

The exact nature of who the Samaritans were ethnically speaking might be all or part of the reason there was tension between the two groups. Many Jews over time insisted that those who called themselves Samaritans were not of Hebrew ethnicity and instead were foreigners who began to occupy the Jewish land while the Jews were in exile. When the Jews returned, there they were. Evidently, they tried to coexist, and there was some intermarriage making their descendants half-breeds and on and on with how racists think.

The Samaritans themselves claim that they are the descendants of the two most northern of the twelve tribes of Israel, many of whom were left behind during the Babylonian deportation and, thus, never experienced the deportation the way the other ten tribes did.

Many years later, there inevitably came conflict between the two groups about which was God’s chosen people. This was a hot item, and eventually the Samaritans stopped worshipping at the great Temple in Jerusalem and built their temple on Mount Gerizim. Theologically, there remained a great deal of commonality, but they became bitter toward each other; and each regarded the other as less than themselves. Think about the tension between Protestants and Catholics in northern Ireland; both Christian groups, but bitter enemies for a very long time.

So, you likely know the story of the Good Samaritan, which was one of Jesus’ parables. A Jewish guy--probably a pious, faithful Jew--had been in Jerusalem for worship at a rather routine time and not for one of the high holy festivals. On the way home, some thugs rob him and beat him up badly and leave him bleeding on the side of the road to die for all they care. Two of his fellow Jews pass by him, but do nothing to help. To make matters worse, they both were clergypersons.

The story is usually told with the priest being on his way to work at the Temple, but the directional adverb used for the priest was the same word used in relationship to the injured man, “down.” The man was going “down” the road, meaning away from the Temple, and the priest also was going DOWN that road--away from the Temple, not toward it. He was tired and ready to get home. He might have been on duty at the Temple a week or so; there was quite an elaborate rotation system for the priests who served at the Temple. The same priests weren’t on duty all the time.

Usually, you’ll hear preachers talk about how the priest in the parable was in a hurry to get to work and didn’t want to get ritually unclean by touching a man who was dead or only half dead but bleeding. He’d just left the Temple, though, and the dynamics are a little different. He’s ready to get home, and if he touched someone who was unclean making himself unclean he couldn’t go home to enjoy the full benefits of his home. I mean, he might have been able to sleep out in the barn or something, but he couldn’t be with his family members. So if he helped the hurt guy, he’d have to turn around and go all the way back to the Temple and get purified by one of the priests who’d just come to work to relieve him. He would never get home. Besides, what could he do? He evidently was on foot. He couldn’t carry the body, if the man were dead. If he were half dead, he wasn’t a doctor; he didn’t know what to do. We can’t let him off the hook entirely, because when Jesus tells the story he makes a point of saying that the priest intentionally walked to the other side of the road, to distance himself from the man who was in some kind of bad shape, and whatever it was the law declared him unclean.

A Levite came by next. A Levite assisted the head priests and often got involved with worship music. We don’t know which way the Levite was going--to or from the Temple, but he did exactly what the priest had done before him. He made a point of passing as far to the other side of the road as the priest had and then got on his way home or to work in the Temple.

One of the really suspicious parts of the story is that people who knew the area knew that road was dangerous and didn’t usually travel alone on it. The injured man had made a bad call and tried it, but it is unlikely that the priest and the Levite were traveling alone. Traveling in a group was the best protection against the robbers who worked those roads all the time. That is speculation because as the story is told there is no mention of companions with either the priest or the Levite--unless they were traveling together, and the priest happened to walk by or ride by the man lying on the side of the road a few paces ahead of the Levite. More speculation.

It’s a parable after all, and not a news account. The priest and the Levite represented the religious leadership among the Jews, and the hurting man represented the rank and file Jew depending on their clergy for ministry and not getting any such ministerial support. The institution was failing the people it presumably existed to serve. What is more important, they were Jews like the injured man. There were two powerful reasons they should have helped him, but they didn’t.

The whole reason Jesus told the parable was to answer the question of someone who asked him how to define “neighbor.” Jesus was teaching, “You must love God first and then your neighbor as yourself,” so some listener said, “I want to do that so help me understand who my neighbor is.”

The awful twist in the story is that a Samaritan, a natural enemy of the injured Jew and presumably a layperson rather than a clergyperson, is the only one who helps the man. He is the only one in the story who acts as a neighbor. He is the only one in the story who loves his neighbor as he loved himself. Had it not been for the help of someone who normally would have taken no interest in any Jew, the man who nearly died would never have pulled through. The Samaritan was not only proactive, but also generous. Why would he do it? Well, there was a Samaritan Torah too--not widely different from the Jewish Torah. He knew somewhere in it there was a verse that told him what to do in situations such as these: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.” The Jew wasn’t exactly one of HIS people, but at least he wasn’t a Roman so the Samaritan gave him the benefit of the doubt.

The Jews who heard the story, no doubt, despised it. Your enemies are doing more to help your people than you or your religion are. Slam!

A hard-core, right-wing fundamentalist Christian was attending a meeting in New York City to protest the building of a mosque near Ground Zero. He said, with Muslims present in the same meeting, that he took Muslims, he was sorry to have to say, to be enemies of God and enemies of the Christian faith--not to mention enemies of the western world. He had said that if he had his way, no mosques would be built anywhere in New York and that if they built this one so close to Ground Zero he was sure the building would be bombed--not by good Christians like him, but rather by his fellow Americans who rightly took Muslims to be their enemies. He spoke in the presence of Muslims as if they were all the same, as if they were all extremists, as if they were all violent, as if they were all lesser humans than he. No one interrupted him.

Several others spoke including a Muslim woman who said her husband was at work in the World Trade Center on 9/11, and he died like most of the others in there. Some brave firefighters had fought their way through billowing smoke to get to the shambles that had been his office, but they were too late. She said that she wasn’t alone in that way; that other Muslims lost loved ones in that attack. She said all ground is sacred ground because God created it. There was nothing special about the spot that had been tentatively chosen as the location for a mosque; she said, in her mind the mosque would be a reminder to those who took time to understand that Muslims, too, mourn what happened that day and can only look to God in hope for a better world where events like that don’t take place.

Some in the room applauded. The man who called himself a Christian and claimed to be stating the message that God had spoken to him scoffed at her, sometimes audibly enough that those sitting near him could hear.

The Mayor’s representative thanked all of those who had come and shared their views. The attendees dispersed--to get back to their homes and places of business.

The Christian spokesperson had hoped to be back at work a little sooner so he took a shortcut and found the street he had taken much more abandoned looking and feeling than he remembered from having driven through there a few months earlier. About the time that occurred to him, some thugs came out of nowhere and beat him to a pulp, stealing everything he had including his money and his fancy suit; they left him bleeding there on the side of the street with absolutely no one in sight.

As it turned out, a minister who’d left his church a little early that day in order to have a meeting with his wealth management advisor was also in a hurry and drove down that same street as his shortcut. He got out his iPhone 4 to dial 911, but the AT&T signal was nonexistent in the location so all he could do was to drive on. Getting an appointment with this wealth management woman was next to impossible, and he couldn’t be late much less miss it. Besides, the poor guy on the street was probably dead already.

A few minutes later a minister of music/organist at one of the prominent Financial District churches with an endowment fund to keep that music program golden until the present congregation’s great grandchildren were elderly drove down the same street in his Jag, a gift from his choir on the occasion of his twenty-fifth year of service with the church. He saw the same scene, but he’d forgotten his cell phone. There wasn’t anything he could except try to remember to call the police when he got to his tanning appointment. His younger hulky partner really hated pale, chalky skin so this was a weekly event for him, and nothing really could interrupt it.

A cabbie in a hurry came down the same street next, also using it as a shortcut to get to midday prayers at the mosque he attended. He slowed down when he saw the injured man, and noticed the name “Jesus” tattooed on one of the man’s arms. (The thugs had taken his shirt too.) Islam respected Jesus as a prophet, and he didn’t see how he could pass by a man who must have loved Jesus enough to have his name tattooed into his skin. So, realizing that he’d miss his prayer meeting for the week, he still stopped, and he called 911 on his cell phone and told the operator to send an ambulance and the police; he wasn’t sure what needed to be done. The cabbie got out of his car and sat on the curb with the man until the ambulance arrived. They determined that the man was still alive but in bad shape; they rushed him to a hospital. The cabbie found out where they were going before they sped off.

The cabbie waited until the police arrived and told them what little he knew. They got his contact information and acted halfway like they thought he might have had a part in the crime. Those with whom he worshipped Allah regularly knew that; being a Muslim since 9/11 brought suspicion upon them in any uneasy situation. He couldn’t control that, but he knew his revered Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, had been credited with saying, “None of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.”

Amen.