July 10, 2016

Susan Adams

Ordinary 15     Amos 7:7-17     Luke 10:25-37

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

John, my sister Elizabeth and I were stranded in Limoux – the French village where Helen and Stephen stayed – there was a strike in Paris and the trains we not running and we could not get back to Carcassonne where we were staying. The temperature was 40 degrees celsius and we were hot and tired after a day out. A group of us had been dropped by a bus at the train-station: English speakers and a couple of French locals. Eventually we discovered that there would be no further transport available that day. The French people wandered off, the English couple were not interested in working on a solution with us – that left three young men from Pakistan. The men came to us offering to work with us on finding a solution. But first they needed to find a place to pray as it was an appointed prayer time for Muslims. They found a place for their ablutions and to kneel, and despite loud disparaging comments from the other English speakers they knelt to pray. Then one of them rushed away leaving us on the grass wondering what next. Just as we were getting really anxious he returned saying he had a possible solution. The English couple said they had ‘options’, and wandered off leaving us behind. So we trekked off slowly after the three young men who were fast walkers (we would need to hurry we were told) and they kept up a fast pace. One kept coming back to see how John and I were doing and offering encouragement as we hurried after them as fast as we could down alleys and over bridges – twisting this way and that going where, we didn't know. Eventually we caught up and were told a school bus would come and return us to our village. It arrived eventually, and two of our Pakistani rescue team and the three of us were duly taken back to Carcassonne. The men left us after a few selfies and headed away to find another mode of transport to take them to their final destination. We were grateful to them and aware we would have been in a pickle without them.

I have wondered since if we would have been so willing to follow a group of unknown backpacking Muslim men if we were stranded and lost in a New York subway without the local language!

The gospel today put me in mind of this story.

It is so difficult for us to reinvest the over familiar story of the Good Samaritan with the horror that the Jews, to whom it was first directed, must have felt on hearing it! Perhaps imagining a member of Isis helping a New York Republican might just do it! Kindness from a bitter enemy! Could you face it? Could I? Or would generations of the social conditioning that shaped and ordered our behaviour and expectations sweep in and make us too afraid to receive their compassion?

In the book I picked up from George Armstrong the other week, Applied Spirituality, by Swami Agnivesh, there is this phrase “Religions are meant to be, nurseries of culture and hospitality, rather than fortresses of hostility” (p4). It seems to me it is challenge that sits powerfully alongside the parable of the Good Samaritan, powerfully confronting us as Christians today in our certainty and self-righteousness born of generations of Christian teaching, religious self-confidence, and cultural imperialism.

Amos, a first testament prophet speaking about 700 BC, is similarly addressing generational self-confidence and inherited ‘common-sense’ shaped by generations of storytelling. Amos is opening an ethical conversation about the social, religious, economic structures and cultural practices of Israel during the prosperous times of King Jeroboam. He speaks, as all good prophets seem to do, on behalf of God and brings to his hearers an image of God measuring the degree to which the people have bent away from ‘God's-way’ by holding up a plumb-line. God’s measure it would seem, has little to do with the established law or common practice, or ‘common-sense’ (the ‘right’ way to do things) as determined by generations of truths passed down and the prevailing dominant authorities version of the way things need to be. King Jeroboam and his officials, both religious and administrative, are under scrutiny by God as are the people who follow unquestioningly in the prosperous times of that kingdom.

Ethics, it seems to me can be understood as the big framework, the big picture of what is in the best interests of the people, the right and just way of ordering behaviour and decisions (social and economic) that will be life-giving for all the people and not only for a selected or privileged group. Amos is drawing this ethical concern to the attention of the people of Israel; to the religious authorities; and to the King – who, after all, has a responsibility to order matters so that all the people are protected and have the means of a good livelihood. Amos cautions each of these aspects of the kingdom‘s administration with the message that God is not happy; that God will not pass over the people of Israel this time. He proclaims God has noticed what is going on and that tilting away from God’s way: forgetting the covenant expectations, is just not acceptable. There will be no escape from God’s expectations or punishment.

The priest and the King tried to banish Amos, to turn a deaf ear to him but they were warned that would not answer. Different frameworks were expected by God: systems and priorities that would measure up to responsible care for all the people, for economic justice, care for the land and care for those who are in need. An ethical framework that would attend to these dimensions of life was expected from the king and all in responsible leadership!

The expectation that an ethos of care, of hospitality to stranger and to those who are different – the ‘other’ – is buried not too subtly in Jesus’ parable. Hostility toward the ‘other’, self-protection and the enactment of ‘common’ morês so as to be seen to be doing what is ‘right’ is out. Instead of simply accepting there is ‘no other way’ than that of popular promotion, and that enmity and hostility to ‘foreigner’ (those who are different) is in the national interest, and that those who are economically dispensable need no special attention, is simply not acceptable by God who is holding up the plumb-line, the measure. Instead, the requirement (in order to measure up) is for hospitality and compassionate kindness, and for an equitable distribution of wealth, even at the risk of our own good-name and reputation.

I think we have to drop off the rhetorical device Luke uses to present the parable, that is the quizzing lawyer, and simply hear Jesus speak the parable that turns upside down ‘common-sense’ as he knew it and what was considered right and acceptable behaviour in his day, if we want to sense the power in the story. The parable describes the situation of enmity, the rivalry and hatred between Jews and Samaritans that everyone knew, it was commonplace and people behaved accordingly, and that would be how it would continue to be on into the future generation by generation for as long as these two peoples kept telling the ‘truth’ that way.

Jesus is telling it differently – he is inviting a new story, hospitality not hostility.

Today, our context also has ‘others’ to whom we are hostile. It is easy for us with our inherited ways of seeing and doing to reject those who are different – different economically, educationally, socially, politically and religiously. We readily leave them by the wayside, sleeping in doorways, drowning in seas far from home, shut away and shut out. without clean water or the means to grow food crops. They are not us, not our concern. Amos the prophet challenges this, Jesus the prophet and wisdom teacher challenges this.

We are invited to tell our stories differently, to begin the shaping of a different ‘common-sense’ about the priorities for our time, about whom we should be in relationship with, whom we should be concern for.

We are being invited to consider the economic structures and priorities we support and to question how the wealth resources of the earth could be shared more equitably.

Amos’ prophecy in a time of prosperity, and Jesus’ parable in a time of hardship for Jews, invite us to think again about ethics, about what is right, about our attitude to others and about the stretch we are prepared for when we speak of hospitality, of justice and of love of neighbour.