Sermon for Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, "Be Thou My Vision"

Sermon 7/11/10, Luke 10:25-37

Be Thou My Vision

            This week we’re turning our attention to the hymn tied for eighth place in our congregation’s list: Be Thou My Vision. It also happens to be my favorite hymn, and so I’m particularly glad to be able to share a bit about this beautiful song with you this morning. Be Thou My Vision, the text, is very, very old, from the sixth century. It was written in Old Irish, and used in the monastic tradition for many centuries before it was put to the music we know today. It is sometimes attributed to Saint Dallan Forchella, an early Irish Christian poet. Dallan is a nickname he was given, meaning, “little blind one,” because he is said to have studied so intensely that he lost his eyesight. He was a scholar of the scriptures and the chief poet of Ireland. The Old Irish text of Be Thou My Vision (stop to listen to it) is called Rop thu mo wall-eh (at least that’s the best pronunciation my non-existent Old Irish allows) and is several verses longer than the short, three-verse hymn we sing today. Each verse, as you can see in your bulletin insert, follows the pattern of the first, which asks that God be our vision. In the following verses, we hear: God, be my vision, my meditation, my speech, my parent, my shield, my dignity, my shelter, my every good, my kingdom, my chief love, my noble estate, and heart of my own heart.       Aside from the beautiful melody with which this text is tied, which I think can in itself make this hymn so moving, I love the message of this hymn. God, be our vision. Let us see with God’s eyes. God, be the heart of our own heart – let your heart be in our heart, be our heart. We think often about trying to be like Jesus, trying to imitate, in our small, faulty ways, the things he did, the way he lived. The scriptures talk about us having the mind of Christ. But what if our heart could be God’s heart? Our sight, God’s vision? If God was our every good, our chief love? Imagine, if we let God be those things for us, how our lives, and our world, could be transformed.

            Let’s keep that question in mind as we look at our gospel lesson for today. It’s a parable you have probably known since you were a child: the parable of the Good Samaritan. Our scene opens when a lawyer stands up after Jesus has been teaching to 'test' him. He wants to know what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. Any student of Mosaic law would already know this answer, as Jesus indicates. The man replies appropriately: Love God and love neighbor. Right, Jesus says, so just do it, and you will live. The man seems unsatisfied. "But who is my neighbor?" Jesus responds by describing a man who is robbed and beaten and left for dead on the roadside. Two religious men - a priest and a Levite - see the men but pass him by on the other side of the road. Finally, a third, a Samaritan, sees the injured man, helps him, provides him shelter, rearranges plans for him, and generally goes out of his way to help this stranger. "Who is the neighbor?" Jesus asks. "The one who showed mercy," the lawyer admits. "Go and do!" Jesus repeats.

You might remember that in May I attended a preaching conference in Nashville called The Festival of Homiletics, where pastors gather to hear preaching and lectures on preaching. It’s really a wonderful event. This year, one speaker was Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, a professor of New Testament Studies at Vanderbilt. Levine is Jewish, and one of her aims in teaching is to help Christians better understand and interpret the scriptures without misconstruing Jews and Judaism in the process. This is the second time I’ve heard her lecture, and she simply transformed the way I think about a couple scripture texts. One of them is the story of The Good Samaritan.

            Typically, you might hear pastors say two things about this story – two things I have said myself when I’ve preached before about this text. First, I’ve always thought of the Samaritans as representing the oppressed people, the underdogs, the ones the Jews viewed as less than themselves. Second, I’ve always understood that the priest and the Levite wouldn’t touch the injured man because it would make them ritually unclean because of Jewish purity laws. So, then, one of the lessons of the story would be about living by the letter of the law, like the priest and the Levite, versus living by the spirit of the law, and truly loving your neighbor, like the poor downtrodden Samaritan shows us. But Dr. Levine cleared up some misconceptions we have about this story.

First, she said, the priest and the Levite would have been able to help the man without breaking the law. The law would have allowed for them to help an injured person. They just didn’t follow the law, didn’t do what they knew they should, like many of us don’t do what we know we should. Martin Luther King once said that the difference between the priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan in this story is that while the first two think, “If I stop and help, what happens to me?” the Samaritan thinks, “If I don’t stop, what happens to them?”

Second, Dr. Levine tried to help us understand the significance, the weight it would have had when Jesus said that it was a Samaritan who was the good neighbor in this story. If I said to you “Larry, Curly, and _____,” you would finish the sentence with “Moe,” right? Dr. Levine told us that to Jesus’ hearers, when they heard someone say, “a priest, a Levite, and” the crowds would normally assume that “an Israelite” would come next. Priests, Levites, Israelites – those were the groups, those were the categories to which everyone could find where they belonged. So they would hear Jesus’ story, this parable, and be waiting for the third person to walk by the crime victim to be an Israelite, as most of them would be. But instead, Jesus says: Samaritan. Samaritans weren’t the downtrodden oppressed, the underdog saving the day; Samaritans were enemies. Consider the countries where we’ve been at war, or with whom we’ve been at war: Samaritans were that to Israelites. So for Jesus to call out a Samaritan as the hero, the true neighbor, the one who showed mercy, who the lawyer can’t even name at the end of this story: Dr. Levine said it would be the unexpected equivalent of saying, “Larry, Curly, and Osama bin Laden.” It’s not just that one of these doesn’t belong. It’s that this third category is someone you don’t want to even think about. And Jesus has just shown them in the role of loving neighbor, truly following God’s law. After hearing Dr. Levine open up this text, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to think about this parable in the same way again.

And that’s exactly what Jesus hoped would happen to those who heard his words. What if we didn’t figure out who was good and bad by the labels they carry but instead by the actions of their lives? What if we asked not “If I stop and help, what happens to me?” but, “If I don’t stop, what happens to them?” The story of the Good Samaritan asks us to rethink the labels that we've put on who is good, and who is bad, who is friend, and who is enemy, who is neighbor, and who is stranger. Rev. Richard Fairchild writes, "It has been suggested - and I think rightly so given some of the teachings of the time and the reality of human nature at all times, that the lawyer is really asking Jesus: 'Who is NOT my neighbor? Who is that I am allowed to ignore or to neglect? Perhaps even to hate? What is the minimal thing that I need to do to keep God's law of love - and what can I safely get away with not doing... 'That is a horrifying approach to keeping the law of God isn't it? Who must I love - and who can I get away with not loving..."

I think sometimes we are perhaps guilty of taking this approach with God. Who do we want to get away with not loving? What if, like monks in the sixth century, we made the words of “Be Thou My Vision” our prayer, our meditation. The Samaritan in this parable saw the beaten man with God’s eyes, God’s vision, even though the worldview would have made them enemies. Jesus was trying to show the lawyer how to love with God’s love. Do we seek to be like Jesus? If we do, that will mean loving in the radical way Jesus loved, seeing with his eyes, feeling with his heart. God, be our vision, our meditation, our speech, our parent, our shield, our dignity, our shelter, our every good, our kingdom, our chief love, our noble estate, and heart of our own heart. “Which of these,” Jesus asks, “was a neighbor?” The lawyer answered, “the one who showed mercy.” Jesus said, “Go and do likewise.” Amen.

Sermon for Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, "Discipline"

Sermon 6/20/10

Galatians 3:23-29

Galatians: Discipline

Today, we continue our journey through Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and we start to see his logic unfolding, as in each text, he builds on the argument he laid down in the last passage. Last week, remember, we talked about how we are saved, and Paul reminded us that it is not adherence to rules, at which we can never be perfect, but faith in God’s free grace, which sets us right with God.

In today’s text, Paul is talking about discipline. We can think about discipline in multiple ways. First, you might think of being a disciplined person. Are you a disciplined person? Do you have something that is sometimes hard to do, but that nonetheless you do regularly? My brother Todd is becoming a very disciplined runner. He’s trying to train for a marathon, and he runs on a set schedule, whether he feels like it or not. That’s discipline. Spiritually speaking, we have disciplines too – spiritual disciplines. I think we’ll be talking about those some months down the road more intentionally – but spiritual disciplines can be prayer, scripture reading, fasting, etc., done on a regular, committed schedule.

But on the other hand, discipline can mean the trouble that we get into when we do something wrong, that is supposed to get us back in line. Both senses of discipline are to keep us in line – remember how we talked about being justified last week – in line with God. Both senses of the word discipline keep us in line, but discipline that happens when we’re in trouble for misbehaving is usually more like punishment. How have you been disciplined in your lifetime? I think I’ve mentioned to you before that I was pretty much a goody-goody two shoes growing up. I didn’t get in trouble very often. So I didn’t get disciplined very often. But the ‘discipline’ I can remember included things like having to go to your room – which was of more consequence when your room didn’t include TVs and ipods and laptops and gaming systems – or not being able to hang out with a particular friend that got me in trouble. My mother wasn’t a particularly tough disciplinarian. But I know others of my friends weren’t so lucky, and they and my less-well behaved little brothers, got grounded with much more regularity than I did, and I know that some of you probably had more strict discipline as children than I did!

 Paul says that outside of faith, the law is our disciplinarian, but that when faith comes, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Jesus, we are all children of God through faith. When he uses the word disciplinarian, you can think of a babysitter. In fact, the role Paul is describing was similar – the word he uses in Greek meant something like a slave who would be in charge of watching children while they were not in school. There’s no real relationship between the disciplinarian and the child – it isn’t a relationship of affection, but of obligation. The slave is required to care for the children by a master. The discipline is meant to keep order, keep things in line. By contrast, Paul says that we belong to Christ, and so we are God’s children and heirs, inheritors of all God’s promises. And because we’re all God’s children, any other categories that are set up for us through the law are meaningless. We’re meant not to be kept in place but set free. Paul names the categories that divided folks in his day: Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female. We could add more: native or immigrant, black or white, rich or poor, gay or straight, pro-life or pro-choice, Republican or Democrat, Methodist or Presbyterian: these categories are nothing in the light of the one label that unites us: we are all children of God.

So what does this mean for us? What does it mean to be children of God instead of wards of the law? Next Sunday we will celebrate our graduates from high-school and college. I can guess about one aspect of their journeys that is a common bond, even though they will take different paths. These journeys – from kindergarten through elementary school, during middle-school days and high-school and for some of them beyond that, the journey of education has involved a lot of following rules and learning to be disciplined. You have to learn rules about how to behave in school – which bus to take and how to get along with your classmates, when you can and when you can’t talk in class. You have to learn how to change classes when you get older and make it in three or four minutes from one end of the building to the other. You have to learn your subjects – math and science, history and English, music and art, language and technology and home and career skills – a little bit of everything. And, to a large degree, you have to learn to stay within the boundaries set for you by the rules, by the teachers, by the administration. You can’t miss too many classes, or show up late. You have to get your permission slips signed to go on field trips, and get permission or passes to be in the hallways. Part of learning and growing up is learning to follow the rules – or suffer the consequences! You have to be disciplined, in a way that comes from inside you, your own self-control, or you will be disciplined from without – timeouts, name on the board, missing recess, detention, suspension, failing classes. You have to follow the rules, at least most of the rules most of the time, or you don’t get to pass to the next level.

But it isn’t only about the rules, is it? I hope our graduates have gone beyond the rules – not through the rules, or bending the rules, or breaking the rules, or getting around the rules – but beyond the rules. I hope – not just for our graduates, but for all of us, that we’ve experienced a transition in our lives from learning because we have to learn because the rules say so to learning because we want to learn. And usually, it happens at least in the areas of learning when you are starting to fall in love with a particular subject matter, when you are starting to learn what will be your passions in life. I remember feeling this way during my piano lessons in high-school. For so long practicing was a chore – something I had to do in order to make it through my lessons without my teacher being too upset with me. It took a lot of discipline to keep practicing my scales and playing the same phrases of music over and over. I like piano, and I wanted to play. But it was more work than pleasure for some time. And then, somewhere in there, the transition happened. My playing, my practicing, became enjoyable. I was actually making some music. And making music inspired me to practice more, to love music more, and to invest myself more in what I was doing. I felt the same way my freshman year of college – I was learning so much and being exposed to so many new ideas that I just couldn’t soak it up fast enough. Like I said, I hope you’ve all experienced or will experience this transition – and it isn’t limited to the classroom, or the world of academics – it’s the passion that my brother Todd has for acting, that made him commit all of his summer vacations to theatre workshops and training programs until he could start getting paid to do what he loved. In religious-speak, we call this discovering of passion a vocation, which means a calling. So often, we talk about being called by God as something that happens just to people who think they’re called to be pastors. But I’ll keep saying it until you believe it: we are all God’s children, so we are all called by God

What is your passion? This passion that we seek for our lives, this figuring out of our vocation and our call from God – this leads us back to our text from Galatians. Paul sees that instead of trusting in the faith that they have, instead of being moved by the Spirit that they’ve received, the Galatians keep returning to the law, thinking that the law will save them, that the law will prove them worthy servants of God. But Paul asks the Galatians, challenges and chides them, “Are you so foolish? Having started with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh? Did you experience so much for nothing?—if it really was for nothing. Well then, does God supply you with the Spirit and work miracles among you by your doing the works of the law, or by your believing what you heard?” (1) Where we pick up, Paul is talking about the law that bound these people together before they heard the freeing word of grace in Jesus Christ. Paul argues that while we can live by the law when there are no better alternatives, when we have a better option, we better take it. Because of Jesus, our better alternative, Paul says, is to live by faith, not by the law, and be justified – set straight – by faith. We “are no longer subject to a disciplinarian” but instead we are “children of God through faith,” “clothed with Christ,” and “one in Christ Jesus.”

Paul was trying to teach the Galatians that they could live beyond the rules that they’d been taught from the law. Not against the rules, not breaking the commandments, not ignoring the way that they’d already come to know God – after all, Jesus taught that he came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it. But the Galatians needed to learn that they weren’t bound and imprisoned by the law because they were free in Christ, free by God’s grace to live in a bigger way, live in a deeper way, life in a more challenging and more satisfying way. Imagine if your whole life you had to get a permission slip in order to do anything? That would be ridiculous of course. But that’s how the Galatians were living – so afraid of breaking the rules of the law they once had learned that they were missing out on the joy of following God because of sheer love and passion.

When we make that transition – from law to faith, from rules to freedom, from practicing to passion, finally, change can happen, and finally, transformation occurs, and finally, we start really being disciples and living out the good news that Jesus shared. Instead of God being the Disciplinarian with us as the students just trying to stay out of trouble, Paul reminds us that God is our Parent and we are God’s beloved children. And as God’s children, we’re meant to follow rules, sure, but God most wants us to grow up into the unique creations we’re meant to be. We’re meant to be full of passion for what and who God has called us to be, and we’re meant to mature in faith as we are filled with a Parent’s love. May we be filled with God’s love and freed by God’s love as we continue in a journey of faith. Amen.