Scriptures:  Micah 6: 6-8, Luke 10: 25-37

Many of you know that I just got back Minneapolis, where I was attending a national conference on preaching, called the Festival of Homiletics.  It was a remarkable experience … a gathering of some 2200 preachers, roughly half men and half women, every age and background, from across this country and Canada.  We had some UCC folks there – and United Methodists, and Presbyterians, and Lutherans, and Baptists, and Quakers, and Unitarians, and Moravians, and MCC folks, and lots of others.  Every one of us was there because we wanted to learn more about preaching, and so we gathered to worship together, three and four times a day, and listened to some wonderful sermons and some great lectures, and had the chance to learn from the best and the brightest in this field.

            One of the best and the brightest – one of the people I was most anxious to hear – is a woman named Barbara Brown Taylor.  She’s an Episcopal priest, almost exactly my age, and her career path has been the reverse of mine.  She began her professional life in ministry, and served in local churches in and around Atlanta, Georgia, for some 25 years.  A few years ago, she left parish ministry, and now teaches religion courses at a small college near where she and her husband live in north Georgia.  I’ve read many of her books, which include several collections of her sermons, and I couldn’t wait to hear what she had to say about preaching. 

            Which was a lot.  And if you were here this morning with the goal of becoming better preachers, I’d share it in a lot of detail.  Since you’re not – but are here instead with the goal of becoming better disciples, I’m going to share only one point, which she kept returning to in both her workshop and her lecture – what she described as the principle of “show, don’t tell.”

What she meant by that was this:  instead of telling your congregation (or your readers, or other audience) about something, show it to them – make it real for them.  Instead of telling other people that “the woman was tired,” Brown encouraged us to show how tired she was … in the slump of her exhausted body, in the lines around her sunken eyes, in the slowness with which she moves, in the hard work of simply lifting one foot and then the other.  Show, don’t tell what her tiredness looks like.

            It is precisely what the prophet Micah is talking about in today’s Old Testament reading.  He raises the single most important question in the life of faith:   “What does God require of you?”  What does God require of us?  What does God want from us? 

            And he answers it very simply and clearly.  He says what God wants is for us to show, not tell.  Micah doesn’t say “God wants us to go out and tell people about justice.”  He says “God wants us to do justice … to show justice in our dealings with others.”  Show, don’t tell.  He doesn’t say “God wants us to go out and tell people how important it is to be kind to one another, or to explain the evolution of the concept of kindness as an ethical construct;” he says, “God wants us to go and show kindness to each other.”  Show, don’t tell.  He doesn’t say, “God wants us to tell other people about what it looks like to live a life of faith” – he says, “God wants us to show people what it looks like to live a life in which our relationship with God is the most important thing in it.”  Show, don’t tell. 

            And maybe it’s this very teaching that Jesus is thinking about in today’s story from Luke’s Gospel, when he gets rudely interrupted right in the middle of a party. 

If we back up to the story just before this story, we hear that some time earlier (maybe a few weeks, maybe a few months), Jesus had sent out 70 of his followers to travel all over the region, to cure the sick, and to share the Good News with everyone – the Good News that all people are loved by God, and that God’s reign was coming near.  And when those 70 people come back (which is where today’s story begins), Jesus is filled with joy – he listens to them excitedly telling stories about the places they’ve visited, and the people they’ve met, and the ones they’ve been able to help, and he realizes that they finally seem to be “getting” what he has been telling them all along. 

            And while they’re all whooping it up over their graduation from seminary (metaphorically speaking), a lawyer stands up and interrupts the festivities with a question.  A bit rudely, he asks Jesus, “Okay, Teacher, tell me, what must I do to be saved?”  “I’m not a special missionary for God like these folks, Rabbi, I’m just an ordinary guy, so what do I need to do to inherit eternal life?” 

            Maybe Jesus doesn’t take him very seriously, or maybe he suspects the motives behind the question, and answers the man (almost dismissively) with what seems like a rhetorical question:  “Well, what have you been told?  What does the religious law say?”  It should be an easy question, since this lawyer obviously knows the religious law well, and he quotes the great commandments to Jesus:  “You must love God with all your heart, and soul, and strength, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.”  And Jesus says, “Great, good job, you’ve got it, that’s the right answer,” and gets ready to go back to the party.

            But the lawyer – maybe wanting to show the crowd how much smarter he is than Jesus – or maybe because he doesn’t want to waste his time loving someone he’s not required by law to love, asks, “Wait a second, rabbi.  Who is my neighbor?”  Is it just the two people whose houses are on either side of mine, who I share side-lawns with?  What about the guy who lives three houses down from me?  Or those people who live across the tracks, in the not-so-nice part of town that successful people like me don’t live in?  I’d like a little clarity here.  Tell me – who exactly is my neighbor?

And Jesus responds to him not by telling – but by showing … through a story that many of us know fairly well. 

            Once upon a time, he says, a businessman from Samaria went up to Jerusalem, and after finishing his business there, decided to head home down the dark, dangerous, winding road from Jerusalem to Jericho, even though anyone with half a brain knew better than to travel this road alone.  But the man wanted to get home to his wife and kids, and besides, he had an important conference call he needed to make the next morning, so he decided to take his chances. 

            And as he walked along the road, probably looking nervously left and right, and listening for any odd sounds, he was jumped by a bunch of thugs, and they beat him nearly to death.  The thugs took off with his clothes, and whatever else he had of value, and left him on the rocky edge of the road to die. 

            Imagine him lying there, in the near-dark and the cold.  One eye is battered and swollen shut, there’s the salt and metallic taste of blood in his mouth where he can feel some of his teeth are broken, his ribs – almost certainly broken – are screaming with sharp tearing pain, and it’s getting harder and harder to breathe.  He almost surely is going to die, and to die soon. 

            And then he hears footsteps.  His first reaction is terror – what if the thugs have come back to finish him off?! 

            And then, through his slitted, swollen eye, he makes out the robes and insignia of – of all people – a priest of the Temple!  He’s a minister – a pastor – one of God’s designated servants.  Help is here!  It’s a little like being in desperate trouble in a bad neighborhood in a section of a big city you don’t know, and suddenly spotting a police officer in uniform – you know that things are going to be okay!  And so, the injured man groans with relief, and with pain, knowing this priest will surely help him.  And so … imagine his dismay when instead of stopping and helping, this man of God takes one look at him, crosses immediately to the other side of the road, and keeps right on walking.

            Some time later – the injured man drifts in and out of consciousness, so he’s not sure how long – he hears more footsteps.  Again, he’s afraid … but again, his hopes are raised. 

He can see by this man’s robes and staff that he is a Levite – surely he’ll do something.  Now, we don’t have a direct parallel for Levites in today’s Christian church, but in Jesus’ time they were as important – and perhaps more important – than the Temple priests.  In addition to performing many of the priestly duties, the Levites were also in charge of music for all worship services, they alone were permitted to carry the Ark of the Covenant, the Temple’s holiest object, they were the Sabbath School teachers for all adults, and they administered the very complicated Temple law.  They were kind of a combination choir director, keyboard and strings player, Deacon, liturgist, religious educator, attorney, judge, and jury all at the same time!              Seeing the Levite approaching, the injured, agonized man must have thought, “well this one will certainly help – he above all others knows the religious obligation to give succor to those in need.  He has to help me.” 

            But the Levite, as soon as he saw the injured man lying there groaning, also walked across the road, turned his head away, and kept right on going.

            The man knows that he is dying … and is ready to give up … again, fading in and out of consciousness … when he hears a third set of footsteps.  Squinting his eye open, he sees by this man’s clothing that he is a Samaritan.  The injured man, who is Jewish, and who knows how much Samaritans and Jews hate each other (try to imagine, if you will, that this is taking place on a rural road in West Virginia, and the injured man is African-American and the approaching helper is a white person, who is deeply prejudiced against people of color; or that this is taking place in a back alley in Baghdad, and the injured man is an Iraqi insurgent, and the approaching man a U.S. soldier) … knowing how much Samaritans and Jews hate each other, the injured man turns his head away and closes his eyes and stifles his groans, hoping that the Samaritan won’t see him … because if he does, the most likely thing for him to do is to finish the job the gangsters had started. 

            But he hears the traveler’s footsteps getting closer … hears the creak of leather as he unfastens his waterskin … hears the pop of the man’s knees as he kneels down in the rocks next to the injured man … is astonished when he feels the cool water poured through his broken and bleeding lips, and splashed gently on the cuts on his face … and is more astonished still when the man tears strips of cloth from his own clothing, and binds up his wounds, and painstakingly lifts him to the back of his donkey, and takes him to a place of shelter and care.

            By the time Jesus finishes the story, we can imagine the crowd practically in an uproar … but he ignores their calls of “that can’t be right … a Samaritan can’t be the hero!” and he turns to the lawyer with his own question:  “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” 

            Well, duh!  Without pausing for a second, the lawyer says “the one who showed him mercy, of course.” 

            To which Jesus says – to him, and to us – “Go and do likewise.”

            Notice again that in this encounter Jesus is not telling the lawyer what it means to be another’s neighbor – he is showing him – and doing it so clearly, that even this legalistically-minded guy can’t possibly miss the answer.  Show, Jesus says implicitly, don’t tell.

            It’s the same thing he calls us to, today.  As we face the brokenness in the world around us, he calls us to show – not just tell – the Good News to others. 

When we see the rice-farmer in Myanmar, crawling out of a rude shelter after the cyclone has finally blown itself out, wandering through his stripped and devastated fields, realizing that his crop is gone, his livelihood is gone, his home is gone … and within a few days seeing his children dying because he has no food and no clean water to give them … we are not called to tell him that God loves him;  we’re called to show him.  When we see the parents of middle-schoolers in Beichuan, China, waiting in terror outside the rubble of the middle-school to which they had confidently sent their children that morning … the school that had collapsed because of its shoddy construction, and crushed hundreds of children in the rubble of concrete and steel … as they watch rescuers unearthing lifeless body after lifeless body … we are not called to tell them that they will be comforted; we’re called to show them.  When we see children, women, men suffering or struggling anywhere – whether it’s our near neighbors in Windsor, Colorado, or our farthest-flung sisters and brothers across the world – our call is not to tell them the good news of hope and possibility; our call is to show them.

            At our conference in Minneapolis, Barbara Brown Taylor reminded us – all of us – that whether we are preaching from the pulpit, or are “preaching” by linking our arms and hearts and spirits with those of our sisters and brothers across the world, when it comes to faith, the primary message for all of us is:  Show, don’t tell. 

            Just like the prophet Micah:  Do justice.  Love kindness.  Walk humbly.  Show, don’t tell.

            Just like Jesus:  Who is the neighbor?  The one who shows the love of God to others.  Show, don’t tell.

May it be so.  Amen.