Another Try

March 2, 2022 – Ash Wednesday
St. John’s United Church of Christ, Union, Illinois

Isaiah 58:1-12; Matthew 6:1-6,16-21[1]

We’ve all made New Year’s resolutions, right? We promise to quit smoking, to lose weight, to get better grades, to make the team, to spend more time with our families. How’d that work out for you? For me, it usually lasts for a few days, but then I slip, skip, or fail. Try again next year, I guess. Often, it seems as if Lent is “New Year’s resolutions part 2.” Only this time there’s more guilt because you’re not just failing yourself, you’re failing God! “What are you giving up for Lent?” is the question I heard as a kid. Was I a bad Christian because, at first, I didn’t understand the question? My answer was “Um, nothing”? I felt like I was missing out on something, something important.

What is Lent really about, anyway? “The traditional purpose of Lent is the preparation of the believer — through prayer, penitence, almsgiving and self-denial — for the annual commemoration during Holy Week of the Death and Resurrection of Jesus.”[2] Prayer serves to direct our attention to God. Penitence is “the condition of being sorrowful and remorseful for sins one has committed.”[3] Almsgiving is charity, giving to those in need and thus showing love for our neighbor. And self-denial is the giving-something-up which is meant to redirect our thoughts and energy from bodily or earthly things to spiritual or divine things. Lent was originally the time when candidates prepared for baptism, which took place during the Easter vigil, the Saturday night before Easter Sunday morning. It was an intense period of fasting and prayer.

Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, the forty-day period leading up to Easter Sunday. (Sundays are not counted as part of Lent since every Sunday is a celebration of the resurrection.) The forty days symbolize the forty days Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness before he began his public ministry. Ash Wednesday gets its name from the practice of placing ashes on the foreheads of the faithful as a sign of repentance. The act echoes the ancient Near Eastern tradition of throwing ashes over one’s head to signify repentance before God.[4] You may recall that Job, after arguing his case before God and being humbled, repented in sack-cloth and ashes. The ashes are also a reminder of our mortality, as we read in Genesis 3:19, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Of course, all of this tradition seems to be just the opposite of what the biblical texts we just read tell us. Isaiah, speaking for God, asks: “Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself… and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?” (58:5) Matthew, quoting Jesus, says: “And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting.” (6:16) Hypocrisy, making a show of faith without any substance, without action to back up the words, is bad religion. Don’t just talk the talk, walk the walk. Actions speak louder than words. The words from Isaiah and Matthew remind us that God knows when we’re faking it.

So why should we celebrate Lent, and why, especially, should we put ashes on our faces? Well, for starters, showy religiosity is not really something we get accused of a lot. We tend to be quite humble in our piety, anonymous in our charity; we never pray in public and we put on a happy face even when we feel miserable, depressed, or hungry for something we cannot find. If anything, we’re not showy enough. But I’m not suggesting the opposite extreme. Please, go home and wash your face tonight, if you like. No, I don’t know where you can find sack-cloth. And, don’t go stand on the street and start shouting prayers; you’re likely to get arrested.

We should receive the ashes and celebrate Lent because we need help keeping our focus on God. It’s okay if we stumble, if we fail, if we fall short. God knows that the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Lent will come again, and we can give it another try. But we should try, because when we do, we store up treasures in heaven, and that treasure can’t be taken from us.

There is value in ritual. There is something powerful in the act of repentance, here before one another, and that power can make a difference in the way we live our lives. If this year we give Lent another try, really take it seriously, maybe something in us can change for good. Maybe something in the world around us can change for good.

Rather than a fast of self-denial as expressed by going without food, or sweets, or indulgences, let us choose the fast of other-sustaining. We know this by the phrase “love your neighbor.” It’s something we already do, but we can take this moment, these forty days, to give our other-sustaining efforts a new intensity.

Share your bread with the hungry, and the Food Pantry customers will be grateful. Bring the homeless poor into your house; they may be angels in disguise. Give clothing and household items to people in need; you may turn a house into a home. We have already done good work to help others through our offerings and donations. But this is just treating the symptoms, not curing the disease. We can do so much more. We can do more to loose the bonds of injustice, to let the oppressed go free, and to satisfy the needs of the afflicted.

This Lenten season let us really try to be constant in prayer, to seek God in every moment, prepared to answer when we hear the call. This Lenten season, let us repent; not merely feeling sorry for the wrong things we have said and done, but really making an effort to correct our mistakes. This Lenten season, let us be generous with our money, with our time, and with our love. This Lenten season, let us deny ourselves what we don’t need, and sustain others with all that we can. This Lenten season, may our light rise in the darkness and raise up the foundations of many generations.

There is a spiritual I learned in seminary that speaks to the spirit of Lent, and how I can best direct my thoughts and my actions this season, and every day. It goes like this:

Woke up this mornin’ with my mind, stayed on Jesus
Woke up this mornin’ with my mind, stayed on Jesus
Woke up this mornin’ with my mind, stayed on Jesus
Hallelu, hallelu, hallelujah.

Amen.

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[1] The scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.  Used by permission.  All rights reserved.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lent.

[3] Donald K. McKim, Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996).

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash_Wednesday.

Who Is My Neighbor?

July 14, 2019
St. John’s United Church of Christ, Union, Illinois

Luke 10:25-37

What is a “Good Samaritan?”

The term is so common that you can find it everywhere. The Good Sam Club is the largest organization of RV owners in the world. I’m not sure that has much to do with the parable, except the traveling part. There are charities, hospitals, and other organizations designed to help people in need based on this parable in the bible. In Illinois, there is a Good Samaritan law which says that any licensed medical professional who provides emergency care without fee to a person shall not be liable for civil damages.

There are stories in the news all the time about Good Samaritans. For example, here is a story from the Good News Network.[i] The Melrose family had been in the middle of a 2,500-mile road trip across Australia last week when their car broke down in the middle of the Northern Territories. They had left their home with two boats in tow so they could compete in the national minnow sailing championships in Darwin. Darwin resident Rodney Sims saw the plea for help on social media, hopped in his truck, and drove to where the family was staying in a motel. After hitching up their boats to his vehicle, he brought the Melrose Family all the way back to Darwin, a staggering 1,200-mile round-trip journey. Needless to say, they were incredibly touched by the stranger’s act of kindness.

Not all the stories have such a happy ending, however. Two summers ago, Todd Surta says, he tried to help a woman badly injured when a boat collided with a personal watercraft on the Fox River. He ended up in police custody, facing criminal charges and a sullied reputation.

The term “Good Samaritan” seems to mean a stranger helping someone. But there is an aspect of the parable that is missed in this description. To the people in the first century hearing this story, Samaritans were “those” people, on the wrong side of the river. We don’t get along with them.

The Jews and the Samaritans had shared ancestors, like Jacob, but they were alienated from each other. There are probably many different, complicated reasons for it, but suffice it to say, there were long-standing hostilities between them.

Things are not so different today between different groups of people. We are constantly tempted to focus on what divides us – the Muslims and the Jews, the rich and the poor, the women and the men, the red states and the blue states, the gays and the straights, the whites and the blacks. It is so easy to fall into “us” versus “them”, to focus on who is “out” and who is “in”. By our words and our deeds we exclude others, we cast them out of our community.

I am often given opportunities to emulate the Samaritan — although the neighbors I help are generally not in the same life-threatening circumstances as the man in the parable, nor are they likely to be enemies or others I can’t get along with. My good deeds tend to be of the helping-out-a-stranger type rather than caring-for-an-enemy type. And no matter my good intentions most of the time, there are occasions when I have excluded others, or put a person in my mental category of “other.”

Luke tells the story of a lawyer who wants to inherit eternal life. Jesus gives him the textbook answer, “But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” He might have really meant, “Who is not my neighbor?” It was a lawyer, after all, who probably liked specifics, clear lines. Are these people next door, at the edges of my neighborhood? You’re not talking about outsiders, right, just neighbors?

Jesus replied with a story about a Samaritan, someone who would definitely have been seen as an outsider by the Jewish community. Using that story Jesus redefines the meaning of neighbor. You think that person over there is an outsider, a stranger, an enemy? That person is your neighbor, a child of God, a member of your heavenly family!

Now when we hear a story, we identify with particular characters. Maybe, as I often do on a busy day, you identify with the priest or the Levite. You see something that needs to be done, a person in need, and you pass it by because you’re too busy or preoccupied, too afraid, overwhelmed, or exhausted to do anything about it. On a good day I strive to be the Good Samaritan That is the ideal. I stop to help, I give what I can out of my pocket, I take the time to be kind.

But what if that is not the character who we are meant to identify with? Not the robbers, surely. We can’t be the bad guys in the story. We’re not the religious leaders, who we secretly judge for their neglectful behavior. But we can’t be the Samaritan, either; the whole point of choosing the Samaritan as a character is that he is not us. If we too easily and comfortably identify with the Good Samaritan in this parable, maybe we're missing the point.

Remember, he was the Other. An enemy of the people hearing this story. He was the object of their condescension, their hatred, and their judgment. He was the outcast.

Think about it this way: An Israeli man is robbed, and a Good Palestinian man saves his life. A Democrat is robbed, and a Good Republican saves her life.  A white supremacist is robbed, and a Good Black Teenager saves his life.  A transgender woman is robbed, and a Good Christian Fundamentalist saves her life.

The differences which divide people in our world are not trivial, and have real consequences. The same can be said of the differences between the Jews and the Samaritans in Jesus’ time. Each was fully convinced that the other was wrong. So, when Jesus made the Samaritan a central figure in the story, it was radical and risky; it stunned his listeners.

A writer named Debie Thomas suggests, “He was asking them to dream of a different kind of kingdom. He was inviting them to consider the possibility that a person might add up to more than the sum of her political, racial, cultural, and economic identities. He was calling them to put aside the history they knew, and the prejudices they nursed. He was asking them to leave room for divine and world-altering surprises.”[ii]

So, if we can’t identify ourselves with the priest, the Levite, OR the Samaritan, who are we left with? “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho.” The beaten man, half-dead on the side of the road is the only character left. He is the only character in the story not defined by profession, social class, or religious belief. He has no identity except that he is in need. This is the character Jesus means for us to identify with – the one in need of mercy.

You see, when you’re lying in a ditch, it doesn’t matter who helps you, whether or not you agree with their politics or religion. What matters is that someone, anyone, stops to show you mercy before you die. What matters is how quickly you swallow your pride and grab hold of that hand.

“Who is my neighbor?” the lawyer asked. Your neighbor is the one who has compassion. Your neighbor is the one who unexpectedly smiles on you with a fresh image of God. Your neighbor is “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”  Amen.

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[i] https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/stranger-drives-1300-miles-to-rescue-stranded-family/

[ii] Debie Thomas, “Go and Do Likewise” Posted July 3, 2016 on https://www.journeywithjesus.net/.