TWENTY-THIRD SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

The Rev. Dayle Casey 

The Chapel of Our Saviour

Colorado Springs, Colorado

October 27, 2002 

Exodus 22:21-27

Psalm 90:1-12

1 Thessalonians 2:1-8

Matthew 22:34

       Two are loading their car at a Home Depot, a shot, and one is taken and one is left.  But it doesn’t take a sniper attack in Virginia or a deadly hostage crisis in Moscow to remind us of a basic fact of life, and of truth.  An aging parent, an accident or an illness, a death in the family will do as well.  The fact is that life is short, a precious gift, not a right.  And that’s the truth.

            It is a truth we will sing about this morning:  “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all our years away; they fly, forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.”

            Here’s the way the psalmist sang it centuries ago:

Lord, you have been our refuge

from one generation to another.

Before the mountains were brought forth,

or ever you formed the earth and the world,

from age to age you are God.

You turn us back to the dust and say,

“Turn back, O Children of men!”

For a thousand years in your sight

are but as yesterday when it is past,

or as a watch in the night.

You sweep us away like a dream;

we fade away suddenly like the grass.

In the morning it is green and flourishes;

in the evening it fades and withers.

For we consume away in your displeasure;

we are afraid because of your wrathful indignation.

Our iniquities you have set before you,

and our secret sins in the light of your countenance.

All our days pass away under your wrath,

our years come to an end like a sigh.

The years of our life are three score and ten,

or by reason of strength even four score;

yet the sum of them is but labor and sorrow;

they are soon gone, and we fly away.

Who considers the power of your wrath?

who rightly fears your indignation?

So teach us to number our days

that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.

            How can we apply our hearts to wisdom?  That’s the question the pharisees asked Jesus.  “Teacher,” they asked, “which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”  In other words, what is it that we must do to apply our hearts to wisdom, so that we might live our three score years and ten as God creates us to live them?   The pharisees wanted to trap Jesus, Matthew tells us, but Jesus gives them wisdom straight from the Scriptures:  “’Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’  This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it:  ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

            In fact, says Jesus to an expert in the Law in a similar conversation in the Gospel of Luke, if you want to inherit eternal life, this is the way it is inherited:  Love God, and love your neighbor.  Do this and you will live.

            And that’s when the expert in the Law, wanting to justify himself, tests Jesus, hoping for an easy, legal answer.  “And who is my neighbor?” he asks.  But Jesus answers by telling his famous story about the man who was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he fell into the hands of robbers.  The robbers stripped him of his clothes, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. 

            Now a priest happened to be going down the same road, said Jesus, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side.  So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw the man, passed by on the other side.  But a Samaritan, as he was  traveling, came to where the man was, and when he saw him he took pity on him.  He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine.  Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn, and took care of him.  The next day, he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper.  “Look after him,” he said, “and when I return I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.”

            “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” asked Jesus.  The expert in the Law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”  And Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

            This is everything that God requires for real life:  to love God and to love your neighbor.  Wisdom lies in doing it.

            “Love God with all your heart and soul and mind; this is the first and great relationship in life” is how Marcus Borg understands it.  “And the second relationship is like the first; love your neighbor as yourself.”  Love of God and love of neighbor, Borg reminds us, are rooted in relationship, in our loving response to God and to the others God sends into our lives. 

            John Fowles’ novel Daniel Martin is about Daniel and Jane.  Both are in their mid-forties; one is divorced, the other widowed.  Daniel and Jane had known each other twenty-five years earlier.  They had once been close, had even considered marriage, but they had married different people and their lives had taken them on different paths and to different parts of the world. 

            The story is about Daniel and Jane’s relationship, about their falling in love in middle age, about their wanting to enter into each other’s lives again.  But it is hard, because they are timid and afraid, afraid of the emotional risk, and concerned about social conventions and cultural differences.

            Daniel and Jane wonder why they didn’t get to know each other twenty-five years earlier, why they weren’t closer then.   They wonder why they didn’t make an earlier commitment to marriage.  And they wonder if they will have the will and courage to love each other now, to come to know each other now, now that they have a new opportunity.  It isn’t certain that they will, because they carry deep conventions and habits, and emotional fears that warn them to be careful.  They ache for love, but because of their fears, their habits, their conventions, they are timid about acting for love.  Better safe than sorry.

             Is not Jesus’ story similar?  There is the man walking along the road, walking part of the story of his own life.  Suddenly, someone does enter his life, but only for a moment, and violently, and only to use him.   And then the intruder vanishes, leaving the man unconscious and bleeding by the side of the road.  Half dead, he is desperately in need of love, in need of the love of God, certainly, but how can God love him except through the love of someone with skin on?

            Someone with skin on comes by  --  a priest, one whose business is to share the love of God.  But the priest is fearful.  Priestly rules, written in the Torah, would complicate his priestly life if the man were dead.  The priest would not be able to lead the prayers in the Temple if he became unclean by touching a dead man.  He had obligations.  He couldn’t risk it.  So he passes by on the other side.

            The Levite, too, comes upon the man in need.  But he also passes the man by.  Perhaps he feared a trick.  Maybe the man was only feigning injury.  The road they were on was notorious.  Gangs of hoodlums were known to deploy one of their own as a decoy to entice someone to stop so they could jump him easily.  “Safety First,” after all.  Better safe than sorry.

            A third man comes along.  Will he stop to love the man left for dead by the side of the road?  Will he enter his story to give him life?  It doesn’t look promising, because this third man is not even a fellow Jew; he has darker skin and the accent of a foreigner.

            But the stranger stops.  He picks the bleeding man up and puts him in his car and drives him to the hospital.  He tells the nurse in the emergency room, “I don’t know who this man is.  I don’t know if he even has insurance.  But here’s some money toward his bills.  Take care of him, and I’ll come back tomorrow to take care of any extra expense.”

            It’s an old, old story, this story about the risk of entering the life and story of another human being, this story about love, about how it’s risky and complicates your life and commits you to another.

            “What do I have to do to inherit eternal life?” the expert in religion had asked Jesus.  And Jesus asks him what his religion teaches.  And the expert in religion knows the answer:  love God, and love your neighbor.  And Jesus tells him, “Do this, and you will live.”

            “Do love, and you will live.”  Or, as Frederick Buechner puts it:  “We think of eternal life, when we think of it at all, as what happens to us after we die; we would do better to think of it as what happens to us when we begin to live.”

            What are we to do with the short three score years and ten God gives us?   What do we make of our finitude, of the passing of our days?  What gives them meaning and life?

            “It happens so abruptly,” says William Willimon.  “You go to bed in a familiar place, certain of who you are, and you wake up a stranger on the far side of the bridge of growing old.  Not that you are old  --  not yet!  It’s just that you are no longer young.” 

            There is still time.  Doors are still open.  But think of the risks!  If you take the plunge and enter someone else’s complicated story, your life is complicated.  Who knows what twist or turn it might take?  Who knows what might happen if we risk a word or act of love?   We might be rebuffed.  We might look like a fool.  We might get hurt.  We’d have to become involved.  Risking love is all so awkward, so dangerous!

            So is not  risking love, as the old lawyer in Camus’ story in The Fall discovered.  Late in his life, the lawyer ends up in a bar, talking to himself about his life as he drinks his life away.  If he had been anything, he muses, he had been a great “success” in worldly terms.  He had done many good things and was well respected by his peers.  He had the world at his fingertips, except...except that he remembers that one day when he was young.  He had been walking by the river in Paris and had heard a cry for help.  A woman had fallen into the icy water and was drowning.  And the young lawyer had turned and walked away.

              And so, as he finishes his personal assessment in the bar that night late in his life, he says to himself:  Self, “please tell me what happened to you on the River Seine that night, and how you managed never to risk your life.  You yourself utter the words that for years have never ceased echoing through my nights and that I shall at last say through your mouth, ‘O young woman, throw yourself into the water again so that I may a second time have the chance of saving both of us.’”

            A door opens, a door closes.  In every beginning there is an ending, the wise are aware.  An opportunity arises, an opportunity vanishes.  A neighbor, a spouse, a child, a friend, an opportunity for love.  But O! the complications, and the risk; there may be joy, but there may be regret; there may be gain, but there may be loss

            What is the meaning of our three score years and ten?  Only God knows, concludes the psalmist.  Only God knows the ultimate significance of what we do and say here.  So, in the end these somber thoughts move him to prayer:  ‘May the favor of the Lord be upon us.  Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts to wisdom....  Prosper the work of our hands, O Lord; prosper our handiwork.’

            Psalm Ninety “ends with words addressed to God because, the psalmists knows, it is ultimately up to God to gather all of our efforts and moments and make them mean what we ourselves can never, by ourselves, mean.  Most of us, most of the time, don’t think much about it.  But at times like today, when the question of life, eternal life, is on the table, the wise step back, take stock, before stepping up and stepping out.

            “Love God with all your heart and soul and mind; this is the first and great relationship of life.   And the second relationship is like it; love your neighbor as yourself.  All the Law and the Prophets hangs on these two relationships.” 

            “O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come; Teach us to number our days,” prays the psalmist, “that we might apply our hearts to wisdom and to truth, that we might apply our hearts to the truth that life is beautiful, even more beautiful for its brevity, for its limits.  Teach us to live with the limits, rather than deny them or lament them, and to put our trust in You.”

            “Our shelter from the stormy blast, and our eternal home; Be thou our guide while life shall last and teach us to number our days, that we might apply our hearts to wisdom and to love, that we may go savor, and risk, and delight in the gift God gives us, the gift of each other and himself.”

            Teacher, what must I do to inherit life?  Encourage someone today, because you may not be able to tomorrow.  Love someone now, for tomorrow may never be.  Do this, says Jesus, and you will live.

            In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.