Can your heart be moved?

Can you imagine things differently?

A sermon preached on July 10th, 2022 for the community at Grace Memorial Episcopal Church.

The text: Luke 10:25-37, popularly known as The Parable of the Good Samaritan.

I’ve been struggling lately; struggling to understand how exactly to be a Christian in the present moment.

This may seem like a strange, and perhaps shocking thing  for a priest to admit, especially on a Sunday morning, but it’s true.

This isn’t me saying that I’m struggling to understand whether or not I am to be a Christian. That is not my struggle. I have, in the past, tried to not be a Christian, only to find that I could no more cease to be a Christian than  I could cease to have hazel eyes or brown hair, or be descended from the Vigils of Spain. I simply am this.

When I say I am struggling to understand how to be a Christian in the present moment, it is because being a Christian in America today seems to involve a range of beliefs, practices, political positions, and alliances that feel so foreign to me, antithetical to my understanding of Jesus, but wildly popular.

I feel out of sync with American Christianity, and yet I am both an American and a Christian.

Some Christians decide that they want to distance themselves from that word, “Christian,” as though claiming a different title while  simultaneously carrying forward a tradition grounded in Christian scriptures, Christian liturgies, Christian hymns, and Christian theology spares them the cognitive dissonance I’m feeling right now.

Personally, I don’t find that practice of distancing to be critical or rigorous enough,  intellectually speaking, nor is it a real solution to the problem.

I’ve always found it challenging, as a queer person, to understand how to bring into harmony my various identities, some of which have been placed in opposition to each other by Christians. So, this wondering about how to be a Christian is not new for me. But it does feel more urgent right now.

My current wondering is not just about my identity, but more about my purpose. And more broadly, our purpose. How are we to be Christians today? Do we have a shared purpose?

And I wonder if that question is at all like the question posed to Jesus by a legal scholar in today’s Gospel reading. Is he struggling like I’m struggling? Do I sound like him?

“What must I do to inherit eternal life?” I ask Jesus. “What is my purpose, as a Christian?”

Jesus responds, “What does scripture say?”

And I respond with a very popular shorthand explanation of what many in the Episcopal tradition believe it means to be a Christian.

“To love God with your whole heart, mind, and soul, and to love your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus gives two thumbs up. 

But then, suspicious of the people who have hurt me, particularly fellow Christians, I say, “Ummm…who is my neighbor?”

And Jesus tells me this story:

“So you are walking downtown after the Pride parade, and suddenly, a group of Proud Boys appears, and, noting how flamboyant you happen to be (perhaps because you’re having such a good day) they descend upon you, and they beat you, and they strip off your favorite shirt, spit on you, call you faggot, and leave you on the sidewalk of Burnside, your gay blood mixing with the Portland rain. You’re bedraggled. You don’t look like a respectable gay, but more like someone on the losing end of a speed bender.

An episcopal priest walks down the road, and noting, with concern, that you are there, they nonetheless cross to the other side of the road. Presuming that you are houseless and strung out, they make a note in their iPhone that they are going to suggest to the Vestry that the church create a committee to develop a statement that can be posted to the website about the church’s response to violence, drug use, and homelessness.

Then, a social worker on their bike swerves around you on their way home, and thinks to themself that they would stop but they are so beyond capacity right now and it is really important for them not to extend themselves too far so that they can do the work they’ve committed themselves to do for their clients.

Meanwhile, you’re still bleeding.

And just then, a member of Fred Phelp’s church, who had earlier in the day been protesting Pride, is leaving downtown with their “God Hates Fags” sign dragging behind them, and they see you. And their heart is moved.

They drop their filthy sign and rush to you. They put pressure on the bleeding wounds. They call an Uber, help load you in and take you to the ER, and then they cover the cost of your care.”

So, Jesus asks, “Which of those three was your neighbor? The episcopal priest with his committees? The overworked social worker with their boundaries and self-care. Or the anti-gay activist who saves your life?”

And I’m so annoyed with Jesus at this moment, because he has just shown me something about this parable that I’ve never seen before, and now that I see it, I can’t unsee it. This parable is about the person who’s suffered the beating and been left for dead. It’s about recognizing their need; their immediate and undeniable need.

The other three characters in this story, which we could swap out in a hundred different ways, are positioned to make us consider one thing:

Can your heart be moved?

Gustavo Gutierrez says in Teología de Liberación:

“The neighbor was the Samaritan who approached the wounded man and made him his neighbor. The neighbor, as has been said, is not the one whom I find in my path, but rather the one in whose path I place myself,  the one whom I approach and actively seek.

The Samaritan approached the injured man on the side of the road not because of some cold religious obligation, but because ‘his heart was melting,’ because his love for that man was made flesh in him.”

Jesus asks us to consider the possibility that someone we think we have cause to hate may be moved to show us, in our time of greatest need, compassion.

And we, should our hearts not be made of stone, might do the same if we encounter someone who has set their mind to hate us.

The problems of the present moment are problems of the heart. They will only begin to change once hearts begin to change.

But the problems are also problems of the imagination; specifically, the Christian imagination.

The problem relates to how Christians think about Jesus completing  what was formally incomplete. This plays out when we listen to a passage from Hebrew Scriptures. Our lectionary can be seen to position them against a passage from  the Christian Scriptures. Even the way we describe them, The Old and New Testaments echoes this.

We hear the Christian Scripture responding, in a way, to the Hebrew Scripture, and that response is often, in our Christian Imagination, saying, “Our story corrects their story.”

An example: Our first reading from Deuteronomy gives us Moses providing a portion of the “Love God, love your neighbor” message. But he does this in a longer speech about the conditional ways that God will favor the Israelites as they continue without Moses to the Promise Land.

A Christian preacher, could, ignoring all scholarly commentaries, not recognize Jesus was referring to both Deuteronomy and Leviticus when he said, Love God, love your neighbor, and he could mistakenly frame Moses as not understanding neighborly love. But worse, the preacher could look at the lawyer in our corresponding gospel story, frame him as a “crafty Jewish lawyer” who is trying to trick Jesus, and then, if that wasn’t enough, frame the priest and the levite in the parable as the Jews who didn’t know how to love, while framing the Samaritan, the non-Jew, as the ideal.

Don’t be like the Jews, that classic interpretation says. Be like the Good Samaritan.

Don’t be like Moses, who sees God’s love as conditional. Be like Jesus, who correctly understands God’s love as unconditional.

That’s the conclusion made by a broken Christian imagination.

My imaginative vision of me, wounded, and a Christian bigot as the one who saves me, is, however impactful it might be, still an iteration of this  problematic, antisimetic framing.

We might instead consider that Jesus and the lawyer are not at odds, but are wrestling with making meaning together as two Jewish people wrestling with scripture.. Jesus, by introducing the parable is seeking to inspire a person from his tribe  to wonder how his imagination could be renewed.

The lawyer asks Jesus these questions and Jesus responds,

Can you imagine things differently?

So we have two problems to hold in prayer. The first is a problem of the heart. The second is a problem of the imagination.

How are we to be Christians today? How are we to interpret scripture in ways that do not harm?

Jesus takes those questions, turns them around, and asks us,

Can your heart be moved?
Can you imagine things differently?