THR: Has the world changed for activists like you?
Belafonte: Definitely. Back then, the enemies were very clear, very precise. It is easy to fight oppression if it comes in [the form of] a swastika and a boot, and as a dictator, and you can see it and feel it and touch it. It is easy when there is a sign that says “No N—–s“ or “No Jews.“ Where it becomes the most insidious is when it buries itself and you can no longer touch it but can taste that yet it is there, fully blown, doing insane mischief. That is why I think the period now is the most challenging I’ve ever lived in. The power in many societies has become almost absolute. Those who have the power in the free-enterprise system start to crush societies and create wars that are unholy. What we did during the Bush period, what we still continue to do, even with Barack Obama, is the continuency of not changing the paradigm, of not changing the view. We still have laws that encourage torture; we did not change Guantanamo; we have laws that allow the police to arrest you at any time, not having to tell you why, and take you wherever they want. This kind of capitalism is taking us to the doorstep of [a] Fourth Reich, I think.
And here’s another one:
THR: Can you pin down what the enemy is nowadays?
Belafonte: Unbridled capitalism. The concentration of money in the hands of a very small group is the most dangerous thing that has ever happened to civilization. We are facing an oligarchy of force. Just look at who controls the press. We all witnessed how money and power squeezed out all essense of Rupert Murdoch and [Silvio] Berlusconi.Thank God for social media, which aids transparency. But even that becomes more and more restricted now, with companies like Facebook buying up all the roots of this technology.
Two researchers at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga found that atheists and agnostics run the range from vocally anti-religious activists to nonbelievers who still observe some religious traditions.
“The main observation is that nonbelief is an ontologically diverse community,” write doctoral student Christopher Silver and undergraduate student Thomas Coleman.
I had fun with this study because, although I don’t ascribe the label atheist to myself, I am not a theist in the classical sense. For those who may not be familiar with the terms: Classical Theism refers to belief in an eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, and personal deity who is responsible for the creation of the universe, exists separately from it, and interferes with its normal operations at least occasionally. Depending on who you ask, the God of classical theism might also be defined as omnipresent, immutable (unchanging) and/or impassable (incapable of feeling or suffering).
I really like a conversational strategy adopted by Unitarian Universalist minister John Buehrens: whenever someone says, “I don’t believe in God,” Buehrens responds, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in.” Most of the time, he says, he is able to say that he doesn’t believe in that God either. Likewise with me: if the classical theist concept of divinity is the only legitimate definition of the word God, then I would be forced to classify myself as an atheist. For various reasons, I reject outright the ideas of immutability, impassability, and separateness from the universe. I radically redefine concepts of omnipotence, omniscience, creativity, and personality in ways that would make them nearly unrecognizable to a classical theist. For reasons that I admit are not entirely rational, I continue to accept the quality of benevolence as central to my understanding of the idea of God.
There are two thinkers with whom I tend to resonate when it comes to talking about God. The first is philosopher/theologian Paul Tillich who famously declared that God is not “a being” but “Being Itself” or “the Ground of Being”. This is also vaguely reminiscent of St. Thomas Aquinas who said (not in so many words) that God does not “exist” but “is existence”. In more recent years, Forrest Church (another Unitarian Universalist) wrote in his book The Cathedral of the World, “God is not God’s name. God is our name for that which is greater than all, yet present in each.”
Like most atheists, I have no trouble acknowledging that God is a mythical concept devised by human minds in a particular cultural milieu. I utterly reject the hypothesis that there is actually an “old man in the sky” who created the world, controls everything, and condemns earth to destruction and the majority of humanity to eternal postmortem torture as punishment for various moral and dogmatic infractions. If that’s who God must be, then you can call me an atheist.
When it comes to the six types of atheists, I might be classified somewhere between a 3 (seeker-agnostic) and a 6 (ritual atheist).
Regarding the 3 (seeker-agnostic) the article says this:
This group is made up of people who are unsure about the existence of a God but keep an open mind and recognize the limits of human knowledge and experience.
Silver and Coleman describe this group as people who regularly question their own beliefs and “do not hold a firm ideological position.”
That doesn’t mean this group is confused, the researchers say. They just embrace uncertainty.
Regarding the 6 (ritual atheist) the article says:
They don’t believe in God, they don’t associate with religion, and they tend to believe there is no afterlife, but the sixth type of nonbeliever still finds useful the teachings of some religious traditions.
“They see these as more or less philosophical teachings of how to live life and achieve happiness than a path to transcendental liberation,” Silver and Coleman wrote. “For example, these individuals may participate in specific rituals, ceremonies, musical opportunities, meditation, yoga classes, or holiday traditions.”
For many of these nonbelievers, their adherence to ritual may stem from family traditions. For others, its a personal connection to, or respect for, the “profound symbolism” inherent within religious rituals, beliefs and ceremonies, according the researchers.
If I had to classify myself as an atheist, based on my rejection of classical theism, it would probably look like some combination of these two categories. However, I don’t consider myself an atheist because even a combination of these recently expanded ideas is still too dogmatically confining for me.
So here I am: neither a classical theist nor an atheist. If there is a widely acknowledged category that most closely describes the place where I live, it would be panentheism (God exists within the universe and the universe exists within God). Unlike pantheism (God is the universe and the universe is God), panentheism leaves more room for mystery and transcendence beyond the realm of time/space/matter/energy.
However, because I like to challenge conventional labels and make up new words, I’ve been playing with the term alt/theism as a description for where I’m at. Don’t read too much into it or get your torches and pitchforks ready, this is just pure fun with words.
For me, as an alt/theist, faith in God is based on a meta-rational “hunch” about the mysteries of existence, connection, personality, and harmony. My hunch (which I cannot prove as fact but cannot reject as possbility) is that each of these experienced realities is derivative from some larger source or whole that can never be fully understood or explained by human reason. To this mystery, the language of my Christian tradition attaches the name God. My only hope in the quest for understanding is to approach the very tip of reason’s precipice and peer over the edge into the ongoing mystery with my eyes, ears, heart, mind, and mouth hanging open in wonder.
I come to you this afternoon on loan from the First Presbyterian Church of Boonville, just north of here, where I have served as minister for the last three years. I want you to know that you have many allies in faith communities of various traditions around the world. I believe that Unitarian Universalism represents the very pinnacle of religious liberalism, but it does not have a monopoly on that label. No, progressive believers of every imaginable religious stripe exist in the churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples of the world. Sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, they seek to embody the Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism within their respective traditions. I am one such person. Speaking as a Christian, I have discovered that these Seven Principles are as clear and concise a description as I have yet found for the way in which I seek to practice my faith. Like you, I am proud to call myself a religious liberal.
Too often, religious liberals have been pigeonholed according to what we don’t believe: we don’t interpret our sacred texts literally, we don’t claim to possess exclusive access to absolute truth, we don’t hold fast to a rigid, black and white moral code. All of these statements about us are true, but they’re not the whole truth. Too often, people have negatively defined us in this way and thus propagated the myth that we don’t believe in anything. (Joke about religious liberals and Jehovah’s Witnesses.) They say that we don’t care about truth, that we don’t care about morality, and that the sacred texts of our traditions mean nothing to us. And that is certainly not true.
Today, I’d like to take a look at what those two words mean in a positive sense: religious liberal. I’d like to talk about what it is that we do believe.
And the phrase we picked for today’s service is “freedom bound”. I like that. As religious liberals, each of us is always in a state of being “free” (liberal) and “bound” (religious). Let me explain what I mean by that.
I’ll begin with the word liberal. As most of us already know, the word liberal comes from the same Latin root as the word liberty, which means freedom. On the most basic level, ours is a free faith. Freedom is where we come from. Religious liberals are those have declared their independence from the narrow confines of antiquated and superstitious dogma. We struggle to keep our minds open to new insights from fields like science and philosophy. For us, critical thinking is a means of grace through which reality is being made known to us. As the 18th century Unitarian minister, William Ellery Channing once said: “I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to the light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from heaven.” Freedom is where we come from.
Freedom is also where we are going. We are “freedom bound” or “bound for freedom.” More than most, religious liberals are able to look at their forebears with simultaneously respectful and critical eyes. For example, we have no problem honoring the memory of someone like Thomas Jefferson as one of the founders of American democracy, but we also recognize that he didn’t go far enough in championing the cause of liberty.
Jefferson’s most famous words are captured in the Declaration of Independence, which he composed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
However, we know that Jefferson himself was a slave-owner who held his fellow human beings in unjust captivity, treating them as mere objects and property. Abolitionists and civil rights activists in subsequent centuries have called for the extension of those unalienable rights to people of all races and ethnicities. Our sisters in the women’s suffrage and liberation movements have drawn our attention to the truth that all women, just as much as men, are created equal. Environmental activists have expanded the boundaries of equality even further to include all beings, not just all humans. Through them, we learn that the Planet itself has unalienable rights that we ignore at our own peril.
Thomas Jefferson gave us a good start in the cause of equality, but our free faith demands that we keep going past the point where he stopped. Freedom demands that we stand up for the equality and unalienable rights of all beings. Freedom itself is a growing thing, as is equality. Freedom is where we are going. So that’s what I mean when I talk about being a religious liberal: I’m talking about freedom.
Here in the Unitarian Universalist Association, you express this truth beautifully in two of your seven principles. You affirm and promote “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” as well as “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” These principles, taken together, provide a firm foundation for the pursuit of religious freedom. Insofar as you affirm these principles, you are a religious liberal.
Now, I want to turn and take a look at the other word in that phrase: religious. I want to talk about what it means to be a religious liberal. Now this one’s tricky. That word, religion, can mean a lot of different things to different people. What does it mean to be religious? Does it mean attending services on a regular basis? Does it mean adhering to a set of beliefs? Does it mean celebrating the holidays and participating in the rituals of a tradition? Religious can mean any or all of the above.
Here’s what I mean when I say it:
The word religion comes from the Latin relego, which means “to bind together or connect.” You’re familiar with Lego blocks, right? What do they do that other blocks don’t do? They connect to each other! To be religious, then, is to be connected.
To illustrate, let me return to what I was saying a moment ago about going beyond the original ideas about freedom and equality that started with Thomas Jefferson. In the beginning, those ideas only applied to a very small, select group of free, white men. Over time, thanks to the efforts of others, those men were joined by women, and people of other races, and people from other countries, and people of other sexual orientations, and people of other gender identities, and the animals, and the trees, and the rivers, and the mountains, and the oceans, and the air, and even the Earth itself: all boundtogether, connected, in one beautiful, perfect WHOLE. For me, that’s what it means to be religious: to recognize and honor the many connections that exist between the parts and the whole of reality. And I can’t think of any better way to put it than you Unitarian Universalists do in the last of your Seven Principles. You “affirm and promote… Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” I love that. You have summed up so brilliantly and so beautifully what it means to be a religious liberal. Religious means connected.
So then, I would say that a religious liberal is someone who is free and connected, connected and free. We need both. We can’t have one without the other.
If we emphasize connection at the expense of freedom, we end up with tyranny (obviously). Individual people become little more than cogs in a machine, with no “inherent worth and dignity” of their own.
But if we try to take freedom without connection, we end up with a very selfish, ego-centric view of the world. This is the kind of libertarianism that says, “I don’t owe anyone anything. If someone else is suffering or oppressed, it’s not my problem. Let them eat cake!”
Folks who live like this have no sense of either history or obligation. We see ourselves as self-contained units who exist independently of other self-contained (i.e. self-centered) units. We say the welfare of the whole doesn’t bother us because it’s none of our business.
You know, there is a particular kind of cell in our bodies that behaves this way: a cancer cell. A cancer cell, according to Michael Dowd, is simply a cell that has forgotten its history, so it consumes and multiplies without discrimination until its host body is utterly consumed from the inside out. We are in the middle of a cancer epidemic in our society, so you can just imagine what it would be like if people started behaving like cancer cells, with no sense of history, identity, or purpose within the embrace of the Whole of reality. Our existence is life out of balance with the whole of reality. That’s what freedom without connection gets you: selfishness.
As religious liberals, we do our best to hold freedom and connection together as our primary values. We affirm and promote “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” as well as “respect for the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part.” We are free and we are bound. We are bound for freedom and we are bound by freedom.
Secrets of Life. A controversial sex ed film from the 1950s.
Reblogged from Think Progress:
California’s teen birth rate has plummeted to the lowest level that it’s been in the past 20 years, according to new data from the state’s health department. The state’s rate now stands at 28 births for every 1,000 teenage girls — a 60 percent drop since 1991, when the rate peaked at 70.9 births for every 1,000 girls.
Reblogged from the Rabbi’s Blog at Temple Emanu-El.
By my esteemed colleague, Rabbi Cassi Kail:
Even in Temple times people needed to be reminded that they should pick a spouse based on far more than looks and social status. And yet, like today, there had been barriers to finding true love.
By John Vachon for U.S. Farm Security Administration (Library of Congress[1]) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
I’m racist. It’s important that you know that about me. I feel that it’s even more important for me to verbalize my racism, given my constant urge to keep up appearances. As a white American living half a century after Dr. King, I have internalized the rhetoric of racial equality without materializing the reality of it.
I like to think of myself as a “good person” and “not racist” but the fact is that neither of those statements is true. I’m actually a bad person and I’m racist.
I live a fairly insulated and isolated life in a just about all-white bedroom community in upstate New York. I can’t name a single African American family in my neighborhood, but I can show you who proudly flies Confederate flag on shirts, hats, trucks, and houses. The church I pastor previously had one African American teenager attending for about six months before he finished high school. The membership currently includes one mixed-race family. I founded an ecumenical outreach ministry in a nearby city that is currently mostly made up of white, liberal Christians in their late twenties to mid-thirties. The clientele of my favorite café, bagel shop, and book store are… you guessed it: mostly white.
The only time I come into regular contact with people of another race is in my teaching job at Utica College, where I’ve noticed that my non-white students regularly (but not always) get lower grades than white students. I don’t know why that is. Have I gone to great lengths to find out what’s wrong with my teaching and/or grading practices? No. Why? Because I’m too busy with all the other stuff going on in my life to put something so big on my plate at an institution where I’m just an adjunct lecturer. I would rather keep my schedule as convenient as possible than work to adjust an imbalance that benefits people who look like me but potentially damages long-term opportunities for people of other races. I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty racist to me.
I am racist because I presume that racism was a problem for previous generations, but thank God Dr. King came along and fixed it all for us with one amazing speech in 1963. I am racist because I think having black friends makes me not-racist. I am racist because I think racism is confined to my personal feelings about black people.
I am racist because I benefit from living in a country where the following facts are true:
Black youths arrested for drug possession are 48 times more likely to wind up in prison than white youths arrested for the same crime under the same circumstances.
Black and Latino men are three times more likely than white men to be stopped by the police and have their cars searched – even though white men are four times more likely to have weapons or drugs.
White men with a criminal record are more likely to be called back for a job interview than black men with no record, even when their education and experience are the same.
Students of color are far less likely to be put in honors courses even after you take test scores and grades into account.
Students of color are more than twice as likely to be suspended or expelled from school even though they are not much more likely to break school rules than whites.
Black college men end up just a few dollars ahead of whites who went no further than high school.
45% of black children live below the poverty line, compared with 16% of white youngsters.
From 1939 to 1959, the earnings of black men relative to whites improved by over one third. However, from 1972 to 1992, the relative earnings of black men tapered off—and this was the period of affirmative action.
Black unemployment rates, for as long as records have been kept, have been at least double those experienced by whites. Today, the definition of unemployment has been sufficiently restructured (the figures no longer count people on welfare, those whose unemployment benefits have expired, those in jail or in the military) to become nearly meaningless. However, it is reasonable to claim that unemployment levels among urban youth exceed 60%.
Black professors hold less than 5% of faculty positions. Less than 5% of the K-12 teaching force is black. About 85% of this group is centered in urban areas.
Of all the doctoral degrees awarded in 1990, just 3.5% went to black men and women.
The attrition rate of black university students at many prestigious universities is greater than 60%.
Most NCAA universities refuse to release attrition rate for athletes. An NCAA study showed that nearly 75% of Division I black athletes failed to graduate.
While black students represent 16 % of all public school students, they make up nearly 40% of those classed as learning disabled.
All of these facts are true but I have made no effort to change a single one of them. That’s why I’m racist.
Because I’m racist, I don’t have the right to accuse African American people of “playing the race card” when entire communities are outraged at the verdict of a trial. I can’t even tell them to stay peaceful and not get violent. That would be like me slapping you across the face and reminding you that it would be immoral for you to slap me back. As it turns out, I have a “race card” of my own and it’s an ace that’s permanently up my sleeve: it’s called being white and it gives me a distinct, unfair advantage over others.
As a racist person, I have an ethical obligation to shut up, listen, and be ready to repent when there’s an outcry. I don’t get to offer my two cents. Not yet. Not while circumstances remain the same.
Yet, here I am: still writing and speaking, still spewing out a thousand or so words that will be read by dozens, if not hundreds, of people in the next few days. I still have this urge to say my piece in public when I should be listening. Why is that? Because I’m racist.
I was talking with an old college friend about the Zimmerman trial, race, Martin Luther King, and the concept of social justice. My friend expressed some discomfort with the term social justice because it seems to get thrown around quite a bit without ever being specifically defined. His last written statement was “Justice = ???”
I think that’s a fantastic question. I can’t claim to answer it once and for all, but I’ll present my angle on what I mean when I use that word. I’m a Christian and so is my friend, so I’ll be speaking in Christian terms and making primary use of the tools of our tradition to develop my ideas.
For me, on the most basic level, Justice = Being in Right Relationship.
My understanding of right relationship involves things like fairness, equity, informed consent, reciprocation, empathy, compassion, trust, and shared responsibility.
The term justice can be broadly applied to the interaction between any collection of two or more moral agents (e.g. person-person, person-object, person-planet, person-society, society-society, person-God, etc.). Wherever one of these relationships is broken or violated, injustice exists.
Social justice is simply the concept of right relationship applied to the political and economic connections between people in large groups.
Speaking as a Christian, I believe there are plenty of texts in the Bible that speak on this subject. Here are just a few of my favorites:
Before you read on, take a minute to click and read those links. Let those words sink in a bit. Go ahead, I’ll wait…
Fairness in political and economic relations is a big deal. Our hyper-individualized consumerist society does its best to shield us from witnessing the effects of the unjust relationships in which we participate. We are actively discouraged from examining the real human and environmental costs of our way of life. Those who pursue ethical integrity in these matters are typically ostracized as weirdos or else canonized as saints.
The particular model of justice to which I subscribe is the model called Restorative Justice. This theory of justice was used by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in his work with the Truth & Reconciliation Commission in post-Apartheid South Africa.
The opposite of Restorative Justice is Retributive Justice (quid pro quo, and eye for an eye, etc.). Under Retributive Justice, justice is served when an offender is caught and made to “pay the price” for what he/she has done. To me, this is a dead-end street. As Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye and eventually the whole world goes blind.”
Restorative Justice, on the other hand, says there can be no justice without mercy and no mercy without justice. Under Restorative Justice, a relationship has been damaged when an offense is committed. Punishment and reparations may be part of the mending of that relationship, but punishment is only ever a means to an end. Justice is served when right relationship is restored. Reconciliation, not punishment, is the proper end of justice.
Landscape with the Good Samaritan by Rembrandt (1638). Image is in the public domain.
There are some passages of the Bible that people have read (or at least heard about) over and over again so many times that it’s hard to look at them with fresh eyes. These passages bear the weight of certain cultural interpretations that aren’t easily discarded, even in the light of decent biblical scholarship. This morning’s New Testament reading is one such passage: the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
The toughest part about writing a sermon on passages like this one is that people think they already know what it means, so they switch on a kind of theological autopilot in their heads and then zone out so that they only ever end up hearing what they already expected to hear in the text. This is a dangerous theological habit to get into, although we all do it. We tell ourselves the same old familiar stories again and again. We never leave our spiritual comfort zone and so we rob the gospel of its radical power to touch and transform our lives.
Well, it just so happens that Jesus’ Parable of the Good Samaritan is all about leaving your comfort zone and being radically transformed. We’re used to thinking of it as a tale about human kindness. We think Jesus was just telling people to do nice things for each other. We call people “Good Samaritans” when they go out of their way to help others in need. Some states even have “Good Samaritan laws” that require citizens to assist a victim when a crime has been committed.
But is that what this story is about? It is certainly a story that has human kindness in it. The image of the Good Samaritan has endured as a symbol for kindness in the intervening millennia since the story was first told. But is kindness the point of the story? I don’t think so.
Kindness is hardly the first word that would come to mind for a first century Jewish person who was hearing this story. Actually, the first word to come to mind would probably be, “Ugh!” or “Eww!” For first century Jews, the only Good Samaritan was a Samaritan that stayed very far away.
Samaritans, from a Jewish perspective, were heretics and half-breeds. They were the leftover dregs of society who had interbred and mixed religious practices with the invading Assyrians in the 8th century BCE. Not quite Jewish and not quite Gentile, Samaritans held a particular place of disgust in the first century Jewish mind.
Even more than that, this particular Samaritan in question appears to have been a trader by profession. He rode a donkey, carried supplies like oil, and possessed a considerable sum of money (at least 2 days’ wages for the average working man). Traders were also looked down upon in the ancient world. They were not rooted down by place or tradition and often went wherever the money took them. Like tax collectors, they were expected to be cheats and thieves.
Finally, this trader Samaritan takes his wounded stranger to an inn. This was even more despicable. In those days, an inn was not what we would call a hotel, it was a seedy dumping ground for the scum of the earth. Nothing good happened there. No respectable person would be caught dead in an inn if they could help it.
So that’s a little bit of background for you. I’m telling you this in order to flesh out just how uncomfortable and maybe even offended Jesus’ listeners must have been when they first heard this parable. It involves a Samaritan trader who books a room in an inn. That fact by itself would seem seedy. In today’s terms, Jesus might as well have told a story about a cross-dressing drug dealer in a crack house. That fact alone would make for a story that you wouldn’t want to tell in mixed company. But does that bother Jesus? Not in the slightest.
So, let’s turn and take a look at why Jesus felt the need to tell such an offensive story to his audience of listeners.
It begins with a conversation between Jesus and a lawyer. Now, the word lawyer here is a little bit misleading. When we talk about lawyers, we usually mean trial attorneys. But in this case, the lawyer that Jesus was talking with was probably more like a biblical scholar: someone who studied and interpreted the Jewish Torah. In today’s terms, this person might be a professor at a theological seminary. On the scale of religious and social respectability, this lawyer would have been the polar opposite of the Samaritan trader.
So, this lawyer (i.e. seminary professor) has some serious doubts about Jesus’ credibility as a rabbi. After all, Jesus was a working-class hillbilly with no formal education to speak of, yet people were flocking to him in droves to hear what he was saying. This scholar probably saw it as his professional and religious duty to expose Jesus, the unaccredited snake-oil peddler, for the fraud that he was.
The fight that ensues between the two of them is a battle of words and wits. It’s all about having the right questions and comebacks. The lawyer starts off with a question, “Teacher,” he says, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” In other words, “How do I live a life that’s really living, not just existing?”
Jesus answers his question with a question, “What does the Torah say?” The lawyer then proves his competence by flawlessly quoting two commandments from the Torah, one about loving God and the other about loving one’s neighbor. Jesus gives the lawyer a polite “golf clap” and says, “Bravo. Right answer. Do this and you will live.” But the lawyer isn’t satisfied. He’s proven his own competence, but he hasn’t yet stumped Jesus in front of his followers, so he keeps going:
“And who is my neighbor?”
This is an interesting question. It’s all about how wide religious people can legitimately cast their nets of inclusion. Different religious groups at that time had different standards by which certain people could join and others could not. To use today’s terms again, the more conservative groups defined neighbor in narrow terms while the more liberal groups accepted a broader definition. But there’s a problem with each of these definitions (the ancient scholar as well as modern liberals and conservatives) and it’s this: Asking the question about neighborliness in this way automatically assumes that the questioner is placing him/herself at the center of the circle (the center of the universe, in fact). Everything else happens around and is related to him/her. The lawyer’s question (“who is my neighbor?”) is an inherently self-centered question.
So Jesus, in response, tells this seedy, PG-13 story about a dirty, low-down Samaritan traveler who stays in inns. He holds up the Samaritan as a moral exemplar over and against a priest and a Levite, two Jewish religious leaders.
At the end of the story, when all is said and done, Jesus knocks the ball back into the lawyer’s court with yet another question, “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” And this is where Jesus wins the argument. He stumps the lawyer by forcing him to admit something he doesn’t want to admit.
The lawyer’s response is priceless as he is unable to even bring himself to name the dirty, rotten, low-down Samaritan as his own neighbor. That would be unthinkable. All the lawyer can manage to squeak out are the words, “The one who showed him mercy.”
Leaving the lawyer with an invitation to imitate his enemy, Jesus is basically saying, “Let that which you hate become your teacher. Learn from what you despise. Let it throw you off-center, off-balance, and out-of-whack.”
Again, the problem with both conservative and liberal models of neighborliness is that both of them place the questioner at the center as the subject/hero, differing only in how wide they prefer to draw their respective circles of inclusion. Jesus, on the other hand, is inviting the Torah scholar (as well as all present-day culture warriors) to re-center their circles somewhere other than their own egos.
In Jesus’ parable, the Samaritan trader is not just a passive presence who is worthy of inclusion in the lawyer’s circle of neighbors, but an active agent who becomes a vessel of kindness to another (presumably Jewish) person. The disgusting, no-good, low-down, half-breed, heretic Samaritan is now at the center of the circle, graciously including Jewish people in his own circle of kindness. The lawyer’s moral universe has just been thrown off-center and now he has to adjust in order to get his bearings.
In Christian theological terms, this is exactly what God does in Christ. The incarnation throws the universe off-center as the divine Ground of All Being takes on our finite, fallen flesh. God’s own center of gravity has shifted in order for God to be experienced with us, here in the ordinary stuff of this universe. According to the Christian story, God is not content to stay enthroned in heaven but meets us here out of deep compassion and solidarity. In this way, God is more than simply loving, God is Love,as it says in 1 John 4.
As Christians in the world, I believe that we too are called to reorient our lives as our own little selfish worlds are thrown off-center. Christ invites us to dethrone ourselves from the center of the universe and live, as he did, for others. In doing so, Jesus says, we render to God the only kind of service God is really interested in: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”
As you go out into the world this week, I invite you to challenge yourself and ask what/who do I truly despise? Who is your disgusting Samaritan?
Let that which you hate become your teacher, let your world be thrown off-balance, and may you discover the Spirit of the God who is love living and breathing in you, in everyone you welcome, and in all who welcome you.
Dear friends, on 9 October 2012, the Taliban shot me on the left side of my forehead. They shot my friends, too. They thought that the bullets would silence us, but they failed. And out of that silence came thousands of voices. The terrorists thought they would change my aims and stop my ambitions. But nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born. I am the same Malala. My ambitions are the same. My hopes are the same. And my dreams are the same. Dear sisters and brothers, I am not against anyone. Neither am I here to speak in terms of personal revenge against the Taliban or any other terrorist group. I am here to speak for the right of education for every child. I want education for the sons and daughters of the Taliban and all the terrorists and extremists. I do not even hate the Talib who shot me.
Even if there was a gun in my hand and he was standing in front of me, I would not shoot him. This is the compassion I have learned from Mohamed, the prophet of mercy, Jesus Christ and Lord Buddha. This the legacy of change I have inherited from Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Mohammed Ali Jinnah.
This is the philosophy of nonviolence that I have learned from Gandhi, Bacha Khan and Mother Teresa. And this is the forgiveness that I have learned from my father and from my mother. This is what my soul is telling me: be peaceful and love everyone.
Dear sisters and brothers, we realise the importance of light when we see darkness. We realise the importance of our voice when we are silenced.
Hopping Hadrian's Wall 