Luke 10:25-37
Cynthia Jarvis
July 10, 2016

“‘Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hand of robbers?’ He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’”

Needless to say, we have endured yet another week when the quality of mercy has been strained to the point of breaking by the inequality of power and fear and race and death over our common life. Lest we be tempted, once again, to walk on by the beaten, the stripped, the abandoned, and the half dead by the side of the road when we leave this temple, Jesus told a parable about the one who showed mercy.

The Greek word translated as pity or compassion or mercy in the New Testament is curiously a word used only of Jesus himself and of three familiar characters in Jesus’ parables: the father of the prodigal, the magnanimous king who has mercy toward a hopeless debtor, and the Samaritan. This is not the mercy or pity or compassion that corresponds to the movements of our merely human hearts. This is a movement in the bowels of God — a movement of the innermost being of God, a movement that is the movement of God toward us in Jesus Christ.

Of God’s mercy, Karl Barth writes: “[God] does not merely help from without…standing alongside, making a contribution and then withdrawing again and leaving [us] to [our] selves until further help is perhaps required. [Rather in Jesus Christ] he interposes himself for [us], he gives himself to [us]… he puts himself in [our] place… he makes [our] state and fate his own cause, so that it is no longer [ours] but his…” This sounds to me, for all the world, like the Samaritan in the story!

But God is merciful not only in relation to us: the God who is merciful is merciful from all eternity. God is merciful in God’s self. “God who is rich in mercy,” I often declare when I am privileged to pronounce the promise of the gospel; or “God is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love”; or “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort.” God’s very being is mercy. How do we know this? Barth admits that “When we confess God to be merciful, it is not even remotely possible to demonstrate this as a logically deducible truth.” We can only confess that God has given Himself to be known by us as merciful in the name of Jesus Christ. We can only try to recognize the reality of the mercy of God in his name.

The story before us has something to do with recognizing the reality of the mercy of God on the road going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. Interrupting a private conversation Jesus is having with the seventy just returned from their first missionary journey, the lawyer asks Jesus, in order to test him, “Good teacher, what I must do to inherit eternal life?” Contained in his question are assumptions about God and about eternal life that we would do well to examine.

There are, Robert Jenson says, “as many eternities as there are… cultures and faiths, but most eternities can be divided into two sorts.” The first sort is secured by law and the second is confessed by promise. The first, secured by law, is the eternity of persistence. “The average God,” Jenson says, “is eternal in this way.” This is the God of religion — “the universal Conserver… the Rock of Ages, the Sheltering Arms, the transcendent Security Blanket” — who “can both guarantee the barns that defend our status quo; and provide a refuge when the status quo becomes too threatening.” In this eternity of timelessness, “the Immutability [the unchangability] of the past settles what can come of the future and so rules time as God: because of what I have accomplished, I can count securely on such-and-such, or because of what I have done, guilt closes such-and-such doorways.” In other words, this average God eternally “guarantees our securities and assigns our guilt; [God is]… the super Bookkeeper who will let us ‘into heaven’ if only we do our best, and are sincerely sorry and try harder from now on.”

The dead giveaway that the lawyer had the average God in mind when he came to test Jesus was the verb he used in his question: What must I do to inherit eternal life? What must I do to be given eternal life as my secure possession? The average God acts to assure the lawyer on the basis of the law as gospel that his status eternally, for good or for ill, depends on his immutable past.

The second sort of eternity is confessed by promise and anticipated in hope. In this eternity the “future [of the God who is rich in mercy] endlessly overcomes all bondage to the past… it is the eternity in which [you and I] are free, exactly in and by what [we] already are, for what [we] are not yet. The God of Israel and of Jesus’ resurrection is eternal in this way,” Jenson says. In God’s eternity of mercy, God even uses the guilt we hold on to from our past as the occasion to do a new thing; and God scandalously uses hope to undo the other eternity’s timeless stasis of good and bad, in and out, justice and injustice, Jew and Samaritan.

Therefore to the lawyer’s question concerning what he must do to secure the eternal life of the average God, Jesus counters with a question concerning the lawyer’s future with the God of mercy. Citing the summary of the law in Deuteronomy and Leviticus, the lawyer says he is to love God with all of his heart and soul and strength and mind and his neighbor as himself. “Right you are!” says Jesus. “Do this and you will live.” “Do exactly what?” the lawyer still wants to know. What is the more and the less he must do in order to assure the average God that I have done what is necessary. “Precisely which ones must I love?”

In response, Jesus answers a question the lawyer did not have it in him to ask. To wit: Who will he finally become? Who will he be in the eternity of the God who is mercy? To answer this question, Jesus abandons abstract principles for a story that turns out to be about mercy: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho,” it begins. No telling who this man is, what tribe he belongs to, what God he worships or what characterizes his human condition other than the vulnerability written all over his face that is written over ours as well. Stripped, beaten, left for dead, he is at the mercy of everyone who passes by. If you are black and male in this nation, every road is the Jericho road. Think Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Laquan MacDonald, Tamir Rice, Antonio Zambrona-Montes, Eric Harris, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, to name a few.

When I lived here for fifteen years, twenty years ago, I played a mental game with myself. I drove the streets of Princeton and every time I saw a car stopped by a policeman, I bet myself $1,000 the driver is black. About nine times out of ten, I was right. I still play that game where I live. I live in a suburb of Philadelphia. On my way to church, I go by way of a speed trap and I know to do twenty-five miles per hour. And every time somebody is stopped by the side of the road, I bet myself $1,000 the driver is black. I would say nineteen times out of twenty. Nassau Street is the Jericho Road. Witherspoon Street, the Jericho Road. Bayard Lane, the Jericho Road. Mermaid Lane, Philadelphia, the Jericho Road. Germantown Avenue, where my church sits, is the Jericho Road.

Yet Thursday night was a brutal reminder that those we send out to patrol the Jericho Road daily walk in the valley of the shadow of death where showing mercy seems to be a matter of life and death.

The people passing by are identified, though we do not know why they do what they do. The priest and the Levite see the man and keep on going. The usual excuse given for them — that they are concerned with ritual purity — does not avail because they are going “down” the road and so away from the temple. We simply do not know why they keep going, just as sometimes do we know the same about our own deficit of mercy in the face of the brutality that our common life has become.

The Samaritan sees the man as well. The Samaritans, you may remember, had just refused to receive Jesus in Luke’s last chapter. At this point in the story, Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine insists that “we should think of ourselves as the person in the ditch and then ask, ‘Is there anyone, from any group, about whom we would rather die than acknowledge, ‘She offered help,’ or ‘He showed compassion’?” Likewise, is there any group whose members might rather die than help us? If so, then we know how to find the modern equivalent for the Samaritan.” In this xenophobic time, the candidates are legion. Levine proceeds to be more specific than the lawyer ever imagined when he asked his question of Jesus. Who is the one who proved neighbor — who loved God with heart, soul, strength, mind and the neighbor as the self? For Levine as a Jew it is a member of Hamas who showed mercy. In a lecture on the same parable at Auburn Seminary, I was in an audience filled with people who recently had experienced the horrors of September 11th firsthand when Levine suggested that the one who proved neighbor was a member of Al-Qaeda.

So the Samaritan on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho sees the man as well, but here we come upon the word with which we began. He is moved with pity, with compassion, with mercy: it is the verb that is used only of Jesus, the father of the prodigal, the king of the debtor and now the Samaritan. He not only feels in his bowels, in the deepest part of his being, the misery and distress of this man; he also acts, mercy being an action determined by a feeling. He binds the man’s wounds, pouring oil and wine on them — elements used in the daily temple sacrifice; he puts the man on his own animal in order to bring him to an inn; there he gives the innkeeper enough money to keep him for two months and says, “Take care of him….” To repeat, the Samaritan “does not merely help from without… standing alongside, making a contribution and then withdrawing again… leaving him to himself until further help is perhaps required. [Rather] he interposes himself for the man, he gives himself to him… he puts himself in his place… he makes his state and fate his own cause, so that it is no longer the man’s but his own.”

Then finally, the Samaritan stands for the man’s future freedom. He says, “When I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.” As the man had nothing now but what the Samaritan had given him, he could have been “at the mercy” (so to speak) of the innkeeper — a profession with the reputation for dishonesty and violence — who eventually could have enslaved him for any unpaid debt. If it is mercy you mean to show and if it is the eternity of the God who is mercy that you hope to inhabit more than inherit, then as my former New Testament professor John Donahue put it, you “must enter the world of the injured not only with care and compassion but must leave it in such a way that the injured is given freedom.”

“Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” The lawyer said, because he could not bring himself to say Samaritan, “The one who showed him mercy.”

What would it be for those of us in this sanctuary who are white to not only feel in our bowels, in the deepest part of our being, the misery and distress of black men and their mothers and their spouses and their children, but also to act, mercy being an action determined by a feeling. What would it look like for us not merely to help from without… standing alongside, making a contribution and then withdrawing again… leaving our black brothers and sisters to themselves until the next spate of killings. What would be different if we interposed our white selves for black selves, giving ourselves to them… putting ourselves in their place… making their state and fate our own cause, so that it is no longer theirs but our own? What would it be for us to bear witness to the God who enters the world of the injured not only with care and compassion but leaves it in such a way that the injured is given freedom? Who would our future selves be, our future nation be, if we gave ourselves to the God who uses the guilt we hold on to from our past as the occasion to do a new thing. If we gave our racist and xenophobic and fearfully defended selves to the God who scandalously uses hope to undo the timeless stasis of good and bad, in and out, justice and injustice, Jew and Samaritan, black and white, rich and poor, citizen and immigrant, saved and lost?

“Go and do likewise,” Jesus finally said. We do not know what became of the lawyer. We can only ask after the persons we may become in the hands of the God of mercy, beseeching God to have mercy on us. Amen.

© 2016
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Luke 10:38-42
Lauren J. McFeaters
July 3, 2016

As we travel this summer with Jesus, we meet two sisters at odds: Martha being upset she’s left alone in the kitchen, Mary freely spending her time at Jesus feet.

Martha is entirely focused on hospitality.

Mary is entirely focused on welcome.

But before we move forward, before we take one more step; one more glimpse – here’s the thing we don’t want to do – we don’t want to make this scripture a caricature, a cartoon, with an obsessive Martha up to her eyeballs in soapsuds and a virtuous Mary curled up in front of the fire and Jesus all the while giving a scriptural warrant for dishes piling up in the sink.

We may be tempted to draw a cartoon bubble over Martha’s head that reads, “Help! I can’t take this anymore!” Or a bubble over Mary’s head screaming, “Miss Bossy Pants is at it again!” Or a haloed and illuminated bubble over Jesus’ head proclaiming, “Chill, Martha, chill. Breathe! I am your non-anxious presence.”

Fred Craddock says if we criticize Martha too harshly, she may abandon serving all together, and if we praise Mary too profusely, she may sit there forever. There is a time to go and do; there is a time to listen and reflect. Knowing which and when is a matter for our spiritual discernment. And if we were to ask Jesus, “Should we be Marys or Marthas? Should we be Marthas or Marys?” his answer would probably be, “Yes.”(1)

I was raised by Marthas, that is, I was raised by women for whom hospitality is an art form. They were all born in the South – Pickens, Mississippi, Savannah, Georgia, Lexington, Mississippi.

There was my grandmother, Josie Mae, and her sisters, my Aunt Willie Hines, Aunt Amy Lee, and Aunt Elene. There was my own mother, Joanne, my Auntie Corinne, my Cousin Bobbie. The next generation is Linda Lee, Lauren Joanne, and Susan Jane.

Southern women are great Marthas and proud of it. Having been raised by them, I know that dinner in a Southern kitchen is a wonder to behold. I say dinner because that’s at noontime when everyone comes in from the fields to take a break and enjoy the central meal of the day.

Those whose Southern hospitality is refined to an art never sit. They hover. They mysteriously glide around the table – as if on ice skates. Plates never go empty. Guests are continually asked if they need anything:

• Susie, you need more black-eyed peas, honey?
• Artie, you want some Taba’co with those mustard greens?
• Bobbie, looks like you’re runnin’ low on rhubbarb sauce.
• Jo, my love, please pass those butter beans.
• Linda Lee, darlin’, more sweet tea?
• Cora, let’s mosey that succotash down the table.

In fact, many times the Southern hostess will continue to cook all through the meal: the okra needs to be re-strained and served mid-way; corn must always be served straight out of the pot; dumplings require a last, oh-so-gentle fold-over before being ladled into the yellow Pyrex bowl; a cast-iron skillet of corn bread is delivered straight from the oven.

And somehow the prayer before the meal is timed so perfectly that the food doesn’t skip a beat.

I have never in all my life been able to time a meal in all of its glory like my grandmother and great-aunts. Their greens are still steaming as the limas are cooling. The biscuits are evenly brown even though there’s one oven stoked by a wood fire. The succotash is folded over and blended by threes. My new Maytag “Gemini Double Oven with Gas Range” has nothing on them. Nothing.

And when does the hostess eat? This is one of the great mysteries of the South. The hostess keeps working, scurrying around the table, stopping mid-stride only to wipe the steam from her glasses with a pristine apron. She gives herself totally to serving.(2) And we are all grateful.

But when you welcome Jesus to your house for a summer meal, things get upsetting. At Martha’s house Jesus has no need (as of yet) for collard greens and a relish tray. What he does need, and it’s a deep need, is for both Mary and Martha’s conversation and friendship.

And that moves us to the heart of the Mary and Martha story. Tom Long puts it like this: There is nothing wrong with Martha’s fixing the food. This is the way people show love and welcome, hospitality and care. In fact there is something absolutely essential about showing one’s love of God and neighbor by stirring the applesauce and canning the crab apples, by organizing the snacks and crafts before VBS, by spackling a ceiling for Appalachian Service Project, and by mixing and baking a meatloaf at Loaves and Fishes.

Martha is doing a good thing, a necessary thing, an act of service. But if we try to do this kind of service

• apart from the life-giving Word of the Gospel,
• apart from sitting at our Lord’s feet,
• apart from steeping ourselves in the Light of the Word,
• apart from conversation with God,

it will distract us and worry us, beat us down, and burn us out.(3)

Jean Vanier, the 2015 Templeton Prize winner, says it like this: I often hear of people committed to the church and social action who are burned out. Sometimes these people have been too generous; they have thrown themselves into activity which has finally destroyed them emotionally. They’ve not known how to relax and be refreshed.

Sometimes people in their over-activity are running from something. They may be too attached to their function, perhaps even finding all of their identity in it.

They’ve not yet learned how to live fully in God, to be freed to live, to discover the wisdom of the present moment, and to relax in body and in heart.(4)

Perhaps Martha has not yet discovered the wisdom of the present moment, nor learned to relax in body and heart. What Jesus wants for her when he says her name, not once, but twice — “Martha. Martha.” — is for her to find the better portion, not in the kitchen, but in him.

Martha’s hospitality is not a trifling. Her cooking was not trivial. Hospitality finally means that somebody has to snap the pole beans and stir the succotash. Someone has to arrive at church early on Sunday morning and put out the bottles of glue and scissors and construction paper. Busy work? Worry work? Absolutely not.(5)

But if we don’t stop and notice Jesus right there in our living rooms, or discover the wisdom of the present moment, or learn to relax in body and heart, then we’ll never hear our Lord beckon us to take a seat right here beside him at HIS table, for His meal, for His Supper.

For “this thing only” does he want for us:

• the better portion of Bread and Cup;
• the better portion of “Take and eat”;
• the better portion of “Do this in remembrance of me.”

That’s the portion that will never, ever be taken away.

Thanks be to the God of the pole bean and succotash.

(1) Fred B Craddock. Luke. Louisville: John Knox Press, 1990, 152.
(2) I am grateful for images and remembrances of Mary W. Anderson’s article, “Hospitality Theology.” The Christian Century (July 1, 1998).
(3) Thomas G. Long. Sermon: “Mary and Martha.” Proper 11, Luke 10:38-42. Day1, Alliance for Christian Media (Chicago, IL: July 2007).
(4) Jean Vanier. Community and Growth. Toronto: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1991, 177.
(5) Thomas G. Long. Sermon: “Mary and Martha.” Proper 11, Luke 10:38-42. Day1, Alliance for Christian Media (Chicago, IL: July 2007).

© 2016 Nassau Presbyterian Church
Contact the church to obtain reprint permission.

1 Kings 19:1-15a
Jacqueline Lapsley
June 19, 2016

At Labyrinth Bookstore, right down here on Nassau Street, there are these little books, only a few inches tall and wide, that hover by the cash register, promising enlightenment or amusement. Last winter, just a day or two before Christmas, when I was casting about a bit desperately for stocking stuffers, I fell prey to one such little book:  “Math in Minutes.”  “Math in Minutes: 200 Key Concepts Explained in an Instant.” “In an Instant” people!  Math revealed, in an instant. It seemed in that moment, standing at the Labyrinth counter, that it would be a mistake to NOT purchase Math in Minutes.  This would be a stocking-stuffer that would open the veil on the profound mysteries of math, mysteries that govern our world, but which remain largely veiled to me.

“Math in Minutes” is arranged by topic, but also increases in complexity as you go along.  So the first entry is on numbers.  It begins: “Numbers at their most elementary are just adjectives describing quantity.”  Excellent.  I am fully on board.  The entry on the number “1” is fine, and the next entry on “zero” is also okay, although, I began to feel a little uneasy when Math in Minutes explained that for a long time philosophers refused to acknowledge the existence of zero.  Did zero deserve the rudeness of not being acknowledged?

Things quickly ran off the rails from there:  the entries on trigonometric identities, tesselations, penrose tilings, were perplexing, to say nothing of differential calculus, linear combinations and transformations, and the ominous, “Monster Group.” The first sentence of the entry on “Null Spaces” goes like this: “Also known as the kernel of the matrix, the null space is the set of all vectors that are mapped to the zero vector by the action of the linear transformation.” Null spaces. The entry on “Null Spaces” was hitting a little … a little too close to home.

In the story I just read, Elijah’s fellow Israelites seem to be having a similar problem to the one I have with math.  Mathematics discloses profound truths about the invisible workings of the universe.  Likewise, ancient Israel’s traditions disclose profound truths about God’s desire for humanity to flourish in a complex world. Yet Elijah’s fellow Israelites seem to have forgotten, or perhaps never understood those traditions. How God desires a just and flourishing community, and how to work for it. God desires a convenantal relationship with humanity and with creation. The covenantal laws were designed to foster life—to make it possible for everyone to flourish in community, together.

But the people have abandoned that life-giving covenantal relationship and only Elijah is left to speak truth to power.  In the chapters leading up to this one, Elijah has been combating the corruption of Queen Jezebel and King Ahab’s unjust regime in Israel. Elijah has just had an encounter with King Ahab where Ahab essentially says to him, “Hey Elijah, why are you messing with the status quo?  Things are okay here—we don’t need your talk of God and justice.”  But worse than Ahab are Elijah’s fellow Israelites. They have become apathetic and fearful, and they too bow to the status quo. Elijah’s faithfulness—to God, to the covenant—has brought him nothing but isolation and exhaustion.  Jezebel is pursuing him to kill him, and indeed, he wants to die.

God has sent Elijah on this mission, so it has to annoy Elijah that God now asks him what he is doing there, out in the desert, simultaneously fleeing for his life and wanting to die at the same time. What is he DOING there? It is no wonder that Elijah vents: “I have been working my heart out for you, God. But your people are the worst—they’re afraid and unfaithful, and my life is in danger.”

In response, God does a “drive by” – offers Elijah a glimpse of the divine presence – just as God had offered to Moses long before in the same place. It was widely believed in the ancient Near East that God appears in storms, in the wind, in earthquakes, in fire—these were the places to perceive the power and presence of God. In fact, in the previous chapter when Elijah called upon God to take down those charlatans, the prophets of Baal, God WAS in the fire.  There God was in the fire and the prophets of Baal conjured only an empty silence.

But here, Elijah, famously, doesn’t get fire.  He doesn’t get an earthquake, or wind, or storms.  The glimpse of the divine he gets is “a sound of sheer silence,” as the New Revised Standard Version has it.  The King James Version has “a still, small voice.” This is one of those translation conundrum: A thin silence? A small silence? A soft silence?  The sound of silence? Thank you, Simon & Garfunkel.  The phrase slips away from us… How to convey the paradox of it?  One scholar (Duhm) calls it a “vibrant silence.” “A vibrant silence.” It is not silence as the absence of sound.  It is the vibrant silence saturated with the full presence of God.  “Elijah heard the vibrant silence.”

Last week I was at the car dealer waiting for my car to be repaired. I found myself in a nice waiting room—free WiFi, decent coffee, okay bagels.  But the first thing I noticed were the two televisions, from which a stream of nonsense—vacuous words and hollow laughter—emitted from the mouths of conventionally attractive people. I thought at that moment of the whales, and other sea life.  We have taken our own noise-filled world, and replicated it, so that the whales are also forced to live in a home as insufferably loud as our own.

The noise we encounter in daily life is auditory, but it is also visual noise, and even olfactory noise. Bus riders in S. Korea now have advertising literally squirted up their noses—the synthetic smell of Dunkin Donuts coffee is released into the ventilation system of the bus just before it arrives at, you guessed it, Dunkin Donuts.

In his latest book, The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford points out that the world has become so noisy that we pay extra for the commodity of silence. When you pay for a “Business class” lounge in an airport you get snacks and Wifi, sure, but the main thing you get is quiet. A respite from the endless blaring of CNN, or worse, Fox News, and the endless advertising. Silence of all kinds has become a luxury good—it is available to those who can afford it. How can we hear God in the silence when there is so little of it?

Elijah runs away from all the noise of his own culture.  He runs from the noise of his epic battle with the 450 prophets of Baal. Now you know THAT was loud.  The text says those prophets “cried aloud” and  “raved” ALL … DAY … LONG.  And that was just their twitter feed.  The ravings of the prophets of Baal are still with us.

Isn’t this why Elijah sticks his face in his jacket?  He is tired of dealing with the anxiety, the fear, the noise of not only his enemies, but of his own people?  He wants to block out the 24-hour news cycle of terrorism, sexual and racial violence, degradation of creation, and on and on. What is the silence of God, even a vibrant silence, in the face of so much noise?

“Elijah heard the vibrant silence.”  What does he hear in that God-filled silence?  Perhaps it is what all his fellow citizens have forgotten. Perhaps it is the message of the Scriptures, the life-giving divine Word that God gave to the people that they might flourish in the land. Perhaps what he heard in that vibrant silence was a deep reminder that God’s relationship with Elijah, with the people, with the world, is the ground of all life, of all flourishing life. Perhaps Elijah can hear in that vibrant silence the sound of all of us connecting with God, connecting with one another, and with the world around us.  That vibrant silence gets inside of him.

He steps to the edge of the cave. Again God asks: “What are you doing here, Elijah?”  It must annoy Elijah to be asked the same question as before. And then something surprising happens. Elijah says the exact same thing he did before:  “I have been working my heart out for you, God. But your people are the worst—they’re afraid and unfaithful, and my life is in danger.”  Wait, what? He heard the vibrant silence, and he says exactly the same thing?

It seems that nothing has really changed in his situation; Elijah still faces the same problems.  But he has the sound of vibrant silence within him.  The sound of a God-given vision of the common good. The sound and vision of a world in which all flourish.  And with that, he goes on his way to face the same situation he fled in the first place.

God tells Elijah what’s next on the to-do list.  He is to assemble a team of folks to help him in taking on Ahab and Jezebel and the powers that threaten the community. So despite the fact that he is still tired, still undone by the noise of his anxious people and his frightening enemies, Elijah gets on with his work. He gets on with the work of calling his community to a covenantal life of justice, of telling them what the Scriptures reveal about God and the world. The “vibrant silence” feeds him as surely as food; it gives him the strength to move on from the cave, to continue his task of calling his people to form and sustain a just society, to make a world in which all can flourish and thrive.

God meets Elijah in the desert not to offer simple solutions to the problems in front of him. The same god-awful mess awaits him, but the vibrancy of that silence strengthens him for the journey.

© 2016 Nassau Presbyterian Church
Contact the church to obtain reprint permission.