Samaritans and Salamanders

 Luke 10:25-37

            I’ve often remarked at what a different role the Bible plays in the lives of people today from the place it had in the culture in which I grew up. 

            Stop right there.  Just so your mind doesn’t wander off track here, wondering if you’re going to have to endure a lament about the poor Bible not being read and obeyed any more, let me disabuse you of that fear right now.  No, I am not for spending any of your time or mine, in or out of church, bemoaning the loss of the Bible or anything else in the supposedly good old days. 

            Even though sunset has come to the day, earlier my ministry, when I could say “please join me in saying the 23^rd Psalm,” and have 90% of my audience know what I was talking about and be able to say it with me, a couple of biblical phrases still hang on.  One is the term “Good Samaritan.”  I haven’t taken a poll to see how many people recognize it, but my sense is that, somewhat like the popular title of another of Jesus’ parables, “The Prodigal Son,” the words “Good Samaritan” still have some use in English speech.

            Be aware that “Good Samaritan” is a phrase that nowhere appears in the biblical text.  It most likely appeared in some edition of the Bible as an editorial title at the top of the page or passage.  If you know a modicum about first century Jews, you know that they generally despised Samaritans as a religiously conservative and ethnically impure group that pious Jews avoided at all costs, to the point of taking the long way around Samaria to get from Judea to Galilee, for example, rather than choosing the shortcut.  So the descriptor “Good” attached to Samaritan was at least in part a nod to the attitude that all the rest of the Samaritans were, to put it kindly, not so good.

            As Jessie Weston argues in From Ritual to Romance, things that start off with a degree of, let’s say, religious significance have a way of devolving over time into the stuff of romance—and ultimately degenerate into entertainment rather than retaining their original power.  A similar process over the centuries has made “good Samaritan” less of a radical figure making a radical point (by Jesus) and more of a kindly soul who stops to help people who are in a fix, especially strangers.  That is not such a bad thing; but I want to suggest that we not go there quite so quickly, nor stay there quite so long. 

            Luke’s story is set within an acrimonious confrontation—one of many, progressively tense—between Jesus and the religious elite of his day.  This time a lawyer, who is a religious figure versed in Torah, the Law of Moses, not a secular attorney, is interesting in tripping Jesus up.  “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”  It doesn’t sound all that tricky, does it?  Jesus returns the question with a question.  “What is in the Law?  What do you read there?”  And the lawyer answers with the Shema, which we know as “the Summary of the Law,” the heart of it.  But Jesus’ agreement doesn’t go very far with him.  He has to justify himself, so he asks another question, “And who is my neighbor?”  That is the question that the parable purports to answer.  But notice that the tables turn as Jesus’ reaches the climax of his story.  The question that the story answers is not “who is my neighbor” but “who does the neighborly thing?”  And the answer, which in the world of Twitter might be #neversaytheirname, is, of course, the Samaritan. 

The lawyer can’t bring himself to utter the name, so he says, “the one who showed mercy.”  So he is doubly stung, the lawyer is.  First, he has failed to ball Jesus up.  Second, he is forced to admit the obvious.  He must be like the despised Samaritan in order to fulfill the Law he so professionally loves. 

            Don’t you just love it?  The smart aleck gets his comeuppance.  Jesus proves his wit and wisdom.  Oh, how we love to vilify the villain!  But before this parable became Sunday morning entertainment, remember that it was a piece of radical sociology.  Jesus specialized in crossing boundaries and obliterating them.  Not a few of his heroes were in fact Samaritans, tax collectors, women, widows, children, lepers, prostitutes, and other ragtag and bobtail people generally outside the Law and the borders of respectability. They were heroes not because they were morally superior but because the boundaries had been drawn all wrong to begin with.  Outside/inside, a division with which human beings are historically and transculturally enchanted, is a concept is turned on its head in the kingdom of God.  Those who think they are righteous and have the certificate to prove it turn out not to be.  And those who have no claim at all on things like righteousness (which means living in right relationship to God and others), or mercy, or grace, are those who are invited to sit at the welcome table despite their table manners. 

            Rather than become stuck in a game of vilifying the villain, let’s see what happens when we take the principle of the Good Samaritan and see where it might lead us today. 

            The Samaritan is a model neighbor precisely because he is alert, aware, and willing to embrace the defenseless.  The story without belaboring details surely suggests that he is willing to risk being beaten or perhaps killed himself simply by stopping to see what the matter was.  He is resourceful, pouring on oil and wine.  He is liberal in giving his time to one who has absolutely no claim on it.  He is generous in paying a stranger’s bill.  He is merciful.  He gets nothing out of the deal, except perhaps the satisfaction of helping.  Remember, too, that he is not a historical person, but rather a credible character in a story told to make a point.  One might surmise that, as a despised Samaritan in a country where he is subject to an attitude that might be called “Samaritan Lives Don’t Matter” he might have suffered just enough ridicule or violence or sorrow or debasement or some form of pain to have discovered that all pain is one, and that somehow he himself, not an unknown Jew, is in fact lying there half dead in the ditch. 

            So we get the point.  “Go and do likewise.”  But I want to suggest that what the Bible is really about is not just giving us a moral readjustment, let alone permission to congratulate ourselves for doing a bit of social action here and there.  Once we see what the Samaritan is really about—openness, courage, oneness with those in despair—biblical faith—I’d rather personify it and call it Jesus—pushes us to take the next step and the next and the next.  And I’m convinced that the essence of neighborliness neither exists in nor stops at pausing to help someone stranded on the highway, although I’ve been happy enough on a number of occasions to have someone stop and help me when I’d otherwise have been totally stranded. 

            Neighborliness may start with Mr. Rogers (of blessed memory), but it goes way beyond his nice little neighborhood. 

It begins to rearrange us into patterns of connectedness not only with people in need, but people very much unlike us, people who are abhorrent to us.  And it doesn’t stop with people.  Neighborliness opens our eyes to see our link to animals, to plants, to rocks and dirt and fire and water and air and fruit.  Yes, to practice even the most basic care and openness for the defenseless is a part of a large project of reimagining the entirety of creation, including our place in the scheme of things.  And, believe me, none of this is any more way-out than the notion of modeling behavior after a fictitious Samaritan was for our smart-alecky lawyer. 

            I’ve recently read an amazing book called Braiding Sweetgrass.  Its author, Robin Wall Kemmerer, is a Native American, a biologist, and a challenging thinker.  She presents a compelling case for an alternative view of life on the planet that stands in stark contrast to our market-driven, ego-minded, dominion-over-all-other-species approach that does not seem to be working too well for the good of the earth or its inhabitants.  She has me thinking.  Of course, I suppose, the hardnosed skeptics among us, not to mention the convinced capitalists, would make quick hamburger of Kemmerer’s Native American views of thankfulness for the gifts of nature, for the intelligence of plants, for the interrelatedness of all animal life, indeed all life, including human life.  All worked up over gun violence and rampant killings and economic injustice and its parent, white superiority, we might find it hard to believe that being neighborly actually means something as mundane as caring about frogs and salamanders.  But in a poignant passage, Kemmerer describes how a bunch of college students in a herpetology class are out on a rainy night in the country, endeavoring to save salamanders trying to cross a road to make it on to the next part of a life cycle before automobiles squash them.  She writes:

Salamanders are so very much the “other,” cold, slimy creatures verging on repulsive to the warm-blooded Homo sapiens. Their startling otherness makes it all the more remarkable that we were here tonight in their defense. Amphibians offer few of the warm fuzzy feelings that fuel our protection of charismatic mammals that look back at us with Bambi’s grateful eyes. They bring us face to face with our innate xenophobia, sometimes directed at other species and sometimes directed at our own, whether in this hollow or in deserts halfway around the globe. Being with salamanders gives honor to otherness, offers an antidote to the poison of xenophobia. Each time we rescue slippery, spotted beings we attest to their right to be, to live in the sovereign territory of their own lives.[1]

Neighbors are not just the dying man left bleeding on the worst roadside in the country.  Nor are they only first responders who risk their lives in the line of duty to protect the vulnerable.  Neighbors are salamanders, both animal and human, who look as if they cannot matter much to God or anyone else.  Neighbors are students and teachers and old people and children who are soaking wet on a spring night out trying to save little creatures that are as connected as we to the Author and Giver of their lives and ours.  Love does not start nor end with us and the people like us.  That, I think, is where the Word of God is leading us, even in a culture that barely knows what it means any more when it calls someone “a Good Samaritan.”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2016

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[1] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants  (Milkweed Editions: Kindle Edition, 2013), p. 358.

Passages Written in Early Spring

1

Creaking wood rubbing against wood

And fallen particles all around

The ancient smiling dragon wound

Bespeak futility neither bad nor good—

Leave questions blowing through the vernal air

Tempting a grasping mind to solve

And stay what must perforce revolve

Around a gash a god could make and bear.

Only draw in blood the mark of death

And fix your seal upon this failing flesh

Till ghostly wind inspire freshened breath

And all my cells and every sense unleash

To toll the knell for what has passed away

And sound a reveille to welcome day.

2

Jam for breakfast, an open honey pot

Among clattering, clanging calls to celebrate,

A mirth that reason cannot calibrate

Nor readily toss into the compost lot

I insistently affirm.  I have been crucified,

No joke, and so am through with sighs

And worries and worshiping the stuff that dies

And from the fingers of the dead is often pried

Loose.  I’ll get on with laughing, making

Others laugh, and in fairy dancing

Wrap a great old pole, and taking

Nothing, not even time for glancing

Back, commit myself to endless gladness,

For my God’s not happier by my sadness.

 

3

Far back in a packed closet

No light shines easily there

Is a box decorated, a simple box

That once held new shoes

And now is stuffed with two

Weeks’ worth of love notes, poems,

Scraps of original art, carefully

Torn pieces of construction paper,

Quotations of writers, sages, saints

Of one sort or another.  She filled

It when our marriage was on its way

To death—a hope chest, given

Me to pore over and riffle through

During a week away.  It is the last

Vestige, this box, of thirty years

Of trials, errors, joys, waiting,

Sins and salvation, of

Warmth and coldness,

Babies and laughter, and great

Nervousness at times.  I

Know it’s there on the shelf

Where I put it last, unable

To let go of all it represents,

Of dreams and promises, vows

Even and even odd moments

When I knew the best of me

And the worst played together

Alloyed under the canopy of

Grace.  I rarely look into it

When I reach for Christmas

Decorations and it falls down

Into a crack, or shift around

Some camping gear when comes

The season for it.  Once or twice

I’ve raised the lid to see

If all’s still there, or whether

Some has decayed, some expired

As the law of entropy wields its will.

I muse sometimes on why it is

I cannot bear the thought

Of trashing mementos of a distant past,

Old pain growing sharper in some

Ways as unstretched muscles

Ache in early morning, wanting

Notice, dissatisfied until used again.

Sometimes it is not love or happiness

Or yet shame or guilt that clings

To us like beggar lice to breeches

In a wintry field—

But unspent tears of what we wished and prayed for

Shoved way down deep into a box

Rarely opened, emptied, shared,

A little casket full of grief

In a dark place away from everyday

Routines, unscheduled for healing.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

4

Catharsis only comes to certain souls

Whose generally uncalculated wounds

Undressed and raw have throbbed and oozed till sounds

A dove-cry piercing stony hearts with holes

A size that sunlight joyfully admit.

O happy fault in human evolution

That wrongs collected see no dissolution

Till great the pain and more the cost of it

Exceeds relentless pressure to repress

What frightened egos do not will to face.

I name all my accumulated stress

And pitch it straight into the lap of grace.

And bows the soul unfettered and unbarred,

Purified and whole though wholly scarred.

5

If swamps are places teeming with life,

Then forests seem to me the land of death.

For three days I’ve meandered

Around woods here and there,

Impressed by all the dead I see—

Fallen logs, a floor of mealy leaves, rotten

Monuments woodpeckers have perforated

Left dying in the spring, emptied of all bugs.

In search of a place to spend a day in hermithood

A little grove I spied

Identified as Hiskitt Cemetery by a little sign.

Two or three old gravestones leaned about,

Decrepit after centuries of weathering,

Their tiny environs established

More or less by a border of decaying

Wood, itself a fitting fence for funeral plots.

I chose a tree, sturdy and inviting,

Against which leaned a smallish marker

To make a kind of headboard for my day

Thinking to keep company with and for

The nameless dead one sleeping next to me.

Just beyond the circle of twigs and branches

I arranged defining my cell

Two old gravestones bent towards

Each other, possibly the way those marked

Had done in life.  Rain and wind

And no doubt snow and ice as well

Had erased the words off one

Beyond reading.  The other tipped

Backward, though, in such a way

As to create a shelter for the lettering

While contributing its other side to

Mold and moss.  I felt at home

Among these few long rotted corpses

Preceding even the oldest trees in sight.

Cemeteries are precincts of peace

And peace is what I came to get.

The dead no doubt could teach

Me a thing or two of peace, so

I asked them to let me in

On what they’d learned.  Silence.

They seemed to say absolutely nothing,

As the dead are in the habit

Of doing.  So I asked the tree

Supporting me what it

Had to tell me.  The tree said, “Be.”

I’ve passed the day almost

Between “Be” and nothing. 

And finally I think I’ve heard

The Word, perhaps the Peace too

I’d hoped for in early morning.

Be.  Nothing.  Or.  Be.  Silent.

It’s as much me to jot this down

As it is for a tree to scan the sky.

I am who I am, though

Who I am is still a project in the making.

As for nothing, nothing seems

Right.  The great silence of the

Thirty-four-year-old wife who died

In June and her now

Nameless neighbor in the grave

Is a clear message on my way to living—

Nothing is the telos toward which my life is moving

And perfect nothingness will be the proving

True of all my gifts and giving—

6

On Saturday of the first weekend in May

Many years ago, a gang of college boys

And their dates struck out with noise

Of blaring radios and horns to pay

A visit to a swimming hole.  Their fun

On unrolled blankets in a field

Delighted some, and others’ hearts were healed

When arms enwrapped them in the midday sun.

I was among their number, and for once

Began to feel accepted as a brother,

A rare experience for one reason or another,

Not being favored by my father’s other sons.

Tied to an oak above a deep place in the river

A rope invited swinging out and falling

Into the water.  Splash produced a shiver

Of either thrill or chill, maybe calling

Adolescents to experience a learning:

Letting go is the soul of all discerning.

April, 2015

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2015.

Beyond Crazy

Luke 8:26-39

            Last Sunday, having finished two morning services in another parish, I arrived home for lunch, went to my office, looked at my computer screen and saw for the first time the headlines about Orlando.  Probably like most of you, I have spent all week sorting out my reactions and responses to this latest massacre, which, only because of the magnitude of its enormity, grips our attention.  Some time ago we reached the point where the average mass shooting, defined as one in which more than 3 people are killed, is on average a daily occurrence in the United States.  Among all the emotions churning up in me this week has been the exasperation that says, “Here we go again.” 

            We have developed a national ritual.  Indeed we are in the midst of it at the moment.  It is the American ritual for dealing with what you might say is an insoluble problem that shows no signs of going away any time soon.  Just as there are other public rituals that have all the marks of predictability, this corporate reaction to mass shootings is predictable.  The language we use, including such words as “outrage,” “senseless,” “gun violence,” “courageous first responders,” “terror,” “instability,” “lone wolf,” are stock phrases that you can count on figuring into reports and conversations for days. 

It will appear at some point that we might have a chance of actually solving this problem of perennial, devastating violence.  A new cascade of victims’ families and grief-stricken relatives will move us to new resolve.  We will find ourselves hopeful, even amid the cacophony of rage and counter-rage that continues to fuel more hatred and more violence.  Yet, as the prospect of new gun control legislation begins to rise, sales in guns will climb. 

This must strike you as something you already know, familiar as the back of your hand.  I imagine that you must be thinking that I have some sort of solution in mind or else I wouldn’t be talking about it. I suspect that you probably think that either I am a cynic who sees no possibility of change in all this, or, more likely that I am headed towards asserting that with proper public pressure we will be able once and for all to reverse this trend and possibly even to solve this intractable problem.

Let me remind myself and you that this is not a political speech, but a sermon.  My aim is to proclaim some gospel this morning, and that involves telling the truth, not just making ourselves feel better, though one might hope that the two are not mutually exclusive.  The truth begins with the fact that we are awash in what can kindly be called crazy behavior.  That is not to say that all of us have totally lost our minds, but that in the aggregate, the phenomenon that we’re in and I have described is insane.  You have heard it said that the definition of insanity is to repeat the same behavior over and over expecting different results.  Well, so far that nails us, doesn’t it?  That’s not all there is to it, but that is a big slice of what is wrong with this whole picture.  The question is how can we stop it?  Or, to use a phrase of St. Paul, who will deliver us?

How interesting that today’s gospel story is one about craziness.  It is, perhaps of all the stories in any of the gospels, the one that dramatizes the extent and depth of insanity.  The mad man of Gerasa is one of the most frightening figures on the pages of scripture.  He is strong, he is untamable, he is demonic, he is scary.  He roams about the tombs in the local cemetery, and it is a cinch that none of the villagers of Gerasa go there with their flowers and candles very much, knowing they will likely run into him.  The story is difficult enough, yet its challenge to us 21^st century people is compounded by the category in which the crazy man is placed, namely demon-possessed.  We don’t deal with demon possession very well in modern vocabulary.  We have other diagnoses: schizophrenia, sociopathology, and so on.  Not only that, but the bizarre story of demons begging to enter a herd of hogs who race down the bank and drown in the Sea of Galilee pretty much asks us to imagine more than we easily can.

What is really difficult for us to see is how this poor character has anything to do with us.  The very problem of modern life in the United States, and maybe the world at large, is that we are in a real sense deeply disturbed and don’t know it.  The very fact that we are the most medicated generation ever to live on the planet is itself a part of the problem.  Of course we are a far cry from raving around cemeteries; but we continue to nurse on delusions.  Huge swaths of our society cannot grasp the fact that no matter who we are, we are infected by racism.  To that extent, we are deluded.  Our systems conspire to keep us under the spell of imagined wellness.  Even when we see its flaws and dark side, we continue to spin with the wheels of capitalism.  Most of us are about as fundamentalistic regarding our Constitution as religious fundamentalists are about the Bible.  We corporately imagine that our constitutional system, with only a minor flaw here and there, is mighty near perfect.  And one of the favorite notions is that every social problem has a legislative solution. 

Into this quandary comes the Healer.  Notice that Jesus meets resistance from the demons.  Delusional thinking and its correlative, crazy behavior, do not vanish quietly.  Like the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s novel, voices in us and in our society say, “What have you to do with us, Jesus?  Do not torment us.  Leave us alone.”  We are doing quite well without you, even as we invoke your name and pretend to be following you.  Don’t upset us by dispelling our fantasies. If you ask us our name, we cannot answer because we have no lasting identity.  Our loyalties are divided among family, work, sex, gender, race, ethnicity.  We are legion.  We know no wholeness. 

And that is the root of the problem.  What we have great trouble seeing is that in this awful violence, we are in fact reaping what we have sown.  The poisonous flower of violence blooms on a stalk grounded in our own fragmentation.  Many of us, despite a whole industry of gyms, diets, beauty products, cosmetics, style, body decorations, and so on, really despise our bodies.  Despite all the self-help books and programs, we find ourselves stuck in the same old patterns.  We pay millions on therapy and hear ourselves saying the same old stuff week after week.  And all of this builds up into a great sea of internalized hatred and anger.  We get angry at our own frustration.  And all of that breeds a culture which gives rise to violence.  We’ll never see this unless we look at the whole scene, beyond our individual pieces of it.  It all didn’t start yesterday.  It has been a way of life for centuries.  Strife, dehumanization, unbridled competition, insecurities, jealousy, envy, discord, slave trade, sex trade, power games, oppression.  The list goes on and on.  We cannot get rid of violence by being violent.  We cannot cast out hatred by hating.  And most of all, we cannot heal from a deep sickness of soul unless somehow we are delivered from the very things that make our souls sick.

The demons gone, the mad man of Gerasa is no longer mad.  He is clothed and in his right mind.  He sits at the feet of Jesus, calm, peaceful.  That is what wholeness looks like.  Now the secret, quite well kept, is that the Jesus who heals us is not some distant god, but rather one that already lives right in us.  It makes little difference whether we imagine this Jesus to be external to us or internal (I do some of both). What critically matters is that we come to understand that our egos—that is to say our conscious, willing selves—cannot heal us.  Healing has to come from some deeper place.  In my vocabulary it is “soul healing,” which really means that, like the Gerasene man, we need deliverance from all that legion of crazy voices in us, including the voice that says, “You’re no good.”  Soul healing is being united with our truest, deepest nature.  Once that begins to happen, peace begins to supplant all the internal violence.

How?  It begins with our admitting our own powerlessness.  We move from there to something quite counter-intuitive:  submitting our wills to the Christ within us, acknowledging him to be our soul-maker and soul-mate.  We begin gradually to let go of our fantasy of being in control of others, our partners, our children, our neighbors, our enemies.  The more we do, the more we become supple, accepting what comes to us and not fighting it.  The less we fight, the more we are free to embrace.  We gradually find ourselves loving our own bodies.  Then it is not too hard for us to begin embracing our own mortality.  And one day we might begin to notice that we are living more and more soulfully.   We begin to live more joyfully, rooted in a practice of being grateful.  We look for the good in people rather than fixate on their foibles.  We make mistakes and take them as opportunities to learn.  We lose our cool and learn to observe our imperfections without laying hard trips on ourselves.  We treat ourselves well, take long hot baths and showers, give money away—lots of it, enjoy long walks, savor good food, celebrate our erotic energy, stop kicking ourselves with guilt, learn how to face into the very things that we are ashamed of, and begin owning our imperfections and vulnerabilities.  Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control:  these are the marks of soulful living, and they are the fruit of the Spirit of Christ taking hold of us, and shaping us into persons wholly one with our deepest nature. 

Easy?  No.  Quick?  Hardly.  But the only way I know of to get out of the tombs and into the clear light of day.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2016