Homily for the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time
St. Agnes, Cincinnati1
July 11, 2010
(Based on Deuteronomy 30:19-14; Colossians 1:15-20; Luke 10:25-37)
When we’re in the part of the liturgical year known as ‘Ordinary Time,’ with no big events in the Jesus story to hold our focus, it can sometimes be hard to figure out why particular passages were selected for our reflection. They don’t hang together and it can be a stretch to find a clear message.
In today’s readings from Deuteronomy and Luke’s Gospel, by contrast, the message could not be clearer.
In Deuteronomy we find ourselves at the last section of Moses’ long final address to the people before his death. He is not going to get to the Promised Land with them; this is his final word. His testament.
For several chapters in the speech he has been laying many very minute prescriptions of the Law (remember, there were 612 of them). And now he sums it all up. He goes to the core of it all.
It turns out that trying to know what the Covenant demands is really not all that complicated. It’s not ‘way out there’ geographically, involving a long journey. And it’s not ‘way up there’, where only sophisticated scholars of the Law can understand it. It’s near and it’s now. Again and again in his speech he comes back to the present reality of it: “as I now command you” (v. 2); “which I enjoin on you today” (v. 11); “I have today set before you” (v. 15).
The answers arealready engraved in our hearts, before they are ever etched on stone tablets. There is a choice for life, for what will bring us all the blessings of the kingdom. Or those short-sighted choices, the quick gain that leads only to dead ends and blind alleys. To death.
(I can’t help but advert to the front-page column in yesterday’s paper, about how out in Hollywood the court system is being swamped and brought to a standstill by all the ugly court cases of our media celebrities. Drugs and DUIs and brutal divorce cases and violent disputes over contracts and non-performance. Who’s going to get the money? All the stuff we see on the tabloids at the checkout counter at Kroger’s. Sad, hollow people lost in the glitter of poor choices. Walking dead.)
Moses’ final summary word is: choose life!Listen to the deepest instincts of your heart, not the superficial momentary tinsel, and you will discover joy and fulfillment. We are imprinted with the call to find the meaning of life in giving ourselves in love, if we can only probe our hearts to the depths.
And then Jesus, in the account in Luke, offers us the same wisdom. Ultimately it’s not about rules and prescriptions, it’s about our deepest orientation and attitudes. Our heart and the love which focuses the way we live. A response of total gratitude and love for the Lord, expressed in the only way we humans can do that: in love for our sisters and brothers.
The lawyer in the story ‘gets it’ at one level. He knows what the core of the Covenant is about. There’s just one problem: who can tell me what is meant by my ‘neighbor’?
We hear that question from the perspective of 2000 years of Christian preaching. We know it as the story of ‘the good Samaritan.’
In the time of Jesus the religious response to the question was much less clear. There were differing strains in the air within Judaism, differing ‘right’ answers to the question. Your neighbor might mean only your blood brothers or sisters, or your extended clan or tribe. For sure it didn’t include the ‘nations,’ the Gentiles. Or even schismatics from the family of Abraham Like the Samaritans.
It was a culture of ‘ins’ and ‘outs.’ A culture of boundaries. The lawyer was really looking for the limits of his responsibility.What do I have to do? Howfar does my obligation extend? (I can’t help thinking of that old question of the adolescent boy: “when you’re making out, how far can you go before it becomes serious matter?”)
It’s important to note that Jesus never does answer the lawyer’s question. He doesn’t say “you have to love these folk—but those other people you can forget about, you’re not responsible for them.” For Jesus and his followers ‘neighbor’ is not a designation of physical geography (we speak of our ‘next-door neighbors’). It’s not a matter of social location: in or out. It’s a matter of attitude: the readiness to respond to people who come knocking unexpectedly at our door. To whoever calls on us in need.
Instead of falling into the trap and answering the lawyer’s question Jesus turns the question around. After telling the story, he asks the lawyer ”which one of the three was neighbor to the fallen man. Which one acted neighborly? Which one did the neighborly thing? ‘Neighboring’ consists—as love always does—in deeds of care.
And of course the one who ‘got it’ was the fellow any Jew would have least expected to: the Samaritan. The apostate.
The representatives of the religious establishment—the priest and the Levite—didn’t get it. They were too focused on the rules of the purity code. You don’t touch dead bodies or people who might as well be dead. You ‘cross over to the other side of the road.’ What a graphic image of official hypocrisy!
Like the Samaritan the children of this world can be wiser than the children of light. In yesterday’s Times there was an interesting illustration.
We’re all familiar with the story of how Martin Luther King’s last mission was to go to Memphis to support the sanitation workers—the garbage men!—in their strike. People around King challenged him on that decision. “That’s not a racial issue! We’re about racial justice.” Yesterday’s account reminded us of another player in the story, one we might have forgotten about. Walter Reuther, the head of the United Automobile Workers, the UAW, also went to Memphis. He brought with him the largest contribution the strikers had received from anyone. It was auto workers’ money. Like King Reuther was attacked by his fellow union leaders. “They’re not auto workers! What do we have to do with sanitation workers?” We only help those who fit that old Irish expression: “our own.”
Reuther said, “As long as I am identified with the leadership of this great union, we are going to extend the hand of solidarity to every group of workers who are struggling for justice.” And the present head of the UAW reminds us how we can lose our focus and get off track, forgetting what it’s all about. “My view of the labor movement today is that we get too focused on our contracts and our own membership and forget that the only way, ultimately, that we protect our members . . is by fighting for justice for everybody. Every human being deserves dignity and a decent standard of living.”
We don’t get to plan where we might be called to be neighbors. The call to neighborliness comes in unexpected fashion. The Samaritan was just going on his way to carry out some business. This distraction wasn’t on his calendar.The sanitation workers weren’t in the UAW strategic plan. Stuff happens. Haiti happens. An oil spill happens. An economy is upended. We learn that a woman in Iran is threatened with death by stoning because she committed adultery, and every decent human being is called to speak out, to be her neighbor. A woman in India is murdered by her own family in a so-called ‘honor’ killing, because she dared to marry a man of a lower caste, and we are called to join the worldin protest at this barbarity.
No, “Who is my neighbor?” is the wrong question. The question is: “who is standing at my door calling me to be a neighbor?” To care and respond in deed. In the Book of Revelation the author has God say, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.”
And there are no boundaries.
Amen?
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1 Warning: This homily was never delivered orally! It turns out that my good friend Deacon Royce arrived at the sacristy with his own homily prepared.
So this venture is being inflicted on you, my virtual congregation. There are no collections in our virtual congregation, of course. But you are encouraged to donate to a local charity of your choosing. . . . .
On Saturday we will be celebrating our last Jazz on the Lawn event as St. Agnes. Great fun: chicken dinners from 3 to 6, followed by a 5-piece combo and vocalist, on the walk and lawn at the front entrance to the church, open to everyone passing by. A community of a couple of hundred will be seated on lawn chairs and visiting with their friends for 3 hours. (I looked into group flight arrangements for all of you in my virtual community but it became too complicated. My very imperfect fall-back suggestion: join us virtually by gathering with a few friends for some John Coltrane or Miles Davis—and Ella, for sure!—in your living room.)