BLINDED BY RELIGION
Luke 10:25-37

A sermon given by the Rev. G. Russell Miller
July 11, 2004 / Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

It is certainly a pleasure to preach here this morning. I must confess that I find myself a bit awed by the task. First, the parable of the Good Samaritan is perhaps the most familiar passage in the Bible and you have heard at least a zillion sermons on it. Second, I am mindful of the old preachers' maxim of never inviting a better preacher into your pulpit. So, I beg your indulgence.

One aspect of the parable has always bothered me. It comes in verses 31 and 32: "Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side." Here we have religious professionals, people who should have shown compassion, declining the opportunity to help. Here they see a stranger. He is naked and lying dead or unconscious on the side of the road. Instead of stopping to help, they continue on their way. They pass by on the other side.

Why did Jesus pick a priest and a Levite for his story? Is Jesus using these men to show that priests and Levites are bad people? I doubt it. That would make the parable too easy. Doubtless there was some dislike of the priestly class and the Levites, members of the tribe of Levi and, thus, set apart for service in the Temple. Priests and Levites had some nice perks and, by all accounts, lived off the fat of the land. Then too, they were charged with trying to maintain peace and order for the Romans. One had to wonder at the extent of the collaboration. Yes, there was some popular resentment, but that is not why Jesus chose a priest and a Levite. If he were looking for an unpopular figure, he would likely have chosen his favorite heavy - the rich man.

Here, the priest and the Levite are not to be seen as bad. This is not about good and bad. The priest and the Levite are to be seen as good men, dedicated and devout. They are coming from their homes in Jericho, then a suburb of Jerusalem, headed for work. They both worked in the Temple. They were good family men, earning a decent living and supporting their families in a comfortable lifestyle. Okay, maybe they occasionally had a bit too much to drink on the weekends and spent more time in the Jacuzzi than coaching their kids' Little League team. But, on the whole, they were decent and honorable men.

These were not bad men. Instead, we are dealing with a clash of values. Something else is at play. Let me explain, for we are dealing with something that is largely unfamiliar to our society: Priests and Levites had to maintain ritual purity. Ritual purity has no analog in the Christian faith, and so we have lost sight of it. Ritual purity involved strict adherence to the Levitical laws, the so-called purity laws. Even my seminary skipped over those laws, saying only that "they're there - look 'em up if you want." But if the priest and the Levite strayed from the law, they would become ritually impure, they would be contaminated. And if contaminated, they would be barred from the Temple precincts. They could not do their job until they had purged their contamination.

One thing that would blow ritual purity was contact with a dead body. Much as we may criticize their action or inaction as callous, what they did was proper; they doubtless supposed the man dead and saw no reason to contaminate themselves. After all, they were on their way to work and if they contaminated themselves by touching a dead body, they could not serve in the Temple - they could not support their family, and they could not worship God. The period to purge their contamination was seven days. In short, their religion blinded them the needs of this stranger.

But religion can have that effect. Religion is a lens that focuses the way we see the world, some things are sharply focused, others, just a blur at best. Religion can enhance our vision in some areas but blind us in others. Much as we would like to believe that our own views are unbiased and purely reasonable, we, like everyone else, have our biases. Our faith goes a long way to forming those biases, toward shaping how we see the world. We see what our belief system teaches us to see; the rest remains a dim haze.

Certainly we can see the blindness that ideology and religion can engender. Consider the hatred of the west that fills the fundamentalist theology of the militant Moslems that comprise Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda must be seen not simply as a terrorist group, but also as a religious body. It is a branch of Islam, albeit a branch that lies far from the mainstream and often opposed to it. In Israel, too, we can see the religiously engendered blindness in militant Judaism and militant Islam embodied in the continuing warfare between Jewish settlers and the Palestinians who, prior to 1948, owned the land. The religious views, particularly in fundamentalist groups, have become so ingrained, so extreme, that they become perversions of the faith tradition of which they are a part. Whereas the Islamic and Jewish fundamentalists come from traditions that teach love and peace, the extremist branches have come to promote hatred and warfare. The fundamentalist ingraining says not only that I am right and everybody else is wrong, but it also supports a corollary: Everybody else must believe as I do. The toleration that marks the mainstream of the faith has been lost in the blindness engendered by the certitude of doing God's will, and it is in that certitude that danger lies.

Lest we join the Pharisee and pray in the Temple, thanking God that we are not like other people, let us also cast our eyes on our own tradition. After all, Christianity baptized much of northern Europe at the point of the sword and brought you the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition. These activities were far from benign and did little to encourage others to trust Christians. But all that is in the past - we don't do that any more. We have forsworn that type of conduct.

Or have we? Let me direct your attention to our President's speech in West Virginia last Sunday. He is quoted in the Globe as saying:

"On this Fourth of July, we confirm our love of freedom. But we also understand that freedom is not America's gift to the world; freedom is Almighty God's gift to each man and woman in this world."

"Freedom is not America's gift to the world; freedom is Almighty God's gift."

In other words, by seeking to impose freedom on Iraq, we are doing God's work. Our invasion of Iraq is a mission that comes from God. We are doing God's will in imposing freedom on Iraq. Like the Blues Brothers, we are "on a mission from God."

I always find the President's logic interesting. We are not in Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction, for there are none and were none at the time of our invasion. We were not threatened by ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq that posed an imminent threat to the security of the United States, for there were no ties between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. That rationale has been so debunked that only the Vice President believes it to be true. The new justification for the war is simple: We are in Iraq because we are doing Almighty God's work.

Well, if that is Almighty God's will, and if God really is almighty, why does God need America's military to effect God's purposes? After all, an almighty God would need only to speak the word and it would be accomplished in an instant. Is there such a dearth of angels that God must conscript the United States Military? And if Almighty God needs the U.S. military, then Iraq is the least of our problems.

Let me suggest that the reason we find ourselves in Iraq is because of a religious vision shared by the President and those around him, a vision that has blinded them to the reality of the situation and leads them to pursue ideological goals in the mistaken belief that they are true. And being blinded by their own sense of infallibility, what they believe is right, no matter who says they're wrong, regardless of whether they're news reporters, or the soldiers on the ground, or the people of the United States. Only the President and his cronies, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Ashcroft, and the rest of the group, have it right and everybody else is wrong. (Is this perhaps because they refuse to read newspapers or watch newscasts?). When anyone is so assured of the rightness of their position, my distrust is immediate.

Several weeks ago, Al Gore, our former vice-president, spoke of this very blindness, a blindness caused by religious zeal, in a speech he gave to the American Constitutional Society at Georgetown University. He said:

"When you boil it all down to precisely what went wrong with the Bush Iraq policy, it is actually fairly simple: He adopted an ideologically driven view of Iraq that was tragically at odds with reality. Everything that has gone wrong is in one way or another the result of a spectacular and violent clash between the bundle of misconceptions that he gullibly consumed and the all-too-painful reality that our troops and contractors and diplomats and taxpayers have encountered.

Here again, ideology, religious ideology has led to a blindness that has consequences clearly contrary to the faith tradition on which it purports to be based. Christianity, and the President holds himself out as a Christian, is here used to justify a result that is squarely contrary to the very premises of the Christian faith. When such a contradiction results, something must be wrong.

But lest we see ourselves as the only ones with clear vision, let us turn a critical eye on ourselves. Do we dare to suppose that we, alone of all the people of the world, are without blindness. Have we no blind spots? Let me suggest that is sheer arrogance to think we have no blind spots; our arrogance, itself, would blind us. When we seek out our blind spots, we gain an opportunity for spiritual growth. If we refuse to seek them, we will be lost in eternal darkness.

While it is easy to see the religiously cultivated blind spots of others, it is much harder to see the blind spots in ourselves. As familiarity precludes the fish from sensing the water around him, so also does familiarity prevent us from seeing our blind spots. Jesus saw this dynamic at play: He said, in his typical hyperbole: "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?" (Luke 6:41)

But what is the log in our eye, the reason our faith makes us blind? A complete answer would make this sermon unbearably long - perhaps it already is. It might even take us beyond lunchtime, so let me just look at one example.

Our faith has come to be an individual thing, something that exists between me and God. In doing so, we have de-emphasized the communal dimension of our faith and rendered it all but impotent. We forget that we are not simply in a one-on-one relationship with God. The truth is that, yes, there is a one on one relationship with God, but we are also parts of a much larger community. There are others with whom we share beliefs, others who join us in making up the body of Christ. This new "me and Jesus" emphasis has weakened our faith tradition, for our individualism posits that we are alone in a hostile world. No wonder we seem more willing to "suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" than to "take arms against a sea of troubles."

Our conservative brothers and sisters have not lost sight of the communal dimension of faith, and in the last thirty years have joined together to become a major force within our society. While they find strength in numbers, our belief system leaves us impotent, unable to effect change within our nation and within our world. Let me suggest that when we think that way we become like the Priest and the Levite, our faith has blinded us to reality.

The reality, however unrecognized it may be, is that corporately, not individually, we are the Body of Christ; we are not alone, but rather individual members of a much larger body. More than a hundred and fifty years ago our spiritual ancestors sat in the pews of this church and said that slavery was an anathema in a free society. These Abolitionists banded together with other like-minded Christians and, lo and behold: the Emancipation Proclamation. The institution of slavery was over. But that was the easy part. The hard part, dealing with the "badges and incidents" of slavery, was only just beginning. The remnants of slavery persist today in the de-facto segregation and inequality we see around us.

I can't say much about Providence, since I recently came here from New York, but if Providence is anything like New York, then the school system is almost as segregated as any southern school before Brown v. Board of Education. In New York; the wealthy whites send their children to private schools, where they receive fine educations. African-Americans, still beset by lower average wages, cannot afford private school tuitions; their children, as well as the children of Hispanics, poor whites and other inhabitants of New York must rely on the public schools, their main hope for advancement. Yet the City is trying to cut the school budget, starving the very schools that are inadequate as it is and increase the inequality. But where is the outrage at this situation? We are far too complacent in our tolerance of inequality. Is it that we have been blinded to the issue, or have we blinded ourselves to the fact that we can do something about it?

Perhaps the multiplicity of societal wrongs has anesthetized us. "After all," we say, " there are so many issues. What can I, li'l old me, do?" We don't see that is more than just "li'l old me" who is called to deal with the issues. We forget that we are a community. We forget that we are the body of Christ.

Let me suggest that we are called not to be like the priest and the Levite. We are called to shed our religiously cultivated blindness and see. We are called to be truly a neighbor to all in need. We are called, corporately and individually, to aid the man lying beside the road to Jericho. We are called to be Good Samaritans. We are called to show compassion by taking action.

Amen