All Your Mind
Amos 7:7-17; Luke 10:25-37

July 11, 2004

For most of us, symbols have become intellectual logos, something by which to recognize a particular group or idea, but nothing more than that. When a symbol really works, however, it drags you into its imagery and makes you participate in it.

When the Al Qaeda-hijacked airliners hurtled into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, that was a terrifyingly visceral use of symbolism. Nothing literary and ephemeral about that one. Now with those twin spotlights bursting out of Ground Zero in New York, a counter-symbol has been inaugurated. When we see those twin rays of light, a different set of ideas and emotions race through our minds than those Al Qaeda intended to trigger.

Sitting here in this sanctuary, we have our own specific symbols, lots of them. Of course, The Symbol has always been that odd choice, the Cross. The Cross does not tell the whole story of Christianity, yet as a symbol it reminds you of what is past, present, and still to be.

Nevertheless, a number of Christians are offended by the Cross and want to replace it with, for instance, a phoenix rising out of the ashes - a kinder, gentler symbol of life emerging out of death. But after M. G. (Mel Gibson), is there any doubt regarding what our Symbol means?

Amos has a symbol in hand, a simple plumb line held in front of a properly plumb-lined wall and building. Actually, Amos isn't holding the plumb line; God is. God is measuring Israel and Israel in the 8th century B. C. is not straight. Israel is so unstraight that the whole building is falling down. No beams of light bursting skyward out of the rubble here.

How was Israel crooked? This was the corrupt northern kingdom that shortly would be conquered by the Assyrians to disappear from history, only the southern kingdom of Judah to survive - and the name Israel.

The Israelites had tried to construct their own truth, a common ailment of most governments and most cultures. How close is our Canadian culture to the truth that defines all truth? A truth that was not born out of laws and rules, but out of the compassion of the Gospel.

The proof that Israel was not straight was in their insidious attempt to discredit Amos. None of your type here - no prophets allowed in Israel. Don't prophesy in mind temple, commands Amaziah the chief priest at Bethel, for this temple belongs to the king and the kingdom.

At first, this attack makes no sense, or else is severely ironical. Israel is the land where prophets roamed and people held their breath to listen, as if to the voice of God Himself - and that is the idea.

Amos responds just as ironically. I am no prophet. You want to make out that I am the kind of prophet who speaks subversive and false words - disinformation - that wrongly accuse you. You're right. I am not that kind of prophet. I am just a herdsman and a pruner of sycamore trees. I only speak what God tells me and that is the truth. There is a plumb line: see how straight you are.

Walking down that Jericho road another prophet walked, a man of few words except the words of active compassion. He was a Samaritan, perhaps the sociological rough equivalent of a Mormon in today's Christian picture. He would become a plumb line, a symbol, for Christianity and for the rest of society.

He is never called "good" in the Gospel parable. Does anyone need to point that out. He saw and encountered what others with better, more legitimate credentials had seen. They opted to pass on by the nearly dead body of a robbed man. All that blood and carnage made him unclean to the priest and the Levite, and no man of God can afford to be unclean, unholy, ungodly.

The Samaritan probably did not think this way, but he was already dirt, so what did it matter to get his hands unclean with this unfortunate person? It mattered that this stranger was in desperate trouble and easily could die of exposure. Right there he tended the man's wounds - there's all those hospitals around the world graced with the symbol of his nationality. Oil and wine are no longer the chosen elements of modern medicine, but they helped rather than harmed. All those so-called "Samaritan laws" enacted to protect the compassion of well-meaning passers-by in today's litigious societies.

He took care of him with his hands and with his pocket book. He was a neighbour to the one in need. Jesus wrenches the answer out of his inquisitor for eternal life: he was a neighbour not by geography or personal relationship, but by the fact that he showed mercy on another person. That is our plumb line.

The Samaritan is not an historical person. Don't bother with any search for Noah's Ark to find the name of this man who had the wrong religion. However, he is real. He is a symbol of what it means to participate in God's kingdom. This is no intellectual exercise, for as you imitate and take part in the compassion the Samaritan symbolizes, you become a Samaritan - odd, quirky, never politically correct, but full of the mercy that shocks people to realize that there is a real world besides our own petty royal kingdoms.

Keep your eye on the road.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan