An article in the New York Times  in April carried the story of a sort of religious revival going on in Harlem.  An order of Franciscan Friars—this particular order founded twenty years ago as a branch of the Roman Catholic Capuchin order devoted to reform and renewal have been given charge of a church in Spanish Harlem.  Once a month the brothers hold what they call a holy hour of prayer and song followed by a music festival in which the brothers play rock and jazz and punk.

            These particular Franciscans have no outside way to earn their keep, but live solely by day-to-day charitable contributions.  Milk, bread, cereal, all their groceries are given in response to their asking.  In other words, they own nothing personally, nor as the order.  They live solely by begging, as Francis said his monks should.  And in a time when religious orders are suffering a devastation in their numbers, this order is booming.  Fifteen or more new vocations in this last year, from among the hundreds of young men who show interest.  What’s surprising about all of this is the age of the men seeking to join the order—this year’s average age was 26—and their abilities.  This year included an Iraq war veteran and a graduate of Cornell.  “…These are young men of great ability, and usually from backgrounds of academic accomplishment,” said the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, who teaches the friars at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Dunwoodie…”They could have done a thousand other things, but they have very deliberately chosen the high adventure of being a Friar of the Renewal.”  (NYTimes, cited in Synthesis)

            The story of the Good Samaritan, told by Jesus, was a surprising story for his hearers.  No—not surprising—profoundly shocking.  In response to the question from a young man about who is the neighbor, a question about how far the duties of care and compassion must extend, Jesus tells a story about a group that experienced profound racial discrimination.  Samaritans were, literally, untouchables for good first-century Jews, a separate clan that had become as gentiles to their kindred by intermarrying with the people of the land during the time of the exile, and by changing many Jewish practices over the centuries.  There was deep enmity among Jews and Samaritans at worst, and profound suspicion on a good day. 

            So when Jesus singles out a Samaritan as the example of the one who truly fulfills the Jewish law making one righteous, he risks offending almost all of his hearers.  It was unthinkable that he should cite a Samaritan’s behavior in this way.  It went against everything they “knew” to be true about “those people.”  After all, it was believed, they’d just as soon kill you as look at you, those thieves and cheats.  The person who turns out to be the good example is surprising to everyone. 

            It’s such a familiar story to us that we hear it as a story about compassion, about the need to offer help to strangers in time of need.  It easy for us to forget the affront it was when Jesus told it, the shock of having such a one be an example.

            The merciful Samaritan, the right-living Samaritan fulfills the commandment to love the neighbor not by feeling good about the beaten man, but by his actions.  He thinks less about what will happen to HIM if he helps (as the priest and Levite, worried about their ritual purity are worried about what might happen to them if they stop), but what will happen to the beaten man if he does not stop.  He is carried out of his own selfish concern—a reasonable concern; this might, after all, be a trap—by mercy and pity.  And he goes out of his way to rescue the man left for dead.  He proved  to be a neighbor, to be righteous, to be loving, by his actions, not by words or thoughts.  And for Jesus, that is the highest measure of obedience to the law, the truest measure of love. 

            To the one searching for a way to fulfill God’s law, Jesus tells this story of selfless compassion.  To the one who feels like he just isn’t quite getting it right, immured in the details of his faith, Jesus says “Go and do likewise.”

            A Protestant theologian wrote, in 1972, “Jesus’ answer [to the young lawyer] means simply, ‘You don’t need any great speculation over the meaning of life; you just need to do the ordinary, everyday things; you need only be there when your fellow man is in difficulty, then you are already in accord with that meaning.  Then you are not merely seeking that meaning; you are in the process of fulfilling it.  For you will meet God  himself in the imprisoned, the hungry, and the naked; when you are close to all of those, then you also dwell close to God, and you are in contact with the basic meaning and goal of your life.”  Helmut Thielke, again quoted in Synthesis

            That search for meaning, and finding it in simple living, in serving the poor and countering violence with love is why young men are seeking out the life of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal.  It is behind the search of young people—and those not so young—all over the world hoping to live lives not defined merely by material goods and possessions, by power and status.  The question that the young man in the Gospel posed to Jesus was a question of meaning.   How do I live?  How does my faith come alive?  How can I know I am doing the right thing?  Jesus’ answer is, when you prove to be loving, when you act like a neighbor to those in need, when your life is lived not always looking to see what will happen to you, but directed toward what will happen to others if you don’t do something, then you find God.  Not as a reward for that selfless living, but because God lives out there, in the battered and bruised of the world, in compassion and service, in rare moments of grace and beauty in unexpected places. 

            Confirmed and lifelong atheist Sara Miles walks into a church one Sunday morning and eats a piece of bread and takes a sip of wine.  What is routing for tens of millions of Americans suddenly changes her life.  She went in seeking community, and came out with a vocation—all having to do with eating and feeding.  She opens a food pantry in her city at that church, distributing tons of food from the altar where she was fed.  Without a formal organization or a single grant, she gets others involved and soon there are food pantries all over her city. 

 

She writes, “My new vocation didn’t turn out to be as simple as going to church on Sundays, folding my hands in the pews, and declaring myself ‘saved.’ Nor did my volunteer church work mean talking kindly to poor folks and handing them the occasional sandwich from a sanctified distance.  I had to trudge in the rain through housing projects; sit on the curb wiping the runny  nose of a psychotic man; stick a battered woman’s .357 Magnum in a cookie tin in the truck of my car.  I had to struggle with my atheist family, my doubting friends and the prejudices and traditions of my newfound church.  I learned about the great American scandal of the politics of food, the economy of hunger and the rules of money.  I met thieves, child abusers, millionaires, day laborers, politicians, schizophrenics, gangsters, and bishops—all blown into my life through the restless power of a call to feed people, widening what I thought of as my ‘community’ in ways that were exhilarating, confusing, often scary.

            Mine is a personal story of an unexpected and terribly inconvenient Christian conversion, told by a very unlikely convert: a blue-state, secular intellectual; a lesbian; a left-wing journalist with a habit of skepticism.  I’m not the person my reporter colleagues eve expected to see exchanging blessings with street corner evangelists.  I’m hardly the person George Bush had in mind to be running a ‘faith-based charity.’  My own family never imagined that I’d wind up preaching the Word of God and serving communion to a hymn-singing flock.

            But as well as an intimate memoir of personal conversion, mine is a political story.  At a moment when right-wing American Christianity is ascendant, when religion worldwide ids rife with fundamentalism and exclusionary ideological crusades, I stumbled into a radically inclusive faith centered on sacraments and action.  What I found wasn’t about angels of going to church or trying to be ‘good’ in a pious, idealized way.  It wasn’t about arguing a doctrine—the Virgin birth, predestination, the sinfulness of homosexuality and divorce—or pledging blind allegiance to a denomination.  I was, as the prophet said, hungering and thirsting for righteousness.  I found it at the eternal and material core of Christianity:  body, blood, bread, wine, poured out freely, shared by all.  I discovered a religion rooted in the most ordinary and yet subversive practice:  a dinner table where everyone is welcome, where the despised and outcasts are honored. 

            And so I became a Christian, claiming a faith that many of my fellow believers want to exclude me from; following a God my unbelieving friends see as archaic superstition.  At a Time when Christianity in America is popularly represented by ecstatic teen crusaders in suburban megachurches, slick preachers proclaiming the ‘gospel’ of prosperity, and shrewd political organizers who rail against evolution, gay marriage, and stem-cell research, it’s crucial to understand what faith actually means in the lives of people very different from one another.  Why would any thinking person become a Christian?  How can anyone reconcile the hateful politics of much contemporary Christianity with Jesus’s imperative to love?  What are the deepest ideas of  this contested religion, and what do they mean in real life?  In this book, I look at the Gospel that moved me, the bread that changed me, and the work that saved me, to begin a spiritual and an actual communion across the divides.

            ..Faith, for me, isn’t an argument, a catechism, a philosophical ‘proof’.  It is instead a lens, a way of experiencing life, and a willingness to act.     

            As the Bible says:  Taste and see.” (Sara Miles, Take This Bread: a Radical Conversion, New York, Ballantine Books, 2007, pp.xiv-xviii)

 

            Sara Miles, and the hip, weird, open-handed Franciscan friars are unconventional followers of Jesus.  But they have found at the core of Jesus teachings and in his presence in worship the meaning and direction of their lives.  Each day in their work with the poor, in their thinking about how God is at work in the world, in them and in those whom they serve, they come alive.  Fed from a table that welcomes all, standing side by side with the outcast and searching of the world, they come to know love.  In their search and in their service they find God.  As Jesus said to the man with the powerful questions:  “Go and do likewise.”  AMEN