Deuteronomy 30:9-14

The LORD your God will make you abundantly prosperous in all your undertakings, in the fruit of your body, in the fruit of your livestock, and in the fruit of your soil. For the LORD will again take delight in prospering you, just as he delighted in prospering your ancestors, when you obey the LORD your God by observing his commandments and decrees that are written in this book of the law, because you turn to the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.

Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, “Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?” Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, “Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?” No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.

Luke 10:25-37

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?”

He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. 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.

But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’

Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

Sermon Text

    “Who is my neighbor?” just might be the most loaded question in scripture. We often think about the other questions that Jesus was asked were more inflammatory: “Are you a king? Are you the son of God? Are you the Messiah, or should we wait for another?” All of them direct and piercing questions, but none of them were as meant to snare someone as much as, “Who is my neighbor.” The man in the story was asking it to justify himself, and those listening were ready to do the same. 

    If Jesus said, “The person who lived in your town.” Then everyone could let out a sigh of relief, “I volunteer at the soup kitchen, I have followed the commandment.” If Jesus said, “Those who agree with you politically.” Then the Centurions watching in the back could relax, “The Jew I kicked into a ditch didn’t count, I’m still a God-fearer.” And, heaven forbid if Jesus had said, “Your neighbor is the person you like and get along with.” Because then we could all say, “Surely, I will inherit eternal life.” Afterall, as Jesus says elsewhere, “If you do good to those who do good to you, what benefit is that to you? Even sinners do that!”

    Instead Jesus puts something before us that we might look at and say, “Oh that’s too much.” Jesus gives us the charge to, “Love our neighbor as ourselves,” but is sure to define neighbor as God intends neighbor to be known. Jesus takes the command, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and transforms our understanding of it. The question is not, “What kind of person should I love,” The question becomes, “What kind of person am I?” The man who was trying to justify himself in talking to Jesus was hoping to be told – help this kind of person, and instead he was told what kind of person he should be.

    The story is backwards from what people would expect. People who heard the story would have insisted that Jesus should have made the man who was beat up the main character and had him find each of the other characters and help them. The version they would have expected would go something like this, “ A man was walking along the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. Along the way he saw a priest in trouble, and he helped him. Then he saw a Levite in trouble, and he helped him. Finally, he saw a Samaritan in trouble, but he did not help him.” The lesson of this parable, and I would say of a great deal of preaching, is that the people you have helped up to this point are your neighbors and no one else. The Lawyer acted the same way we do today, he was looking for a message that would condone his behavior and condemn everyone elses.

    Jesus goes beyond what the man asked, which is essentially, “Who am I allowed to ignore?” and gives the real lesson. We should not go through life asking, “Who do I have to love?” Instead the question is, “Am I loving?” The man asked Jesus “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus’ response at the end of this passage tells him, “You are a neighbor to anyone you show mercy to.” In other words, the only way to love your neighbor as yourself, is to be a neighbor to all the needy.

    In the parable it is not power or lineage that determine a persons status as neighbor. Levites were attendants to the temple, descendants of Jacob like any good Jew would be. Priests spoke on behalf of God, at least in theory. Yet, these people did not show mercy to the injured man. These people who were theoretically the most shining example of what it was to be a faithful Jew, they lost their participation in God’s kingdom by refusing to show mercy. The Samaritan enters in as more than an example of unlikely help, he is an example of God’s grace working in us.

    The Samaritans were not just foreign people to the Jews. They were the descendants of survivors from the Assyrian massacre of Israel long ago. They were part Persian, part Israelite. They practiced different religious traditions than the Jews, they still do today. Jews at the time did not like them because of these differences. Even though they both worship the same God, they could not stomach having someone worship God differently. It reminds me of when I went to my first Catholic mass and someone I knew looked at me and said, “I just don’t know why you would experiment with other religions.” To me, it looked like a cross at the front of the church and the ministers were still reading the scripture, but to this person the other differences were unacceptable.

    Jesus tells this story in a way that sets people up and constantly makes them question their expectations. We have to imagine him tell this story like any good storyteller, he is trying to get the audience interested. We can hear in his words the build up and the fall. “Now by chance a priest was going down that road…” Oh good, our hero! “and then he saw him by the side of the road and…” This is where he helps him! “he passed on the other side.” The crowds would be disappointed – that isn’t the right ending.

    Jesus repeats the disappointment with the Levite. Then comes the Samaritan. The crowd would have expected at this point that everyone in the story was going to abandon the man, that Jesus was going to talk about how all people failed to keep the law. However, the Samaritan went above and beyond what was expected. Carrying the man from the road to a hostel, paying to take care of him, and opening a tab for anything that might the man needed. This man may have objected to the help, to having a Samaritan do all this for him, but regardless of whether or not he got credit for his good work, the Samaritan in the parable carried it out. The crowd would be confused, they might even be angry. “How can he say these people get it more than we do.”

    Jesus wanted to speak to two tendencies which we in the church face today. The first is that we like to be selective in who we help. We take the command to love our neighbor and the command to share things in common and we relativize them. We can do that, but not for such and such a person or only in such a such a scenario. We have no commitment to doing the work of God at all times to all people. Here though, Jesus has insisted that we are not only to work for good always and with all people, but that we cannot limit who God can work through. When we think the only people who can do right are the ones we agree with, who look and act like us, then we have forgotten what God has told us before. 

    Our text from Deuteronomy touches on the second excuse we in the church cling to. Namely, that it is impossible to follow God’s command. We look at the people we know and the world we live in and say, “It would be great if we could follow that commandment, but that’s too hard!” This is when we fall into empty truisms, things that while not wrong can easily become excuses. For example – “I’m not perfect, just forgiven.” Is true, but if we use that as a reason not to do good then we fall into sloth, we give up before we even started. To prevent any such talk, God speaks through Moses and is very clear.

    God tells us directly, “This commandment I give you is not too hard.” Translated another way, “It is not a mystery.” God tell us, “It is not far away from you.” I did not hide it Heaven or in a distant land so that you would not be able to get it. The language used here is telling. God reassures them that they do not need a great man like Moses to guide them to do good. God tells them, “You don’t have to send a man up a mountain to know what you have to do, it should be obvious to you.” Indeed, this word is very near, it is in your mouth and in your heart. The most essential parts of the Christian life are evident to us – they do not take much thought. God does not say, “It is in your mind,” as if it takes a lot of thinking to figure out – it is in your heart that you will feel it and know it, it is in your mouth that you speak blessings and not curses.

    When we are called to act as a neighbor to those around us, God does not put a burden we cannot handle on our shoulders. If we believe that Christ’s, “Yoke is easy, and [his] burden light.” Then we cannot say it is impossible to do good. We will definitely fall short of the example Christ lays before us, and at the end of the day what we do does not save us – only our faith. However, we must commit ourselves to a better goal, to doing the work of God which is in our heart. We have the assurance that God will see us to our goal, and the assurance that our short-comings will be forgiven, now let us live out both these realities.

    We are like Christ, we are like the Samaritan, we travel a world in which we do not belong. We must take the time to help those we meet along the path. Our destination is Heaven, but who will we send down the same path as us? The ones who we become the face of mercy to, the ones who we show the path to, those who we are able to become Christ for. We must go forth into the world and proclaim the word of God, but we must go forth and do it, but we don’t have to go far to find it. This word is very near, it is in our mouth, it is in our heart. We must go now, and put it into the world. – Amen

2 Kings 5:1-14
Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Aram, was a great man and in high favor with his master, because by him the LORD had given victory to Aram. The man, though a mighty warrior, suffered from leprosy. Now the Arameans on one of their raids had taken a young girl captive from the land of Israel, and she served Naaman’s wife. She said to her mistress, “If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.”
So Naaman went in and told his lord just what the girl from the land of Israel had said. And the king of Aram said, “Go then, and I will send along a letter to the king of Israel.” He went, taking with him ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten sets of garments. He brought the letter to the king of Israel, which read, “When this letter reaches you, know that I have sent to you my servant Naaman, that you may cure him of his leprosy.”
When the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes and said, “Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me.” But when Elisha the man of God heard that the king of Israel had torn his clothes, he sent a message to the king, “Why have you torn your clothes? Let him come to me, that he may learn that there is a prophet in Israel.”
So Naaman came with his horses and chariots, and halted at the entrance of Elisha’s house. Elisha sent a messenger to him, saying, “Go, wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean.” But Naaman became angry and went away, saying, “I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the LORD his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy!
Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them, and be clean?” He turned and went away in a rage. But his servants approached and said to him, “Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, ‘Wash, and be clean’?”
So he went down and immersed himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the word of the man of God; his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean.

Luke 10:1-11
After this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go. He said to them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. Go on your way. See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves.
Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road. Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace to this house!’ And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you.
Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide, for the laborer deserves to be paid. Do not move about from house to house. Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; cure the sick who are there, and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’

But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say, ‘Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you. Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near.’

Sermon Text

Today we have two words before us. Both of them telling us what it is to be a prophet in the land. At one end there is the work of Elisha toward Namaan, and at the other the work of the Seventy Disciples in proclaiming the Gospel. Two stories of prophetic action, two stories of the kingdom of God coming near, both with ample lessons for us to take into our lives today. Today we will look specifically at the idea that we are called to be a prophetic voice in the world, to proclaim the good news to all people no matter the circumstances.

We come into Elisha’s ministry shortly after Elijah was taken up to Heaven. Elisha served his predecessor faithfully for quite a while, and the initial transition into his new role was met with some trouble. When he first put on the mantle of the chief prophet of Israel, the other prophets looked to him and acknowledged he was in the full power of Elijah… and then immediately ignored him. “Truly you have been given the Spirit of Elijah… But, could we please go and find him? We would really like him back and we think God might have put him on a mountain.”

Elisha was kind though, and despite what could be perceived as a slight he allowed his followers to look for Elijah. They searched every mountain peak and found nothing, returning to Elisha and admitting that they were wrong to think they could dwell in the past. The future was now, and they were ready to follow him wholeheartedly. At this point, Elisha must have let out a sigh of relief. The hard work of winning over the other prophets was over, and now he only had to keep the king in line. What could possibly go wrong there? Well, it turns out quite a lot. Israel had, after all, been abusing its vassal states and one of them got fed up with being taxed and not getting anything for all that they gave. It was essentially the Coal wars played out in South East Israel. Moab rebelled, and the king was left with no choice but to turn to God.

Elisha helped the king, though he had fallen into idolatry. He called upon God and water sprang up out of Edom, flowing through the camps of the King and equipping his armies to win a victory over their enemies. Elisha would then work among his own people – supplying the necessary supplies for a widow to save her sons from being sold into slavery. He removed poison from food with nothing more than a bit of flour. He multiplied food and fed the hungry. His ministry was challenged from the beginning, yet he pushed through and with God’s aid conquered every obstacle that came his way.

It is this dependence on God that made him strong. He was not a prophet because he spoke well or because he was richer or stronger than anyone else. His ability to prophecy came from God alone. God gave him the authority to preach, to call down miraculous signs, to testify against kings and all authority. Nothing that Elisha did was of his own accord, but everything he did was initiated and blessed by God. This was his strength, and this is what leads us into his encounter with Naaman, general of the Arameans.

Naaman we are told, was given victory by God in a battle – giving him great respect among his people. When he contracted leprosy, a slow death sentence in those days, the king was willing to pay silver and gold equivalent to 3.8 million dollars. Which is a number that is huge on one hand, but on the other isn’t much more than they charge for ambulances now. The King sends this offer to the King of Israel and awaits a response. King Joram, ever a calm and collected soul, goes into full mourning at the idea. Having just barely won a war with the rebellious Moabites – taking everything but their main city – he was not ready for another war. In the eyes of the king, this call to send a healer for Naaman was nothing but a prelude to war. They were looking for an excuse, for anything which the spin doctors in Aram could make into sufficient justification for a war.

Elisha is prepared though, and when he hears of the request he sees it for what it is. He calls to the king and tells him, “Send him to me. Let them see that there is a prophet in Israel.” In other words, “Let them come and marvel at what God has done.” Israel had, at this point, become an overwhelmingly idolatrous nation – especially its royalty. They had plenty of so-called prophets, but none of them were giving any meaningful messages. When Elisha called for them to show, “There was a prophet in Israel,” he would have raised some eye brows. People would have said, “We have our prophets, what do we have to prove?”

But they did prove there was a prophet. Naaman came, and Naaman was healed. Bathing seven times in the Jordan – in a filthy river of mixed salt and fresh water – he was made clean. Having skin that was not only free of disease, but new – like that of someone much younger than he was.

It is here, in the work of Elisha at the Jordan that the work of we in the modern church, and those Seventy Disciples from our Gospel Passage get our lesson. When we of the Church commit ourselves to making an example of our work and to becoming a true sign of God’s work in the world – that is the moment that we become prophets. A prophet is not someone who tells the future – although sometimes they might – a prophet is someone who brings the word of God to the world. We in the church each take on a prophetic voice in the moment we enter into it. Whenever a person is welcomed into the church, we recommit the baptizand and the church to:

“With God’s help… proclaim the good news and live according to the example of Christ. Surround [one another] with a community of love and forgiveness, that [we] may grow in [our] trust of God, and be found faithful in [our] service to others.”

That is a high calling. However, it is one that we have all signed onto. We are to proclaim the Gospel of Christ, that he came and died for us, that we would not only be legally reconciled to God, but be placed in a solidarity with God. God working with us not only so that we could be saved from death, but renewed completely in our resembling of God, that image which we were made in long ago. We live out this image of Christ in acting like Christ. Preaching moves in concert with good works, the two do not overtake one another, they do not compete. The prophet proclaims, but the prophet also acts.

Those who were sent out in our Gospel reading went into the world act and to preach. They were to enter into households and declare they came as agents of peace. Ancient hospitality required that most, if not all, travelers were to be welcomed into your home if they did not do so through force or coercion. Thus, when we read their harsh reaction to being denied it becomes clearer – they asked for common courtesy and were given a door in the face. Those who accepted them were given the chance to hear the gospel, to receive healing and to see wonders. They went forward to prove to the world that once again, “There was a prophet in Israel.”

For those of us in the modern day, we are given more opportunities than ever to push into the world and do good, to go into the world and proclaim the Gospel. We live in a unique period of time, one in which more people from more places than ever living among us. People of all races, cultures, and backgrounds now live among us. We can respond to this in one of two ways – as a threat to the artificial distinctions which we have created for ourselves, or as an opportunity for God to enact God’s work in the world. God’s work not to have a church that looks just one way, prays just one way, speaks just one way – but a church that is open to all people from all corners of the world. People who live together in community, not uniformity.

The mission of the Church today is to enter into those areas which we are not comfortable with. We are to go into areas where we may not be welcome, but we are to enter into them as Christ came into the world. Though we are turned away, we do not respond with anger or with wrath. Those who reject us today may be saved tomorrow, and we leave them to God in the meantime. We go forward in peace, not aggressively. Too often we in the church enter into a situation and start picking fights with people, or respond aggressively to those who are at first apprehensive of us. If we enter a place and act in peace and love, and are rejected then we bear no guilt. If we enter in anger and wanting our own way, then the guilt is on us not our hosts.

If we are willing to work with people, to do good and act as Christ in the world, openly giving God the glory along the way, then we have hope of God’s work being known. The king of Israel was unsure of Elisha when his ministry began – Elisha responded to a general call, not a specific one. “Bring me a prophet of the Lord.” Naaman did not even know the name of Elisha. However, after the miracle of the waters from Edom and the feeding of the hungry and the care for the widow, Elisha was known in Israel. When the time came for someone to heal Naaman on behalf of the King, Elisha gave an order and the king obeyed – such was his influence which his good works had brought him.

We must go into the world as a prophet would. Our face like that of an angel, our desire for God’s glory to be known not for our way to be had or for our own gain. All that gold that was sent to Elisha was turned away; he would not take a piece of it. What he did accept was the words of Naaman, when he saw the work of God, he committed his life to worship of him. His washing in the Jordan was like a baptism for him, washing him of his past life and allowing him to enter into a new one. We too can bring people to the font of baptism, we too can do wonders. We must believe in the God who sends us, and face any opposition well. Let our hearts be clear, our motivations be of God, and our lips and hands be committed to the work of God alone. Let our lives make the world look upon us as say, “Now I know that there is no God in all the world except in Israel!” – Amen