A MATTER OF LIFE

SS

May 3, 1992
8:30 and 11:00 a.n. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
mo -Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
i Corinthians 12:4-12
Luke 10:25-37

"...a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when
he saw him, he was moved with pity." -Luke 10:33 (NRSV)

for long in the city is how to deal with homeless people, ad-
dicts, poor people who stand on the corner, Sometimes Singing or
dancing, sometimes intoning a flat litany: "can you spare some
change? Please help the homeless," sometimes aggressively
thrusting themselves into your path, but mostly just Standing,
sitting, " ying there beside the road." You cannot survive with-

Tt is not terribly acute here on Michigan Avenue compared
Say to Calcutta, where a friend of mine, well traveled throughout
the Third World, visited recently and told me he had never, in
his lifetime, seen anything like it, and became physically ill;
or Sudan where thousands of people will die of hunger today be-
Cause of intentional government policy. It is nothing like that,
but even here you must have that Skill, a method, or you will not
get very far down the avenue. So you can, as some do, carry lots
, or

dollar coupons sold at half-price still produce the cash to
burchase cheap wine if that's the object. And some of us, proba-
bly most of us, rather intentionally walk by the man who isa

: the same thing and, particularly when the tourists are about
doing fairly well actually; and in the case of the one who we can
sense has singled us out and may even be walking toward us, we
avert our eyes, look down or straight ahead, tuck in just a bit
tilt our head ever so slightly forward, and walk just a bit
faster. It's the method most of us use, I have observed.

Although sometimes even that doesn't work. As I strode by,
one man snarled at me,--"Have-a-nice day, you bastard!" anq I
confess it made me very uncomfortable and very angry; and then I
turned around to look and make sure it wasn't Jesus,

Around a church in the city you sooner or later hear every-
thing, every conceivable tale of disaster, misfortune, grief and
suffering - sometimes authentic, sometimes the same story or a

slight variation from the one the same man told you the day
before yesterday.

So we develop a skill and in some ways it is a very neces-
sary skill or you would never negotiate half a block without
breaking your heart and emptying your wallet. And I doen't know
about you but I never do it without thinking, for a fleeting
second or so, about the man on his way to Jericho who Saw another

man lying beside the road and who when he came near, was moved
with pity.

The trouble with the Good Samaritan is that he makes us feel
guilty. But his story is actually quite complex and when read
carefully contains a few surprises. The first surprise is that
the story is in fact an answer to a question and the question is

people lying by the roadside?" nor is the question "Who is my
neighbor?" ‘The original question was, "Teacher, what must I do
to inherit eternal life?" and SO our observation ought to focus
first on that and what it is and what the lawyer was really
wanting.

Eternal life - when the lawyer asked Jesus what he had to do
to get some of it, he did not mean merely existence in a celes-
tial paradise after he died. That's too small actually. What he
was asking about was full and Joyful and whole and happy and com-
pletely human life now - in the present; life so thorough in all
its dimensions that death is nothing compared to it; life like we
try to talk about it on Easter and are reduced to Singing hymns
and admiring flowers and holding each other close. Jesus knows
what the question is. It's the oldest question in history -
maybe the best question in history: “How can I live my life as
fully as possible? How can I use it up, enjoy it, invest it...
look back on it one day with a sense - not of emptiness and
futility, but fulfillment, completion?" Jesus knows the ques-~
tion. He gets the lawyer to recite the prescribed answer, which
is "love." "Love God with heart, soul, strength and mind and

neighbor as self," Jesus Says. "Do it and you will be truly and
totally alive."

I suppose the lawyer doesn't want to hear that because he
knows it is true. So he tries to change the subject. He knows
he doesn't love enough, so he tries to alter the agenda. "Who is
my neighbor?" he asks and Jesus, the master storyteller, answers

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in a way that sounds at first like a definition of neighbor; but
the energy of the story is how to be a neighbor because the
original question is still his focus.

So, before you are paralyzed by guilt about the way you fail
to be Samaritan every day, at least consider the fact that he is
not so much a model of good behavior as he is an example of what
it means to be alive - fully, joyfully, humanly alive.

On a notoriously dangerous road a man is mugged, left to
die. A priest and a Levite, religious officials see him and slip
into their urban survival mode, tighten up a bit, look straight
ahead, move actually to the other side so as not to see much
more and walk on. A Samaritan, a social an@ religious outcast,
sees, has compassion, stops, deals with him, binds up his wounds,
carries him to town, arranges for his care, even thinks to ar-
range payment for extended care.

"How can I inherit eternal life?"
"Go and do likewise," said Jesus.

"Don't exaggerate the deficiencies of the Priest and Levite"
warn the New Testament scholars. [See Fred Craddock, Interpreta-
tion, Luke, p. 151] And how the preacher loves to do just that;
hold up these two unimaginative charactersasmodels of selfish-
ness, insensitivity, and sin. Actually, they are very reasonable
people. You and I make decisions like theirs every day of our
lives. It may even be helpful to know that for both of them
there were important reasons for not stopping. If the victim was
a gentile, or worse yet, a dead gentile, the religious officials
would be rendered "unclean" by any physical contact and for the
priest that meant at least a week of unemployment until he could
be purified. He could be a minister unable to preach, a physi-
cian unable to see patients, a counselor unable to see her cli-
ents for a week. Not even to mention the oldest scam on record
which was in fact practiced on that road: a decoy acts hurt,
someone stops, two others appear and hit the one in the act of
trying to help. It happens at Water Tower Place, on buses and
trains every day. Someone appeared to faint on a CTA train and
some of us shouted to the unsuspecting tourist with a Cincinnati
Reds baseball cap on, "Be careful; keep your hand on your wal-

let." So, priest and Levite are not morally reprehensible. They
are normally reasonable, careful people,

And now the second surprise. The priest and the Levite are
the actual victims in the story. If anyone is dead or at least
not fully alive, they are, not the man by the road who, please
notice, retains his anonymity throughout. The Samaritan of
course is gloriously alive. He's the lover; he is full of pas-
Sion, caring, eros, verve, exuberance, love. The ones so caught
up in their religious system, so.driven, so captive to custon,

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fear, obligation that they don't dare risk caring; they are the
ones to keep your eye on, Jesus told the lawyer.

Robert Wuthnow, a sociologist at Princeton University, has
written a number of books about our culture which everybody is
discussing, most recently, Acts of Compassion: Caring for Others
and Helping Ourselves. In that book, Wuthnow observes that
compassion has been an important part of our value system from
the beginning. Today, if we don't learn to care, we'll not make
it. Governor John Winthrop told the Massachusetts Puritans still

on board ship: "We must delight in each other, make others
condition our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and
suffer together." [Wuthnow, p- 9]

Wuthnow reports that 80 million Americans are engaged as
volunteers in some kind of caring activity for an average of five

hours per week and that the value of the tasks performed is $150
billion annually. ;

Wuthnow worries that we are inclined to do good in order to.
feel good. He can't imagine Jesus saying to his disciples:
"Take up your cross and follow me - it!1] make you feel good."
[p- 87] ;

And yet there are undeniable positive effects. Psychology
Poday reported that "caregivers..experience.subtle -but sweet
rewards for caring for frail loved ones." A Gallop Poll revealed
that people who donate money or time to charitable causes score
higher on various measures of self-esteem than those who do not.

Wuthnow concludes that sociologically compassion is a good

. thing. ...It produces a-sense of linkage, a chain of caring, and it
nurtures a very important value in the culture - something called
"common humanity." How important is that?

I think we have seen this week how important it is; that in
a very real sense our society is threatened, not by external
enemies, but by our refusal to care, our blindness to what life
is like for many Americans, our intentional passing by on the
other side of the road.

Ironically, I wrote this sermon on Wednesday morning, went
to O'Hare and got on a plane to Los Angeles. We landed through
the first smoke Wednesday evening... I was there-until early
Friday morning and while that does not make me an expert, I did
see it, experience it closely, smell it, and tried to attend to
the business for which I was there - while ten minutes away
stores were being looted and people were being killed.

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There were several African-American Presbyterians at the
meeting. One of them said to me about the Rodney King verdict,
"Thank you for your concern, but you will never know what it
feels like to be black and in trouble with the police."

Now, police officers do what most of us would not want to
do. They work hard; urban police risk their lives and sometimes
lose them, for not very much money. The lesson here is not that
police are insensitive or racist. The lesson which we must learn
is that police do reflect the way the society thinks.

I recalled the black college professor, waiting for his wife
who was making a speech; he was window shopping, looking at a
jewelry store, and was arrested, roughed up.

And I read this morning about Thaddeus Garrett, a Domestic
Policy Advisor to President Bush, who was picked up by the po-
lice, walking through Embassy Row in jeans and tee shirt. It was
Garrett who this Friday finally told the President, and who was
instrumental in persuading President Bush to acknowledge a denial
of justice which has assaulted every American regardless of
color.

We will be thinking and talking about this for a long time;
but it seems to me that Christians should, today, know in a new
way that the compassion which their Lord taught is absolutely
imperative if we are to live...

- that racism, the fundamental denial of the humanity of
other people because of their race, is still very much with us,
and that there is work to be done;

- that all the looters are not expressing rage, but that

nothing is so arrogant as the refusal to acknowledge that people
are deeply and profoundly hurt;

- and that when the racism which exists in ugly ethnic
humor, for instance, when that racism combines with an economic
philosophy which produces incredible wealth for a few and incred-
ible poverty for many, there is a state of injustice among us and
that unless we repent of that, life - individual lives, but
surely the life of this nation, will remain in mortal danger.

How important is it? Lewis Thomas has written a fine new
book on the human prospect entitled The Fragile Species. "The
future," Thomas believes, "depends on our getting along and
recognizing, celebrating our common humanity." [p. 26]

It's important because sometimes we forget it. The New York
Times last week reviewed a disturbing book, Ordinary Men, Re-
serve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.

It's about a battalion of thirty and forty-year-old men from

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Hamburg, in World War II, too old for conscription, whose job it
was to execute Jews and who did it. How was it possible? How
did the unthinkable happen? After extensive research and inter-
views, the author concludes that -for the people. who:did it, or-:
watched it, "the Jews’ were not: in-the~same human family as they."
That's why it is important to remember the Holocaust - because
ordinary people forgot for a while.

It's important to remember as well that compassion is corpo-
rate as well as individual; that societies are caring or uncar-
ing, as societies. Most scholars quip that if the Samaritan
found another man along side the road the next day, on his return
trip, he would have been remiss if he did not at least inquire of
the political authorities about conditions on the Jericho Road.
So it begins immediately with your personal encounter with human
need; but at some point, common humanity and common morality
dictate a broader societal encounter. It is private and corpo-
rate. It is tutoring a youngster and voting for representatives
who will take seriously public education, and housing and employ-
ment and health care. We need a. thousand "Points of Light" and
we need a power source ~ a spirit of caring corporately for human
beings in this country who are not now and will never be touched
by acts of private benevolence - the chemically dependent, the
crack baby who never makes it to the hospital to be rocked, the
AIDS victim dying alone, the mentally ill homeless whose behavior
itself drives away even. the mostpatient and ucaring: volunteer,
the children who do not: vote:and: doyvnot-contribute-to Political
Action Committees and who pay the price for our unwillingness to
care, our selfishness, our lack of compassion.

For some of us the point of contact with this story of the
Good Samaritan is the person who was set upon by robbers, beaten,
stripped, left to die. For some of us, life has been hard and
cruel: set upon by forces more powerful than we, pushed around,
punched, assaulted, ignored - some of us know what it means to be
lying by the side of the road. And there is a sense in which all
of us, sometime or another, know that. And the Gospel is that
Jesus the Good Samaritan comes and kneels by our side and binds
up our wounds and cares for us completely and ultimately.

But perhaps for most of us, the point of contact is with the
two people who walked by, such ordinary people, caught up in the
busyness of living, captives, not of evil forces, but their jobs,
their life-style, their religion, so determined and busy they” -
didn't have time or inclination to love God or neighbor or self
for that matter.

They are the victims, the-oneswho-are*missing’ life. And so
are we, I fear, to the degree their behavior mirrors our own.

The Good Samaritan - the lover - is alive.

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Who or what is most precious to you? The person who gives
you gifts, the business that pays your salary, the account that
generates an income stream? Not really. According to this story
- according to the one who told it - the most important person in
your life, the most precious institution, is the one that stimu-
lates you to love and give and to feel passion and pain and joy.
and to weep tears of happiness and sorrow.

Of course you cannot empty your purse every time you see
someone in need. But do give it a thought. Try it sometime.
Give your heart, give your all; love someone - some needy person,
some cause, your nation, this city, the Gospel of Christ, your
church even - so much that you feel pain and hunger in yourself
and anger. Love someone, some cause, so much that you do stop in
your tracks and open your heart and your life.

Do it, he promised - and you - even you - will live..
+ +t tte te tt

God of compassion, forgive us for forgetting that we are all
your children.

Free us to care, and in our caring to live fully; through
Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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