God Passes By

God Passes By
A Sermon preached by the Rev. Peter De Franco at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, NJ
July 11, 2010

In the 2005 movie the 40 year Old Virgin, Steve Carrell finds himself in a strange situation. His date, who has had one too many to drink, gets into the driver’s seat and asks him to breathe into a Car Breathalyzers, also known as ignition interlock devices. Judges require people with drivers with multiple incidents of drunk driving to have a breathalyzer installed in their car to prevent them from driving while drunk. Ignorant of the purpose of the breathalyzer, Carrell blows into it and his drunken date swerves down the road, on the verge of yet another drunk driving accident.
In the new ABC Series, What Would You Do?, such an incident happens. A drunken woman, really an actress, tries to get a passer by to blow into her breathalyzer so she can start her car and drive it while drunk. So what would you do? The series goes on to present a variety of situations which ask the ethical question: What would you do? What would you do if you saw a customer berate a cashier with downs syndrome? What would you do if you witnessed a restaurant owner sexually harassing a young hostess?
What would you do if you witnessed a person being racially harassed?
Ethical choices confront us every day. Did you ever read the letters to the editor of the Clifton Journal? Many of the letters involve ethical dilemmas faced by our fellow citizens in Clifton?
What do you do when a pagan baits Christians about their beliefs?
What do you when a person proposes that it is ok to berate a person because they do not speak English? What do you do when a person alleges that the female pastor of First Presbyterian church is out to destroy the faith of the city of Clifton?
In today’s readings, God is posing the ethical question to us: What would you do if? Now if you listened to the readings today, I am sure that you are imagining that we should look at the parable of the good Samaritan.
Let’s begin with the first reading from Amos. There was a line in the text that caught my attention: I will never again pass them by. We might look on this line as a word of comfort, a reassurance that God is with us, that God will not pass us by but will be with us. This passage assures us that God’s presence comes to us as a word of confrontation and judgment and not always as a word of comfort and assurance.
Do you remember how Amos is confronted by Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, the capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel where King Jeroboam is ruling. We would imagine that the King would go to the temple to be comforted with God’s presence.
Jeroboam built an impressive kingdom with people living the life of luxury. Amos described the life style of the rich and famous of Israel in these words: they “…lie on beds of ivory, and lounge on their couches, and eat lambs from the flock, and calves from the stall; 5who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp, and like David improvise on instruments of music; 6who drink wine from bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils.”
I doubt if any of us here have a bed of ivory and live a life of lavish luxury. If you do, perhaps you might want to invite us all over for a lamb feast with fine wines and a band providing idle songs to the sound of the harp. Let’s not let the language of upper class wealth cover up the word that God is saying to us as God passes us by. Are you living a self absorbed life? Are you living an ethically responsible life?
An ethically responsible life involves us in caring for the needs of others. An ethically responsible life challenges us to look deeper than we are accustomed to look. An ethically responsible life is the life that God lives and God passes us by to invite us to pass through the world as God does: Caring for those unjustly deprived of liberty, advocating for the undocumented and the illiterate, women and men and children who are hungry and homeless.
God has given us the gift of worshiping in this section of Clifton where we rub shoulders with those who are different than we are, who speak different languages, who have a different educational level, who come out of a different culture or religion.
God has placed us in a situation where we are given a choice: to behave like the priest and the levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan or to behave like the Samaritan and make the needs of the person on death’s door to be our own needs. If we close our hearts to the person in need, if we blind our eyes from seeing them, if we turn our back on them in Path Mark or Shop Rite, we run the risk of God closing God’s heart on us, of God ignoring our prayer, of God turning God’s back on us when God passes us by.
As we come to this temple to worship, God invites us to play What would you do? God is standing with us, inviting us to a change of mind and heart, a change before it is too difficult to change. What would it take for you to shift your mind and heart to see the world not from the narrow perspective which blinds us but from God’s point of view which heals us. Then God will not pass us by.
As the priest and the levite passed by the person hurt by robbers. We will discover the identity of that unnamed good Samaritan. The good Samaritan is Jesus. The good Samaritan is you.