Sermon delivered Sunday, July 24, 2016 (The Eighth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 12, Year C (Track 2)), at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
Sermon Text: Luke 11:1-13
“Lord, teach us to pray,” the disciples ask. “Teach us to pray.”
Jesus responds by giving them an outline of the kinds of things they should pray for and then tells them a parable about the efficacy of prayer. The fact that he tells this parable in response to their question about how to pray leads me to believe that maybe the disciples were asking out of a sense that they weren’t doing things right, that Jesus might know a different way to pray that would get them better results. “How can we get our prayers answered” seems to be the underlying question, not just “teach us to pray.”
Jesus’s answer to them is: just keep asking. He says to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.”
Although the friend initially turns down the request, he ultimately gives in because the person knocking at his door just won’t give up. Jesus’s message seems to be: if you know that persistence and constant asking can be effective in finally getting what you want from other broken and sinful human beings, who do not always have your best interests at heart, how much more should you be certain that God, who loves you and does have your best interests at heart, will give you what you want if you are persistent in asking?
This parable is unique to Luke, but Luke links it with a saying of Jesus that appears in some form or another in all four Gospels: “ask, and it will be given to you.” The same exact words appear in Matthew in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:7-8). Mark and John do not have this exact passage, but the same theme appears in those Gospels as well. “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours,” Jesus says in chapter 11 of the Gospel of Mark (Mark 11:24). And in John 14, Jesus promises the disciples, “If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.” (John 14:14)
These passages seem to suggest that all we have to do is ask, and God will give us whatever we want. They can easily lend themselves to a “vending machine” view of God, where all we need to do is insert prayer, press D4, and whatever we have prayed for will promptly be deposited into the receptacle at the bottom of the machine. But I expect that most of us have found that prayer does not always work that way. It does not seem to be as easy as “ask, and you shall receive,” as “select your desired outcome and it will be delivered to you, no questions asked.” Although sometimes our prayers do seem to be answered exactly as we have asked, most of us have plenty of examples of times when we asked for something from God and did not receive it.
This is not a new problem for the “modern believer;” the earliest Christian communities already recognized that they did not always get everything they asked for from God. The author of the letter of James deals with this issue by arguing that the people are not receiving what they ask for because they are asking wrongly, because their desires are not in line with the will of God. James 4, verses 2-3, says this: “You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.” James’s answer for why some prayers go unanswered is that people are asking for the wrong things for the wrong reasons. That can be a helpful interpretation when we know deep down that our motives in asking for the things we are asking for are probably not the most godly, that they may be motivated by selfish desires. In those cases, we can accept that our prayers are not answered because we were not asking for the right things. But what about the cases in which we ask for something that we believe to be in line with the will of God, when we ask for the very things God has promised us, like life and health and justice and mercy and resurrection and peace, and we do not receive them?
One need only turn on the news in the past few weeks to find plenty of examples of unanswered prayer. “Oh, please, Jesus, don’t tell me he’s dead,” Philando Castile’s girlfriend prayed on the video she took after he was shot by a police officer at a routine traffic stop. And that prayer cut right to the heart of so many of us because we too have prayed that prayer. “Please, Jesus, no.” We know the pain of crying out to God, “NO,” of praying earnestly that whatever horrific thing that is happening in front of us would somehow be undone, and yet the situation remains unchanged. God seems to be silent.
Jesus tells the disciples that they will be able to heal in his name, and in the Gospels and the Book of Acts we have stories of the disciples healing the sick and raising the dead, but I have never known a Christian who was able to literally raise the dead. The prophets constantly tell us that God has promised to “restore the fortunes of Zion,” and yet the conflict in Jerusalem and the surrounding areas continues unabated. The prophets tell us that God wants “justice to roll down like waters,” but we see oppression and injustice continuing in our own society and around the world. So how are we to reconcile these unanswered prayers with Jesus’s words that “if in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it”? That “everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened”?
Again, this is not a new question. The biblical authors also struggled with unanswered prayers. The psalmists asked, “How long, O Lord?” How long will you hide your face from us, how long will you not respond to our prayers, to our cries for help? As we survey the violence that has wracked our country and the world in recent weeks and months, the biblical prophets give voice to our collective weariness and grief. The prophet Habakkuk asks, “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save?” (Habakkuk 1:2) Job cries out to God, “Even when I cry out, ‘Violence!’ I am not answered; I call aloud, but there is no justice” (Job 19:7). In Psalm 22, the psalm Jesus quotes while dying on the cross, the psalmist says, “O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer. By night as well, but I find no rest” (Psalm 22:2).
In figuring out how to deal with the agony of unanswered prayer, the biblical prophets are a good place to turn, because they know that pain themselves, deeply, intimately, as evidenced in these and many other passages. And what do they do? They express their anguish about unanswered prayer to God, not only to other people. Significantly, they never take the step that so many people do today, to assume that the fact of unanswered prayer must mean that God does not exist. The biblical writers “keep the faith” even in the midst of unanswered prayer, even when God does not turn out to be their own personal divine vending machine. They stay in relationship to God and express their anguish to God, even if no answers are forthcoming.
They also remember the times God has answered prayer and how many blessings they have received from God. In the same chapter as Job cries out that there is no justice and his prayers are not answered, he goes on to say that “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth” (Job 19:25). Immediately after the verse in Psalm 22 about crying to God but receiving no answer, the psalmist goes on to say, “Yet you are the Holy One… our forefathers put their trust in you; they trusted, and you delivered them… you are he who took me out of the womb, and kept me safe upon my mother’s breast” (Psalm 22:3-4, 9). In the midst of laments about unanswered prayer in the Bible, there is almost always a recall of times that prayer has been answered, when we asked and it was given to us, when we sought and did find, when we knocked and the door was opened to us.
A priest mentor of mine once told me that when people come to her and say, “I’ve lost my faith,” she asks them, “When did you last see it?” – the same kind of question you’d ask someone if they were looking for a lost wallet. You had it with you at some point, so where did you last see it? When did you last know, without a shadow of a doubt, that God was with you? That God loves you? That God has your best interests at heart? Because just like that lost wallet, if you retrace your steps, you can find it again.
Jesus never promised us a life free from pain and suffering. But he did promise “to be with us always, even until the end of the age.” We may never have a satisfactory answer for why God leaves some prayers unanswered, even those prayers that are for the very things we believe God himself wants for us and for the world. But that need not stop us from affirming those times that God has answered prayer, that we have felt God’s presence, that we have seen God’s hand at work guiding our lives. We can hold the two in tension with one another and, with the biblical prophets, continue to cry out in our grief, confident that God is still there.
Sunday, July 24, 2016
Sunday, July 10, 2016
Who is the Samaritan? A call to see beyond the divides
Sermon delivered Sunday, July 10, 2016 (The Sixth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 10, Year C (Track 2)) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
“Who is my neighbor?”
“Who is my neighbor?”
I know that I’m supposed to love God and love my neighbor, says the lawyer, but who is my neighbor? Who is it, exactly, who I’m supposed to love?
Have you ever noticed that Jesus doesn’t actually answer that question? In his clever way, Jesus is always doing that, somehow sidestepping the question people are asking to answer another question they’re not asking but should be. Giving them the answer they need rather than the answer they seek.
So when the lawyer asks, “Who is my neighbor,” Jesus sees that what is behind the lawyer’s question is, as the scripture tells us, a need to “justify himself.” The lawyer is actually more concerned about himself and his own personal salvation – what he needs to do to “inherit eternal life” – than he is with anyone else’s wellbeing. The very fact that he even asks, “who is my neighbor” shows that he has not quite gotten the point of the commandment.
But Jesus doesn’t answer him in a straightforward way. He doesn’t say, “Everyone is your neighbor. All lives matter. You must love everyone.”
Instead, he tells a story that gets right to the heart of the lawyer’s biases, of his need to divide the world into “us” and “them,” to figure out who’s in and who’s out, to determine who is “worthy” of our love and who is not.
He tells a story about someone who is in need, someone who has been hurt and has been left vulnerable, someone who has been a victim of violence. Interestingly, Jesus does not tell us anything about the person who was hurt, besides the fact that he was “a man.” He doesn’t tell us anything about the man’s ethnicity, religion, profession, political affiliation, or any other marker of identity. But he does tell us about some identity markers of the people who come across him on the road. The two who pass by the hurt man, who even cross over to the other side of the road to avoid coming into contact with him, were of the highly respected classes of Jewish society, the priests and Levites, the “good people,” the “righteous people,” the people who knew the answer to the lawyer’s question “what must I do to inherit eternal life” backwards and forwards, the ones who talked all day long about loving God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind, and loving your neighbor as yourself – but they walked right past this man in need, this person who had been hurt, attacked, this victim of violence – and they did nothing. They said nothing. They avoided the pain.
The person who stops to help him is a Samaritan, and this word has become so synonymous with “good” in our society because of the ways this parable has influenced popular culture that we miss the fact that “Good Samaritan” most likely sounded like an oxymoron to the audience to whom Jesus was speaking.
The Samaritans were rivals, enemies, of Jesus’s community. But contrary to how they often are portrayed, they were not an entirely different ethnic or religious group, another nation like the Egyptians or the Assyrians. They were actually another sect of Judaism, who had different ideas about where and how the God of Israel should be worshipped, and who claimed to be the true, most authentic representation of the religion of Israel from before the Israelites were exiled into Babylon. The Samaritans were the folks who managed to avoid the exile and stayed in the land and continued the practices as they had been going on before the exile, and when the other folks returned from exile, a lot of things had changed about how they practiced the faith, and a conflict began.
It was an internal fight, and we all know how those can be all the more difficult and painful. A modern equivalent for us in the Episcopal Church might be the conflict between us and the “Anglicans,” the American Episcopalians who left the Episcopal Church to affiliate with other parts of the Anglican Communion.
Think about the vitriol and bitterness that comes out of some people in our denomination when they talk about “the Anglicans.” That’s probably something similar to how the people in Jesus’s community talked about “the Samaritans.” They were the people who didn’t “get it” religiously, who were doing things all wrong, who were clearly not as “enlightened” as “we” are in all things religious.
And yet, in Jesus’s story, it is a Samaritan who stopped to help someone in need. Jesus holds up the Samaritan as the example of what it means to live out the essential elements of the faith. Jesus uses a person from the group most unlikely to be seen as sacred, holy, or righteous, from the group that is hated and vilified, from the group who is “the other” and says, “Look at this. This person gets it. You, with your focus on ‘who is my neighbor,’ you don’t get it. But precisely the person you assume is the problem, they get it.”
So the question for us, then, is not “who is my neighbor,” but “who is the Samaritan”? Who is our “other,” the one in whom it is most difficult for us to see the face of God?
Think about that for a moment. Who do you consider the enemy, the other, the problem? We all have those people in our minds, no matter how much we like to profess that we “love everyone.” There is always someone that, despite what we say outwardly, inwardly we find ourselves seething with anger toward that person or that group. Now, consider Jesus’s story with that person in the role of the Samaritan.
Close your eyes for a moment and picture this. A man is beaten, robbed, left for dead, shot and bloodied, perhaps just down the road on MacArthur Boulevard. And several people from your group, people who look like you, talk like you, think like you, believe like you, maybe other Episcopalians, maybe people from this church, they walk right past him and do nothing. But then this person, this person who is part of that group that you consider the problem, the other, the enemy, this person who stirs up anger and negative emotions in your heart whenever you think of them, that person walks up, sees the hurt person, and stops to help. They don’t avoid the pain. They get up close and personal. They use their jacket to try to stop the flow of blood. They pick him up in their car and drive him to a hospital. They pay his medical bills, spending up to about a quarter of their salary for that week on this person they’ve never met before in their life.
What does it feel like to imagine that person, part of that group that you have such difficulty feeling compassion for, doing something compassionate? What emotions ran through your body as you saw that scene? And how does the lawyer’s question, “who is my neighbor?” sound different to you now?
History is full of these stories. In spite of the divisions that pit one group against another, there are always people who are able to see beyond the divides and recognize our common humanity. Whether it’s Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who saved thousands of Jews from death during the Holocaust, or Keisha Thomas, the black woman who threw herself over a white man at a KKK rally to protect him from counter-protestors who had turned violent, shouting, “Kill the Nazi!,” or Nick Kelton, one of the inmates who broke out of a holding cell in a Parker County, Texas courthouse last month to save a guard who had collapsed from a heart attack, these people would have never thought to ask the question, “Who is my neighbor?” They saw human need, and they acted. No matter who the person was who was in need.
When interviewed by the press, Nick Kelton acknowledged that the inmates realized that they could have potentially lost their own lives in trying to help the guard.
“We were worried they were going to come with guns drawn on us,” he said, and indeed, the deputies who heard the commotion the inmates were making assumed a fight had broken out, and when they arrived and saw inmates broken out of their cell surrounding an unconscious guard, the first thing that went through their minds was probably not that these inmates were trying to help that guard. But the deputies exercised restraint, and they herded the inmates back into the cell, and assessed the situation before responding with more violence, and all parties involved came out alive.
When asked why they did this, Kelton gave a surprising response.
“Cause that’s a good man,” he said, pointing out toward the hallway where the guard had been sitting. “He saves lives.”
He elaborated further, “I mean, it never crossed my mind… whether he’s got a gun or a badge, if he falls down, I’m gonna help him.”
Another inmate added, “It just seems natural to me.”
Keisha Thomas expressed a similar sentiment when asked why she acted to protect a man who represented an ideology that saw her as inferior.
“Violence is violence,” she said. “Nobody deserves to be hurt, especially not for an idea.”
She also indicated that her own experience of being the victim of violence motivated her to help.
“I knew what it was like to be hurt,” she said. “The many times that happened, I wish someone would have stood up for me.”
She also acknowledged how violence can be a vicious cycle, and how necessary it is to intervene to prevent the cycle from spiraling out of hand.
“Let’s say they had killed him or hurt him really bad,” she says. “How does the son feel? Does he carry on the violence?”
As it happened, a man in a coffee shop one day came up to her and said thank you. “What for?” she said. “That was my dad,” he said.
In the midst of the divide and turmoil that has shaken our country this week, there will be no way forward without solidarity across the historic divides.
Forty eight years ago, Martin Luther King gave a sermon the night before his death, a sermon in which he commented on this parable of the Good Samaritan. He said that in fighting for justice, we must be willing to develop “a dangerous kind of unselfishness.” The people who didn’t stop to help the man on the road might have been worried that the robbers were still nearby, that their own lives could have been in danger if they stopped. Dr. King said that when they saw man on the side of the road, they asked the question, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?”, and it was their fear that kept them from acting. But the Samaritan asked a different question. He asked, “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
In his context in Memphis in 1968, Dr. King was fighting for the rights of the sanitation workers who were on strike, and he asked the congregation gathered to consider that situation in light of this parable:
“[T]he question before you tonight… [is] [n]ot, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?” Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?" The question is, "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question.”
And for us, today, this week, the question is not, “If we stop to stand up for black men who are murdered at a disproportionate rate by police, what will happen to us? To our jobs? To our friendships?” The question is, “If we do NOT stand up and say that Black Lives Matter just as much as any other life, if we do NOT stand up for our black brothers and sisters – and in an increasingly multiracial world, that “brother” and “sister” rhetoric is becoming increasingly less metaphorical and more literal – what will happen to them?” What would have happened if those inmates in Texas looked less like the white guard and deputies who had authority over them and more like my cousin Kaliq, son of a white mother and a black father, whose dark skin and afro would have made him “other” to those in authority? Would that situation have ended with everyone still alive and unharmed?
On Thursday, Ric Hudgens, a poet and pastor in Evanston, Illinois, just outside Chicago, posted this poem to his blog:
What It Will Take (Poem)
My eighty-year old neighbor,
a man of deep, abiding faith,
now frail and bent with age,
who marched
when marching made a difference,
once upon a time
late at night
heard a yell
from our alley.
A black man
screamed for mercy
as policeman raised their clubs.
My neighbor left his bed,
entered the alley,
threw his body over his neighbor
making himself a shield.
The police stopped.
This is what it will take.
White men
throwing our bodies
in between.
Making them break us
before
they break our brothers.
If there’s anyone in the world who should understand this, it is we who call ourselves Christians. For we follow a savior who also “threw his body in between,” who allowed himself to be murdered rather than respond to violence with violence, who sacrificed himself for a world that rejected him. Who died to save not just his friends, but those who considered themselves his enemies. Who called us to not be afraid, to see beyond the divides, to love God and to love neighbor, and to show mercy. He has called us to “go and do likewise.”
“Who is my neighbor?”
“Who is my neighbor?”
I know that I’m supposed to love God and love my neighbor, says the lawyer, but who is my neighbor? Who is it, exactly, who I’m supposed to love?
Have you ever noticed that Jesus doesn’t actually answer that question? In his clever way, Jesus is always doing that, somehow sidestepping the question people are asking to answer another question they’re not asking but should be. Giving them the answer they need rather than the answer they seek.
So when the lawyer asks, “Who is my neighbor,” Jesus sees that what is behind the lawyer’s question is, as the scripture tells us, a need to “justify himself.” The lawyer is actually more concerned about himself and his own personal salvation – what he needs to do to “inherit eternal life” – than he is with anyone else’s wellbeing. The very fact that he even asks, “who is my neighbor” shows that he has not quite gotten the point of the commandment.
But Jesus doesn’t answer him in a straightforward way. He doesn’t say, “Everyone is your neighbor. All lives matter. You must love everyone.”
Instead, he tells a story that gets right to the heart of the lawyer’s biases, of his need to divide the world into “us” and “them,” to figure out who’s in and who’s out, to determine who is “worthy” of our love and who is not.
He tells a story about someone who is in need, someone who has been hurt and has been left vulnerable, someone who has been a victim of violence. Interestingly, Jesus does not tell us anything about the person who was hurt, besides the fact that he was “a man.” He doesn’t tell us anything about the man’s ethnicity, religion, profession, political affiliation, or any other marker of identity. But he does tell us about some identity markers of the people who come across him on the road. The two who pass by the hurt man, who even cross over to the other side of the road to avoid coming into contact with him, were of the highly respected classes of Jewish society, the priests and Levites, the “good people,” the “righteous people,” the people who knew the answer to the lawyer’s question “what must I do to inherit eternal life” backwards and forwards, the ones who talked all day long about loving God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind, and loving your neighbor as yourself – but they walked right past this man in need, this person who had been hurt, attacked, this victim of violence – and they did nothing. They said nothing. They avoided the pain.
The person who stops to help him is a Samaritan, and this word has become so synonymous with “good” in our society because of the ways this parable has influenced popular culture that we miss the fact that “Good Samaritan” most likely sounded like an oxymoron to the audience to whom Jesus was speaking.
The Samaritans were rivals, enemies, of Jesus’s community. But contrary to how they often are portrayed, they were not an entirely different ethnic or religious group, another nation like the Egyptians or the Assyrians. They were actually another sect of Judaism, who had different ideas about where and how the God of Israel should be worshipped, and who claimed to be the true, most authentic representation of the religion of Israel from before the Israelites were exiled into Babylon. The Samaritans were the folks who managed to avoid the exile and stayed in the land and continued the practices as they had been going on before the exile, and when the other folks returned from exile, a lot of things had changed about how they practiced the faith, and a conflict began.
It was an internal fight, and we all know how those can be all the more difficult and painful. A modern equivalent for us in the Episcopal Church might be the conflict between us and the “Anglicans,” the American Episcopalians who left the Episcopal Church to affiliate with other parts of the Anglican Communion.
Think about the vitriol and bitterness that comes out of some people in our denomination when they talk about “the Anglicans.” That’s probably something similar to how the people in Jesus’s community talked about “the Samaritans.” They were the people who didn’t “get it” religiously, who were doing things all wrong, who were clearly not as “enlightened” as “we” are in all things religious.
And yet, in Jesus’s story, it is a Samaritan who stopped to help someone in need. Jesus holds up the Samaritan as the example of what it means to live out the essential elements of the faith. Jesus uses a person from the group most unlikely to be seen as sacred, holy, or righteous, from the group that is hated and vilified, from the group who is “the other” and says, “Look at this. This person gets it. You, with your focus on ‘who is my neighbor,’ you don’t get it. But precisely the person you assume is the problem, they get it.”
So the question for us, then, is not “who is my neighbor,” but “who is the Samaritan”? Who is our “other,” the one in whom it is most difficult for us to see the face of God?
Think about that for a moment. Who do you consider the enemy, the other, the problem? We all have those people in our minds, no matter how much we like to profess that we “love everyone.” There is always someone that, despite what we say outwardly, inwardly we find ourselves seething with anger toward that person or that group. Now, consider Jesus’s story with that person in the role of the Samaritan.
Close your eyes for a moment and picture this. A man is beaten, robbed, left for dead, shot and bloodied, perhaps just down the road on MacArthur Boulevard. And several people from your group, people who look like you, talk like you, think like you, believe like you, maybe other Episcopalians, maybe people from this church, they walk right past him and do nothing. But then this person, this person who is part of that group that you consider the problem, the other, the enemy, this person who stirs up anger and negative emotions in your heart whenever you think of them, that person walks up, sees the hurt person, and stops to help. They don’t avoid the pain. They get up close and personal. They use their jacket to try to stop the flow of blood. They pick him up in their car and drive him to a hospital. They pay his medical bills, spending up to about a quarter of their salary for that week on this person they’ve never met before in their life.
What does it feel like to imagine that person, part of that group that you have such difficulty feeling compassion for, doing something compassionate? What emotions ran through your body as you saw that scene? And how does the lawyer’s question, “who is my neighbor?” sound different to you now?
History is full of these stories. In spite of the divisions that pit one group against another, there are always people who are able to see beyond the divides and recognize our common humanity. Whether it’s Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who saved thousands of Jews from death during the Holocaust, or Keisha Thomas, the black woman who threw herself over a white man at a KKK rally to protect him from counter-protestors who had turned violent, shouting, “Kill the Nazi!,” or Nick Kelton, one of the inmates who broke out of a holding cell in a Parker County, Texas courthouse last month to save a guard who had collapsed from a heart attack, these people would have never thought to ask the question, “Who is my neighbor?” They saw human need, and they acted. No matter who the person was who was in need.
When interviewed by the press, Nick Kelton acknowledged that the inmates realized that they could have potentially lost their own lives in trying to help the guard.
“We were worried they were going to come with guns drawn on us,” he said, and indeed, the deputies who heard the commotion the inmates were making assumed a fight had broken out, and when they arrived and saw inmates broken out of their cell surrounding an unconscious guard, the first thing that went through their minds was probably not that these inmates were trying to help that guard. But the deputies exercised restraint, and they herded the inmates back into the cell, and assessed the situation before responding with more violence, and all parties involved came out alive.
When asked why they did this, Kelton gave a surprising response.
“Cause that’s a good man,” he said, pointing out toward the hallway where the guard had been sitting. “He saves lives.”
He elaborated further, “I mean, it never crossed my mind… whether he’s got a gun or a badge, if he falls down, I’m gonna help him.”
Another inmate added, “It just seems natural to me.”
Keisha Thomas expressed a similar sentiment when asked why she acted to protect a man who represented an ideology that saw her as inferior.
“Violence is violence,” she said. “Nobody deserves to be hurt, especially not for an idea.”
She also indicated that her own experience of being the victim of violence motivated her to help.
“I knew what it was like to be hurt,” she said. “The many times that happened, I wish someone would have stood up for me.”
She also acknowledged how violence can be a vicious cycle, and how necessary it is to intervene to prevent the cycle from spiraling out of hand.
“Let’s say they had killed him or hurt him really bad,” she says. “How does the son feel? Does he carry on the violence?”
As it happened, a man in a coffee shop one day came up to her and said thank you. “What for?” she said. “That was my dad,” he said.
In the midst of the divide and turmoil that has shaken our country this week, there will be no way forward without solidarity across the historic divides.
Forty eight years ago, Martin Luther King gave a sermon the night before his death, a sermon in which he commented on this parable of the Good Samaritan. He said that in fighting for justice, we must be willing to develop “a dangerous kind of unselfishness.” The people who didn’t stop to help the man on the road might have been worried that the robbers were still nearby, that their own lives could have been in danger if they stopped. Dr. King said that when they saw man on the side of the road, they asked the question, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?”, and it was their fear that kept them from acting. But the Samaritan asked a different question. He asked, “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
In his context in Memphis in 1968, Dr. King was fighting for the rights of the sanitation workers who were on strike, and he asked the congregation gathered to consider that situation in light of this parable:
“[T]he question before you tonight… [is] [n]ot, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?” Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?" The question is, "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question.”
And for us, today, this week, the question is not, “If we stop to stand up for black men who are murdered at a disproportionate rate by police, what will happen to us? To our jobs? To our friendships?” The question is, “If we do NOT stand up and say that Black Lives Matter just as much as any other life, if we do NOT stand up for our black brothers and sisters – and in an increasingly multiracial world, that “brother” and “sister” rhetoric is becoming increasingly less metaphorical and more literal – what will happen to them?” What would have happened if those inmates in Texas looked less like the white guard and deputies who had authority over them and more like my cousin Kaliq, son of a white mother and a black father, whose dark skin and afro would have made him “other” to those in authority? Would that situation have ended with everyone still alive and unharmed?
On Thursday, Ric Hudgens, a poet and pastor in Evanston, Illinois, just outside Chicago, posted this poem to his blog:
What It Will Take (Poem)
My eighty-year old neighbor,
a man of deep, abiding faith,
now frail and bent with age,
who marched
when marching made a difference,
once upon a time
late at night
heard a yell
from our alley.
A black man
screamed for mercy
as policeman raised their clubs.
My neighbor left his bed,
entered the alley,
threw his body over his neighbor
making himself a shield.
The police stopped.
This is what it will take.
White men
throwing our bodies
in between.
Making them break us
before
they break our brothers.
If there’s anyone in the world who should understand this, it is we who call ourselves Christians. For we follow a savior who also “threw his body in between,” who allowed himself to be murdered rather than respond to violence with violence, who sacrificed himself for a world that rejected him. Who died to save not just his friends, but those who considered themselves his enemies. Who called us to not be afraid, to see beyond the divides, to love God and to love neighbor, and to show mercy. He has called us to “go and do likewise.”
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