Viral: July 14, 2019

Colossians 1:1-14
Psalm 25
Luke 10:25-37

Bacteria have been a bit of a thing in recent weeks. Last week our lectionary readings included the story of Naaman, the Aramean general who seeks healing in Israel. Naaman is afflicted with leprosy, a disfiguring and contagious condition, something we hear a lot about leprosy in scripture. But the term was used for any disfiguring or unsightly skin condition, so we don’t know for sure exactly what Naaman suffered. Still, it is sometimes actual leprosy, what we today call Hansen’s Disease, and it is bacterial.

Several weeks earlier, I spoke about the human microbiome, the symbiotic bacteria that inhabit our guts and other parts of our body, that we increasingly understand as essential and even formative of our sense of self, with an unhealthy biome contributing to depression and autism spectrum disorder, among other things.

This is a bit of a paradigm shift, for we have been primarily focused on the eradication of all bacteria. We’ve belatedly come to realize that this has been a mistake, this demonizing of entire class of life form. For example, only bacteria and a family of similar single-cell organisms called archaea can synthesize B12, a vitamin essential to metabolism and DNA synthesis, so without bacteria, there is no us, there is no this, no advanced multi-cellular life forms at all. From your yogurt to C-diff, we find bacteria everywhere, contributing to human culture and sometimes taking lives.

It should not be surprising, then, that scientists continue to study this microscopic life that is part of our lives. So it was that geneticist Rotem Sorek and his team at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science began an experiment focusing on bacterial response to a viral infection.

A virus, unlike bacteria and other cellular organisms, cannot reproduce independently. The goal is to replicate, and they can only do that by invading a cell, using its own processes against it. This is important. The virus convinces the cell that everything is okay until it is too late. It is successful when it reaches lysis, destroying the host cell and releasing copies of itself into the environment to infect other cells.

Sorek wanted to see if bacteria somehow communicated with one another as they resisted bacterial infection. What he found shocked him, for he discovered that the viruses actually had a secretive form of communication. This was unexpected, for while incredibly destructive, viruses are relatively simple. They do what they do leaving destruction in their wake in a mechanism seemingly as old as life itself. But secretive communication? Viral destruction is more sophisticated than it first seemed.

Since Sorek and his team’s discovery, a term has been coined for this viral behavior and the subsequent field of study, sociovirology. There is tremendous potential here, for viral diseases like ebola and HIV still haunt us.

There is something a bit like a virus at work in today’s reading, the beloved and oft preached Parable of the Good Samaritan, though it might as well be called the Parable of the Bad Jews, for the Hebrew religion of the first century was badly infected with a theological virus, a purity code that resulted in people being declared tumah, or impure. Pretty much everything involving reproduction was impure, especially women’s bodies, but so too were the dead or disfigured. If someone died in your house, the house, everyone and everything in it, became impure. If someone who was tumah touched another person or object, the impurity was transferred, was contagious. The greatest sin of all would be to bring impurity into the Temple, so members of the priestly castes were especially obsessive about the rules, though the text suggests that the priestly parties in today’s texts were leaving Jerusalem, and therefore not at risk of corrupting the Temple.

This wasn’t moral impurity, mind you, a whole other category, but pseudo-physical impurity. Some of the restrictions probably had their origin in legitimate ancient practices meant to prevent the spread of disease, others originating in primitive beliefs about the nature and power of blood, but these behaviors and beliefs took on a life of their own, no longer aligned with whatever their original purpose may have been, but instead very much the way First and especially Second Temple Judaism defined itself. This is who we are, they might proclaim, the people who are set apart by our attention to centuries old ideas about purity and contagion. It is no wonder that occupying forces would refer to them as being particularly stiff-necked.

It is purity that is at the heart of today’s parable, the notion of purity, and more broadly religious practice, that Jesus has in mind when he uses the proverbial enemy, the abhorrent Samaritan, as the hero in today’s story. We have two-thousand years of admiring about the Good Samaritan, our almost exclusive use of that word, so we miss how jarring it was for those following Jesus to hear “good” and “samaritan” in the same sentence. It would be like a crowd of Homeland Security employees hearing someone refer to a good Honduran asylum seeker… simply not possible.

We are to understand that the man in the ditch is a Hebrew, just like the Priest and the Levite. They do not help him because he might be dead, and if they touch him to check, they will become unclean, tumah, and the rituals to restore cleanliness are an inconvenience they don’t want to deal with. You know, like providing children with adequate food, water, shelter, and hygiene.

The Purity Code has so completely infected the Hebrew faith of the First Century that they have forgotten other aspects of the law, and especially forgotten the words of the prophets, for love is always first, but they put religion above love, as do so many today.

Bad information, bad code, bad belief that was going viral, was destroying the heart and soul of the faith. Jesus, the Jewish reformer, offers them a rude awakening. The Samaritan is not despicable. It is those good religious folks who have forgotten love that disgust God.

The prophets said it again and again. God does not care about your religious observance and ritual. God does not care about the Temple. It is going to be destroyed. Jesus makes this clear. The building is not important. Offer bulls on the altar until the street run with blood. Worthless.

What does the Lord require?

That you go down in that ditch. That love trumps cost and inconvenience and religion and rules every single time. Every single time.

Do justice. This is the prophetic equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath, first do no harm. Justice is no more than equilibrium, the reason the concept is portrayed as a female figure blindfolded and holding scales. It is what the authors of Matthew, and presumably Jesus, have in mind when they use the word we translate as debts in the Lord’s Prayer, for it is broader than financial debt, encompasses any form of obligation, of imbalanced relationship. Forgive and be forgiven so that we can come back into equilibrium. Stop keeping score.

The “to do justice” of Micah 6:8, then, is human justice, is checking a box, is doing what is necessary to grease the wheels of civilization. It is the baseline, not the ideal.

The next line is a bit tricky, for it sounds odd in translation. We want more. “To love kindness” doesn’t really do anything in the way we are called to “do” justice. Great, I have a warm and fuzzy feeling inside when I see the “Person of the Week” on the nightly news, box checked. In response, some have tried rendering it “loving kindness,” though it is clear that the ancient authors are giving us a set of three infinitives. There is a formula here. To best get at this, we should remember that the ancient Hebrews did not put things in mental boxes in quite the same way we do. Religion was not a thing, not something you did on Sunday morning or at sundown on the Sabbath. It was a way of life. There was no separation between what you believed and how you organized yourself as a society. There was not supposed to be any difference between what you believed and how you conducted business. The prophets are all over that sort of hypocrisy, as is Jesus. To love kindness is to be loving and kind in the world, and kindness is not the “enough” of justice, is not simply reciprocity. Jesus tells us that God is radically outward, is radically loving, is sacrificial, an image we see in the Cross. Jesus tells us that we are to be radical and outward and sacrificial. To love kindness is not admire an abstract trait. It is getting in the ditch, risking tumah, and figuring out if you can help that man, that stranger.

All too often, religion is the enemy of love and kindness, a playground for sticklers and demagogues, for priests and Levites who are more concerned with their own needs, who insist on getting their way, even when there is a fellow down there in the ditch. None of the pastors I know are particularly surprised when a new issue of “The Christian Century” arrives on our doorsteps reporting some recent poll that shows the least welcoming and loving group in America, the group that could care less about refugees, literally and father and child in a ditch at the southern border, the group that is happy to ignore the slaughter of transgender people in our own country, is white evangelicals.

As news broke of the Rev. Amy Butler’s departure from the famed and high-profile pulpit of New York’s Riverside Church, the second short pastorate there in a row, we were reminded that a virus can weaken the body of Christ too.

Finally, the unknown authors of Micah call on us “to walk humbly with our God.” This is not the humility of the oppressed, the downcast eyes of the woman trapped in patriarchy, the humility of the black man terrified that anything other than complete submission to law enforcement will result in summary execution. This is not the humility of the sort of self-loathing instilled in us by abusers and bullies and gossips. God does not call us into this world for misery, despite the twisted theology of some. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. But made is the operative word, this life a beautiful firework that appears for a moment and is gone, but oh what a moment. Our humility before God and for each other is nothing more nor nothing less than being in right relation with holy mystery and with those who, like you, are divine sparks burning right now, in this time and place.

If it seems like I have been preaching this exact same sermon again and again for the last three years, there is a reason. I have been. Our faith is not one of immense complexity. Let the religious do battle over the nature of Trinity, over how Jesus is divine and human. That is not our way. In fact, our faith is relatively simple. And incredibly difficult. It sits at the pivot between all that is fearful and small, the Darwinian animal programmed to fight and rut, and all that is expansive and creative, the transcendent being that is made in the image of an expansive and creative mystery we name as God, that the Hebrew people experienced in the person of Jesus.

A man answering a question: Who is my neighbor? Simple, really. He’s the one in the ditch. Will you be religious? Or will you help?

May the only thing that goes viral be our love. May we turn away from the self-righteousness, greed, and nastiness of the wider culture, from the smug satisfactions of the religious who win their wars and destroy their souls. May we be the people of the ditch, a little messy, a little impure, but always there to help.

Amen.

Benediction & Commissioning

There will always be evil in the world, on the hunt for victims,
ready to rob them of their dignity and their lives.

It is our job to be the resistance, for we follow Jesus,
and he was the resistance.

May you find the courage to do so. Amen.