The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
October 26, 2008

Proper 25-A
Exodus 22:21-27
Psalm 90
1 Thessalonians 2: 1-8
Matthew 22:34-46

This past week Barack Obama suspended his personal campaigning for two days so he could visit his aging and ailing grandmother. The reason? Doctors told him that if he waited until after the election to visit her, it might be too late. A week ago Friday one of the founders of the Chapel of Our Saviour, Jim Day, died. This past Friday night another friend and long-time pillar of this parish, Helen Hughes, also died. It doesn’t take a natural disaster or an accident to remind us of a basic fact of life, and of truth. An aging parent or grandparent, an illness, a death in the family reminds us 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 sang about last week: “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 child of earth!”

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.

**********

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.

**********

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 ask Jesus this morning: “Teacher,” they asked, “which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” 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 were trying 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.” Or, as Jesus summed it earlier up in his sermon on the mount, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

If you want eternal life, says Jesus, this is the way to inherit it: Love God, and love your neighbor. Do this and you will live.

And in Luke’s account of this episode, this is the point at which the expert in the Law, wanting to justify himself, puts Jesus to the test. “And who is my neighbor?” he asks, fishing for an easy, legal definition. But instead of giving him a definition, Jesus tells 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 by, 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 pay 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, in the Bible, is not a kind of warm glow; it’s not simply a feeling of good will, a kind of easy “all-you-need-is-love” sentiment that is so often celebrated in the songs of contemporary culture. Love, in the Bible, is a decision. It is a hard choice the mind makes, with the support of the heart and the soul, a choice to act, to act for the good of another. Love lies in going and doing likewise.

“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 are rooted in relationship, Borg reminds us, rooted in our loving response to God and in our loving response to the others God sends into our lives.

In Jesus’ story there is the man walking along the road, walking part of the story of his own life when, suddenly, someone does enter his life, enters violently and only for a moment, enters only to abuse 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 a person vested with flesh and blood?

Someone vested in flesh and blood comes by – a priest, one whose business it is to share the love of God. But the priest is fearful. Convention counsels caution. If the man by the side of the road is dead, convention cautions, touching him would complicate his priestly life. According to the Law, a priest who touches a corpse becomes unclean and cannot offer the sacrifices in the Temple until he is ritually cleansed. No, the priest decides, he has obligations. He can’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 decoys to entice someone to stop so they could jump him easily. “Safety First,” he reasons. “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 and 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.”

Some of you will remember the neighbors Judy met on I-25 several years ago on her way to Cuchara. It was about six o’clock and moving quickly toward a cold October night. She ran over something that ruined a tire just north of Pueblo, and she had pulled off the road. An Hispanic couple stopped to help. The man put on her spare tire for her, then the couple followed her into Pueblo, where they found a tire store that was just closing for the day. The owner of the store said, ”No problem, I’ve got time to put on another tire.” Then, when Judy couldn’t find her credit card, the man who had changed her tire also bought her tire for her. Love, in the Bible, is a decision, a choice the mind and heart make to act for the good of another.

In his book Alive and Well in Pakistan, our son Ethan shares a similar experience. Ethan was going from Karachi back to the north of Pakistan, but in Karachi he somehow got on the wrong train. When a young Pakistani on the train realized that Ethan was lost and headed toward a destination different from the one he intended, he got off his own train with Ethan at Hyderabad, ”found a railway official, asked when and on what platform [Ethan’s] train would arrive, explained [to Ethan] what [he] needed to do, and when Ethan thanked him profusely, the man put his hand over his heart and said simply: ‘It is my duty. You are our guest.’”

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

“What do I have to do to inherit eternal life?” the expert in religion asks 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 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, of course – 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’d have to become involved. We’d certainly be delayed and inconvenienced, as the Samaritan was delayed and inconvenienced, as the Hispanic couple and that young Pakistani were delayed and inconvenienced. Risking love is all so awkward. Sometimes it’s dangerous!

So is not risking love dangerous, as the old lawyer in Camus’ novel The Fall discovered. At the beginning of the story we meet the lawyer late in his life. He is in a bar in Amsterdam, talking to himself about his life as he drinks the rest of his life away. He had been a great “success” in worldly terms, he muses. He had done many good things. He had earned a lot of money and the respect of his peers. He had the world at his fingertips, except..., except that he cannot forget that particular day when he was young. He had been walking by the river in Paris when 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 of his life over a late-night Scotch, 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.’”

At every moment during the three score and ten years of mortal life a door opens, a door closes. An opportunity arises, an opportunity vanishes, the wise are aware. A neighbor, a spouse, a child, a friend, an opportunity for love. But O! the complications, and the risk! If you go there, there may be regret. There may be loss and pain. Certainly, for the man on the road to Pueblo and for the Pakistani on the train with Ethan there was both cost and inconvenience. But there also may be life. There may even be joy.

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 this somber thought move the psalmist 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 a prayer addressed to God because, the psalmists knows, it is ultimately up to God to gather all the moments and actions of our lives and make them mean what we can never make them mean by ourselves. 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, at times like today the wise step back and take stock.

“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. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. 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 savor and risk and delight in the gift God gives us, the gift of himself and of each other.”

Teacher, what must I do to inherit life? Encourage someone today, because tomorrow you may not be able to. Love someone today. Do this, says Jesus, and you will live. But God alone knows if, tomorrow, a door will open or a door will close.

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