Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
July 15, 2007
Sermon by Pastor Joy Bussert
The
Holy Gospel according to St. Luke. (Luke
10:25-37)
Just then a lawyer stood up to test
Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I
do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said
to him, “What is written in the law?
What do you read there?” He
answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all
your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your
neighbor as yourself.” And Jesus said to
him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”
But wanting to justify himself, he asked
Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus
replied, “A man was going down from
“Which of these three, do you think, was
a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
The
Gospel of the Lord.
Please join me in prayer.
Our loving
and gracious God, whose mercies are new each day, grant us a measure of your
grace to show mercy to the neighbor, as you have shown mercy to us.
Amen.
I look forward to seeing just about everyone at our
annual Bussert family reunion at Okoboji, well, just about everyone, minus one
in-law, maybe, but everyone. But of all
of the thirty-some siblings, in-laws, and nieces and nephews, the one who so
often warms everyone’s heart is Justin.
When Justin, my second oldest sister’s first child, was born with Down’s
syndrome, it seemed a tragedy at the time.
But Justin has become the most precious of all of the grandchildren, for
Justin is a treasure of pure love. No
one in the family knows the ins and outs of a hospital room like Justin, for he
was born with heart defects and an abscess on the brain. From the time he was a tiny tot, two, three
and four, many times Justin would come to family reunions with a bandage all
around his head from the most recent surgery, from ear to ear. He has now lived fifteen years longer than
the doctors predicted.
This year it was Kate and mom’s turn to end up in the
emergency room at the local Okoboji hospital.
And I have Kate’s permission to tell this story. It had been a full day of swimming and diving
off the raft down at the beach, when walking back to the cabin Kate developed a
scary pain in the right side that would just not go away. After what seemed like the most painful hour
of our life—“Does it hurt here?” “Does
it hurt there?” “Does this hurt?”—the
doctor on call at the ER at Okoboji concluded that the appendix had to come out
and was ready to wheel her right into the surgery room on the spot. “Would there be time to get home to
And we hurried back to the family reunion to gather
up our things and get ready for the four-hour drive home. Out in the parking, just before we left, the
aunts and uncles and cousins who were close by, all gathered around us to wish
us a safe trip. They said just the right
things, all the right words of comfort and encouragement. There was a group prayer, of course, and then
a group hug.
But as the group was breaking up and sending us off
to the car, as if he had just now grasped the significance of what we were
facing, what he had been through so many times before, Justin suddenly threw
his arms open to Kate and I, and he said, with the labored words that so many
children with Down’s syndrome do, “I will
write you a letter.” “I will write you a letter.”
If ever you have been the recipient of such authentic
love and spontaneous mercy, you know how much we felt carried on the wings of
divine mercy on that four-hour drive, which seemed more like forty, all the way
back home to Children’s in Minneapolis.
How remarkable, I thought—as I gulped really bad coffee from
Superamerica just to stay awake, with Kate now sound asleep in the back seat of
our blue Honda, tucked in with pillow and blanket by Justin before we left—how
remarkable, I thought, as the endless miles of interstate under headlights
whizzed by in the pitch black of night, that the one and the same Justin,
judged by our society to be low in the intelligence
of the mind, could be rated so high by his Aunt Joy and cousin Kate in the intelligence of the heart. How remarkable, I thought, that in a society
that values technical and professional expertise, it would be one with no
particular training and no particular credentials who would come through with expertise of the soul. For all of the support and just the right
chosen words from a quite wonderful family, for all of the expertise in the
world on the part of quite wonderful emergency-room nurses, doctors, and
technicians, who in the end, after more tests, including a three a.m. in the
morning CAT Scan, concluded that there was in fact no appendicitis and no need
for surgery at all. For all of the
wonderful technicians, all of the technique in the world could never compare to
Justin’s simple outpouring of spontaneous mercy, pure and unfiltered, just when
it mattered, and straight from the heart.
In our Gospel story for today, we see a picture, a
contrast, of one with tremendous expertise who asks all of the right questions,
on the one hand, compared with one who has no apparent credentials, training,
or social standing, but simply shows mercy at a crucial moment, on the other
hand.
The lawyer, at the beginning of our story, is asking
the right questions. He wants to be a
competent lawyer, with the necessary tools for his practice. He wants to know what the law says so that he
can do his job well, and that’s a good thing.
He had a talent for constitutions and by-laws. He knew he was an expert in the details of
Jewish law. “Teacher,” he says, ”what
shall I do to inherit eternal life?”
Seeing what he needs, Jesus asked him what he knows. “What is written in the law? You shall love the Lord your God with all
your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and your neighbor
as yourself.” There you have it,
straight from Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19. He got it right. So Jesus gives him what he wants, which is
affirmation that he is right. “You have
answered right. Do this and you will live.”
But wanting to score some more points on the bar
exam, the lawyer pushes the question further.
“So who is my neighbor?” What is
impressive here is that Jesus has not lost patience, but instead takes a
question focused on professional expertise and legal abstraction and places it
instead on a dangerous road from Jerusalem to Jericho, in the middle of a
tragic and yet so very obvious human situation.
I hardly need to remind you that the two who passed
by on the other side of the road, from the one who lays wounded and half dead
in the ditch in our story, were considered the most expert in religious matters
in Israelite culture. Also, in Jesus’
time, as in ours, conventional legal as well as religious and even medical
wisdom stressed correct belief and right technique over loving compassion and
human understanding. The lawyer, the
priest, and the Levite, all professional peers in Jewish culture, were simply
dedicated to preservation of good practice.
But the fourth one, who showed empathy, unfiltered
and spontaneous mercy, who had compassion, who proved to be neighbor without
needing first to define legally what “neighbor” meant, or even to stop to
consider the implications of what he was doing, the one who proved neighbor to
the bleeding man on the side of the road, this good Samaritan, was only part
Jew, and he would have been considered a heretic by his colleagues. Yet, here in this story that Jesus tells, it
was the heretic, the outsider, the one who had the faith and the law all wrong,
he did the right thing, and straight from the heart, while the two of
right of faith as well as the young lawyer needing to get it all right flunked
the bar exam and theology as well, for a legal and theological question in the
abstract about who is my neighbor had
suddenly been recast in light of the quality of neighborly love, shown in the
face of a real human situation—reminding us, once again, that the longest road
in the world is not the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. The longest road in the world is the journey
that takes us from the head to the heart.
You will remember that familiar old story, that we
need to hear it today as much as students of faith needed to hear it long
ago. It is a story of the very expert
veterinarian who, with all good intentions, wanted to create just the right
Christian practice for the families, with all good intentions, that he
served. He was sincere, he meant
well. But one day an elder gentleman,
retired—his wife had passed on years before, and the only thing he had left to
love was a little black lab mixed with something else. And he carried this little puppy in a rug in
his arms into the veterinarian's office.
After inquiring about what they could do for his dying puppy, he was
told that the philosophy of this particular practice was guided by a Bible verse
sprawled across the wall in big letters: “YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH
ALL YOUR HEART, MIND, AND SOUL.” “But do
you also love animals?” the elder gentleman inquired. “Like I said,” the receptionist replied,
seeming not to notice the precious cargo he carried in his arms, but pointing
to the wall again, “our philosophy is ‘You shall love the Lord your God with
all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’” “And thank you very much,” the elder
gentleman replied, turning for the door, “but in order for my puppy to get well
I will have to find a place where they will also love her.”
“Make love your
aim,”
“Make love your aim,”
Amen