Pentecost 8(C) – Deuteronomy 30:9-14; Luke 10:25-37
As many of you know, I had the opportunity to spend the first part of this week with ten of our youth members here at the church on a four-day overnight where we talked about food. There really is no greater joy in my life than spending time with these teenagers, and I think they had a really good time too. But I have to say, as time goes on, these overnights are getting harder and harder to plan.
The reason for that is a simple one, but it’s also very frustrating to me. When I put these together, I use an educational method that comes to us from the Bible studies done by Base Christian Communities in South America. You begin by observing the world around you. Really see the situation as it is, in all it’s complexity and depth, joy and pain. Then you process it. This is more than just thinking about the problems you’ve seen; it’s really digging into them, trying to get at the reasons behind the problems, to allow the scriptures and traditions of the church to encounter them, to see where God’s Gospel meets the world’s injustices. Then, based on what you’ve seen and what you’ve discovered, you take action.
That’s not the end of the process. There are steps after the action one, evaluating and celebrating the change that’s taken place. But it is where I get hung up. Because while I think it’s very easy to seek out, to discover, to encounter injustices in our world looming many and large, it’s very difficult to do anything about them.
A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. It’s a simple problem at first glance. A man is hurt, and he needs help. For the purposes of this exercise, we’ll ignore the larger problem of highway robbery for now, all of the evils carried out by people who prey upon a weak and lonely traveler; all of the evils that drive people to turn to robbery, to violence and theft, in order to survive themselves at the cost of another because there seems to be no other way to live; all of the systematic evils that pile up and propagate and proliferate on one another and just stick to the man dying by the side of the road. He needs medical attention. Anyone who sees him knows this, and can guess pretty easily what to do. Simple problem. Simple solution.
Except clearly not so simple, because a priest comes by, a person who, in that society, certainly had enough power and ability to provide the help that the man needed. And he sees the man, and he walks by on the other side of the road.
And then there’s a Levite who does the same thing.
It’s too easy to quickly vilify the priest and the Levite. We like to make the religious authorities in the Bible into the bad guys of the story. But they’re not. They’re the ethical authorities of their world; they not only know what’s right, but they work hard to do what’s right. From their childhood, they’ve striven every moment of their lives to love and please God with their actions. They have spend thousands and thousands and thousands of hours studying the Law and the Prophets, to be able to declare what should be done in every situation in life. They are good people. They want to be good people. But then real life presents them with a real problem and something gets in the way. Fear? Worry? Confusion? Are the robbers still around? Will they set upon them, too? Does the man have a disease? Will they become unclean, impure? What if he dies while in their care? What if something worse happens? They don’t know what to do, they’re driven to inaction, and so they cross to the other side of the road.
And us? When we encounter the world’s injustice, what do we do? I’m not just talking about the little things; I don’t think this text should just make us feel guilty for not pulling over to the side of the road when we see someone with a broken-down car. I’m talking about real, broken, systemic injustices. I mean that twelve percent of the inhabitants of Worcester County, some hundred thousand people, are forced to turn to the food pantries to find a way to feed their families. I mean that you can go walk down the streets of the south side of Worcester and the poverty is VISIBLE. And the people who live there can’t eat fresh food on a regular basis, not just because they can’t afford to buy the half-rotting produce off the supermarket shelves, but because they don’t even have a kitchen to prepare it in. I mean that poverty and racism and health problems like diabetes and obesity go hand in hand in our society, that I can safely go to one of several grocery stores and choose from thousands of foods while a black teenager can’t go to a convenience store in Florida without being shot and killed, that most of us can waffle between choosing our food based on nutrition or convenience while others in our world are having to decide which family member goes hungry today. I mean that corporate agriculture gives me the privilege of buying a cheap tomato in February that tastes like styrofoam while the farm worker who grew it can’t scrape together a living wage and spends every day running the risk of being torn away from his children and deported AND I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT.
The story says, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho.” Did you know that today, you can’t get from Jerusalem to Jericho? There’s a wall between Jerusalem and Jericho, a wall that keeps Israelis on one side and Palestinians on the other, a wall that was built because of fear and terror, a wall that robs people of their dignity and well-being every single day? There it is, standing there in the middle east, a concrete testament to fear and hatred and injustice. And I just keep going about my life, I ignore it, I walk on by, on the other side of the road, on the other side of the world, and nothing changes.
So I suppose I have a little bit of empathy for the priest and the Levite.
And I’d bet God does too. God gets how difficult it is for us to defeat the evils of this world by ourselves. Which is why He doesn’t leave us to do it ourselves. In fact, in today’s reading from Deuteronomy, God promises us no less than three things to help us on our way.
First, God promises prosperity in everything we do. This isn’t some kind of crazy American-style prosperity gospel. God doesn’t promise us that we’ll have everything we’ve ever wanted and more, riches beyond our wildest dreams. Deuteronomy specifies: Abundant prosperity in the fruit of our bodies, in the fruit of our livestock, in the fruit of our soil. That is, for our most basic needs, we have more than enough. More than enough for ourselves. Enough, that is to share with, to provide for our neighbor who does not have enough. And not only will God do this, but it will be God’s joy to pour out abundant prosperity and provide for our neighbor through us.
Second, God promises that we will follow his commandments to love one another. This is an odd promise, and yet there it is in verse ten. “When you obey the Lord your God.” It says it like it’s a given, and that’s even more true in the original Hebrew. The formula used is for a condition that is sure to happen; the verb is in perfect tense, which means it’s already happened. Like the priest and the Levite, we can decide that inaction is the best action, but we can’t stay there. God will work in our hearts to drive us to do something, to work for justice and peace, to treat our neighbor with love. God won’t just let us be complacent. It’s a promise.
And third, God promises that we won’t find it impossible. As Lutherans accustomed to hearing that we cannot live up to God’s law, that may come as a shock. But that’s just on our own. With God’s help, we can be a force for positive change in our world. God’s instructions for living well together, for transforming this world into a place where fear and greed and hate are given up for faith and hope and love, are not out of reach. This world-shaking love is not written in heaven or under the sea. It’s written right in our mouths and on our hearts.
God has promised us everything we need. We have the means, the motivation, and the love to be the means by which healing comes to our world. God transforms us from apathetic priests into radically generous Samaritans.
I can’t stop talking about the things we did last week, the youth and adults who together explored food issues in our world. It’s mostly because I went into the week feeling kind of hopeless. Feeling there was no action to take, nothing we could do except be spectators of the huge challenges we have in our world around hunger and food economy, food justice and food sovereignty. But there were two moments that changed my mind. The first came at the Community Harvest Project, a vegetable farm down in Grafton. 100% of the work on this farm comes from volunteers like our youth last week, and 100% of the produce goes to the Worcester County Food Bank where it is passed on to more than 150 hunger programs throughout central Massachusetts. That day, as I shared with our teenagers in harvesting, cleaning, and packaging more than 2,500 pounds of zucchini and squash–that’s more than a ton of fresh vegetables headed for our neighbors who would otherwise never see anything that didn’t come from a can–I felt like I was watching Jesus at the feeding of the 5,000, taking a few loaves of bread and watching them keep going, and going, and going…
And at the end of our time together, I wondered with our youth what else we could do to make change. And then I watched as they imagined what real change might look like. As they stepped beyond the charity of feeding people to the justice work of helping people feed themselves. As they toyed with the ideas of a community garden, and serving meals, and finally hit on a decision to learn how to garden for themselves, and then take that information to communities of poverty in our area, and teach people to grow their own vegetables. And the excitement in that room as they talked–it was everything we could do to stop ourselves from leaping up from our seats and getting started right then!
Sisters and Brothers, do you feel helpless? Do you feel like you’re caught up in the world’s problems, that everything is too big, too impossible to make a difference? Well, God’s promise is that you aren’t on the road alone. A Samaritan is coming your way, who will bring change and healing and wholeness to you and your situation. You are loved, you are inspired, you are neighbor.
Now go and do likewise. Amen.