by Preston Moore, Intern Minister

A sermon given November 28, 2004

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Imagine yourself sitting on a hillside in First Century Judea.  You and a crowd of other Jews are listening to Jesus.  A lawyer stands up and asks what he needs to do to have eternal life.  Jesus and the lawyer go back and forth about the ancient commandment to love thy neighbor.  The lawyer wants to pin Jesus down, so he asks, “Who is my neighbor?”

Jesus answers with a story about a guy robbed and left for dead on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho.  He’s been stripped of his clothing, so there is no way to tell what tribe he belongs to. Two high officials of the Jewish religious establishment come along.  Both see the victim lying there.  Both pass on by. Then comes a traveler from nearby Samaria.  He too sees the victim lying there.  And now, Jesus delivers a shocker, declaring that the Samaritan had compassion for the victim.

Your mind is rebelling at this turn in the story, because you and all other Jews despise the Samaritans as worse than heretics—as turncoats who sided repeatedly with the oppressors of Israel. You have never heard the word “good” connected with the word “Samaritan.”

The story continues.  By taking charge of the bleeding victim, the Samaritan makes himself a risky, slow-moving target for attackers. You know he probably isn’t wealthy, but he expends his scarce wine and oil tending the victim’s wounds.  He takes him to Jericho and prepays for lodging so the victim can mend—promising to return and pay all additional expenses.  You are struck by this because you know that under the law, a person who fails to pay his debts can be taken into servitude.

As you listen to Jesus tell this story, you look for a character you can identify with.  Obviously it can’t be the robbers.  The church officials are out, because they walked on by.  You’d like to identify with the rescuer, but he’s a Samaritan.  You don’t want to see yourself as the victim, but it seems to come down to either him or the Samaritan rescuer.  You feel very conflicted. 

Jesus has given you a startling answer to the question “Who is my neighbor?”  You are challenged to be magnanimous to an enemy in need.  But that’s not the half of it.  In this story you are also challenged to consider that you may be the one in jeopardy, to whom your Samaritan enemy was neighborly.  And you know Jesus isn’t just talking about physical jeopardy.  No, the radical from Nazareth is suggesting, in that allegorical way of his, that you are in great spiritual jeopardy.  Help is on the way, he’s saying.  And it’s coming in the form of someone you hate.

The parable is a narrative rendition of one of Jesus’ most memorable imperatives in the Sermon on the Mount.  Referring to Deuteronomy and Leviticus in the Hebrew Bible, he said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

How was this message received?  The Jewish people were repeatedly victimized by enemy occupations.  Imagine how it hit their ears to be told to be generous to these imperialists—or worse yet, that their arch-enemies would rescue them from spiritual jeopardy.

Jesus’ version of generosity is as radical today as it was in first century Judea. It doesn’t match our conventional definition of generosity, which is simply “liberality in giving.”  The synonyms identified for this word include “magnanimity and largesse.”  The essence of this conventional generosity is charity, a word that takes its meaning from the Greek word for “gift.”  Several important consequences flow from this conception of generosity.

First, if generosity is based on charity, then when you give, you are giving away only your “superfluity,” as Jesus so pointedly named it—things that don’t really matter much to you.  Thus the people to whom you are giving don’t matter much either.  And how undemocratic is this notion of generosity!  Generosity as charity allows only those who have much to be generous, leaving out the poor and marginalized.

Occasionally, we do see someone act outside of this conception of generosity as charity.  This happened to a friend of mine on her way to soccer practice one day.  She was running late.  She came to a green light just in time to make a left turn before an oncoming car reached the intersection. She never saw the two women in the crosswalk until they slammed onto the hood of her car. She jumped out of her car and ran across the street to a gas station to call an ambulance.   Someone stopped and was comforting the injured pedestrians.

My friend sat there on the curb weeping, waiting for the ambulance, not knowing what else to do.  Through her tears she saw one of the injured women looking back at her with the kindest and most forgiving smile she had ever seen. There she lay, with what turned out to be a broken pelvis, and smiled. As if to say, “I know you didn’t mean it. I know you are a good person and you just made a mistake. I forgive you.” Her smile came from her whole being.  The accident victim was not well off—quite the contrary.  All she had to give was a look of forgiveness for a negligent stranger.  This was radical generosity.

A second consequence of generosity as charity is that it singles out the giver for admiration.  But that requires accounting.  When those who are well-off act charitably, a bookkeeping entry is made in that intangible ledger where society keeps score on people:  a credit for those who gave liberally, and a debit for those who received this “help,” this “charity,” and who therefore are now “indebted” to the magnanimous giver.

Occasionally, we see someone reach out to another in a way that ignores this accounting system.  A few days ago, the doorbell buzzed at the 13th Avenue entrance to the church office.  Two people came in, identifying themselves as husband and wife.  Another visitor was also sitting in the reception area, waiting to begin a meeting with a staff member.

The wife, her voice filled with distress, said that they had been sleeping on the streets for over a week.  She had a huge backpack on an aluminum frame, with a bedroll and other belongings lashed onto it.  Their clothes were ragged and dirty.  She explained how they got here and what had happened to them.  She asked for $130 for bus tickets back to Texas, where they had some possibility of getting help.

I looked for the kindest possible way to tell her that the church did not have money to distribute in situations like this.  But the wife pleaded with me to see if there wasn’t some way for them to get help.  I agreed to check around with others in the office and asked them to wait.  I walked back down the hall.  I was pretty confident their need was genuine; but I knew that wouldn’t change the hard facts about no money being available.

The other visitor in the reception area, sitting within earshot of this conversation, followed me down the hall.  Her pocketbook opened and her checkbook came out.  She said she wanted to help.  While the church accountant cashed her $130 check, I thanked her for her generosity.  “This is what God put me here to do,” she said.  I asked about her church, and she identified a fundamentalist Christian one.  We walked back out with the cash.  The relieved, elated couple hugged us and then left for the bus station with their huge backpack.  The visitor will never see this couple again.  No accounting entry will be made for her good deed.

I went back to my office reflecting not only on her generosity but also on my own attitude toward her and her people, her kind—fundamentalist Christians, and therefore quite possibly homophobic, quite possibly militaristic, quite possibly “unworthy” if judged by my values.  I wondered if I could be as generous to her as she was to the two needy strangers.

Yet another consequence of generosity as charity is that it really is not about any particular experience of relatedness between giver and recipient.  Rather, attention is focused on the things that need to be given.

I confess that was the focus of my own thinking about generosity for much of my life.  Focusing on what needed to be given fit easily with my problem-solver training as a lawyer.   But when I became active in social justice work in my home church in Oakland, something happened to change my outlook.

I led a group that founded a social justice program called “gotCOM.”  This was when the “digital divide” was first becoming a hot issue.  GotCOM’s mission was to provide low-income families in West Oakland with computers, training, and Internet access.  We were working with hand-me-down computers and donated software. I had reduced my law practice work quite a bit by then and was spending most of my time as a volunteer at the church—devoted largely to gotCOM.  Most of the rest of the group were doing what volunteers usually have to do—wedging in time on this justice program wherever they could, alongside holding down full-time jobs.

GotCOM ran into big technical headaches—compatibility problems, equipment needing some rehabilitation, and lots of time spent testing and troubleshooting.   I got very concerned about whether we could achieve the ambitious goals I had set.  I had long talks about these concerns with a close friend in the church who was an experienced professional in anti-racism work.  She said that the computers and Internet access and training were fine things to do, but the crucial piece was whether the volunteers and the families experienced a shift in relatedness.  This, she said, was what we and the families had to give each other:  an experience of our essential sameness rather than our circumstantial differences.

This advice didn’t make me happy.  A problem-solver doesn’t want to hear that problem solving—focusing on the logistics of what needed to be given—may not be a sufficient answer.   But as gotCOM moved forward, I started to get my friend’s point.  I had been thinking of the digital divide as a problem of inequality, and the solution was to even up that inequality—by transferring things from a group of haves to a group of have-nots.  The deeper truth, though, was that merely to even up the inequalities in this way would never solve anything without a basic shift in relatedness—just as my friend had said.  Until we can relate on the basis of our essential sameness, and then translate that way of relating into the social structures in which we live, new inequalities will continue to arise as fast as we even up the old ones.

My friend’s advice made me think about my volunteer teammates differently too.  What about that relatedness?  In my zeal to solve the digital divide problems of West Oakland, was I making our project so ambitious that their experience of it would mostly be one of stress and frustration?  As I poured my semi-retired self into this effort to promote generosity to the poor, did I lose track of my generosity to my friends, who were trying to keep up the pace I was setting while dealing with their full-time jobs?

GotCOM didn’t make the digital divide vanish—not even in West Oakland, although we did a lot of useful work.  But the important thing it did do was change the way the participants related to each other.  It moved us closer to seeing each other as we really are, appreciating our essential sameness.  At the end of the project, I felt like I was a different person.

There is one more important consequence of generosity as charity.  It entitles the giver to judge who is worthy of generosity and who is not.  To get beyond mere charity, this sense of entitlement to be judgmental has to be surrendered.  And that’s what each of the generous actors did in this morning’s stories.  There was nothing saintly about these people.  What moved them to do what they did? In reflecting on generosity, I got curious about where this word came from—being a “word person” and all.  It shares ancestry with the word “kin.”  Someone we consider “kin” is “our kind.”  The language is showing us a connection between kindness and recognizing someone as our kind. 

This word history upends the conventional definition of generosity as charity, which is based on differences between people.  The charitable actor has leftovers and is sharing them with people who don’t have enough.  But true generosity is based on recognition of the sameness of people, on kinship.

We easily see this sameness, of course, in the familiar people around us.  And it is no small thing to be kind even to our own kind.  But this may reflect simply the complex mutual support network we have with those we already recognize as our own kind.

When we reach out to a stranger or an enemy, on the other hand, the meaning of our actions is pretty clear:  an expression of the love in our hearts.  In recognizing someone as our kind or kin, we see ourselves in that other person.  In this way, we see that person for the truth he really is—for his essential humanity.  This is the foundation for love of another human being.  Love expressed in action is the real meaning of generosity.  And to express love in action toward a stranger or enemy, to treat that person as kin, I say is radical generosity.  Love behind enemy lines.

I think the generous actors in this morning’s stories saw themselves in the strangers they encountered—saw the strangers as their own kind.  As conveyed in Jesus’ parable, the stranger or enemy is our spiritual rescuer, and we are his, because only such an encounter can fulfill the deep wish of every human heart to affirm that all are one kind. If you go through life without expressing the radical generosity that is waiting in your heart, if you harden your heart to the stranger or enemy, you will miss a spiritual gift of immense value.

This dissolves the dilemma of Jesus’ listeners, vexing over which character in the parable to identify with.  Jesus didn’t want his audience to pick sides, to identify with one character or the other.  His message was that the two who looked like enemies or strangers actually were neighbors, were essentially the same.

When Jesus answered the question, “who is my neighbor,” he challenged his audience to broaden the kind of people to whom they showed generosity and from whom they accepted generosity.  The parable continues to deliver this challenge today.  If we can’t answer it, all the mass movements for peace and justice won’t make any lasting difference.

We can broaden what we call “our kind” further than we think.  We can include the one who is a stranger.  We can include the one who has been labeled an enemy.  Even after thousands of years of paying so dearly for our tribal view of generosity, it is not too late to do this.  It is not too late to embrace the answer to this challenge, given on a hillside in ancient Judea, by a man who loved deeply and was willing to act radically.  Amen. 

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Copyright 2004, Preston Moore.  All rights reserved.