1. The first reading is from the children's section of the Summer 2009 issue of our denomination's magazine, the UU World:
"The Man Who Helped" (Luke 10:25-27)
Jesus said people should love their neighbor as much as they love themselves. One man, a lawyer, asked him, "Who is my neighbor?" To answer the question Jesus told this story.
One day there was a man who went on a trip and robbers beat him up and left him on the road. Later, the village "holy man" came by and saw the man and he crossed to the other side of the road without helping. Later still, the holy man's helper passed by the man and he, too, kept walking. Then a person from Samaria came along. Now, people in Jesus's neighborhood hated the people from Samaria and treated them badly. But the Samaritan put the poor man on his donkey and took him to an inn. He asked the innkeeper to take care of the man and said he would pay the innkeeper on the way back from his trip.
Then Jesus asked the lawyer, "Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?" The lawyer answered, "The one who helped him." Jesus said, "Then go and do the same yourself."
Have you ever been helped by someone who has been mean to you? Did it surprise you? Would you help someone in trouble who has been mean to you?
2. The second reading is from the Gospel According to Matthew, Chapter 4, verses 13 and 14:
"You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trodden underfoot by men. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Nor do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven."
3. The third reading is from St. Paul's letter to the Galatians, Chapter 3, verses 23 to 29:
Now before faith came, we were confined under the law, kept under restraint until faith should be revealed. So that the law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. 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. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise.
4. The fourth reading is from the Gospel According to Mark, Chapter 7, verses 24 to 30:
...And he entered a house, and would not have any one know it, yet he could not be hid. But immediately a woman, whose little daughter was possessed by an unclean spirit, heard of him, and came and fell down at his feet. Now the woman was a Greek, a Syrophoenician by birth. And she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. And he said to her, "Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs." But she answered him, "Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." And he said to her, "For this saying you may go your way; the demon has left your daughter." And she went home, and found the child lying in bed, and the demon gone.
5. The fifth reading is from The Evolution of God, by Robert Wright:
In the book of Mark, the word "love" appears in only one passage. Jesus, asked by a scribe which biblical commandment is foremost, cites two: "The first is..., 'you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength' The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'" When the scribe agrees and deems these commandments "more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices," Jesus says, "You are not far from the kingdom of heaven."
This is definitely a message of love. But love of what breadth? We've already seen that in the verse Jesus quotes -- the Hebrew Bible's injunction to love your neighbor -- the meaning of "neighbor" was probably confined to other Israelites. In other words: neighbor meant neighbor. There is no obvious reason to believe that this part of the earliest gospel, the only part of Mark where the word "love" shows up at all, was meant more expansively.
In fact, there is reason to believe otherwise. Two gospels carry the story of a woman who asks Jesus to exorcise a demon from her daughter. Unfortunately for her, she isn't from Israel. (She is "Canaanite" in one gospel, "Syrophoenician" in another.) Jesus takes this into account and replies, with one of his less flattering allegories, "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." Pathetically, the woman answers, "Yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table," after which Jesus relents and tosses her some crumbs by tossing out the demons.
Defenders of Jesus might say he was just piquantly driving home the fact that Gentiles can find salvation through faith. Indeed, that is the way the story plays out in Matthew, as Jesus exclaims "Great is your faith!" But in Mark, the earlier telling of the story, there's no mention of faith. What wins Jesus' favor, it seems, is the woman's acknowledging her inferior status by embracing her end of the master-dog metaphor; with the woman bowed before him Jesus answers only, "For saying that, you may go -- the demon has left your daughter."
6. The closing words are from an article in The New Yorker of August 3, 2009, by Joan Acocella, on the history of stories about Judas Iscariot. She concludes:
All this, I believe, is a reaction to the rise of fundamentalism--the idea, Christian and otherwise, that every word of a religion's founding document should be taken literally. This is a childish notion, and so is the belief that we can combat it by correcting our holy books. Those books, to begin with, are so old that we barely understand what their authors meant. Furthermore, because of their multiple authorship, they are always internally inconsistent. Finally, even the fundamentalists don't really take them literally. People interpret, and cheat. The answer is not to fix the Bible but to fix ourselves.
Last modified 18 August 2009