Ethics For Modern .Christians, Part III John M, Buchanan

How to be a Disciple Without Being Religious Broad Street Presbyterian Church
Luke 10: 25-37 Columbus, Ohio

March 13, 1977

Several years ago a Broadway Musical with the engaging title, How to Succeed in
Business Without Really Trying, parodied the way American corporate structures some-

times reward a person for skills and abilities which have very little to do with the
real business of the corporation,

Finch, you will remember, advances up the ladder on the basis of luck, charm and
endless self-confidence, One of the best - and most significant moments in the play
occurs when in the Executive Washroom, he looks at his own image in the mirror and
breaks into the show-stopper, "I Believe in You",

A few years later a Methodist clergyman, Charles Merrill Smith, wrote a little
book, How to Become a Bishop Without Being Religious, which poked frn at the syndrome
in the institutional church, Even Presbyterians, who have no bishops, knew never-
theleas, what he was talking about,

I should like to add to that impressive library this morning with a contribution
under the title How to Be a Disciple Without Being Religious, sans music, of course,
That is, I believe, the point of the most famous story Jesus ever told - the Parable
of the Good Samaritan,

The setting in St, Luke's Gospel is every bit as significant as the story itself.
One day a lawyer came to Jesus to discuss theology. "Teacher," he asked, "what must
I do to inherit eternal life?" Lawyer means "Scribe", a man whose job it was to know
and interpret the law: the Holy Law of Judaism which contained 613 separate rules
and regulations for every conceivable human situation. If one of those 613 rules
did not apply directly; if there was some question regarding appropriate behavior,
a Scribe interpreted the law, The law described how to be religious: it defined
morality. More than that, the Law itself was regarded as good, To disobey the law
was sinful, To disregard the law's prescriptions for correct behavior was equally
sinful, When the Gospels refer to "sinners", more often than not the people in-
volved are not notorious evildoers, but poor folk who simply didn't care about the
law,

The man who asked the question about inheriting eternal life_knew the law. He
knew that the answer to his questions was the watershed Of Judaism as a formal re-
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ligion, We conclude, therefore, that his purpose probably was to set a rhetorical
trap. In the name of religion, he hoped to entangle and indict, in the court of
public opinion, one who, more and more, was looking like an enemy of established
morality.

Jesus was such a master at this kind of thing, "What do the scriptures say? How
do you read it?" The answer was simple: the lawyer knew the book: "You must love
God with heart, mind, soul, strength and your neighbor as yourself," "Goad," said

Jesus, "Go and do it,"

See how the Lawyer, who had come to discuss theology and in the process trap
Jesus in some heretical liberalism, found himself on the defensive. Members of his
profession today have to admire the subtlety of his next maneuver: he asked another
question, "But who is my neighbor?" Perhaps he thought he could precipitate a
theoretical discourse on the definition of neighbor: perhaps he was still holding

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out for the possibility that Jesus would indict Himself in His own response, In any
event, he shouldn't have asked that question because it gave Jesus the opportunity

to tell a story, In the story the original question, "Who is My Neighbor?" is turned
around and re-phrased" "To Whom am I a Neighbor?" At the end Jesus has moved from
academic speculation to morality: from abstract theology - "How do I inherit life?"
to a rather specific and radical ethic, It was a prescription for being a disciple
without being religious,

You know that beloved story, A man on the notoriously dangerous road from
Jerusalem to Jericho was attacked, beaten, robbed and left to die in the ditch, Two
religious types, a Priest and Levite, passed by, A Samaritan, regarded by purists
as a racial half-breed, and by the orthodox as a religious heretic, stopped, bound
up the man's wounds, transported him to an inn and arranged for his care,

It doesn't require great scholarship to understand that, It says, rather clearly
I think, that following Jesus Christ is something different from and more than, obey-
ing the rules of common decency and orderliness, The Priest and the Levite, a minor
Temple Functionary, were not bad men, They did no wrong. They broke no law, Every-
one here has done the same thing, perhaps with regularity, These two men simply made
a wide circle around the man lying in the ditch and proceded with their journey. Some
New Testament scholars speculate that they were on religious business, and that the
law prohibited their coming in contact with someone who might be unclean, The poor
man in the ditch was naked. They couldn't even tell if he was a Jew, One thing is
certain: the law did not prescribe what to do when one stumbles over an unidentified,
half-dead robbery victim lying beside the road, No law can, Their neat religious
system did not deal with the matter of meeting immediate human need in somewhat
unusual circumstances,

That is first: if we are, in fact interested in following Jesus Christ, which is
to say, in being disciples, we must be prepared to be guided by something other than
the standard and accepted rules of good conduct in our culture, That is not to say
that the common morality is unnecessary or irrelevant, It is simply to acknowledge
that common standards of right behavior are not enough. It is to allow that while
religious rules may define what it means to be religious, discipleship - according
to Jesus of Nazareth - is something different,

Beginning in the New Testament, extending throughout the whole two thousand year
course of Christian history and emerging again in our day, there is a tension be-
tween a legalistic approach to morality and the way of Jesus Christ, His ministry
was punctuated by the conflict with representatives of legalistic religion, He told
His followers that their goodness would have to exceed the goodness of the Scribes
and Pharisees: i.e, the goodness which resulted from obeying the rules, Jewish
Christians insisted that Gentile converts to the Gospel must adhere to the moral and
ceremonial and dietary laws of Judaism, Out of that First Century conflict came St.
Paul's discourses on law and freedom which in his letter to the Galatians reach a
kind of pinnacle called the Magna Charta of Christian Freedom, But that did not
resolve the issue, The Christian Church down across the centuries has consistently
opted for the law as the safest and simplest way to nurture right behavior, '"Do
this and that - don't do this nor that," In an article on the Ambiguity of Biblical

Religion, in the January issue of Theology Today, the Roman Catholic scholar.,..Gregory
Baumy writes, "The roots of legalism are situated in the human psyche: for the legal-

ist mentality is even found in people who have little to do with religion, Unfortun-
ately, religion readily lends itself to a legalist misunderstanding," (p,349).

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The trouble is that when legalism and religion join hands in order to define
morality the way of Jesus inevitably gets swept under the carpet, But He won't allow
it. In the Parable ofthe Good™Saiiaritan He made abundantly clear that His new ethic
was above and beyond law and that, furthermore, a person has to move above the law
even to begin understanding what it means to follow Him as a disciple,

His ethic is defined by the Samaritan and contrasted with the legal correctness
ot the Priest and Levite, It is an ethic of outgoing, extravagant, spontaneous,
loving action, It is an ethic courageous enough to leave legal requirements behind
and take risks, It is an ethic spontaneous enough to stop by the road without thumb-~
ing through the rule book to discover what in the world to do next,

It is an ethic of active love which begins with the ability to identify with
another person: to see, really, the other as a child of God with specific and pain-
fully particular needs, Helmut Thielicke writes; "Love not only looks for resources
to help - it lets us see the misery of our fellow man, Before love sets our hands in
motion it opens our eyes," (How to Believe Again, p.123).

I think that is very much to the point, The sin of the Priest and Levite was one
of omission, They didn't even see - I mean really see - the man in the ditch, Oh,
they probably felt a twinge of compassion or guilt, They probably made a mental note
to get in touch with the authoritics about conditions along the Jeri@fio road, They
may even have organized a Task Force to study the problem and provide input to the
City Council, Those jobs need doing also, But the person is still bleeding to death
beside the road and there is something essential to following Jesus Christ about
breaking through all the red tape, all the institutional systems, and binding up
his wounds,

That's relevant, We are a people who care, Our society generates an abundance
of structures and institutions for the purpose of expressing our concern, But some-
times, I sense, institutional charity walks right by the miserable victims lying in
the ditch, That, by the way, is what is so necessary about the location and minis-
tries of this particular Church, It is terribly easy in our society to "care at a
distance": to serve on a Board of Directors, or write a check and let it go at that,
But here we see them: not the social problem in the abstract, or the object of a
planning chart, but human beings who live and breathe and have feelings and hopes,
although not very many.

The ethic of Jesus insists that we open our eyes and see another human being:
walking down Broad Street in sub-zero weather with no gloves, no socks, no food and
nowhere even to sit down: or sitting at a desk in the office next to us, dying of
loneliness: or across the street, looking for all the world like an example of Better
Homes and Gardens ideal American family but living in despair because communication
doesn't happen anymore: or in the intimacy of a marriage gone stale, where all the
rituals are played to the hilt but a husband and wife have stopped seeing each other
as persons with needs and hurts and hopes,

The ethic of Jesus is one of spontaneous love which begins with the cultivated
ability to see, The person courageous enough to try it may not look very religious
in his or her efforts, That is the point of Jesus’ Parable, He wants disciples
whose highest moral imperative is not the following of someone's rules but the need
of another person,

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So far so good, But, what about the Church? It's one thing to advocate a radical
new ethic for individual Christians, The going gcts considerably rougher when we
suggest that the Church, as a corporate entity, ought to practice this ethic. It's
one thing for the Church to urge people to behave in a certain way in the interest
of following Jesus Christ as individuals, It is an altogether different matter to
give the Church as Church identity and look to it for corporate testimony, The
particularity of Presbyterianism is in this insistance, namely, that the Church is
under the same ethical imperative as individual Christians: that it is the particular
beauty of the Church that it has the equipment and strength to follow Jesus Christ
in ways the individual cannot,

The controversy surrounding Presbyterian mission activity in recent years is
precisely at this point, It has been made infinitely more painful for Presbyterians
by the revival of a kind of religiosity that does not and will not share the dignity
of an honest theology of the Church, There is tremendous appeal in a religious
ethic that focuses on individual behavior and piety and assumeS naively that corpor-
ate, social evil will be defeated by lone individuals bringing their convictions to
bear in the public arena, It is a relief, frankly, to be excused from corporate
responsibility for the establishment of the Kingdom of God,

The danger in making a commitment together to follow Jesus Christ is that we may
not always agree regarding our strategy: knowing Presbyterians as I do, we will not
often agree, We will not always be of one mind about the Church's responsibility
vis a vis hunger, poverty, justice in the world. I have not always agreed with the
stances and programs of the United Presbyterian Church, But I thank God that it has
remained, through the conflict and turmoil of the 60's and 70's, the kind of Church
that will take risks and be vulnerable as it seeks faithfully to follow Jesus Christ,
We may and will continue to disagree about particular strategies, One thing we can-
not do, and that is to ask our Church to stop acting like a church and leave us to
work out our own individual ethical stances, That Presbyterians can never do,

The United Presbyterian Church is engaged in a great effort to renew itself in
mission called the Major Mission Fund, You have heard much about it, Some of you
have made your commitments: others will be telephoned today and in the days follow-
ing. It is not my purpose this morning to repeat what has been said already, You
share my conviction, I trust, that the world needs a church that is strong and brave
and faithful, You know the extent of the need,

I would rather put the entire matter of your response to the Major Mission Fund
in the context of the ethic of Jesus Christ, an Ethic for Modern Christians, I would
rather invite you to consider the people who will be helped and healed in the con-
text of the story about a man who knew what Jesus meant by loving your neighbor,

And then I would ask you to put the whole matter in the context of that question
with which the lawyer began: "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" It
is the question, Everyone asks it sooner or later, What can I do to live - really
live? What is the secret to a life that is worth living, a life full of zest and
vitality, a life fresh with excitement and purpose?

"Teacher," we ask, /'what shall I do to overcome boredom? How can I escape this
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deadly staleness? What the prescription for finding something authentic in the
midst of a culture which works so hard to convince us that real life is using the
right deodorant, serving the right wine, driving the right automobile and getting

7% on our investments?" The revival of fundamentalist religion is the evidence
ee.

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that young people are asking the question as never before! Sect proups with strange
sounding names provide an answer - "give your Life: dedicate” yourself to something:
open your heart: love something enough to die for it and you'll suddenly find out
what your own life is all about," How terribly sad that the staid institutional
Church has allowed the Moonies, the Childrén 6f God, the traveling evangelists to
say that in the face of our own thunderous silence, How sad that we have hidden the
excitement of the ethic of Jesus behind the facade of réTigi6éUS"rules and rituals,

Gerhardt Nebel suggests somewhere that much neurosis is simply the product of
asking the same question as the lawyer about life, not finding an answer, and then
descending into a cycle of introspection and brooding, Victor Frankl, Austrian
psychiatrist, has written a new book The Unconscious God in which he identifies "the
caistential vacuum" as the dominant motif in the Western World, Frankl employs the™
over-used term "meaninglessness" to define it and concludes that the only way out is
to find something or someone about whom we care enough to love and give of ourselves

freely,

Can it be that salvation is as close as the person who needs us? Can it be that
wholeness is as near as someone else's hurt? It may come as somehwat of a surprise,
but that is what Jesus said,

"Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" Who isn't hungry for an
answer to. that.question? Who isn't weary of the inadequate, half-baked sthemeés of
the peace-of-mind merchants? Who wouldn't give anything for life - real life - now?
It is not a matter of obeying more rules, saying more prayers, singing more hymns,
It is, rather, a matter of opening our eyes to the needs of others and then doing
something about them; something loving and lovely, something sacrificial and
generous, something giving and therefore deeply satisfying,

When Jesus told the Parable of the Good Samaritan He was paraphrasing the Gospel,
It doesn't take much interpolation to see us - you and me - as the ones in need, He
is the one who has come and keeps coming to the roadside, He is the one who has
come to live our lives, to feel our pain, to laugh and cry with us, to stand with
us in suffering and to die our death, He is the Good News that God loves and cares
about us: that we are worthy - in His eyes - of the most extravagant love,

Because God is like that, we are called to be like that for others, It is a
radically new ethic of discipleship, and to participate, to live it, to know oneself
loved and to love others - is to usher in a little bit of God's Kingdom on earth,

It is to know the answer to the question, "Teacher, what must I do to inherit
eternal life?"
Amen,

Father, forgive us our wide circles around human need, Forgive us for
neglecting to see and care for those closest to us. Inspire us to love ~ and give,
in the spirit of Him who Loved us and gave Himself for us: even Jesus Christ,

Amen,