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Several
weeks ago when I took a week of continuing education I met five delightful
men. They are priests of the
Mar
Thoma
Church
.
I had to admit that I had never heard of the
Mar
Thoma
Church
. Regi, Matthew, George, Minoy, and Noble are from
India
. Their
accents are pretty thick and I had to listen very intently to understand
what they said, but what they had to share with us was fascinating.
If
we go way, way back to the earliest history of the church, actually back
before we could rightfully call it a church, we remember the
apostle Thomas, the one who is
called the doubter. Tradition tells us that he took the message of the
love of Christ to
India
, where he
arrived in the year 52. My new friends are priests of the church he
founded. They had many refreshing perspectives to offer us American
Episcopalians, and as we studied Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians
they offered insights and experiences that enriched our understanding.
One
of the thorniest issues Paul dealt with in this letter was that the new
Christians of Corinth were not getting along. They lived as a tiny
minority in a very pluralistic society. They weren’t altogether sure,
and they certainly were not of a single mind as to how the customs of
the culture impacted this very embryonic worship. Generally the question,
at least as posed to Paul by whoever wrote to him blowing the
whistle on his fellow parishioners was what are the standards? I mean, how
do we know when someone has crossed the line?
The
Christians of Corinth had several thorny issues. It seems the rich people
brought lavish food and drink to their gatherings and wouldn’t
share with the poor. People were turning a blind eye to some incredibly
scandalous behavior so as not to create waves. And they wondered
what to do with food offered to pagan idols. That one didn’t much strike
a chord with us. It felt like an intellectual exercise until one of our
new friends spoke up.
They
said, kindly and gently, that that might not be a problem for us in the
US
, but it was a very real issue for them. Their neighbors and friends
were Hindu, Jainist, Buddhist, and Muslim. When December rolled around
their friends reminded them that Christmas was coming and that they
were looking forward to the cake they hoped would be shared with them. And
they reciprocated whenever it was the festival of Shiva or Ganesh,
and brought special treats to their Christian neighbors. And so the
question that faced the Corinthians also presents itself to twenty-first
century
Christians in
India
. On the one hand, we know that there is only one God, one true God, and
that we honor and worship him, and that these
statues of other gods are nothing but statues crafted by human hands of
wood or metal or plastic. The friends who offer the treats are important
to them, and so they face the dilemma: do they accept the delicacies and
enjoy them – they made clear that one does not throw away food in
India
– or do they insult their friends because the food was dedicated to
false gods? The question, stated simply, is what is the standard?
That
is the question at the heart of today’s readings from the Prophet Amos
and the Gospel According to Luke. Amos is pretty darned clear.
Prophets could not afford to be subtle. Amos was raising the alarm to the
northern kingdom that if they did not take radical action and get right
with God they were about to lose everything precious to them, as they did
in 722 BC when the Assyrian empire them out forever. Amos gave
them the image of the plumb line, a piece of string with a weight on the
end of it which a builder would use as the standard of verticality against
which to relate all other angles of a building. The plumb line is a
certain and secure reference point, and it insures the soundness of all
else that it built.
The
lawyer who confronts Jesus on the road to
Jerusalem
is in essence asking for a plumb line in a more complex world. We’re all
too familiar with
lawyer jokes of our day and we tend to cast him in that light. But this
man is a serious student of the Torah, not an ambulance chaser.We’re too
quick to believe that he is adversarial rather than sincere in his
request. In fact he asks the same question as the man we know as the rich
young ruler,
and my suggestion is that we give them both the benefit of the doubt and
assume that they were asking with a pure heart, Teacher,
what must I do
to inherit eternal life?
His
exchange with Jesus is not testy. He knows the law, but he wants more. We
are told he goes on in an effort to justify himself. The word
‘justify’
is key. It is exactly the same word we use when we talk about the plumb
line. It is about measuring ourselves in relationship to a known standard.
It is bringing ourselves back to our center. He listens patiently to
Jesus’ story, and in the end he gives the correct answer as to who was
the true and
merciful neighbor even though he could not force himself to utter the
word, ‘Samaritan.’
Psalm
85 says, ‘Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace
have kissed each other.’ The challenge of today’s lessons is that it
is
not a case of either/or. Our call as followers of Christ is not to embrace
mercy at the expense of righteousness and certainly not to stick to the
letter
of the law and let the chips fall as they may. It is to trust that there
is a way, that God will provide a way for
us if we are faithful and if we relinquish
our need to be in control so that the plumb line of Amos and the mercy of
the outrageously kind Samaritan will coexist and challenge us to become
ever more Christlike.
The
term ‘good Samaritan’ has become trite. It slips off our tongue too
easily. The scout who helps an old lady cross the road is a good
Samaritan.
The person who hands a homeless person a cold bottle of water is a good
Samaritan. We have the Good Samaritan law, which was enacted after
the paparazzi failed to rescue Princess Diana in favor of getting their
photo ops, which was the charge against the Seinfeld cast in the finale of
the
comedy series and landed them in jail. We don’t understand the power of
the term. How about the good Al Qaida, how about the good pimp, how
about the good serial killer or child molester? Are they distasteful?
Things we shouldn’t say in church? No more to us than the good Samaritan
was
to Jesus’ audience.
In
essence, the point of the story is that if you don’t have mercy the
rules mean nothing. It doesn’t matter who you are, what social class you
belong
to, you are called to show love and mercy. The Greek word we translate as
‘mercy’, ‘eleos’, means
much more than our sense of evenness. It is
truly vast. It is without boundaries or conditions. And the point of the
story is also that there is a standard and that it does have meaning. God
gives
us something to measure ourselves against, and that is Jesus himself.
We
see the picture of him hanging in the foyer of the
Parish
Life
Center
, and we find the little squares where we are, where our children are and
our
friends are, and we are looking at the standard we are to measure up to.
Mercy and justice are not an either/or. Do we err on the side of mercy or
of justice? And the answer is an unequivocal yes.
Imagine
that you are one of my new friends, a priest of the Mar Thoma church in
southwestern
India
, and the mother of your daughter’s best friend,
the family who lives two doors away and who are Hindu rings your doorbell
and proudly presents you with
whatever it is that the recipe has been
handed down for endless generations for this festival of the god Indra,
and her eyes sparkle as she hands you the heirloom plate.What do you do?
Our new friends wrestle with this dilemma, and they do the best they can
imagine. They thank their friend. They accept the dish. They honor the
spirit
of the gift. And when the door is closed, they take it into the heart of
their home and they lift their eyes to the Lord their God and they ask the
Lord
Jesus to bless this food. And it may not be cut and dried, and in the end
it may not be ‘right’ but it is a gift received in love and respect.
And
as they enjoy the food that was given with joy, there truly is no
Christian or Hindu, no Buddhist or Muslim, no Indian or American, no Jew
nor
Samaritan, no male nor female. Being a neighbor is seeing the Christ
center in the other. Mercy is nothing less than seeing with the eyes of
Christ.
Go, as he said, and do likewise.
Amen.
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