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Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost – July 11, 2010
On March 13, 1964, at about 3:20 in the morning, twenty-eight year old Catherine Genovese, called Kitty by everyone who knew her, came home from her job as a bartender, parked her red Fiat in a lot next to the Kew Gardens Long Island Railroad Station in Queens, New York and began walking down Austin street to her apartment building. What happened next in what at the time was described as a “staid, middle-class, tree-lined area,” sent shock waves not just through New York City but through the country and, indeed, the world.
As the lead paragraph in the New York Times story put it, “For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens…watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks…Twice their chatter and the sudden glow of their bedroom lights interrupted him and frightened him off. Each time he returned, sought her out, and stabbed her again. Not one person telephoned the police during the assault.”
The chief in charge of the borough’s homicide detectives – a veteran of 25 years on the force – told reporters that the slaying baffled him, not because it was a murder, but because what he called “the good people” failed to call the police. “The assailant had three chances to kill this woman during a 35 minute period,” he said. “He returned twice to complete the job. If we had been called when he first attacked, the woman might not be dead now.”
And it was not as if nobody knew what was happening. By all accounts, Miss Genovese became suspicious of a man she saw lurking down the street and was on her way to a police call box on the corner when she was attacked. At the sound of her voice, lights went on in a ten story building, windows slid open, heads stuck out and Miss Genovese yelled out that she had been stabbed. “Please help me! Please help me.” From the upper windows in the building a man called out, “Let that girl alone!” The assailant shrugged and began walking away. Miss Genovese struggled to her feet. The window closed, the lights went out, and the killer came back. Again the victim screamed; more windows, more lights; again the assailant left; again he came back when nothing more happened.
It was 3:50am by the time the police received their first call from a man who was a neighbor of the young woman. He explained that he called the police after much deliberation, first phoning a friend to ask what to do, then crossing the roof of his building to the apartment of an elderly woman in an effort to get her to make the call. Why did it take him so long to pick up a phone? “I didn’t want to get involved,” he told the police.
That brief answer set off a wave of self-reflection, sermonizing and symposia. One such gathering occurred the next year, 1965, at the University of Chicago Law School when scholars from four countries pondered the lack of response to Kitty Genovese’s cries for help in the New York night, titling their seminar “The Good Samaritan – and the Bad.”
Some blamed big city living, citing its vanishing sense of community, its moral numbing; the idea that crime is only for the police to handle. But, as one law professor put it, “Our common law has always refused to transmute moral duties into legal duties,” citing a New Hampshire court ruling of 1897 which said that “a man who ignores a drowning baby may be a moral monster, but he is not liable in damages for the child’s injury, or indictable under the statute for its death.”
At the time, so-called Good Samaritan Laws were not common in this country as they are now, but these laws, mind you, do not obligate our involvement if we hear someone crying for help on a street in Queens or if we see someone lying beaten on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. They do not make us come to someone’s aid; they only protect us if we decide to do so. A typical Good Samaritan Act, this one from Hawaii, says: “Any person who in good faith renders emergency care, without remuneration or expectation of remuneration, at the scene of an accident or emergency to the victim of an accident or emergency shall not be liable for any civil damages resulting from the person’s acts or omission…” There are exceptions; “good faith” is the guiding principle; there must be no money involved and the care must be at the scene.
The law in Illinois is similar. Still, as far as I understand it, in this state, as in many others, there is no duty to help or even to warn a person of imminent danger, no so-called “Bad Samaritan Laws,” punishing you for not getting involved. There are exceptions where a so called special relationship exists, such as parent to child, spouse to spouse, storekeeper to customer, employer to employee and so on. Apparently, being a neighbor does not qualify as a special relationship, at least as far as the law is concerned.
So fittingly, it is a lawyer who puts the question to Jesus today, “What must I do?” “Must.” Indeed, Luke uses a more technical term for lawyer, rather than using the word for “scribe,” who were also considered experts in the law. This one had graduated from the biblical equivalent of law school and, given his persistent use of questions, might have been familiar with the preferred law school teaching technique known as the Socratic Method.
Anyone who has seen the movie “The Paper Chase,” featuring the late John Houseman as the intimidating Harvard law professor Charles Kingsfield, has been exposed to this form of nerve wracking yet effective instruction. On the first day of class he tells his quivering students, “You teach yourselves the law. I train your minds. You come in here with a skull full of mush, and if you survive, you’ll leave thinking like a lawyer.”
That’s still the goal of a legal education, and that’s still the means by which it is accomplished, although it’s much less sadistic, according to a recent lecture by a University of Chicago law professor named Elizabeth Garrett who said, “Professor Kingsfield’s performance is an exaggerated and outdated caricature of the Socratic Method.” Professor Garrett then describes how she approaches her students, “We could lecture students about legal reasoning, but those of us who use the Socratic Method prefer to foster as much active learning as possible. Just as a professor who immediately answers her students’ questions loses an opportunity to help them discover the answers on their own, the professor who dispenses legal principles in classroom soliloquies will reduce students’ opportunities to engage in independent critical thinking that can lead them to a deeper understanding.”
“What must I do?” the lawyer asks. After he provides his own answer – Jesus responding like the good Socratic style teacher he is: “In the law, what do you read?” The lawyer comes up with another question: “And who is my neighbor?” And this time there is no follow up question, no lecture, no soliloquy. There is, instead, a story, sounding like a case study; like all good stories, this one is designed to promote critical thinking and bring about a deeper understanding.
A man going down from Jericho to Jerusalem fell into the hands of robbers, “who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.” Notice, that’s all Jesus tells us about this man. He never gives a name, a race, a religion, a language; never mentions if he is finely or poorly dressed. In fact, he never says what he was going to Jericho for; it could have been for something illegal or illicit. All he says is that he was in need of a neighbor – at its root, the word “neighbor” means “near dweller.” What this man needed was someone willing to go near him and assist him with his needs; what he needed was someone willing to get involved.
Notice, nowhere does Jesus say whether or not this man was “worthy” of saving; nowhere does he argue that he deserved to be seen to. All he tells us is that the man was in need of help.
The story goes on: “A Samaritan” – and by now you know that Jesus’ listeners could think nothing good of the Samaritans, considering them a heretical sect, unclean, not to be associated with – “A Samaritan, while traveling, came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity.”
Something else to notice here: there is no indication that the Samaritan had any kind of relationship, special or not, with the man lying half dead on the road. No indication that he ever went to his house or even nodded to him on the street; and yet, Jesus says, the Samaritan “was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers.” Why? Because he had compassion for him; “he was moved with pity.”
So, engaging in a solo Socratic Method, if such a thing is possible, it occurs to me that the proper question to put to the lawyer – and all of us – is “Who is the one who acts as a neighbor?” And the answer, as the lawyer discovers on his own after hearing the story, is: “The one who showed mercy.” And all Jesus says is, “Go and do likewise.” Class dismissed.
Go and do likewise. Act as a neighbor; be willing to get near to someone in need; be willing to be involved with someone calling for help, a call that could take any number of forms.
I don’t think that there’s anyone here who would not call the police if they heard someone screaming in the middle of the night. I don’t think there’s anyone here who would not attempt to render aid if they saw someone involved in an accident. And, you know, I don’t think there’s anyone here who would not lend a listening ear or an embracing arm to someone whose pain may be less obvious but just as real.
We will do it for each other; will we do it for someone we don’t know? Our neighbor is anyone we are near who is in need of compassion; and, let me ask you another question: Can you think of anyone who doesn’t have such a need? Think of how much of our time is spent with strangers who may be neighbors; neighbors who may be strangers; people with whom, in the fabric of everyday life, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant said, we are all “unavoidably side by side.”
Given that Kant wrote these words in the 18th century and that he never traveled more than fifty miles from his home town, his words have a prophetic sound to them in this age of thinking globally and acting locally.
We do both here, don’t we? We think globally by coming to the aid of Nepalese Hindu women who seek to better their lives and the lives of their children through our aid to Heifer project. We act locally by welcoming and sharing a meal with our Muslim neighbors, learning about their faith and realizing that they work as hard and worry about their families as much as we do.
Any time we allow ourselves to come side by side people who may not share our culture, our race, our language or our faith but share the same need for compassion, we are called to think and act like Christians; called to transform mushy sentiment into a life-giving meal. The call may come at any time, waking us from our sleep, causing us to stop on our journey, demanding that we display a Gospel most people on our block probably have never read and know very little about. The best way to do that is to be a good neighbor.