Homily for the Eighth Sunday after
Pentecost 10 July 2016
The Rev’d John R.
Clarke, Rector
Luke 10:25-37 (Jesus resets the boundaries of a lawyer's neighborhood)
“And who is my
neighbor?” Luke 10:29b
In politics, splitting hairs is always in season.
No more so than in this election cycle.
Example: To
avoid guilt-by-association and electoral suicide, you can claim the
contradictory “Of course, I support the presumptive nominee. I just don’t endorse him.”
Or take a six-pointed
star and attendant attack ad, lifted ─ by one of the
campaigns ─ from a blatantly white-supremacist site. In context, is it a Star of David,
pitched to anti-Semitic voters? Or ─ ignoring altogether
the tweet’s provenance ─ is it a sheriff’s badge? And then, too, sometimes a star ─ improbably in this case ─ is just a star.
Well, then, what is it? Splitting hairs.
Of course, the hair-splitting
bar was set pretty high when a former President was charged with lying to
Congress. His tortured defense? “Depends what ‘is’ is.”
But today, not
from CNN’s sunny Anderson Cooper … not from Fox’s perennially petulant Bill
O’Reilly … or my favorite, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow … but from Luke the Evangelist,
no less, we have an exercise in hairsplitting that has the most-hairsplitting
of politicians beat. It involves Jesus and a lawyer whose business card boasts,
“No hair too thin to split.”
The good news
is, the lawyer discovers that Jesus operates under a different motto: “Love
your neighbor as yourself.”
And that’s what triggers the lawyer’s challenge,
“And who is my neighbor?”
A case of honest
curiosity? You must be kidding. It’s hairsplitting. Because, sure, the lawyer
agrees in principle that God’s Law requires you to love your neighbor.
(Truth-in-advertising: Jesus
didn’t invent this stuff. Moses did. In the Law, the Torah.)
But the lawyer
wants Jesus to answer the question: “When it comes to loving my neighbor, just
how far am I required to go?”
Depends on what
“neighbor” is.
Because when you
dig a bit deeper into the lawyer’s question (“And who is my neighbor?”) what
you've really got is outrageously lawyerly-but-logical hairsplitting. His line
of questioning reads as, “Let’s say my neighbor is defined as someone ‘close’
to me. Can we agree on that, Jesus? My
neighbor is someone who lives near
me. Just how near, then, is ‘near’? One block? Two blocks?
“Or is my
neighbor people just like me? Are people I wouldn’t dream of getting close to
my neighbor? I mean, is the dishonest tax collector my neighbor? Is the trigger-happy Roman
soldier my neighbor? What about an untouchable leper? Just how do you define ‘neighbor,’
Jesus?”
But Jesus has
little patience for splitting hairs. So, he reframes the question ─ for a moment, away from the “neighbor” part of “love your neighbor” to the “love”
part. “What you’re really asking,” Jesus determines (in so many words), “isn’t
a definition of ‘neighbor.’ You’re asking, ‘What are the limits of love?’”
Or, “Who ─ specifically, who ─ is not my neighbor?”
And to help the
lawyer answer that one, Jesus weaves the most hard-hitting parable of his
entire career ─ perhaps the most hard-hitting parable of all time: “A man was going
from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers….”
And ─ spoiler alert! ─ you just can’t walk away from this parable with a prayer of splitting
hairs!
Because we learn
the inconvenient truth of what we’ve always suspected: We’re in the story. And
at one time or another we play all the roles: the victim in the ditch … the religious
elites whose default is to ignore him … the rescuer, who, from the victim’s
point of view, is the most improbable neighbor of all, a “good” Samaritan.
And because
we’re all in the story, Jesus’ point is that we’re all neighbors. That’s because
we learn from the parable that Jesus lives in a neighborhood that doesn’t even
have the kind of fences that make good neighbors. In Jesus’ grasp of economics,
walls ─ between people or running the full length of a border ─ come at a price too high to pay.
That also means
Jesus lives in a neighborhood that can’t afford the costs ─ the human costs ─ of systemic racism that makes inevitable the violence we’ve witnessed in
our neighborhoods this past week:
Alton Sterling. Killed
─ execution-style ─ by police Tuesday while he was selling CDs outside a convenience store
in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Philando Castile.
Killed by police the next day ─ at close range ─ during a
routine traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota.
And then, Dallas,
Thursday evening. A peaceful ‘Black Lives Matter’ protest. Twelve police
officers ─ protecting and working with
the protesters ─ 12 police and two civilians gunned down. Of the police, five murdered
in cold blood by sniper Micah Javier Johnson acting out his own racist rage
against white police officers.
Tracking how we
got to this point ─ and acknowledging the violence in many minority communities ─ New York Times columnist
Charles M. Blow suggests, with uncommonly clear eyes, its inevitability:
Our American “ghettos” were
created by policy and design. These areas of concentrated poverty became fertile
ground for crime and violence. Municipalities used heavy police forces to try
to cap that violence. Too often, aggressive policing began to feel like oppressive
policing.
Relationships between communities
and cops became strained.
A small number of criminals
poisoned police beliefs about whole communities. And a small number of dishonorable
officers poisoned communities’ beliefs about entire police forces.
And then, too often, the unimaginable
happened.
And we are left to conclude:
The way those Baton Rouge police acted, they broadcast:
“Alton Sterling is not my neighbor.”
The murderous Falcon Heights police officer weighed in
unambiguously: “Philando Castile is not my neighbor.”
With each round, each bullet, Michael Javier Johnson left
no doubt: “The white police officer is not my neighbor.”
This isn’t news, then: We have to get out of this mess.
We have to move forward, if we are to survive and fulfil the promise of our
professed liberating impulses. But the way forward will remain unattainable as
long as we in our communities ─ and those of us who claim to follow Jesus ─ engage in the kind of corrosive
hairsplitting Jesus abhors: “Who is not
my neighbor?”
That means, as some rightly suggest, we take appropriate steps
in criminal justice and police training, in schools and in public conversations,
in the moral formation of all our citizenry, so that each of us experiences
what we each deserve: to be treated as neighbor by neighbor.
In practical
terms and at its most basic, that means ─ as Charles Blow
suggests ─ for each and all to make it home safe each day or night to be with the people we love.
Now, that would
look like Jesus’ neighborhood … a neighborhood filled with
people all of us at one time or another have placed beyond the limits of our
love because of age, physical limitations, income, race, sexual orientation,
gender, intellect, profession, religion.
Bottomline: With
the horrifying gunshots of Baton Rouge, Falcon Heights, and Dallas still ringing
in our ears … before the next shots split the air … Jesus demands that each of
us answer the most consequential question of all time: “Who is not our neighbor?
