Magical Thinking

The scriptures referred to are Genesis 15:1-6 and Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16.

The first musical I remember was “Peter Pan.” This wasn't the Disney cartoon but a filmed version of the original musical play starring Mary Martin as Peter. It premiered on Broadway the same year I was born. The TV version I saw must have been the 1960 color production which was also rebroadcast later. You may have seen the 2000 version with Cathy Rigby as Peter or the 2014 version in which Christopher Walken played Captain Hook. In any case, a key scene is the one in which the fairy Tinkerbell drinks the poison meant for Peter and is dying. As her light flickers feebly, Peter looks at the audience and tells us that if every boy and girl who believes in fairies claps their hands it will restore Tinkerbell to life. I remember my brother and I clapping our hands like mad and being overjoyed when Tinkerbell begins to shine brightly again.

The odd thing is I don't remember actually believing in fairies. I grew up with TV and I knew the difference between the make-believe stuff you see on TV and in movies and the way things work in real life. It may have been because my dad knew a guy who owned a store that sold magic tricks. I was into them for a while but my brother has made a life-long hobby of performing magic, which he still does at children's hospitals. But even if I can't figure out how some of the tricks are done, I know that magic is merely an illusion. It's fun to suspend your disbelief while watching a magician do the seemingly impossible. But you don't want to end up like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who thought his one-time friend Houdini really did have magical powers or that two British girls actually took photographs of fairies, which to us look like exactly what they were: paper cutouts. It is a testament to Doyle's integrity as an author that despite this, he never converted his character Sherlock Holmes to a belief in the supernatural. In The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire, Holmes says, “This agency stands flat-footed on the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.”

So what are we 21^st century Christians to make of all the talk of faith in today's readings from the Bible? After all, in Hebrews we are told, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” So is our faith as fanciful as beliefs in fairies or vampires or Santa Claus? A lot of skeptics think so. Sigmund Freud saw religion as wish-fulfillment. Nobody wants to think the world is random so we dream up a God who is in charge. We dream up a devil to explain evil. We dream up heaven to assuage our fear of death and of permanent separation from our dead loved ones. How do we know that our rituals in church aren't the equivalent of clapping for fairies?

For one thing, not all beliefs are of equal validity. For instance, we all recognize some things are superstitions, at least when we see them in others. Like the baseball player who always wears his lucky socks because he once had a hot streak when he first wore them. Or the person who knocks on wood when they express any hopeful sentiment so that it won't be jinxed. Or the grandmother from the old country who spits or makes a gesture to ward off the evil eye. We laugh at such things, though we may have our own superstitions. I cannot shake a couple I picked up when I was a nurse, like deaths come in threes or that patients act up and things get hectic at the hospital or nursing home during the full moon. If I did a scientific study I would probably find that I only notice such things at certain times and don't notice the times when they fail to be true.

And of necessity we believe a lot of things that we haven't personally seen or verified. We believe in black holes and distant galaxies and what we are told about conditions on other planets like Mercury or Venus, though no humans have ever been there. We believe that we have internal organs that we have never laid eyes on. We believe in bacteria and viruses no human can see with the naked eye. Why? Well, in these cases, because reputable scientists have studied these things and told us about them. And that is an important feature of believing something to be true: you often learn it from someone you trust. A lot of what we believe comes from others. As children there is only so much we can learn from personal experience. And there are certain things nobody wants to learn from personal experience, like that drinking something you find under the sink will kill you. When Mom and Dad tell us not to do certain things because they are dangerous, we tend to believe them. You do not want to be like the girl I knew as a child who discovered why you should not play with matches. She lived but was scarred for life.

The key here is trust. You have to trust some people. If not, you can't function. For instance, when you take your car in to be fixed, you trust that they will in fact fix the problem. And they trust you to pay them. Of course, at first the trust is blind. Say, you are new to a town and find a place to take your car. If they do a bad job, you go somewhere else next time. If they do a good job, you now trust them for a different reason: you are building up a history with them. It's the same with people. It's called a blind date because you know very little about the person you are meeting for the first time. If it goes well, you meet again. Hopefully, you observe them in different situations, like how they react when either you or they are having a bad day and how they interact with friends and relatives, both yours and theirs. After a while, you feel that you know what kind of person they are. You learn over time who is trustworthy and who is not.

It's the same way with God. The Hebrew word translated “believe” in our reading from Genesis means “trust,” as does the Greek word translated “faith” in our passage from Hebrews. In the Bible belief in God is not merely thinking God exists; it means trusting God. Abram thought he was too old to have a natural heir. But God told him he would. Because of his history with God, because he had learned that God was trustworthy, Abram “trusted in Yahweh and he counted it to him as righteousness.” I like the way the NET Bible puts it: “and the Lord considered his response of faith a proof of genuine loyalty.” In other words, because Abram trusted God to be good to his promise, God trusted Abram to do the right thing, which in this case was to loyally wait for God to fulfill his promise at what would be the right time.

It is in this sense that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.” They are not unseen in the sense of not really existing, as with fairies, but of not yet having happened. In fact you could call “hope” the future tense of “faith.” We trust in God to be with us now and we put our hope in him to make things right in the end. I hope that my grandkids have long happy lives. I will probably not live to see that. But I trust that their parents and my wife and I have set them on the right path. We have taught them right from wrong and encouraged them to trust in God. I pray for them every night and trust God to take care of them.

Even scientists have faith. They trust that the scientists on whose work they are building did their studies and experiments correctly, made accurate observations and did not fudge the data to get grants or get published in prestigious journals. But because scientists are human, we are finding that not all of them are trustworthy. We now know that the British doctor who linked autism with vaccines faked the results of his 1998 study in return for more than half a million dollars from lawyers who were suing the vaccines' manufacturers and wanted some “scientific” evidence.

For that matter, even atheists have faith. They trust that the philosophers and scientists they follow are right. Yet Anthony Flue, one of the most influential of modern atheists, decided that God existed when he realized that the math did not support the idea that this fine-tuned universe could come about simply through an unimaginable series of happy accidents. Recently another mathematician worked out that the idea that life could spontaneously arise from inorganic matter was so mathematically improbable that it should be considered practically impossible. Basically it would be like putting all the individual parts of your smartphone in a box, shaking it for billions of years and expecting it to come out not only properly put together but already programmed. We are born programmed to do and learn specific things like language. And if DNA is the code which tells us how every part of us is made and how everything in us functions, who wrote that code? Accidents in transmitting the code over time may explain variations, like why some people's earlobes are connected to their heads and why some hang free, but who wrote the original code that gave us the complicated inner structure of ears in the first place? Who made sure we have an incredibly redundant immune system that keeps us from dying the minute we encounter the millions of microbes we are exposed to every day? As someone said, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist.

But the real question is this: is God good? Is he trustworthy? Here we are in the same boat as scientists. First we act on information from those we trust. In our case, it is the gospel, the good news that is centered in Jesus. We read the reports of what he did and said. And he didn't merely come as a moral teacher. Jesus said he was the Son of God. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, then Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic or the Lord just as he said. We also read about how he was executed and buried. We read how he rose again and this turned his followers from cowards into people who proclaimed his resurrection even though they knew it could get them killed—and in almost every case, it did.

Today we see how fast folks are to abandon the lies they tell when it gets them in trouble. We know about these lies because of whistleblowers, insiders who come out and tell the truth. Ten of the twelve people who co-authored the study that linked autism to vaccines retracted the idea that there was a causal link. In contrast, Jesus' disciples were either stupid to keep lying at the risk of death or else they really did see, touch and eat with the risen Jesus. Does it make sense that there were about 500 people who saw the risen Christ, as Paul tells us, and yet, if it were a hoax, none of them ever told the authorities, who would have loved to stamp out Christianity? (1 Corinthians 15:6)

But, like scientists, we also must test the God hypothesis. And scientists have studied believers. Since they can't quantify how religious someone is, they go by how often people go to religious services. And they have found that people who regularly attend services have a lower risk of death from all causes, including suicide and drug overdose, have better survival rates of heart disease and cancer, lower rates of depression, lower levels of anxiety, better overall mental health, lower rates of divorce, greater life satisfaction, and find life more meaningful.

But, you may say, these are studies of people who attend services of any number of religions and so do not differentiate what kind of God these folks believe in. We don't even know how many actually do believe in God and how many just go for cultural or social reasons. It may be that the social support they receive and the encouragement of healthier habits, like not drinking and smoking, might play a part.

True. So what's the next step we can take? First, consider this: French tightrope walker Charles Blondin crossed the gorge at Niagara Falls in 1859. He did it several times, sometimes blindfolded, or in a sack, or on stilts. If you had asked onlookers, a lot of them might have said they believed Blondin could cross the Niagara Gorge carrying them on his back. But I wonder if they would have taken him up on the offer. One man actually did. It was his manager, Harry Colcord. He trusted Blondin enough to climb up on his back and let himself be carried the whole 1,100 feet while 160 feet above the water. You can see a picture of them doing it on Wikipedia.

In the final analysis, the only way to see if God is trustworthy is to trust him. Put yourself in his hands. Follow his way. Put your hope in his promises. Which does not mean to imagine that your every desire will be fulfilled, but to trust him for your daily needs. He's your heavenly Father, not a genie. Nor does it mean you will never be given more than you can handle. It does mean that he will help you handle whatever comes. As a teacher of mine said, following Jesus doesn't get you off the hook.

Indeed, unlike cult leaders and con men, Jesus does not promise that his way is easy. He says, “If anyone wants to become my follower, he must disown himself, take up his cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23) The easy life is an illusion. The idea that things like wealth, good looks, popularity, a high IQ or the latest high-tech gadget are the keys to a good life is an illusion. A recent study shows that highly educated and otherwise successful people like lawyers, engineers, scientists and surgeons actually have an unexpectedly high mortality rate. But people still put their trust in these things and applaud those who have them as proof that they have achieved the good life.

Putting your trust in the things of this life is magical thinking. And a lot of people have a hard time believing that old-fashioned things like faith and hope and love and building character and being part of a church and helping others and trusting God are what really counts, even when doing so is hard. Ironically it is a magical person, Dumbledore in the Harry Potter books, who says it best: “We must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy.”

It is easy to do what appears to work in this life: looking out for number one and doing whatever it takes to get what you want. Yet every day in the news we see those who have reached the pinnacle of human success and are still unhappy and unfulfilled. Jesus asked, “For what good does it do a person if he gains the whole world but loses his soul? Or what can a person give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in his Father's glory and then he will repay each person according to their deeds.” (Matthew 16:26-27) He also said, “This is the deed that God requires—to believe in the one whom he has sent.” (John 6:29)

So the question is: do you believe in the illusions of your fellow creatures or do you trust in our Creator, who knows how things really work, what we really need and who loves us enough to give his life for us and give his eternal life to us? 

Under the Sun

The scriptures referred to are Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14, 2:18-23, Colossians 3:1-11, and Luke 12:13-21.

The most famous line from Shakespeare is the beginning of Hamlet's soliloquy: “To be or not to be, that is the question.” What most people don't realize is that Hamlet is contemplating suicide. Basically he is asking whether it is better to live or to die. “Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. To die—to sleep, no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.” In other words, by dying you end all the pain and suffering of life, just like a good deep sleep does. But then he realizes something. “To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub: for in that sleep of death what dreams may come...” Hamlet realizes that “the dread of something after death, the undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others we know not of...” In other words, most of us would rather deal with the problems and pains of life than risk having to deal with whatever we might experience after death.

Long before Shakespeare penned his plays, the writer of Ecclesiastes wrestled with the problems of life. But he was not dealing with the problems most of us have—trying to make a living, dealing with difficult people who have power over us—the stuff 99% of the world's population throughout history have suffered. No, our passage says, “I, the Teacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem,” which would indicate that he was Solomon. So he had it better than most people. And what does he conclude? All is vanity. The Hebrew word here literally means “air, breath, vapor.” It expresses something that has no substance. So the Jewish Publication Society's version of the Tanakh translates it “utter futility.” The International Standard Version renders it “absolutely pointless.” The Good News Translation gives it as “useless.” The NIV uses the word “meaningless.” The Contemporary English Version translates the first verse of our passage this way: “Nothing makes sense! Everything is nonsense. I have seen it all—nothing makes sense.” It's a pretty bleak assessment of life and a surprising one to find in the Bible.

But the Teacher's perspective is limited. He says “I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun.” Under the sun” is repeated 29 times in this short book. So he is looking at what happens between birth and death. He concludes that everything is temporary and therefore meaningless. Pleasures are meaningless, work is meaningless, advancement is meaningless, riches are meaningless. In other words, if this life is the only one we get, then nothing we do means anything in the long run. Add to that the problems that Hamlet later lists—the wrongs of oppressors, arrogant people in high office, “the law's delay,” seeing the unworthy succeed—and there is no justice in life.

My wife and I love to watch British mysteries or as my son calls it, “murder porn.” We don't like them too dark, however. We like clever puzzles. But of course, when the bad guy is revealed and caught, it is hard to see how the murder victim gets justice. Even Sherlock Holmes realized this. At the end of one of his more tragic cases, he says, “What is the meaning of it, Watson?...What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance,which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.”

I said it was surprising to find the idea that life is meaningless expressed in the Bible but you know who would agree? Atheists. Indeed there is a Youtuber who used to be a Mormon and is now an atheist who paints an even bleaker picture of life without God. Brittney Hartley says that along with the death of God comes the death of not only ultimate justice but objective morality, objective truth, tradition and culture, assurance of an afterlife, and progression towards an ultimate ideal. What Hartley doesn't list is the death of hope. There is no reason to believe that anything will ever get better.

If this is the only life there is, then everything is futile. And just as we see with the Teacher, even being rich and powerful can't make your life meaningful. It's not hard to think of rich and powerful people who had sad lives. They are not immune to broken relationships, losing loved ones, suffering disease, undergoing disasters, being murdered or committing suicide. They know better than anyone that he who dies with the most toys wins nothing of lasting value. If there is no afterlife and no loving and just God to make things right, then there is no justice or meaning to this life.

Nevertheless the writer of Ecclesiastes concludes his book by seeing some value in obtaining wisdom and obeying God's commandments. It can make this bleak life better. The real problem, though, is that he is only looking at life under the sun. And humans find this perspective intolerable. As we noted last week, religion goes back to the beginning of our species. And as evidence in belief in an afterlife, anthropologists point to intentional human burials with grave goods, like one found in central Israel that dates back 100,000 years. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar asked why did our ancestors give things useful to living people, like pots and tools and weapons and food and drink, to a dead person if they were not intended to be used in the next life?

We have an advantage that the Teacher did not. We have the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Within 3 days his discouraged followers went from mourners cowering in a locked room from the authorities to people who were not afraid of death because they saw and touched and ate with the risen Jesus. They defied the same authorities that had Jesus killed because they knew that death, like the other things in this life, was also temporary. The only thing that isn't temporary is people.

Which means that what you do in this life is not meaningless. As C.S. Lewis pointed out that if you are just going to live for 70 or 80 years and then cease to exist, it doesn't matter what kind of person you are. But if you are going to live forever, it does.

When I was in a college ministry where we went to a nursing home, I noticed that some elderly people were very bitter at the end of their lives. They couldn't forget and move past old slights and injustices and feuds and disappointments and regrets but just kept going on about them. But some elderly people were happy, despite the circumstances that put them into the nursing home. One lady was a brittle diabetic who had lost her sight to the disease and eventually both legs. But she was always joyful. She sang the loudest at our church services and loved to talk with us students. Our time at the nursing home each Sunday often ended with all of us in her room, fortified by her strong faith. And if I was going to live forever I would choose to become like her rather than like the narrow bitter souls in the same place though they might be physically better off than her. She was like a ray of sunshine. And I could see some of those people becoming like spiritual black holes, sucking in everything around them, including light, and giving nothing back.

That's why what we are becoming in this short life is so important. It sets our trajectory into the next life. And that's why Paul says, “Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly.” And by that he doesn't mean things like family and friends and the things essential to a physical life. No, he lists stuff like sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, greed (which is idolatry), anger, rage, malice, slander, and abusive language. As we read last week, if we are in Christ, Jesus has nailed such things to the cross. (Colossians 2:14) Sins are like cancer: they grow and grow in us until they kill us spiritually. We know that one way to prevent lung cancer is to quit smoking. In the same way, we must stop feeding the things that harm our relationship with God, our relationships with each other and our relationship with ourselves.

And you may have noticed that a lot of the things Jesus tells us to do make no sense if this is the only life we get. Things like not resisting an evil person, turning the other cheek, loving your enemies, and not worrying about things like food and drink and clothing, do not make sense if you only live once. Those are the very things that got Jesus killed. As Paul says, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing but to those who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:18) From God's perspective it is the world's wisdom that is foolish. Paul continues “But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:24)

There is a famous psychological experiment that was done with marshmallows. Kids were shown a marshmallow on a plate. The adult told them that they could eat the marshmallow while he was gone but if they waited until he came back, they could have 2 marshmallows. They watched what the kids did and then followed up on them throughout their lives. They found that those kids who resisted eating the first marshmallow, who were able to hold off on getting an immediate reward in order to gain a greater reward later on, did better in school and in life. God is saying that that same principle applies to this life and the next. You can, like the man in Jesus' parable, just think about building up wealth so you can live this life eating, drinking and being merry, or you can look at life from God's perspective: eternity. And eternal life beats this temporary life in every way.

Jesus said, “And whoever has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.” (Matthew 19:29) Jesus is not talking about abandoning these things unnecessarily but being forced to by persecution, as the parallel passage in Mark makes clear. (Mark 10:30) Jesus is saying we should take the long view; see life through the lens of eternity.

Ultimately the Teacher saw that you can't find meaning through things. He does see value in having other people in your life. He says that one person working alone is meaningless but “Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work. If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who has no one to help him up! Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.” (Ecclesiastes 4:9-12) As God says in the beginning “It is not good for the man to be alone.” (Genesis 2:18) For us it is even better. Jesus said, “For where two or three are assembled in my name, I am there among them.” (Matthew 18:20) Whenever we gather in Jesus' name, however few in number, we are the body of Christ and his Spirit is with us, in us and among us. (1 Corinthians 12:13-14)

But what if we are wrong and there is no God and no afterlife? The mathematician Blaise Pascal looked at this question logically. If we Christians are wrong, and death is the end, we will never know that we were wrong. However, if we are right, we will receive a great reward. On the other hand, if an atheist is right that there is no God and no afterlife, he will never know that he was right. If he is wrong, however, he will be in the same situation as the man in the parable and that is not good. Betting on God's promise of eternal life for those who put their trust in him has a great return and no downside; betting against God has no return and a huge downside.

The Bible shows both perspectives on life. Looked at from a purely material point of view, life is meaningless. Looked at from a spiritual perspective, life is full of meaning. Everything we do can move us along one of two trajectories: closer to God or farther from him. Because every person you meet has the immense potential to grow into a wonderful, giving, larger-than-life person who will bedazzle you when they enter glory or they can shrink into an infinitely tiny ball of rage and regret and empty and unfulfilled desires. As someone said, a person wrapped up in themselves makes for a very small package.

Or look at it this way: everyone you meet is either a brother or sister in Christ or a potential brother or sister in Christ. So you can help them discover and develop this by what you say and do. And by giving of yourself to help them, you will also become more Christlike. So, with apologies to Shakespeare, to be a follower of Jesus or not to be—that is the question. 

Beyond Justice

The scriptures referred to are Genesis 18:20-32, Psalm 138, and Colossians 2:6-19.

Recently I listened to a podcast from the Templeton Foundation in which the hosts interviewed anthropology professor Robin Dunbar on the origins of religion. Defining religion as a belief in a transcendental world inhabited by spiritual beings, he says we can trace religion back at least 20-30,000 years. If we include the Neanderthals, religion might go back 500,000 years, 200,000 years before evidence of our species, homo sapiens. Science says religion has been around longer than modern humans.

What I found relevant to today's message is that he agrees with many other researchers that religion is what makes large civilizations possible. Dunbar is famous for working out that humans have the capacity for managing relationships with only about 150 people, which is now called the Dunbar Number. As it turns out the average number of friends people have on Facebook is 149. So, using the estimate for the original population of Jericho, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, “how do you get 10,000 people living together in very, very cramped conditions, without falling out with each other constantly, and indeed, presumably, also without robbing each other all the time. And the answer is, religion provided the one mechanism which is extremely powerful as a tool for managing large social groups like that.” In other words, religion is the glue of civilization.

The word “religion” comes from an obscure Latin word which some think meant “to bind.” Religion binds people together. Dunbar notes that religion binds us through things like singing, dancing, eating together, and telling emotional stories. Religions also give us moral codes. And usually the founder of a religion is a very charismatic person who comes from a poor family background during a time of turmoil. And so these leaders teach us to behave fairly towards one another and to take care of the less fortunate. This bottom-up personal commitment works better at getting people to behave than the alternative which is to have order imposed from above through force.

The commitment to fairness or justice is the subject of today's Old Testament reading. In our passage from Genesis Abraham acts as a mediator with God regarding his judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah. God tells Abraham that the outcry about the sins of these cities has come to him. And while Abraham does not dispute the fact that these two cities are very sinful, he is worried about what will happen to the few righteous people who live there. And you should know that the Hebrew word for “righteous” also means “just.” So his concern is for people who do live according to the moral code and act justly. Abraham says, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?”

And God listens to Abraham and agrees to spare Sodom if only 50, and then 45, and then 40, and 30 and 20 and finally just 10 righteous people live there. Since Abraham knows that his nephew Lot and his family live there, he is really counting on there being just 5 more righteous folk in the city. However we know how the story turns out.

But I want to point out a couple of things. First, God is reasonable. He does not tell Abraham that he is out of line to question God's justice. Instead he listens and agrees to lower the bar on how many righteous people it will take to save the city from punishment.

Second, because God is willing to show mercy on the unjust for the sake of the just, this shows that he values mercy more than he does absolutely strict justice. Let's face it: even the righteous there, which seems to consist entirely of Lot and his family, must be complicit in such overwhelming injustice, if not corrupt. (Genesis 19:6-8, 26, 30-36) And by the way, we are not merely talking about the rape that the men of the city intend to perpetrate upon the angels God sends. In Ezekiel we are told, “See here—this was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters had majesty, abundance of food and enjoyed carefree ease, but they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and practiced abominable deeds before me. Therefore when I saw it I removed them.” (Ezekiel 16:49-50) So whatever those abominable deeds were, God nevertheless puts special emphasis on how they did not help the poor and needy.

Nor is this a rare instance of God's concern for social justice. Altogether the Bible mentions the poor, the needy, the widow, the fatherless child, the resident foreigner, the blind, the deaf, the lame and the sick 834 times, an average of 1 mention for every 37 verses in scripture. That's more than the Bible talks about worshipping other gods (which is more than 200 times). Just as Jesus pointed out that the two great commandments are to love God and love our neighbor, so too the prophets come down fiercely against both not worshipping God properly and not treating the powerless justly.

Isaiah says that God will not listen to his people's prayers because of the blood on their hands. He tells them to “Wash! Cleanse yourselves! Remove your sinful deeds from my sight. Stop sinning! Learn to do what is right! Promote justice! Give the oppressed reason to celebrate! Take up the cause of the orphan! Defend the rights of the widow!” (Isaiah 1:16-17) Worshipping God is not a substitute for taking care of the needy.

Jeremiah tells God's people that among them are those whose “'houses are filled with the gains of their fraud and deceit. That is how they have gotten so rich and powerful. That is how they have grown fat and sleek. There is no limit to the evil things they do. They do not plead the cause of the fatherless in such a way to win it. They do not defend the rights of the poor. I will certainly punish them for doing such things!' says the Lord. 'I will certainly bring retribution on such a nation as this!'” (Jeremiah 5:27-29)

Later in Jeremiah, God dresses down the current king, Jehoiakim. “Sure to be judged is the king who builds his palace using injustice and treats people unfairly while adding to its upper rooms. He makes his countrymen work for him for nothing. He does not pay them for their labor.” (Jeremiah 22:13-14) He contrasts this king obsessed with buildings who cheats his laborers with his father, Josiah. “'He did what was just and right, so all went well with him. He upheld the cause of the poor and needy, so all went well with Judah. Is that not what it means to know me?' declares the Lord.” (Jeremiah 22:15-16)

Things go well for God's people when they take care of the less fortunate and they do not go well when they are mistreating the poor, the sick, the disabled, the widow, the fatherless, and the resident alien. God is concerned about justice for all, not just for some. Remember how in Ezekiel he condemns the haughty. That word in Hebrew is related to the word in our psalm where it says, “The Lord is high, yet cares for the lowly, perceiving the haughty from afar.” In both cases “haughty” means “ high, powerful and arrogant.” Why does God see them “from afar?” It isn't that God has moved away from them; they have moved away from him. They feel that they have no real need for God. They certainly don't feel they need to humble themselves before him. That is why Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a sewing needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. (Matthew 19:24) As Jesus concludes in his parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.” (Luke 18:14) As the Bible says, “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8)

Too often the powerful see themselves as blessed by God because of what they have. And even today some churches teach that if you don't have money and power it is your own fault for not having enough faith. But Jesus taught that in his kingdom “many who are first will be last and the last first.” (Matthew 19:30; cf. Mark 10:31; Luke 13:30) God's kingdom turns the values of this world upside down. There is no preferential treatment of the rich, the powerful, the pretty and the popular. Indeed there is no preferential treatment for anyone.

If justice is getting what you deserve and mercy is not getting all that you deserve, then grace is getting what you could never deserve. God is gracious. Sodom did not deserve for God to even entertain the notion of saving them from their much deserved judgment. We do not deserve to be saved from the hell on earth that we have turned this planet he gave us into. We do not deserve to be saved from the evil we have done to ourselves by misusing his gifts to make things better for ourselves and those we care about while making things worse for those we don't like or don't care about. We don't deserve to have God come down to live among us as someone from a poor family in a world under the thumb of a powerful and ruthless government. We don't deserve to hear any good news about God's love and forgiveness. We don't deserve to have Jesus die for our sins. We don't deserve to receive the hope of a resurrection like his and the gift of eternal life with him.

But as Paul said, “For by grace you are saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so that no one can boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9) We cannot earn God's favor. We would have to be perfect, completely in harmony with his goodness. (Matthew 7:1) Instead God gives his grace freely to those who trust and love him.

And if we trust him, he gives us his Spirit who in turn gives us the power to be reborn and to grow into God's image, that is, to become more like Jesus. Paul wrote, “...practicing the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into Christ, who is the head. From him the whole body grows, fitted and held together through every supporting ligament. As each one does its part, the body grows in love.” (Ephesians 4:15-16) This echoes our passage in Colossians which says, “As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.”

As you can see, becoming like Jesus is not instantaneous. It is a process, just as we see in so many of Jesus' parables about seeds growing into wheat and vines and trees producing good fruit. (Matthew 13:3-8, 18-23, 31-33, Mark 4:26-29; Luke 13:6-9; John 15:1-8) And what is the fruit we are to bear? Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23) As Dunbar noted, you need such things to have a good and stable civilization. As we're seeing, the absence of these qualities are leading to instability in our world and in our country.

People like to say that we live in a Christian nation. But we do not see a bumper crop of the fruit of the Spirit. And we do not see a lot of justice. We do not see mercy. We do not see grace. Instead we see a lot of injustice, especially to those who are disadvantaged, disabled, diseased, destitute and despised. We see a lot of people who have gotten rich and powerful, sleek and fat, through deceit and fraud, who build monuments to their name while neglecting to uphold the cause of the poor and needy, the widow, the fatherless and the foreigner in our land. And we have seen what God let happen to his own people when they did such things. We must be like Abraham, pleading with God for mercy. We must be like the prophets, warning people that God expects us to help those who are not doing well in this life. Because only if we do, will things go well for us.

Right after Paul says that we are saved by grace through faith and that we are not saved by our works, he goes on to say, “For we are his workmanship, having been created in Christ Jesus for good works that God has prepared beforehand so we may do them.” (Ephesians 2:10) We are not saved by good works; we are saved for them.

What should we do? Look around you. You see people in need? You see injustice? You see hopelessness? You see people suffering? There is a lot to be put right. Join up with others who love Jesus, pray and get to work.

The Logic of God

The scriptures referred to are Colossians 1:15-28.

Logic is not, as many people think, a way to determine the truth of something but rather a method of staying self-consistent. If the assumptions you begin with are faulty, like you think the world is flat, you can logically build an argument that is very consistent with that premise but also very much at odds with reality. One huge crisis for the flat earthers was when our astronauts landed on the moon and sent back pictures of the earth that showed it was indeed a globe. That is why they usually say that we never landed on the moon, that it was faked and that NASA and the government are part of a vast conspiracy to keep the truth from us. They have concocted very clever and elaborate explanations for this. And those explanations might work if you discard Occam's razor, the principle that the simplest explanation, the one that requires the least number of elements, is the one that is most likely true.

If a magician makes an elephant seem to disappear before you eyes, you might posit a whole new set of quantum physics to account for it. But the simplest explanation is that it is an illusion. The elephant hasn't gone anywhere. The magician has used the way the stage is set up and possibly a very large mirror to make it look like the elephant has vanished. We don't have to unnecessarily multiply the number of elements involved.

Still logic is useful, provided the basic premises you start with are true. We use logic all the time, such as in math. 2 plus 2 equals 4. In fact, one of the big questions in philosophy is whether we have invented mathematics or whether we have simply discovered it to be part of the universe. Reality testing shows that math does reveal how the world works. Some of Einstein's descriptions of the universe were not testable in his lifetime. But ever so often the technology and conditions come together to make one of his propositions testable, such as the existence of gravitational waves, proven in 2015, or that gravity can distort the flow of time, proven in 2022. Einstein predicted these things accurately because he did the math correctly. From that we can argue that we didn't invent math; it was built into reality. The question is by what or by whom?

However, one of the problems for very logical persons is that reality seems to make sense but not quite. Reality contains paradoxes, instances where two seemingly opposite things are true. Like the fact that light behaves both like a wave and like a particle, depending on how you approach it. But in everyday life the paradoxes we run into most often are people. Hitler, responsible for the deaths of millions of people, nevertheless liked dogs and children. Charles Dickens wrote movingly about the plight of the poor and even wrote a book about Jesus for his children and yet at age 45 he fell in love with an 18 year old actress and not only tried to have his wife put in an institution but took all but one of their 10 children to live with him and his mistress.

And we see this writ large in the story of humanity as a whole. It's obvious that we did not rise to the top of the food chain because we were stronger or faster than other predators. People often say it was because humans were more intelligent. But scientists are saying that was not the most important feature of our species that allowed us to survive. Instead it was our ability to cooperate on a scale not seen in other primates. A clever human is still not a match for a wooly mammoth or a buffalo. But a group of humans working together can bring down a bigger, stronger animal. Our worldwide civilization is an amazing achievement brought about by literally millions of humans working together.

But at the same time the story of humanity is one of almost continuous wars. Human intelligence has invented ingenious devices to make life better as well as gruesome instruments of torture. We have developed medicines that cure and biological weapons that kill. Numerous contributions to civilization have been made by women and people of color and immigrants yet they still suffer from inequality and discrimination and xenophobia. How do we reconcile these things?

2 millennia ago a small group of people called Christians offered a way of understanding the paradox of humanity. And we see an overview of this viewpoint in today's passage from Colossians.

It begins with the assertion that Christ Jesus “is the image of the invisible God.” This immediately points us to Genesis 1:27, where it says that humans were created in the image of God. That's where our gifts and potential for goodness comes from. So where does evil come from? Genesis chapters 3 through 6 shows how we have decided that we know better than our Creator and how we have used our God-given gifts of intelligence, skill and cooperation to harm one another. We are told, “But the Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind had become great on the earth. Every inclination of the thoughts of their minds was only evil all the time...The earth was ruined in the sight of God; the earth was filled with violence.” (Genesis 6:5,11) Because we tried to replace God's will with our own contradictory wills, his image in us has become distorted into a diabolical parody of what God is like.

In Jesus we see what God is really like: loving, just, forgiving, healing, life-giving. And this is how loving God we see in Christ is: “in him all things hold together,” as our passage says. God did not turn his back on us. He is still keeping things from falling apart. For instance, there is a broad consensus among physicists and cosmologists that the universe is fine-tuned for the existence of life. If gravity, electromagnetism, and several universal constants were only slightly different, it would make life impossible. Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga has said, “It's as if there are a large number of dials that have to be tuned to within extremely narrow limits for life to be possible in our universe. It is extremely unlikely that this should happen by chance, but much more likely that this should happen if there is such a person as God.” The alternative is to believe that we are the beneficiaries of a wildly improbable series of happy accidents, akin to winning the lottery trillions of times in a row.

We know what we do about the mind-bogglingly large universe by means of imaging. We use extremely sophisticated telescopes to see things we can't with our unaided eyes. We use lenses to focus what is out there into images we can examine. And as J.B. Phillips put it, Jesus is the unimaginably vast God behind everything focused in terms we can grasp: time and space and human personality.

And how does the incarnate God see himself? As a healer. Jesus said, “Those who are healthy don't need a physician, but those who are sick do. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Mark 2:17)

He sees himself as a beacon in this dark world. Jesus said, “I am the light of the world. The one who follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” (John 8:12)

He sees himself as a servant and as the means of freedom for others. Jesus said, “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:45; cf. Matthew 20:28) The Greek word for “ransom” means the redemption price required to free a slave. Jesus gave his life to free those enslaved to sin.

How do you stop the harm we humans do to each other, ourselves and to our relationship with God? We humans are convinced that the only way to stop harm is with violence. The result is that violence begets violence and the wheel of suffering never stops. God in Christ decided instead to absorb the harm. He essentially took on a suicide mission, entering enemy-occupied territory, spreading the good news that he could free those who followed him and taking on the brunt of the evil we have unleashed upon the world. He let himself be betrayed by a follower, abandoned by his friends, whipped and beaten by his enemies, stripped naked on a public road, and nailed to a cross while people mocked him. The people who did not want to hear his good news thought they could silence him through death. But the incarnate Word of God could not be shut up for long. He triumphed over death and offers eternal life to all who disown themselves, take up their crosses and follow him. (Mark 8;34-35: cf. Matthew 10:38; Luke 9:23)

Our passage tells us “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.” The Greek word for “reconcile” used here means to reconcile completely, to bring things back to a former state of harmony. God wants to restore that image of God we have lost. He does that through Jesus.

So Jesus not only shows us what God is like but he also shows us the image of God in humanity as it was meant to be. He shows us what we can become. As our passage says, “And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him...”

The word “holy” has become disparaged today because people mistake it for being sanctimonious. But “holy” means “different” as in “sacred” or “set apart.” I don't use my communion chalice to drink soda or beer or even water out of. I don't keep snacks in the pix or container I used for the communion bread. They are different from other cups and containers because I have set them apart for God's purposes. To be “holy” is to be set apart for God's purposes.

Similarly the Greek word translated as “blameless” literally means “unblemished.” The Passover lamb was to be unblemished as was any sacrifice to God. (Exodus 12:5; Deuteronomy 17:1) In Romans, Paul tells us, “Therefore I exhort you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a sacrifice—alive, holy, and pleasing to God—which is your reasonable service.” (Romans 12:1) By giving our lives to God they become sacred. We use them for his purposes. And by the way, the Greek word translated “reasonable” is logikos, from which we get the word “logical.” Since Jesus gave his life for us, it is logical and self-consistent that we give our lives to him.

I think it is in this sense of living a self-sacrificial life that Paul talks of “completing what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” What Paul gave up and underwent in his mission to spread the gospel throughout the Roman empire was his sacrifice to God. His Christ-like suffering that was necessary to plant and grow churches was his contribution to the body of Christ.

And then Paul gets to the ultimate answer to the paradox of humanity, which he calls “the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations.” He calls this mystery “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” The “you” in Greek is plural, so it is not Christ in the individual but Christ in “y'all,” the whole body of believers, both gentile and Jewish. And because of the Spirit of Christ, living and working through the community of believers, we can look forward to the glory of being completely in the image of God in Christ.

Because in Jesus we not only see what God is like but we see what we can become. The original temptation in Genesis 3 is to be like God by disobeying God and taking a shortcut to gain his wisdom. (Genesis 3:4-5) It's not that God didn't want us finite creatures to grow into the image of his infinite love but what we were tempted to do was to achieve it in our own way. And that has led to misery. People want to be like God in his power. God wants us to be like him in his moral character. As it says in 1 John, “Dear friends, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. We know that whenever it is revealed we will be like him, because we will see him just as he is.” (1 John 3:2) We will reflect his love and fairness and mercy.

In Jesus we can become like God—if we join our lives to him and let him live in us. God says he will recreate the heavens and the earth and make them a paradise once more. But the only way it can be paradise is if we are people who love and help one another rather than hate and harm one another.

Look at it this way: you can't put a Hitler in heaven. He wouldn't like it: there would be too many Jews and people would be worshipping God and not him. It wouldn't be heaven for him. And that would cause him to act up all over again and it would cease to be heaven for others

Only if a Hitler totally changed his nature would it be possible for him and everyone else to be happy there. But he can't change his nature. None of us can—not by our efforts alone. Only God can change us. But he will not force us. God is love and love requires consent. If we consent to let him into our lives, if we consent to let him reign in our hearts and minds, then we will be able to change. Then we will be able to shed this horrible parody of the person God created and become the person he intended us to be.

The final paradox is that only when we become like him will we truly be ourselves. As finite beings we cannot reflect all that God is. But we can reflect the various aspects of God through the different gifts he has given us. Biologists, astronomers, physicists, neurologists, chemists, and other scientists can reflect his knowledge of the workings of creation. Poets, painters, singers, dancers, musicians, and other artists can reflect the beauty of his creativity. Runners, mountain climbers, gymnasts, swimmers and other athletes can reflect the glory of the body in motion. Storytellers, philosophers, comedians, writers and other thinkers can reflect his nuanced and deep wisdom. While none of us can reflect the entire image of God, by coming together, like pieces of a mosaic, we can reflect our large and complex and marvelous God. But to make this work we must all reflect his love. God loves us. We must love him back. God loves all people. We must love them too. That is the logic of God's love.

Defining Your Neighbor

The scriptures referred to are Luke 10:25-37.

The 12 tribes of Israel voluntarily united into one kingdom under David. (2 Samuel 5:1-3) It remained a single kingdom under his son Solomon. But Solomon's splendor came at a heavy price. When the northern tribes went to his son Rehoboam and asked that he lighten their burden, he ignored his advisers and said he would make things harder for them. In response to his harsh answer, the 10 northern tribes broke away and formed their own kingdom, which they called Israel. (1 Kings 12:1-16) Samaria was chosen as the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel. The southern kingdom, which was ruled by the kings of David's line, was called Judah. This split took place around 930 BC. In 722 BC, the kingdom of Israel fell to the Neo-Assyrian Empire. This was seen as a punishment from God for the idolatry they practiced. The elite of Israel and the people the Assyrians saw as useful were taken into exile and then exiles from other conquered lands were settled in what used to be Israel. (2 Kings 17:21-24) These foreign people intermarried with the poor Israelites who were not taken into exile and left behind.

Eventually their descendants, the Samaritans, developed their own worship of the God of Israel. Alexander the Great allowed them to build their temple on Mount Gerizim. They adopted as their sacred scriptures their version of the Torah, the 5 books of Moses, and excluded the other books of the Hebrew Bible. During the Maccabbean revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes, one of the successors of Alexander, the Jews destroyed the Samaritan temple in 128 BC. In Jesus' day there was still animosity between the Jews and the Samaritans, which the Jews considered half-breed heretics.

The reason I am telling you this is because today's readings include the parable of the good Samaritan. Jesus' audience were Jews. The person asking Jesus about eternal life is a scribe, an expert in the Jewish law. His question is how does one inherit eternal life?

Jesus, as he frequently does, answers a question with a question. “What is written in the law? How do you read it?” And the law expert goes to a fairly obvious verse: Deuteronomy 6:5. It is part of the Shema, the central prayer of Judaism. It starts with the verse before the one the scribe quotes: “Listen, Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one!” (Deuteronomy 6:4) It goes on to say we are to love God with everything we are and have. Most rabbis of Jesus' time would agree that this is the greatest of the commandments.

The scribe then offers a second commandment, this one coming from Leviticus 19:18, where God says “You must not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the children of your people, but you must love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.” In other words, God is saying, I am serious about this; remember who commanded you to do it.

When Jesus was asked which commandment is the greatest, he answered with the same two passages. (Mark 12:29-31; Matthew 22:37-40) We don't know if the scribe had come to the same conclusion or whether he had heard Jesus say this and was trying to sound like he agreed. Because after Jesus commends his answer, the man asks a further question: “And who is my neighbor?”

Now why would he ask this? Luke says that he is trying to justify himself. But about what? He probably had a rather narrow definition of who his neighbor was. At the time the Jewish people were divided into several factions.

The Pharisees believed that the written law, the Torah, and the Oral law, the traditions that came from various rabbis' interpretations of the law and how they applied to everyday life, were of equal authority. That's why they were nitpicky about the way Jesus' disciples washed their hands and why they thought his healing people on the Sabbath violated the commandment against working on that day. But they did believe in eternal life and that people faced either punishment or reward after death.

The Sadducees were the priestly party. They held that only the written law, the Torah, was authoritative. They did not believe in an afterlife.

The Essenes were an almost monastic group who held all their property in common and usually did not marry. They spent their time worshipping and studying the Torah. They were so obsessed with purity that they took frequent ritual baths. If the Dead Sea scrolls are any indication, they thought all other Jews were corrupt and they were waiting for Jerusalem's fall and a final battle between the sons of light and the sons of darkness. Most scholars think they lived in Qumran in the desert, away from other Jews.

Then there were the Zealots. They opposed Herod and the Roman occupation of Judea. They believed only God was their king. They were militant and during the Jewish war against the Romans, they took over the temple in Jerusalem and turned it into a fortress.

The scribe, probably a Pharisee, is trying to justify being neighborly to those who are like him and agree with him and looking for an excuse to not do the same to Jews who differ from him. Human beings have always divided the world into “Us” and “Them.” That was a common attitude then and it is common now. We have politicians who say they hate other Americans who do not support them. They accuse them of wanting to destroy the country. There is a move to take away citizenship from those born in this country because their parents were not.

Perhaps in telling the parable that defines who God considers to be our neighbor, Jesus was thinking of a verse in the same chapter of the book of Leviticus that the scribe cites. Only 15 verses after telling us to love our neighbor God says, “When a foreigner resides with you in your land, you must not oppress him. The foreigner who resides with you must be to you like a native citizen among you; so you must love him as yourself, because you were foreigners in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.” (Leviticus 19:33-34)

So Jesus tells his Jewish audience a story. He starts with a common occurrence. A man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho was attacked by robbers. Jerusalem is almost 2500 feet above sea level and Jericho is about 800 feet below sea level. So in a distance of about 17 miles you do go down over 3000 feet. It's a very twisty road through narrow rocky passages and gorges, the perfect place for robbers to hide. William Barclay adds that the man must have been very foolish to go alone rather than as part of a caravan. Five centuries later, it was still called the “Red or Bloody Way.” So the idea that a man would be attacked on the way was something Jesus' audience would accept.

They would also accept that a priest and a Levite would head along that road. Jericho was, among other things, a residential community for priests and for the Levites who served them. And they would have believed that the priest and the Levite would walk around the man they saw rather than help him. Jesus said the man was half dead. Touching a corpse would leave a man ritually unclean for 7 days, so that he could not serve at the temple. (Number 19:11) The Levite may have been thinking the same thing. But Jesus says that they were going down the road, in other words, going home and away from Jerusalem and the temple. Their service was over. Being unclean would be an inconvenience but their rotation at the temple was over. To paraphrase Barclay, their rituals meant more to them than the suffering of another person.

Barclay does point out that they may have been worried about their own safety. Sometimes robbers would stage a scene in which one of them would pretend to have been a victim of attack. If someone stopped to help, his confederates would jump that person and rob him.

Now Jesus' audience, knowing the rule of three in storytelling, may have expected the next person to be a common Jewish man. But Jesus pulls a plot twist. The next person is a Samaritan. Now Jesus' audience would be thinking, “Oh, no! Things have gotten worse! This villain is going to finish off the victim!” But, no. When the Samaritan sees the man he is “moved with pity.” The Greek word means to have a gut feeling of compassion. And surprise! This heretic half-breed is the hero of the tale!

Jesus says that first the Samaritan approaches the man. Neither the priest or the Levite checked to see if the victim was dead or not and thus would not necessarily have rendered them unclean. The Samaritan doesn't just feel bad for the guy and offer thoughts and prayers. He jumps into action. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, the priest and the Levite asked themselves what would happen to them if they went to the man. The Samaritan asked himself what would happen to the man if he didn't go to him.

Next he gives the victim first aid. Our ancestors weren't stupid. They didn't know about germs or the antiseptic qualities of alcohol and oil but they did know from practical experience that putting oil and wine on wounds and bandaging them helped a person heal. The Samaritan used the knowledge he had to help.

Next he gets the man to safety. They are in the wilderness. They can't call 911. There are no ambulances. So the Samaritan puts the man on his donkey and takes him to an inn.

And he doesn't just dump him and let him become Someone Else's Problem. He continues to care for the man. This victim probably costs his rescuer a night's sleep.

But he costs him money, too. The Samaritan can't stay but he gives the innkeeper the equivalent of 2 days' wages and instructions to take care of the man until he returns. If it costs the innkeeper more, the Samaritan will reimburse him.

Finally Jesus asks the expert in the law which of the 3 men seemed to be a neighbor to the victim. The scribe can't even bring himself to say the word, “Samaritan.” Instead he says, “The one who showed him compassion.”

What do we learn from this?

First, your neighbor is not necessarily someone like you. He doesn't have to be of the same race or the same religion or the same country as you. He doesn't have to be anyone you know. He is anyone you encounter who is in need. And today, you may encounter him or her in the news or on the internet because distance is not the factor it was in Jesus' day. You can help people across the world through charities and aid organizations. That they aren't nearby is not an excuse.

Second, the reason your neighbor is suffering is irrelevant. The man was foolish to travel that road alone. The Samaritan didn't determine why the man was in that situation; he took care of him nonetheless. When Jesus' disciples asked him if the reason that a man was born blind was his sin or his parents', Jesus didn't assign blame. He saw it as an opportunity to serve God by healing him. (John 9:1-3) Neither does Jesus bring up the reason why the people in the parable of the sheep and goats ended up hungry or naked or sick or in jail or a foreigner. We are to take care of them regardless and serve Jesus. (Matthew 25:31-46)

Third, we are to offer practical help to our neighbor. As James says, “If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacks food, and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace, keep warm and eat well,' but you do not give them what the body needs, what good is it?” (James 2:15-16) As it says in 1 John, “Little children, we should not love in word or with our tongue but in action and in truth.” (1 John 3:18) In the parable the Samaritan does not say “I want you to know that I love you, my neighbor, as I do myself.” He simply demonstrates it by loving actions. To paraphrase James, creeds without deeds are dead.

Today when so-called Christians are talking about “the sin of empathy” or “toxic empathy,” I wonder how they square this with Jesus' command, “In everything, treat others as you would want them to treat you, for this fulfills the law and the prophets”? (Matthew 7:12) That requires empathy: understanding and sharing the feelings of others.

Lack of empathy is the real problem that Jesus is addressing in this parable. It is typical not to have empathy for those different from us. Right now I imagine most of us are more concerned with the more than 120 people who died in Texas last week than the 56,000 people who have died in Gaza over the last two years. But to Jesus they are all our neighbors. We are to love all of them. We are to serve all of them, not just with our lips but with our lives.

What would we do if they were people we already love and care for? We would go to their rescue. We would take care of their needs.We would help them in any way we could, even if it costs us in time, effort and money. So, as Jesus says, “Go and do likewise.”

A Fuller Image

The scriptures referred to are Isaiah 66:10-14.

“Is God a man or a woman?” the Sunday School teacher asked. The kids in her class, sensing that this was a trick question, said nothing.

Except for one little boy. He said, “God's not a woman; he's three guys.”

The teacher hadn't been thinking of the Trinity but, seeing a teaching moment, replied, “I wouldn't call them guys, but do you know the names of the 3 persons in the Godhead?”

“Yeah,” said the boy. “Harold, Howard and Dad.”

“Uh, where did you get those names?” asked the teacher.

“In the prayer we say,” the boy replied. The teacher looked confused because this didn't sound like any prayer she'd heard or taught them. The kid goes, “You know—the one that starts, 'Our Father, Howard in heaven, Harold be thy name.'”

The question I put in the joke was actually the one I drew from our sermon suggestion box one Sunday. It looked like it was written by a child. And it's a natural question because most living beings they know—people, animals, birds—are either male or female. Children perceive this to be a major category and so it would seem to apply to God as well. And throughout history, most pagan gods were conceived of as having genders. Zeus is male; Venus is female. But just as the God of the Bible transcends the idea that one being is always one person, so too he doesn't fit into our neat (or once neat) categories on gender. So why does the Bible always use the masculine pronoun when talking about God?

The assumption of a lot of people is that this is because Christianity and Judaism are inherently and thoroughly sexist. But to say that you have to ignore a lot of the Biblical data. Like the fact that women figure prominently in both the Old and New Testaments: Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, Zipporah, Miriam, Deborah, Ruth, Bathsheba, Esther, Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Mary the sister of Martha and Lazarus, Pricilla, Dorcas, Lydia, Junia and more. In fact, one scholar, noticing all of the significant women in the Torah, and all the emphasis on marrying for love, proposed that it was written by a woman. Another scholar has suggested that Paul's colleague Priscilla, who worked with her husband Aquilla as a ministry team, was the author of the book of Hebrews.

Oddly enough, some people hold up fertility religions as an egalitarian contrast to the Judeo-Christian tradition. But to do that you have to ignore the facts about them as well. Fertility cults were the original “Keep 'em barefoot and pregnant” religions. Yes, women were allowed to be priestesses in those religions—so long as they functioned as temple prostitutes. Yes, the female form was venerated—in much the same way that Playboy magazine did. In such societies women were sacred, all right—sacred sex objects. They didn't value women as anything other than baby machines. Contrast that with the Bible's description in Proverbs 31:10-31 of a wife whose “value is far more than rubies.” She sells what she makes and buys land. Unlike an ancient Greek wife, she doesn't have to stay in the women's part of the house. Ironically if you want to see more egalitarian cultures, you should look at the warrior societies. The Mongols, the Celts, and the Vikings let their women do more than just care for the hearth and home. Some even became leaders, like the Celtic queen Boudica who led the Celts against the Romans, and Freydis Eiriksdottir, a fierce warrior who successfully fought Native Americans.

The prophets denounced the fertility goddess Asherah, which some Israelites worshipped. (Deuteronomy 7:5; Jeremiah 17:1-2; 2 Kings 23:4) And it was probably to avoid all connection with such fertility cults that the Jews, who unlike the Greeks lacked a neutral pronoun, referred to God in the masculine. This does not mean that our God is like Mars, the Roman god of war, who is the personification of all that is male. God does have characteristics traditionally seen as feminine. The Hebrew word for God's compassion (racham) is the root of their word for “womb.” (Psalm 86:15) In Proverbs chapter 8, God's wisdom is personified in a poem and referred to as “her.” In today's reading from Isaiah, God says to Jerusalem, “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you.” Jesus said, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, stoning the prophets and killing the ones sent to you! How often I wanted to gather together your children the way a hen gathers her young under her wings but you were not willing” (Luke 13:34)

There is another way in which we know that God has both masculine and feminine characteristics. In the very first chapter in the Bible, it says, “And God made humanity in his image; in the image of God, he made him; male and female, he made them.” (Genesis 1:27) Notice the fact that both male and female are created in God's image. This is important because in the ancient Near East, the monarch was said to be the image of God and so to have his authority. In Genesis 1, both man and woman were created to act as co-regents of the earth under God. In fact, the subordination of the woman to the man is depicted as a consequence of the fall of humanity and was not part of God's original design. (Genesis 3:16) As we will see, all inequality comes from sin.

Since our sins have been dealt with by Christ, we can echo Paul, who says in his letter to the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28) It is odd, therefore, that Christians are as susceptible to the twin mistakes about gender as non-Christians are. Those two mistakes are either exaggerating the differences between the sexes or else ignoring them.

The most common mistake is to approach the genders in a dualistic fashion. By this I mean seeing the 2 sexes as if they were almost 2 different species. It is true that there are other differences besides our reproductive organs. The 2 hemispheres in women's brains are more strongly connected, enhancing intuitive thinking and multitasking; men's brains are more strongly connected from front to back, enhancing focus and motor skills. Women tend to do better in verbal abilities and languages whereas men tend to do better in math and spatial relations. Women's relationships tend to be about the people in the relationships; men's relationships tend to be about things they like to do or enjoy together. Men tend to like sports; women tend to like hobbies. But these are generalizations, true only when looking at large groups of people. Any individual woman may be more logical or more of a sports fan than any particular man. Any specific man may be more sensitive in his relationships than any specific woman. There is an amount of variation in the sexes. Mr. Rogers displayed the gentler and more nurturing side of being a man. By all accounts, Florence Nightingale was more intelligent, better organized and much more formidable than most men.

Unfortunately, there are those who act as if gender differences are a vast “No-Man's Land” running through all societies and all activities. Some approve of the division between the two while some see it as regrettable but inevitable. Often those that approve of it see the divide as divinely ordained, but that can only be maintained through a selective emphasis on certain passages and the exclusion of others. Point out 1 Corinthians 14:34 but skip 11:5; emphasize 1 Timothy 2:12 but ignore Romans 16:1; make a big deal of Ephesians 5:22 but divorce it from verse 21 from which the verb “submit” must be borrowed. It is not a matter of being Biblical or not but of being Biblically balanced or not. If you don't look at scripture as a whole but cherry-pick select verses or ignore contexts you will miss the nuances to be found in God's wisdom.

In fact, most of the differences in the treatment of men and women owe more to the pre-existing cultures than to the scriptures. And usually it is men who insist that there are huge differences between the sexes. They also tend to see them not in terms of mere function or approach but in moral terms. They see bodily differences the way racists see skin color: as indicative of underlying moral and intellectual inferiority and biologically determined behavior. Sadly, some feminists mirror them, seeing men as the troublesome sex. But demeaning or demonizing either sex is certainly not the solution to the problem.

Women do suffer disportionately from poverty, domestic violence and lack of education. And one study says the wellbeing of a nation is directly related to the economic freedom of its women. But I doubt that the people of Iran would say that sexual inequality is their biggest problem. Nor would the Israelis or the Palestinians. The real evil is humankind's general tendency to treat inhumanely those who are different in any way and to try to establish dominance over them. We see this when it comes to matters of race, religion, counties of origin, languages, customs, and politics. Inequality in the treatment of the sexes is just one more manifestation of the sin of not loving your neighbor as yourself.

On the other hand, there are those who feel that we should pretend that there are no differences between the sexes. I read a critique which said that while American feminists tried to erase legal differences between men and women, European feminists won maternity leave and special legislation that dealt with problems specific to women. In other words, European feminists focused more on accommodating the differences. And currently 10 European countries have women Heads of State or Heads of Government.

I think the solution is to reject “one size fits all” answers to the twin problems. We need to recognize when the differences in the sexes should come into play and when they shouldn't. It makes no sense to exclude women from jobs or positions that they can do. (The 2 longest reigning British monarchs were women: Elizabeth II and Victoria. Elizabeth I is also in the top ten.) And it makes no sense to pay them less for doing the same work. On the other hand, we need to recognize the different needs of women and men. Doctors have noted that women may manifest different symptoms than men when they have heart attacks. They may react to certain medications differently. It doesn't help that traditionally women have been excluded from drug trials because researchers don't want to deal with the complexity of factoring in things like menstruation and pregnancy. Women's nutritional needs are different. And in many public places, they should have more bathrooms than men. Men rarely have to stand in long lines to use restrooms.

When the Declaration of Independence says that all men are created equal, it is speaking of their worth in the eyes of God. Obviously we are not equal in all aspects or abilities. Both sexes and all individuals have various strengths. So we must strike a balance when we approach each other. Because, as we have seen, the image of God does not reside exclusively in either sex alone but in both working together. We see in others reflections of the God who both nurtures us and demands that we become mature, who both disciplines us and forgives us, who both encourages us to take bold actions and reminds us to think of others when we act, especially those who are less fortunate or powerful, who tells us both to work for justice and to be peacemakers. The sexes were not meant to compete but to complete the picture of the God who is love, to bring out and bring together all the facets of the image of God which we can find in every person if only we look for them.

First preached on July 2, 2006. It has been revised and updated.