7 Pentecost 2007 Zion, Washington

The Summary of the Law is the line from Deuteronomy in today's First Reading and a line from the Book of Leviticus. But the important thing is the conclusion of this passage that decrees that this commandment "is not too hard... neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, 'Who will go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?" But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it."

Even so, there is an ancient and persistent haunting feeling that God has to be "too high up and too far off" for people to gain access to God. Somehow the rules and laws and rituals and sacrifices need to be nearly impossible to do, in order for humanity to approach divinity. In the New Testament, we see it in those Pharisees who made a big show of their piety and expected to be treated royally, because they had the time and the means to keep all the 360 laws of Judaism, which were far too demanding for the average Jew to observe.

In modern day American Christianity, we see denominations that have set up fairly elaborate sets of rules for their members; established as much to distinguish them from other Christians as to draw their members nearer to God. (When I was in high school, the running joke was that the co-eds at the nearby Church of Christ college would meet secretly at night in the dorms rooms... and put on make-up.) I once lived in a town in which two Pentecostal churches, not a thousand years from each other, despised each other with a perfect hatred because one church baptized in the Name of Jesus and other baptized in the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

All of these groups are looking for God too high up and too far off. But the commandments of God are very near. They are in our mouths and in our hearts, so that we can do them. It's just not necessary to have a lot of time or money or brains or energy or skills or wisdom in order to draw near to God. Jews and Christians and Muslims understand that the only things that are essential are found in those lines from Deuteronomy and Leviticus - to love God completely and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. The trick, of course, is actually to do what the commandments command.

Because it's easier to love what we can see and to serve what we can control, the peoples of this world face a constant temptation to engage in idolatry, rather than worship God who is invisible these days. Here in the USA, because of our incredibly high standard of living, it's gotten to be standard practice to point to our bank statements and our daily calendars to see where we spend our money and where we spend our time, in order to discover what our own personal idols are. After all, it was Jesus who said, "Where your treasure is, there is where your heart is also."

Certainly, here at Zion, as we return to a more traditional approach to stewardship, we will all be asked to reflect on where our treasure is spent and where our hearts really are. It's easy to become "penny wise and pound foolish" and fret over how we spend our pennies and yet spend great hulking wads of dollars on things that are transient, at best. So it can be a sobering revelation to look as much at the Transaction Description column as at the Payment/Fee/Withdrawal column of our bank statement in order to discover what we love and what we serve; in order to discover if we have idols - and don't know it.

But, as Christians, God calls us to love and serve Him only, and to do that through the Church: this collection of "neighbors" whom we are to love as much as we love ourselves. Yikes! This is the point at which the Summary of the Law gets personal and becomes substantial, ...and law. We can choose our friends, but we can't choose our family and we can't choose our neighbors. And, of course, that's what Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan was all about.

This past week, I've read a couple of commentaries about this parable, at least one of which was irritating because it was inaccurate by being extreme; trying to cast the Samaritans as "totally unclean by clear scriptural standards". In fact, the Samaritans were simply "mixed blood".

In 587 BC, Jerusalem finally fell to the Babylonians - the Iraqis, if you will. The Babylonians hauled all the leaders and "all the best families" in Israel and Judah off to Babylon, leaving a leaderless nation of "average Joes and Janes" who weren't savvy politically, and weren't noted for their vigorous piety at the Temple in Jerusalem.

Consequently, while the Jewish exiles in Babylon were transforming into "Super Jews", in both piety and racial purity, some of the good ole folks back in the Holy Land started fraternizing with some of the non-Jews who lived on the West Bank of the Jordan River and even went so far as to inter-marry and blend their casual Judaism with the traditions of the non-Jews. So as the exiles saw more and more things as black and white, those who were "left behind" (to coin a phrase) in the Holy Land were getting grayer and grayer.

Needless to say, when Cyrus the Persian - and Iranian, if you will, set the exiles free and they returned to the Holy Land, they were appalled at all of the mixed marriages and the blending of religious traditions and they developed a passionate prejudice against the Samaritans who were, in no small way, very much like them before they went into Exile. You see, all those "best families" weren't noted for their "vital piety" nor for their "political savvy", much more than the average citizens of Israel and Judah - which (Hello) is why we have all those books of the prophets in the Old Testament, trying to warn all of the Israelis and Jews to shape up and avoid being conquered by the Babylonians as they trooped through the Holy Land on their way to The Big Prize - Egypt. (Oh please, you don't really think that the Babylonians were particularly interested in the Holy Land, do you? Egypt was like France. Israel was like Belgium.)

So 500 years after the Babylonian Exile, at the time of Jesus' ministry, the prejudice of the Jews against the Samaritans had turned cold and dispassionate; though, as with any prejudice, there was a deep passion just below the surface. It's not any different from our own modern day racial prejudices, in which we pretty much dismiss people of other races until they start getting "uppity"; which is to say, until they come to our attention in ways that demand decisions or that cause us to face realities about the implications of living in a multi-racial community and nation and world.

Clearly, Jesus perceived that the lawyer who started all this mess in the first place by wanting to taunt and test Jesus by asking about eternal life only wanted to love his neighbors who "looked like him" and believed the same way he did and held the same values as he. In short, the lawyer wanted to be commanded to love only those people whom he considered to be loveable and safe to love, acceptable to love.

Instead, Jesus said, go and love those people who hate you as coldly as you hate Samaritans. Go and serve them sacrificially with your time and your skill and your resources and with your money. (Jesus didn't say, go, love the Samaritans. That would have been cheap and easy. It's no big deal to bend down and be gracious to someone we don't much care for and then return to our own personal "safety zone" and feel relieved and pleased that we had done a good work without suffering embarrassment or injury. - Believe me, San Mateo is stuffed with thread-bare cast-offs from some of the best parishes in the diocese who did just that.) Jesus said, go and serve the people who hate you. Those people are also your neighbors whom God has commanded you to love as much as you love yourself.

That's very different. (In light of the continuing strife between Israel and the descendants of the Samaritans who still live on the West Bank of the Jordan River, I'd just as soon Jesus had told that lawyer to lighten up on the Samaritans.) But the thorny commandment remains: Who hates us? Who hates us at a personal level? Who hates us because of our denomination? (I mean, we've all gotten painfully ribbed about what's going on in the Episcopal Church. And believe me, it's more common than you might imagine for me to have people turn their heads as we pass, when I'm wearing my clerical collar.) Who hates us because of our religion? Who hates us because of our race? Who hates us because we are Americans? Who hates us because of our job or because of the way we spend our leisure? Whoever hates us, if Jesus is anything to go by, is also our neighbor, along with everybody else, whom God has commanded us to love and to love with as much love as we dote on ourselves. Because if we can truly love the people who truly hate us, we will have developed the capacity to love everyone else on this planet.

But, just as we are prone to wander away from loving God with all our hearts, souls, and minds, in favor of something we can see or something we can control, we're prone to prefer loving people who are "just like us"... and, by extension, not to love people who are different - in any way. But that's not what God demands. That's not what God commands. It's human nature.

Differences make us as uneasy as things that we can't see make us uneasy. Consider "Bruce the shark" in the movie "Jaws". The terror of that film was all about what we couldn't see. Stephen Spielburg learned what Alfred Hitchcock knew all along. It's also a spiritual truth, in which God calls us to love what we cannot see.

Consider the United States, fifty years ago. People who were different were kept out of sight, either in their own neighborhoods or put away into institutions, or simply not allowed to join the club. Ten years ago, I was told by a very self-assured, well-educated young Japanese woman that there were no handicapped people in Japan and that all Japanese are alike. Ah well. They are where we were. It's a spiritual truth, in which God calls us to love those who are different, even different in the extreme, as well as those who are similar, and those who are "just like us".

 But this is not simply a call. It's two commandments that have no loopholes. And these two commandments are the foundation upon which all that is good and beautiful and holy and powerful in Judaism and in Christianity and in Islam are built. And of these three Abrahamic religions, we Christians are under the added obligation of obeying these two commandments because they are central to the distinctive teachings of our