No Fences

Here is my sermon from yesterday. The passage was the parable of the Good Samaritan, Luke 10:25-37.

“Kill the cockroaches. They cannot escape. Let us hunt them in the forests, lakes, and hills; let us find them in the church; let us wipe them from the face of the earth. Kill them wherever you find them – don’t spare a single one. Kill the very old, kill the babies. If you do not kill you are a coward! If you are a cockroach, there is no escape, we will find you and kill you. Do your duty. Kill them all.”

That is what was broadcast on the radio stations in Rwanda during one of the worst atrocities in human history. From the beginning of April 1994 until the middle of July of the same year, the Hutu majority of Rwanda went on a rampage. In just three months, at least 800,000 people were killed. That’s more than 260,000 a month, more than 8600 a day. It’s nearly impossible to know how many were killed, because the government not only systematically killed them, but they also eliminated all trace of their existence destroying birth records, baptismal records, medical records, school records, anything which could prove that they had once existed were also destroyed. This was outright genocide, but it was not done with guns or poison gas. It was accomplished primarily with clubs and machetes. 800,000 people were literally cut to pieces by their friends and neighbors, which is what made this crime against humanity so startling. The killings were not limited to just a few people, as in other genocides. A few people cannot murder that many in so short a period of time with just clubs and knives.

Instead nearly the entire Hutu population was involved, because if you did not participate you risked your own life by being considered a Tutsi sympathizer. Survivors’ reports tell of the Hutus who were sheltering them from being killed going off during the day with the killing squads and coming back in the afternoon covered in blood and acting as if nothing had happened. What is clear from the stories of perpetrators and survivors is the total dehumanization of a group of people which took place in Rwanda, and indeed takes place in all atrocities of this sort. The victims were no longer humans, they were cockroaches, and so there was nothing wrong in killing them. Could this or any other atrocity ever really take place if we were to truly answer the question, who is my neighbor?

The story of the Good Samaritan is one of the best known stories in the bible. We now apply that name to anyone who helps someone in need. But because it is so popular, it is also probably one of the most clichéd and least understood stories. Whenever I cover this parable in bible studies, people quickly talk about Good Samaritan laws and the dangers of helping those in needs because of potential litigation, and in the end the Good Samaritan becomes this touchy feely happy go lucky guy that we all admire. As a result we miss the truly radical and confrontational nature of this story. The Samaritans and the Jews hated each other. The Samaritans were a group of people who occupied the lands formerly held by the northern tribes of Israel. The Jews said that the Samaritans were a group who were brought by the Assyrians after they had destroyed the tribes of the northern kingdom and the Jews there were taken into exile. They were foreigners who usurped the land. The Samaritans, however, claim that they were the remnant of those tribes. But regardless of where they came from, the real differences and animosities came over religion.

The Samaritans, who still exist today, are also monotheists and have their own copies of the first five books of the bible, the Pentateuch, which differ from the Jewish books. They worshipped and had their own temple on Mt. Gerizim, which had been destroyed by the Jews around 128 BCE, and they said that they were the true keepers of the law. They claimed that the religion practiced by the Jews had been corrupted during the Jewish exile in the Babylon, and that the Samaritans were the ones following the laws as handed down by Moses. As you might imagine, the Jews disagreed with this assessment and said that the Samaritans were the ones who were wrong. Jews and the Samaritans simply did not like each other, and this was not limited to just a small group, this was felt across the board. Some of you may remember back to a sermon pastor Joel preached last fall about Jesus’ encounter with a Samaritan woman in which Jesus calls her a word which is the English equivalent of saying she is a female dog. But, as you also might remember, the Samaritan woman has a faithful response and changes Jesus’ answer. But that story just serves to illustrate that Jews and Samaritans did not like each other, and if you miss that, then you miss the point of this story. So let’s make it a little more modern.

A certain man is on a trip, when he is beaten, stripped and left for dead. Now by chance David Ortiz was passing by, but when he saw the man, he passed by without doing anything. So likewise, Tom Brady was also walking by, but he too passed the man without doing anything. But Alex Rodriguez, or maybe Kobe Bryant, came near and had pity on him and stopped and helped him and made sure he was taken care of. Does that help you too see it in a different way? But really, even that is too tame. Instead let’s say that a certain man is on a trip, when he is beaten, stripped and left for dead. Now by chance Mother Theresa was passing by, but when she saw the man, she passed by without doing anything. Likewise, Martin Luther King, Jr, when he came to the place also passed by without doing anything. But, a member of Al Qaeda came near, and when he saw him, had pity on him, and went to him bandaged his wounds, took care of him, took him to a doctor to be seen and promised the doctor to pay whatever it cost to get the man healthy again. How would you feel then if I was to ask you who was the better neighbor, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, Jr. or a member of Al Qaeda? Is that shocking or upsetting? Is it a sort of a kick in the gut or a slap in the face? That is what it would have been like for the people who first heard Jesus tell this parable. Notice that the lawyer cannot even bring himself to say the Samaritan to answer Jesus’ question about who was the neighbor. Instead he can only say, “The one who showed him mercy.”

Now one of the reasons often given why the priest and the Levite passed by was because of their concerns over remaining ritually pure, and so they couldn’t stop. In other words they put their purity laws over showing compassion to the man. However, most Jewish commentators, and those who have studied 1st century Jewish practices have discounted this reasoning, saying that becoming ritually pure again would be required when they went to the Temple even if they did not stop to help the man, so this could not be a reason. In addition, Jewish law stipulated that they would have been required to stop and assist in burying the body to make sure it was buried by sunset, and that this would have trumped the purity laws. So that simply leaves us with the fact that they saw the man, they ignored him and kept going. The Samaritan, however, we are told was moved with pity, and whatever animosity he may have had for Jews was overwhelmed by his need to take care of the man, to be neighbor.

In 1944, Bob Levine was a 19 year old assigned to the 90th infantry division, when he found himself on d-day surrounded by German soldiers, his leg wounded from a grenade. As he and his fellow soldiers were being led away as prisoners of war, Bob was again hit, this time by allied shelling, and his already wounded leg was shattered. Next thing Bob knew he was lying on a kitchen table turned operating table, with a German doctor standing above him holding Bob’s dog tags and asking in English what the H stood for. The H, of course, identified Bob as Jewish, as a Hebrew. Bob said nothing but thought that he would never live to see his 20th birthday with a German doctor operating on a Jewish American soldier. But, when the anesthesia wore off, he found himself moved again, this time lying in a pile of straw in a barn, with a portion of his leg removed. The doctor, who had been redeployed right after the surgery, also knew that in order to save Bob he had to remove more than just his leg and so he removed Bob’s dog tags so that he would not be identified to the other German soldiers. The doctor did leave Bob with a note explaining what he had done and why he had to remove a portion of his leg, and as a result of the actions of this doctor Bob survived the war. “My story should be shared as much as possible,” Bob said recently, “because people have no idea what war is or what ‘enemy’ means.”

What must I do to inherit eternal life? the lawyer asks Jesus. The lawyer is an expert on the law, and so Jesus turns to him and says what do you read there and so the lawyer quotes first from the Book of Deuteronomy: “You shall love the lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” although the fourth statement about the mind is not in the original, and then he quotes from the book of Leviticus “and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Notice that he does not quote from the ten commandments. In fact, when this story is told in Matthew and Mark, the man asks Jesus what the greatest commandment is, and these are the answers given. But the lawyer wants to know, who is our neighbor?

Laws set boundaries. They establish what is acceptable and what is not, they say who is good and who is bad, and so the lawyer wants to know that his boundaries are okay. He wants to be told that the people he is excluding, the people that his society is excluding are okay to be excluded, but that, of course is not what Jesus tells him. Instead, Jesus says that everyone is neighbor. The Jew is neighbor to the Samaritan and the Samaritan is neighbor to the Jew. To believe that the one person in the story that everyone hates is the one who turns out to be the good one is just unbelievable and totally shatters everyone’s understanding of the kingdom of God, and hopefully it continues to shatter our understanding even today.

Amy Jill Levine, is a New Testament scholar who is also Jewish, which should also shatter our expectations, says “we should think of ourselves as the person in the ditch and then ask ‘is there anyone about whom we’d rather die than acknowledge, ‘she offered help’ or ‘he showed compassion’?’ More, 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. To recognize the shock and possibility of the parable in practical, political and pastoral terms…”

To love one’s neighbor as oneself meant, and still means, rejecting societal standards of who belongs and who doesn’t, of who is okay and who is not, of who is acceptable and who is not, it is to live in the most direct terms into the kingdom of God, it is in fact to see the world as God sees the world – a world without distinction, without borders and without boundaries. As God’s people, as children of God, we are to love without regard and to act through that love to the entire world. It may be one of the hardest things we are called to do for it is just as radical and difficult in our day as it was when Jesus first said it. But Methodists have understood this radical call from our earliest beginnings because we are called to personal holiness, loving God, and we are called to social holiness, loving neighbor. You cannot have one without the other, both are necessary.

The old saying is that good fences make good neighbors, but we know deep down that that’s not true. This came home to me recently during a trip to Plymouth Plantation, where the Indian village is completely open, but as soon you go the English settlement what is the first thing you see? It’s the large stockade fence separating them from the outside and everything that it represents. But mainly it’s about fear, which is almost entirely the only reason why any fence is constructed. Sometimes there are good reasons for fences. When we moved into the parsonage we asked the trustees to put up a fence in the backyard in order to keep the girls away from the pond. A good reason, but it was still a reason driven by fear.

When we let fear dominate our lives and we construct fences, both literally and figuratively to keep out the other, when we construct boundaries and constraints, when we create insiders and outsiders, then we have violated God’s understanding of neighbor. Every act of genocide from the holocaust to Rwanda would never have happened if we all saw the other as neighbor. Wars would never take place if we all saw the other as neighbor. Every act of social injustice would never take place if we only saw the other as neighbor.

Anytime that we try and put restrictions on whom we will love and whom we will not, we have violated God’s message. Anytime that we say that I know God does not love that person then we have missed the gospel message entirely. Anytime that we limit people and try to make them less than human we have violated God’s commandments. Anytime that we see anyone as being excluded from God’s kingdom then we have violated God’s love. God calls us to live lives open to God’s love, which means to live lives without fences or boundaries, to live lives without fear. That is the 1st message delivered after all by the angels about the coming Christ child, “fear not.”

We are to love God with all our heart, all our soul, all our strength and all mind, that is the vertical, and we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, that is the horizontal. That is how we live cross centered lives. You cannot love God without loving neighbor, and you cannot love neighbor without loving God. How do we inherit eternal life? we live cross centered lives. Go and do likewise. Amen.