[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Welcome to the collective table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy.
This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation, and even the podcast. So we're glad your here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:39] Speaker A: All right, so we have been going through a teaching series here on our core values as a church. The Oceanside Sanctuary in 2025 went through a process of re envisioning the next five years of our community life together. And out of that process, among other things, came five core values. These are the expressions of our church that you really, if you were a part of this process, if you were here in 2025, you helped sort of shape and form these core values. These aren't values that, you know, just like Janelle and I cooked up. This really came from the community, from the ground up. And today is week number four. So we're talking about the fourth value, which is liberating love and the way we've articulated that is this because Jesus taught a life of love and liberation for ourselves, each other, and the world, we commit to the lifelong journey of practicing his way.
I'd love to talk about that today. Sound good? Would you pray with me? God, we thank you again for this opportunity for us to gather, to be a community together, to lift our voices in prayer and in song, to bring our hopes and anxieties and frustrations and fears to this space that is welcoming, that somehow mysteriously and magically allows us to be who we really are.
And we're grateful for that.
We pray, Lord, that as we learn to be who we really are, that we would grow in our ability to love, that our capacity for love would be expanded.
We pray all that in Jesus name. Amen.
Many of you know that Janelle and I have three daughters. Our middle daughter's name is Judah. She's 27 years old and just recently married. Last summer, she married a wonderful gentleman named Cem, who's Turkish. So our lives have become really rich and full with, like, this new Turkish family.
And whether Judah was going to get married or not someday was never in question.
Right when Judah was very, very little, like as young as three or four years old, when she would see a cute boy, she would say, oh, my heart is doing that.
Oh, yeah, I'm sure she's watching right now, Mom. My heart is doing that thing. By which, of course, she meant that, like, her heart was fluttering because she saw somebody that, you know, was so attractive and interesting and cute that she got excited about it. And she was very happy to share with us every time she saw somebody who made her heart do that thing. And I'm a pretty stereotypical straight white CIS Gen Xer, which means that, you know, all the cliches are true. I drink IPAs, and, you know, I, of course, introduced all my children to the Lord of the Rings when they came of age, because the Lord of the Rings, both the books and the films were formational in my life. And when Judah was about five years old, I thought, this is the right time to introduce her to the Lord of the Rings.
And so I sat her down along with all the other girls and made them watch the extinction extended versions like back to back to back.
And a funny thing happened when an elf named Legolas came on the screen.
Judah said, dad, my heart is doing that thing.
And I mean, Orlando Bloom, you know, who could blame her?
We like to say about Judah at that time in her life that she was in love with love.
And that's true.
She was captured by the idea and the experience of love, and she still is.
I mean, it plays out differently in her life, but she is in love with love.
When I thought about this core value of liberating love, and maybe for you, too, when we talk about love, the passage that came to mind, obviously was the greatest Commandment, Matthew, chapter 22.
And this is not going to be up on the screen. I'll just read it to you. It's very familiar. Matthew 22, verse 34. When the Pharisees heard that he, meaning Jesus, had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. Te which is the greatest commandment, which law is the most important, which binding obligation is primary for us? And he said to him, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. And this is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is, like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments, hanging all the law and the prophets.
Churches like ours like to sort of cite this passage as a summary of law. This is what Jesus said. This is what fulfills the law. All the law and all the prophets hang on this idea that our job is to love God and to love each other. That's a handy way to remember how to be in the world.
But I prefer the Luke version of this passage, which we will put up on the screen.
Luke tells the story A little bit differently.
Luke, chapter 10, verse 25 says this. Just then, a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. Teacher, he said, what must I do to inherit eternal life?
And he said to him, what is written in the law?
What do you read there?
And he, being the teacher in the law, answered, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength, and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself.
And he being Jesus, said to him, you have given the right answer.
Do this and you will live.
But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, and who is my neighbor?
And this is why I love this passage, because the same answer is given right? In the first case, Jesus gives the answer. In the second case, the lawyer is able to give that answer. But in Matthew, it sort of ends there, right? He gives the formula, love God, love each other.
That's it. By this you will have filled the law and the prophets. But in this story, the lawyer says, yeah, but here's my question.
Who's my neighbor?
And I love how in the Luke passage, verse 29 says, but wanting to justify himself, Luke comments on the motives of the expert in the law.
Somehow Luke knows what he's thinking, and we accept that as part of the story. But it seems reasonable he's an expert in the law. He wants to know how to justify himself.
This I'm not big into, like, you know, the preachers who, like, talk about the original language. I think that can be manipulated fairly easily.
But I actually really love the word for justify that we translate in English in my NRSV Bible as justify is the Koine Greek word dikaios, which is a forensic legal term. It means to vindicate.
It means to find guiltless or blameless.
It means to set free.
In asking this question, the expert in the law is looking to be set free from the obligation to love.
And in this way, this story, this passage sets us up right at the very beginning by linking love with liberation.
Only what the lawyer, the expert in the law, wants is he wants to know, how can I be liberated from this greatest commandment? When do I know that I have to fulfill the greatest commandment? And please tell me, when I don't have to fulfill the greatest commandment. How can I be free not to love?
How can I be justified in not loving? How can I be vindicated in not loving?
Jesus replies like he often does by telling a story.
Jesus replied, a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers.
You guys know this story.
Who stripped him beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. Now, by chance, a priest was going down the road. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side.
So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, he passed by on the other side.
But a Samaritan, while traveling, came near to him. And when he saw him, he was moved with pity he went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them.
Then he put him in his on his own animal, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, which is money, and gave them to the innkeeper and said, take care of him, and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.
Verse 36. Then Jesus asks the lawyer, which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?
And he said, I imagine, very reluctantly, the one who showed him mercy.
And Jesus said, go and do likewise.
What I love about this story is that the lawyer tries to attach love and liberation because he wants to be liberated from the obligation to love. Jesus takes the opportunity to tie love to liberation in an entirely different way.
I love this quote by bell hooks from her book, literally written about love. She says, the moment we choose to love, we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love, we begin to move against. Toward freedom. And I think Jesus is teaching the same idea.
The lawyer wants to know when he is free from love. And Jesus says, you're missing the point. We move towards freedom. We. We move towards liberation when we choose to love.
In telling this story, Jesus makes it clear that everything in our lives, everything that we do, subordinated to love.
I don't know about you, but I expect that the Samaritan who's walking along the road is busy. He had things to do, he had places to be. He says he's traveling along the road. He must be going somewhere for some reason.
But unlike the priest or the Levite, who also must be busy, the Samaritan sets aside his daily obligations. He sets aside whatever commitment he is heading towards, whatever appointment he might be late for. And he chooses to care for the person who is beaten and bloodied on the side of the road.
Our everyday business in life is subordinated to love.
Another way to put that is nothing that you're doing in your life is more important than love.
No appointments, no job, no ideology, no religious commitment, no ritual, no political identity, no ethnic identity. None of that is more important than love.
If any of Those things are getting in the way of you loving. Then love is always the choice that leads to liberation.
Being a Samaritan illustrates this in an even more powerful way. Because, of course, you've heard that as a Samaritan, this man is, ironically, a part of an ethnic group that is a rival to the ancient Jews. The story goes that Samaritans were the remnants of people who were sort of marginalized and sidelined during the captivity in Babylon. So as the Hebrews were conquered and carried off into Babylon, the Samaritans represented a group of people, a kind of mixed ethnicity, who made their way back to Israel, sort of trickled in and patched together a kind of religious identity that was faithful to their understanding of Judaism. And then when the Jews came back en masse from Babylon, they re established Jerusalem. And the Samaritans were sort of left out in the cold, and a rivalry developed between them. The Samaritans considered their version of their Hebrew identity and their Jewish faith to be the right ones. Meanwhile, those Hebrews, those Jews who were based in Jerusalem, felt that theirs was. And power began to aggregate there with the Jews in Jerusalem. Eventually, Samaritans became those rival ethnic minorities who insisted on practicing, according to Jewish folks, a corrupt version of their faith. They weren't the real deal.
Because of this, we're often in competition with each other in a variety of ways.
Jesus chooses, in telling his story, chooses a rival, an enemy of the Jews, to fulfill the law of the Jews.
And he does this intentionally to say very clearly, very loudly, your identity doesn't matter either.
Your ethnic identity doesn't keep you from loving your religious identity doesn't keep you from loving your ethnic. Your religious identity doesn't mean that you're not able to be righteous or good or loving.
All that matters is love.
Similarly, we see the irony of the priest and the Levite coming across a person who's been bloodied and beaten and broken, and they cross to the other side of the road. These are people who are religious professionals.
You would think of all the people who might be willing to help somebody who's hurt and beaten and bloodied on the side of the road, it would be a priest and a Levi, the people whose entire life is ordered around fulfilling the law.
But most commentators will point out that likely what's happening here is that the priest and the Levite, who have high requirements to maintain ritual purity, see a man on the side of the road bloodied and beaten, and rightfully wonder if he's dead.
And of course, to Touch a dead body would make them, as holy people, ritually unclean.
It is part of their job as priests and Levites to remain ritually pure. They can't do their jobs unless they are ritually pure. If they are defiled by a dead body, then they'll have to go through an entire process of sacrifices and cleansing in order to regain their ritual purity so that they can perform their tasks as priests and Levites. And so, in seeing somebody who may be dead on the side of the road, they do what they think the law requires. They give that dead body a wide birth.
The irony of this, of course, is that in trying to meet the requirements of the law, they break the spirit of the law, because the spirit of the law is that we ought to avoid harming others and promote what is good for them.
This speaks to a very real issue in the Bible.
How do we know when we obey and how do we know when we disobey?
I'm going to share with you five ways that I think this story reveals how leaning into love, fulfilling the requirements of love, actually liberates as well. The first obvious way is that the man who is beaten and bloodied and close to death on the side of the road is liberated by the love of the Samaritan.
And the Samaritan does love him.
Sit with that for a moment.
The Samaritan loves him.
The Samaritan sees this man hurt and the text tells us, feels pity for him, is moved by this person's suffering.
And the Samaritan's response is to care for his wounds, to put oil and wine on his wounds, to disinfect them, to wrap them up, to bandage them, to put the man on his donkey and lead him to an inn where he can get him a room and help him to convalesce and recover. And I have no idea how the Samaritan felt about this man emotionally. Did he look at him and say, oh, my heart is doing that thing?
Probably not.
But he loved him nonetheless.
In this way, Jesus demonstrates that love is more than that sort of childish notion of romance, that it is instead the ways that we act towards each other when we are in need.
It's care, it's concern, it's tenderness, it's relief from suffering.
In this way, very obviously, the first liberation we see in the story of the Good Samaritan is that the man is liberated from his pain, from his wounds, from his suffering.
And in this way, Jesus clearly defines love as the ways that we treat each other.
The second liberation that I notice is that The Samaritan is liberated.
The Samaritan who belongs to a group of people who are hated and reviled and marginalized and excluded and vilified and condemned. The Samaritan participates in this story in an act of mercy that liberates him from those judgments.
He demonstrates that his ethnic and his religious identity doesn't keep him from the ability to show the genuine love of God, to be righteous, to be vindicated, as the lawyer wanted himself to be.
The third liberation that I see in this passage is that the community is liberated in this passage. And I have to give credit where credit is due. Janelle noticed this bit in the passage when I was sharing with her yesterday what I was planning on talking about today. She was like, oh, well, you know, what I noticed is that the innkeeper, as a member of the community, is also included in this act of liberation.
And she said, you know, it reminds me of Baraj.
You guys don't know who Baraj is, but Baraj is the best friend of one of our sons in law, and he owns an inn just up the road here on Coast Highway. And one of the things that you wouldn't know about Barrage is that he regularly provides, provides rooms and shelter to people who live on the street.
And he grumbles about it and he complains about it and he laments it, but he never fails to do it.
And Janelle and I have called on him many times and said, hey, we've got somebody on our porch who's really struggling.
Is there any chance you have a vacancy?
And he always does.
And, you know, the church will pay for it.
But if the church couldn't pay for it, he would.
I guess I should say, you pay for it.
I hope that's okay.
But that's just Barrage. You know, I.
The fact that Bharaj is Hindu does not mean that he cannot participate in the righteousness and the goodness and the love of God, because he does.
And in that way, the community is liberated, the community is redeemed when we all have the opportunity together to participate in the liberation of those who suffer.
MLK famously said that justice is what love looks like in public. And I think that's exactly what's happening here by engaging the innkeeper, by engaging other people in the community, whether that is local owners of motels, or whether it's, you know, another nonprofit in the community that provides free showers for people who live on the streets, or whether it's the school district who provides care for people who are in need or city staff who are there. To help in whatever way they can. The entire community participates in love in a way that can only rightly be called justice.
The fourth liberation I see in this passage is that, and go with me on this one, The law itself is liberated in this story.
The law itself is liberated from its own constraints in this story.
I think this entire parable is a story about the tension between what I referred to earlier as the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law. I think this is the central ethical and moral dilemma of all of Judaism and Christianity. Here's what the law says we should do. But sometimes what the law tells us to do is unjust because laws are constrained. They're limited by time and space and culture and circumstance and all good laws. If we give laws the benefit of the doubt, and I, I know that's hard to do right now in the United States of America, to think that maybe our lawmakers might make every law from a place of good faith. But let's just pretend for a moment that when people make laws, Moses in the Hebrew Bible and the United States Congress, that our essential intent is to alleviate harm and to promote good.
In that sense, the law is good. The law is holy.
The law is a beautiful thing.
The problem is laws as they are written are constrained by time and place and circumstance and what was intended for your good. With a little bit of time passing and a little bit of culture change and a little bit of, like, exceptional circumstances can actually become harmful.
Cue the priest and the Levite.
The priest and the Levite in this story illustrate this very problem. They have obligations to the law to remain ritually pure.
That's okay.
But when their adherence to the law keeps them from helping somebody who's suffering and dying on the side of the road, the law has become something that you should disobey. Hear me? The law becomes something that you should disobey in order to fulfill it.
One of the hardest things about the entire Judeo Christian tradition is that, you know, some streams of Christianity and Judaism think that the whole point of the Bible is to teach you to obey.
And other streams of Christianity and Judaism think that the whole point of the Bible is to teach you to disobey.
It's my contention that the whole point of these spiritual traditions is to teach us to be people of love and wisdom who know when to obey and when to disobey.
Because sometimes love requires that you break the law in order to fulfill it.
Refer back to Martin Luther King, Jr.
Last liberation.
And then I promise I'm done. And it hasn't even been 50 minutes, you guys.
You are liberated by this story.
I'm liberated by this story because if what this teaches us is that love is our ultimate guiding principle, that love supersedes all other things in our lives, then we are free to love in ways that actually perpetuate people's good and relieves their harm and produces justice in the world, regardless of what those laws or rules or social norms or customs might say.
Because love fulfills the law, you are free to fall in love with love.
That I think, is our job.
It's not, you know, five year old Judah's version of love for Orlando Bloom in a long blonde wig.
Although I'm not judging you.
Our job as Christians is to fall in love with this kind of love that relieves suffering, that liberates the oppressed, that sets the captives free. This is Jesus's entire definition of the God gospel.
I used to belong to. Janelle and I together used to belong to a.
A denomination before we, like, disentangled ourselves from more controlling expressions of religion. We used to belong to a denomination whose founder liked to say that at every staff meeting at his very large church. He would begin every staff meeting with the question to his staff, on what business are we in?
And they all knew the answer to that question. We're in the people business.
And then his next question would be, how's business?
And that always rubbed me the wrong way.
Like, I think charitably, I understand that, like at a church, we are in the business of people in the, in the sense that we're here to try to like, meet people and connect people together who build good relationships together and maybe belong to groups together and lead ministries together. Yeah, I think that's true. But I think to say that we're in the people business sort of perpetuates the worst characterizations of like mega churches. Like, our job is to like, have as many people, like collect people like Hummel dolls or something, you know, I think that we're in the business of love.
I think that a church is in the business of promoting and teaching and acting out in ways that are defined by love, like the Good Samaritan, so that love becomes justice in our neighborhood.
I'd love to ask you this question on a regular basis.
What business are we in?
How's business?
She's not wrong.
It's hard.
It costs something.
All of this cost the Samaritan something.
I think it's worth it.
I think it's worth it for the liberation that we gain together.
Amen.
Would you pray with me. God, we thank you for today. Again, we're grateful for the ways that these stories and texts stretch us and grow us and challenge us in some ways that are uncomfortable.
It's our prayer today that you would teach us how to love just the way we sang today. That you would teach us how to be there for others who are suffering.
That you would teach us how to not cross to the other side of the road when somebody in our path is hurting.
That you teach us how to love in a way that draws more and more members of the community into expressions of love and justice.
And that you would teach us most of all how to be liberated by love.
To declare boldly that there are no laws that can be made against love.
We pray that you would make that true in our lives. In Jesus name, amen.
[00:34:37] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where you're tuning in.
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