For
those of you who don’t know Kate and I
have been on a delayed honeymoon, cruising the Caribbean,
and I’m going to flaunt that for all its worth today. We had a great time for a
week on sunny beaches and reading outside and, of course, stuffing ourselves
with food on a boat that didn’t break down; it was all just about perfect. But there
is one thing that happens whenever we travel that doesn’t thrill me, even
though admitting it might make me out to be a bit of a vacation scrooge. I
don’t like talking with new people. Well, you might say, that’s me just being a
good Scandinavian Lutheran, but it’s not that I don’t like meeting new people;
instead, it’s tiring to have specific conversations about life back home—you
know how these conversations go. Where are you from? Where’s that? That far
north? Do you have polar bears? And then, inevitably, what do you do?
Now,
most of you aren’t pastors and so you have the luxury of not saying what I
have to say, but I am, so let me tell you: it is no fun. I know what’s going
to happen: I’m going to tell these people that I’m a pastor and they are going
to respond in one of three ways. #1) They are going to tell me their whole life
history with the church or their history of why they don’t believe in God and
why I’m an ignorant person for doing what I do, or #2) They are going to start
making excuses for why they don’t go to church as often as they should, or #3)
The conversation is going to end abruptly and awkwardly. Honestly, none of
these options thrill me.
Thankfully,
on this cruise we had some pretty good conversations, possibly because the
people we talked with were largely sitting next to us at dinner and didn’t have
a choice to go anywhere else, but regardless we enjoyed it. However, I have a
whole host of awkward conversation stories after telling people what I do. One person,
upon learning I worked in the church, went on a thirty minute rant about the Da
Vinci Code in which I got in maybe five words; another person once tried to
convert me to being a Roman Catholic. But the one that I want to bring up
today—and the purpose for this long, rambling dissertation—is a conversation I
had some years ago with a man whom I unfortunately told I worked in the church.
When he heard those words it was like I lit a fire under him and I knew immediately
that I was in trouble, but I wasn’t sure at first if he was going to launch
into the history of his conversion or punch me in the face. Sometimes I almost
prefer the latter because it’s less painful. As it turned out, this man had a
ready-made tirade against non-Bible-believing Christians, by which he meant—as
far as I could tell—any Christian who didn’t believe exactly the same things he
did.
Finally,
at some point in his rambling speech the man said, “Every word in the Bible is
true and just as important as every other word.” And it was at that moment that
something inside of me just couldn’t take it anymore. It’s just not true. Not
every word is as important as every other word. In fact, that’s a really
dangerous way to read the Bible. If every word is as important as every other word
I should be preaching just as much on levitical laws and dimensions of the
tabernacle as I am about Jesus—there are almost as many verses in the Bible
dedicated to the size and purpose of the temple as there are about Jesus. So, I
was preparing myself to say something about this to the guy and I got about as
far as saying, “Well, actually…” when he cut me off and started on another
subject. But that moment stuck with me. I realized in that conversation that it’s
a problem to believe that all of scripture is some uniform set of rules that
are equally applicable every moment of everyday to all people. It’s just not
true; it was never meant to be that way; it’s a misuse of the Bible.
When
you look at the Gospels—and yes, I’m finally getting to today’s readings—we
have precious few examples of Jesus interpreting scripture. Every so often we
have Jesus being the hard-nosed re-enforcer of the law, but that’s about it,
except for a few cases like today’s reading of the Good Samaritan, and Martha and Mary, in which Jesus does something interesting: he interprets
scripture against other scripture. Think about the story of the Good Samaritan
for a moment. It’s easy to fast-forward to the moral without considering what
it is that Jesus is doing in telling this story. The priest and the Levite pass
by a man, hurt on the side of the road. They don’t pass by because they are
selfish but because they are pious; their religious instruction (from the Hebrew Bible) tells them that this man is unclean and, by virtue of their
position, they cannot touch him. Even if they’d like to help they felt
compelled by scripture not to stop. Now, the Samaritan had no such
restrictions—he wasn’t a leader in the synagogue; he wasn’t even Jewish!—so,
naturally, he stops and to help.
To
most of us it’s obvious that the Samaritan is being the neighbor, but if we’re
lifting up all scripture as equally important then the Samaritan is just as bad
as the Priest and the Levite. They are all stuck between two different
laws—purity laws and love of neighbor—and they can’t follow both. Importantly,
Jesus prefers one of these laws: he suggests that one is more important than
the rest. He begins this story by naming the most important law: “Love the Lord
your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your
strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” This is the law
that trumps all laws. If the question is between religious purification and
loving your neighbor; it’s not a choice of equally important things. You love
your darned neighbor. This is why I was bothered by what that man ranting at me
once upon a time was saying. All of scripture cannot be equally important.
Jesus himself says that some scripture is the most important. All of it is
there for a reason, but not all of it is binding every moment of our lives.
Some of it was written for specific moments in time that have passed and other
parts are laws that apply to everybody in every circumstance. Most important
are these simple, overarching guidelines: Love God; love your neighbor.
Everything we should do as Christians need to pass through that lense, and
honestly, it’s not that hard.
We
make it hard because we are too concerned with righteousness, like the priest
and the Levite. We make it hard because we want to lift up all the good work
we’ve done, like Martha. We make it hard because we want to slice and dice who
is our neighbor and who is not; we want to think that only those who look like
us or sound like us are our neighbors. All of us do this—every one of us. We
want to focus our attention on people who are familiar, not people who are
strange or foreign. But even in the telling of this story Jesus flips all that
upside down. Who is it that acts like a neighbor? The Samaritan. In the
Gospels, Samaritans have already rejected Jesus; the Samaritans are friends to
nobody, and yet, the Samaritans are capable of being great neighbors, because
being a good neighbor does not require social status or racial or cultural
preference.
Love
God; love neighbor: The rest is circumstantial. Jesus tells us that all of
scripture is not equally important. Not all commandments stand on the same
universal footing. In this Lenten season we move toward Jerusalem with Jesus—toward the cross and the
resurrection—events at the heart of our faith. Those events matter to us more
than others and we shouldn’t be ashamed of that; they are not equal with a
random story from Chronicles. So, the next time I have somebody sidle up to me
and start ranting about equal importance of everything in scripture I am
readier now than I was then, and I hope I say, “No, not all of scripture is
equal. Love God; love your neighbor. Death. Resurrection. That’s what matters;
the rest is commentary.”
But
then again, maybe I should just keep nodding; maybe that is the love my
neighbor needs.
No comments:
Post a Comment