Radically Available Love

Radically Available Love

by Rev. Scott Elliott

a sermon based on Luke 10:25-37

given at Palm Bay, FL on July 14, 2013

 

I thought I’d start off with a few funny-ish church sayings:

The first one is about a minister of whom it was said: “You could tell he was a great preacher because at the close of every sermon there was a great awakening.”

This one is about a congregation (perhaps that pastor’s) of whom it was said: “If all the people in church were laid end to end they would be … more comfortable.”

This one I think might just be about all of us at one time or another: “The average person’s idea of a good sermon is one that goes over their head and hits a neighbor.” 1 (World Greatest Church Jokes, 240-241.)

We just heard MARY BETH/ROSY read The Good Samaritan, perhaps Jesus’ most famous parable.

And actually that last joke I told about sermons going over our heads and hitting our neighbors applies to how, more often than not, modern Christians seem to hear Jesus’ parables, that is, we tend to hear them as Hallmark card-like moral tales that guide us to root for the application of an obvious moral that we usually hope others will get, because, well . . . we already get it.

So typically we hear The Prodigal Son: as a father welcoming a wayward child home; The Unforgiving Servant: as saying a forgiven person ought to also forgive; The Lost Coin: as teaching each person is of value; The Wise and Foolish Builders: means build things on solid ground; and last but not least, The Good Samaritan: we hear as teaching, help out neighbors in need.

Those are just a few examples, and all of the morals I named are fine. They are simple rules mostly about how to be nice. But really if we think about it they are pretty much just conventional wisdom tagged onto a storyline.

We like to think we’d follow those morals, and that, well, it’s just usually our neighbors who don’t follow them. In this way the morals, and the stories, we tend to hear in Jesus’ parables aren’t very revolutionary or radical or extreme, are they?

And here’s the thing, if we know anything at all about Jesus we know that he was a revolutionary with a radical message. Jesus wasn’t hung on the cross to die because of sweet easy to live by moral tales. Jesus was captured and executed because he was teaching radical love and a revolutionary way of relating.

In and on Jesus’ Way everybody gets loved, not just by God and by Jesus but – gulp– by us!

And not just an “Oh yes, that’s the nice way to do things” kind of love, but a kind of love that calls us to give up our old ways and follow Jesus, including into the dark and lonely, dank and scary places that most people in the culture don’t want to go.

With Jesus we are to bring love and care to scabby lepers, foreign aliens,  bleeding women, scamming tax collectors, begging poor people, unknown strangers, hardened criminals, wildly demon possessed, sad outcast widows, the dying and diseased, adulterers, armed occupying soldiers and despised enemies.

These are not Hallmark, made for TV, G-rated people Jesus tends to and calls us to tend to. They are what the Roman culture, and to much extent our culture, considers the grit and the grime of the world, the outcasts on the edge of society tossed away, often living in appalling places and conditions and they are appalled by others.

Not only are we to get love but we are to make sure the oppressed and loathed are provided love. We are to help them have enough, enough food and health care, enough justice and rights.

That’s not easy-peasy stuff. It’s not soft and fluffy and sweet stuff like we tend to hear in Jesus’ parables. And the truth is Jesus’ parables were not originally intended to be pleasant tales, to entertain, yes, but to also be dynamic and transformative, gutsy and provoking.

One of Jesus’ great gifts is he told parables, but the parables he told were not just nice stories, they were designed and intended to be provocative.

They get softened up because,  see, when something is provocative like a Bible verse, sermon or a parable we tend to like them better when the meaning goes over our head and hits a neighbor.

We are all fine and dandy with neighbors being provoked and changed, but not ourselves.

If we’ve been reading the Bible, picking out the verses that work for us, or if we’ve been listening to sermons or parables thinking that Jesus’ Way is about others changing while we stay the same, we haven’t been paying attention.

Jesus’ life and teaching, and his death and resurrection, were (and are!) about provoking all of us to change, not just our neighbors. All of us need to transform, to be saved from our lesser ways and guided to our better ways as individuals and as a people. And Jesus told parables as a way to help his followers to do this –and yes, that includes us.

So lets talk about parables and how they are provocative and then let’s reconsider the Good Samaritan and see if we can hear it as a radical message of love, because that’s what Jesus’ ministry was about. ///

So what the heck is a parable? A pretty famous Jesus scholar and theologian C. H. Dodd noted that

At its simplest a parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought. (GOJ,120, Lecture 9/28 (quoting C. H. Dodd).

Vivid– strangeness–doubt–teased thought. That doesn’t sound like a simple morals story does it?

Jesus’ parables are not supposed to be heard as earthly common sensical.

Parables shake and rock the boat, they are heavenly sensical, but non-sensical to many on earth.

Staying with the surface earthly sense reading may make us feel good, but chances are it misses most of the meaning of Jesus’ parables, the real sense is lost. The heavenly sense gets buried.

And sure enough, when we start digging a little deeper than our surface “hits” we get provoked and pushed to transformative thinking from Jesus’ parables.

I recently wrote about this in one of my God Matters Hometown News columns. It’s true you can read this stuff at home if you fish it out of the recycling . . . or the bird cage.

Jesus’ parables are stories about the ordinary which draw extraordinary illustrations meant to evoke contemplation and transformation.

Through parables Jesus paints visual pictures of how God connects with us in the ordinary, how heaven’s way could play out in earthly situations.

A great professor of mine, Dr. Stephen Patterson, in his remarkable book The God of Jesus: wrote that through parables, Jesus was suggesting that God encounters people in the concrete everydayness of their lives. The transcendent is immanent. The Empire of God is –or could be– a present reality already breaking into the world as we have constructed it. 1

So lets turn now to Jesus’ parable of  “The Good Samaritan” (Luke 10:25-37), a very good example of his parables, it may just be my favorite.

But we need some background information to get the full meaning Jesus imparts. To begin, Jesus’ original audience would have identified with the Jewish victim, not the good Samaritan. Samaritans were hated and loathed in first century Palestine.

Also the priest and Levite would have been snickered at as hypocritical bureaucrats of Rome’s temple elite government.

To get the impact of how this original context alters the story let’s try and hear it in our context with those ideas. Here’s the story in an  “updated” version. It’s now a the story about a FEMA official; a politician; someone we loath; and a Palm Bay man in trouble:

A Palm Bay man was trapped in a hurricane surge– nearly drowned, he lay half-dead on a street.

A FEMA official happened by, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side.

So, too, a politician surveying the damage saw the man and passed by on the other side.

But a known member of the Taliban, hiding in the area happened by; when he saw the man he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured medicine on them. Then he put him in the back of his van, brought him to a hotel room and took care of him. The next day he left paying for the room and asking the hotel manager to take care of the man out of his own debit card.

Wow! That’s a far cry from the sweet-neighbor-doing-a-good deed example that we usually take away from the story. After the FEMA official and politician walk by, the ordinary progression we’d expect is a known rescuer type to appear, a familiar hero, maybe Bruce Willis or Tom Cruise passing by.

But something extraordinary happens instead. A Taliban member, a hated and loathed person, shows up. Our hope for rescue (in the injured man’s shoes) is replaced by fear, anxiousness and confusion.

As we listen the story is not going as expected. We have no clue as to the outcome.

Indeed we fear that this Taliban fellow will stop as we lay there helpless–  he is dangerous. And when he does stop we worry for our health. And then when he moves in to help we worry even more:

Is he looking for a wallet?

What’s in the bottles?

Will he run us over?

Is he going to booby-trap, kill or maim us?

Then when he helps, gives us hospitality and pays for it, we worry for our reputation and what law enforcement officials and Homeland security will think about us. It’s a topsy-turvy tale. (Footnote to Patterson)

This story, understood in this radical parabolic way, makes us think way outside the box.

It’s not a Hallmark card experience, it’s a mind-bending experience.  So many questions are evoked.

What does Jesus mean by having the hated rescue us?

Where are the boundaries of compassion?

Why do we feel guilty for thinking ill of a Taliban member or the Taliban in general?

How is this the Empire of God?

How would we feel if we could not stop someone loathsome and hated from helping?

Would we rather be dead than have his help?

Would we help a Taliban member laying on the street?

Would we take that risk?

Would we pay for his care?

In light of this story, how would we stack up against the hated person in the story?

Could someone the cultural considers loathsome really be more humane than us?

Are the loathsome supposed to be loved and allowed to love us?

Jesus’ story in this light offers a new world view.  It’s a parable drawn from common life that arrests us by its strangeness, moves our mind to sufficient doubt about its application and leaves us wrestling about what it illustrates.

Can God actually be experienced through acts of compassion by someone we loath and hate? And vice versa?

That’s sure not our earthly experience or expectation.

But, wait a sec, the Gospels tell us that Jesus left us– and still gives to us– peace that is not of this world. Jesus calls us to be good neighbors, radically good neighbors.

Are we to be so radical we love even those we are supposed to hate? . . .

Like it or not, that sure sounds like the Gospel, doesn’t it?

And it’s not a soft and fluffy moral, Most of all it’s not a story we can very easily hope to let go over our head and hit our neighbor. It’s aimed at us.

Right.

At.

Us.

Following Jesus means working to change the world-view from one of “us versus them” to one of “us loving them and letting them love us.” And we are supposed to have that view all the time.

As Jesus put it, “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you . . . ” He also taught, Love your neighbors and Love your enemies.

Following Jesus means love is not just for those we are related to or married to or those we like, it means love is radically available to everyone and accepted from everyone, even those we have been taught to hate.

Those we are supposed to hate and loath are instead to get our care and our compassion and our desire for well being. We are to love everyone.

And those we are supposed to hate and loath are to be permitted to love us too.

Jesus’ Way is about radically accessible love.

That’s the good news of the Gospel!

AMEN!

 

ENDNOTES

1. Paterson, Stephen, The God of Jesus, p. 126-127.

2. I got a lot of these ideas from Professor Paterson’s 2005 Fall course “Biblical Studies III” at Eden Seminary, see also, ibid.

COPYRIGHT   Scott Elliott © 2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED