William Yagel
Grace Radford
July 10, 2022
Proper 10, Year C
A Prayer Attributed to Sir Francis Drake
Disturb us, Lord, when
We are too well pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we have dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.
Disturb us, Lord, when
With the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed our vision
Of the new Heaven to dim.
Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wider seas
Where storms will show your mastery;
Where losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars.
We ask You to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push into the future
In strength, courage, hope, and love.
We pray in the name of our captain, who is Jesus Christ. Amen
Disturb us Lord.
This is not our usual cry.
Often, in fact, we come to Church for exactly the opposite. The hymns we love bring us peace, the grand phrasing of our liturgy may offer respite from the mundane routine and remind us of something far greater. Maybe it is just being with the community of Grace that brings us particular comfort, especially as we navigate this time of pandemic and find ourselves re-entering a world we left 2-1/2 years ago. All of these, and the myriad of other reasons personal to each of you are good, and right. We do come for comfort. But our lessons this morning remind us that that is not all we are here for.
Comfort is certainly NOT what Amaziah, the priest of Bethel in the Northern Kingdom, heard from Amos in our reading this morning. He heard of the fall of Israel, he heard of the demise of the children of Israel, the dividing of his home, and Israel’s exile out of her ancestral lands. Not the kind of disturbing that he wanted, as we head today. “OH seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah and earn your bread there.”
A little back story, King Jeroboam was in power in the first half of the 8th century BC. The kingdom of Israel had been divided about 180 years earlier, after the death of David’s son, King Solomon. Bethel was a city in the Northern Kingdom, which had retained the name of Israel. The Southern Kingdom was called Judah because of the majority identity of the tribe of Judah that settled there. Judah retained the holy city of Jerusalem along with Solomon’s temple. History would prove to favor the Southern Kingdom of Judah for some time, but both kingdoms would ultimately fall.
Anyway, Amos was from the Southern Kingdom of Judah. So, when Amaziah says to go earn your bread in Judah he is telling Amos to go home, we don’t need your disturbances here! Amos was a simple herdsman who pruned trees in season, but who pulled a Lorax and walked right into the Priest at Bethel to make plain his vision from God. He predicts the downfall of Israel because the Northern kingdom has lost its way. It isn’t that they are worshiping other Gods exactly. They are maintaining their rituals and they are worshiping God, but they are completely out of relationship with God. They are enslaving people and binding them into debt slavery to keep them oppressed. When they go to worship at the synagogues, they are opulent, immoral, smug, and pious. The people of the Northern Kingdom had made their worship hollow, and thus their relationship with God was hollow. It lacked the challenge that God had offered. It lacked Justice. They had bent the arch of their culture so that those in power could exploit those without it.
But it was comfortable! Well, for some, I suppose.
Amos prophesied against them for their lack of real devotion and their hypocrisy. Small wonder that The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. leaned so heavily on the words of Amos in his ministry for Civil Rights. He did not need to study long to see the parallels between the lives of the oppressed in Israel and the lives of the oppressed in his time. He vocalized the cries of the oppressed in our time in concert with those from 2700 years earlier. He shared the cry of Amos to disturb our Country and thank God he did. We needed to be disturbed by that prophetic voice.
Well, the Northern Kingdom of Israel did not change its ways, and it did fall about 20-30 years after the visions of Amos to the Assyrians in 722 BCE. It fell when the capital of Israel fell and the Assyrians deported the people. And what was that capital of the Northern Kingdom?
The city Samaria.
So, in our Gospel today, when Jesus tells the well-known story of the Samaritan, he is leaning on almost a millennium of history. You see the Samaritans in Jesus day were ancestral remnant of the Northern Kingdom who had avoided deportation. They had a different understanding of the faith of Israel and were held in contempt by the Jews and vice versa. We are talking about, well if you consider the dividing of the kingdom the beginning of the problem, about 960 years of the Hatfield’s and the McCoys! The distrust of these communities was deep, and I am not doing justice to their history here, but hopefully you get the image that the Samaritans were not the enemy DuJour, their opinions of each other go waaay back.
And this is precisely what Jesus is relying on when he invokes their identity.
Don’t get me wrong, there are wonderful sermons that we have all heard about being good to people who need help, and I LOVE that message, but there is MORE than that here! Jesus invokes this identity because they KNOW the Samaritans are NOT good. It goes without saying in their context. In fact, I would argue that we have unintentionally changed the point story by continually calling it the story of the good Samaritan.
Should we understand that he is the only good one? Did our traveler on the road meet the ONE exceptional Samaritan? Is it OK to like that one good one, but still maintain our world view that all the others are somehow not good? If we are not careful with this narrative we can bend it to our own needs not unlike the people of the Northern kingdom.
When Jesus relays this story the hearers are disturbed, just like the hearers of the words of Amos. Jesus is not simply offering a lesson in history like I have offered here today. Jesus is doing far more by leaning on the biases of those who are listening to him speak. I imagine sideways glances and murmurs around as Jesus speaks this story. Jesus then refuses to answer the question that the lawyer asked. You see the Lawyer wanted to know who. The Lawyer wanted to be able to bend and control the narrative so that the neighbors he imagined were all like him. So that the neighbors could be of his choosing. Jesus refuses to put an asterisk on the Law, and Jesus never tells the Lawyer who his neighbor is, or isn’t. Instead, Jesus tells the Lawyer how to behave, how to Love, what to do.
Hear the echo of justice from Amos resonate across the centuries from the lips of Jesus. When you encounter those who hate you, Love them. Break down those barriers you have erected in your heart to separate and segregate God’s creation. Jesus says to go and love as this Samaritan loved. You see Jesus knows a little bit about being hated. God incarnate would be hated and feared and ultimately crucified, yet he still loved them until the end. Jesus is really saying to go and Love the world as God loves them.
And this can be disturbing. Being called into a life of Love is not always an easy road, but it is the way of God, of Christ, of the Holy Spirit. Comfort is important, vital even, but we can be comfortable at home in our PJs on a rainy Sunday Morning. This morning we are called to be disturbed. We are called into those rougher seas where we must depend on God. We are called to be disturbed and challenged by the life of Jesus.
Then we are called to go and to likewise. Amen