Down the Jericho Road - A Sermon in Celebration
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- Created on Sunday, 25 October 2009 01:00
- Written by Gary E. Smith
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It was one year ago that I traveled down the Jordan River valley, from Nazareth in the north, on a road with security fences to the left and right, the country of Jordan to the left, just across the river, the West Bank territories to my right, down to the Dead Sea, about to turn west toward Jerusalem. The city of Jericho was there at the turn, off in the distance, and we did not stop. Now seventeen miles to Jerusalem, through a desert as I’ve always imagined a desert, rolling sand, here and there a Bedouin camp site, otherwise quite desolate. And then a hill above Jerusalem, looking down on the city, and then we moved slowly through city traffic to our hotel.
This road I traveled was a road from Jericho to Jerusalem, but it was not THE Jericho Road. The road I traveled was often a four lane highway, excellently maintained, many trucks and military vehicles, a straight shot to Jerusalem. It was only later, the next day, that I saw the Jericho Road. We traveled into the Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, it was pouring rain by now, getting dark early as it does here in late October, people crowded together . This is the road to Jericho, our guide is saying, and I am in the front of the bus trying to take pictures to bring home to you.
We navigate through these narrow streets, these apartment buildings, these stores, this poverty, this rain, these faces, the Jericho Road, I am thinking, and then the road is blocked, we are at the end of the road. Here is the security fence; a massive twenty foot concrete fence with Israeli soldiers on one side, Palestinian police on the other, no vehicular traffic will pass here. The fence is covered with graffiti and slogans, no need to translate; we know what the words say.
Anger, poverty, hopelessness, ancient hate, oppression, violence, death, it is all there. It is dark, and it is raining, and there are the soldiers, Israeli and Palestinian, and there is the fence. “One day,” Martin Luther King said, “we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway.” That man could preach!
But there was one more thing in this whole scene in East Jerusalem, there on the road back to Jericho (you may want to disable your mystical pop-up blocking button now): I imagined many of you there by the side of that road, doing some small part to make the road safer: housing, food, education, jobs, justice, peace. Go out into the world in peace, we say, strengthen, support, help, honor. And there are your faces who dreamed this Jericho Road Project into existence: Tom, Katharine, Alta, Laura, Tony, Jennifer, Jenny, Rob, Philip, Eric, and new faces, too, represented this morning by Dan, Leslie, Jodi, Kate, Alan, Tammie, David, Charles and so many more. Those faces, your faces, I imagined there.
There are roads everywhere, I know, and, in particular this morning, we lift up the roads and streets of Lowell, our near neighbor and all the dear people who live there and the dreams they have, and the Jericho Road project now replicated in Lawrence and Worcester, and maybe someday soon in Lynn and Pasadena and Roxbury and who knows where else: many roads, many dreams, many faces.
The Universalist side of our family ushered in a faith that was not so much centered on personal salvation as it was on building up what they called a “blessed community” in the here and now, and that tradition and that distinction lives on to this day. “Do we love our neighbor as ourselves?” we might ask each other, not so we can have a four lane highway to the right hand of God, but so that our neighbors can be fed and clothed and sheltered and loved and share in the same joy of the community that we ourselves know. Do we go out into the world in peace so that we can build up point totals for the pearly gates or because we know in our very bones that hell and war and injustice for one group of people is ultimately hell and war and injustice for us all.
We are called to build up the beloved community and no more urgently than in these days. So we look down the Jericho Road and watch the familiar story unfold. Here comes the man on the way to Jerusalem. Here are the robbers who jump on the man, take his money, beat him up, leave him for dead. Here is the first man who passes by, even taking the trouble to cross to the other side of the road. Here is the second man. Can you believe it? He passes by as well, same route, other side of the road. Here comes a third man, one who gives Samaritans a good name. He stops when he sees the beaten man, he helps, he bathes his wounds, he takes him to a shelter where he can recover, rest and heal.
“Which is the neighbor?” Jesus asks his students. “The third man,” they answer. “Go and do likewise,” Jesus says to them and to us. So the name: first called the Jericho Road Project, First Parish Center for Social Change. And when the project was launched, I had never heard the Good Samaritan story in just the way King describes it. I have always seen the characters in the story, the traveler, the robbers, man number one, man number two, the Samaritan, even the inn keeper, but I had never before considered the road itself and what it stands for, and how our own best selves may call us to address the need to transform that road.
“True compassion,” King went on to say, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructure. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth... and say, ‘This is not just.’” And then King asked, “Why are there beggars at all?”
The teacher Allen Callahan writes about the Gospel of Luke, the Gospel from which Jenny read the Parable of the Good Samaritan earlier, and he says that Luke of all the Gospels “advances what theologians call ‘the preferential option for the poor’… God takes sides in the struggle of haves and have-nots we call history. God sides with the least, the lowest, and the left-out.” And Callahan wonders what would happen if Jesus were invited to a lunch with the President or with members of Congress. Callahan reminds us that Luke tells several stories about Jesus being invited to meals and never failing to offend the host.
In fact, in a story Luke tells soon after the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus is invited to what Callahan calls a power lunch with the Pharisees. It turns out that they’re furious Jesus does not wash his hands before eating. But “instead of offering an apology, Jesus launches a verbal attack. He berates his host for being obsessed with clean exteriors while being filthy inside with greed. He goes on to say that clean hands come by the purifying act of feeding the poor, that the Pharisees leave the hard work of justice undone.” Callahan says that Jesus goes into this tirade in front of other guests, primarily the scribes, “ancient Israel’s equivalent of today’s policy wonks.” So when the scribes tell Jesus he’s been rude, he lights into them, too. “He says that their policy directives harm more than help… They use their insider knowledge to keep people locked out, and they use their expertise – the buzzwords, jargon and doublespeak – not to illumine but to confuse.”
What would Jesus do if he were invited to lunch with the President or any of the policy makers in Congress? Callahan says “he would tell them [among other things] how the wealth of our nation makes the poverty of children a greater obscenity than any four-letter words they might [consider]. And then Callahan says that Jesus would “probably be invited to leave unfed.” Jesus went right at systemic change in the world of his day. He wanted to turn society upside down. Callahan reminds us that Luke begins with Mary’s song: “He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.”
The Jericho Road Project is going right at systemic change. Moving down the Jericho Road is high-risk work for us here, because WE are the mighty and WE are the rich. But we are also the people who can make change happen. We have the way, if we have the will. “An edifice which produces beggars,” says King, “needs restructure.” That has been the business of the Jericho Road Project for many years and hopefully for many more years to come. The work of justice remains. We are building a beloved community, and all must be included.