I love to follow recipes when I cook.  Before I moved to Boston to start at Harvard Divinity School, I pored over the shelves of cookbooks and recipe collections at my house.  I pulled out all my favorites and typed them up, double-checking to make sure that I hadn’t missed any ingredients or confused tablespoons with teaspoons.  I bought a notebook, dividers, and page protectors, and I placed each of these recipes into their assigned section.  In case you can’t tell, I also love to organize—but that’s another story for another day!  Every time I find myself at a bookstore, I always take time to check out the cookbooks, and I inevitably find one that I just can’t live without.  Whenever I come back home and visit my parents, I always make sure to peruse the most recent issue of “Bon Appétit” and the other cooking magazines that my mom receives, and I usually leave with a bunch of new recipes to add to my collection.  I love recipes so much that I hate to deviate from them when I am actually cooking.  Once I’ve made a particular dish a few times and notice that it needs less salt or more garlic, I might, and I repeat might, think about making a few changes.  But, for the most part, I end up sticking to the recipe.  There’s something really satisfying about replicating the same recipe time after time, until the piece of paper on which it is written becomes wrinkled, faded, and stained from so much use.  Following a recipe, doing something the way you’ve always done it, is comfortable.  Having a recipe to follow, especially if it’s a familiar one, leads me to a predictable ending without any challenges, or much thinking, along the way.  It always gives me exactly what I am looking for.

            The lawyer we hear about from Luke in this morning’s Gospel seems to be interested in finding a recipe to follow.  This man, well-versed in the law, the Torah, comes to Jesus and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life.  What’s fascinating to me about this exchange is that the lawyer assumes that eternal life is his for the taking.  He does not come to Jesus wondering if he is able to inherit eternal life.  Instead, he is concerned with finding the right technique, the right recipe to follow, that one thing he needs to do in order get him what is his in the most efficient way.  Unfortunately for the lawyer, Jesus does not give him exactly what he’s looking for.  Instead, in true teacher form, Jesus responds with some questions of his own, asking the lawyer to tell him what is written in the law.  Citing verses from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, the lawyer responds by articulating the two great commands of the law: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”  Ever the lawyer, still looking for answers, he asks Jesus a follow-up question: “And who is my neighbor?”  In other words, the lawyer asks, “Who are the ones I am to love?”

            Once again, Jesus doesn’t give the lawyer the answer he’s come to expect.  The expected answer would have described the neighbor in terms of the usual status markers of the day: gender, occupation, family, ethnic background, or religious sect.  Instead, Jesus tells a parable that many of us now know by heart.  He tells the lawyer, tells us, of a man on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho who is attacked by robbers and left for dead.  A priest encounters this man on the road and “passes by on the other side.”  Next, a Levite comes by, and he too “passes by on the other side.” They are not bad people, the priest and the Levite.  They are not ethically dead and totally devoid of emotion.  While their behavior was certainly not commendable, it wasn’t without reason.  Contact with a corpse would have defiled the priest and the Levite and disqualified them from performing their duties in the Temple.  The body on the roadside could have been a plant by robbers to lure other travelers into stopping; they could have been robbed and killed themselves.  They knew what the rules were, and they knew what the risks were, and they stuck to the rules.  And then, a Samaritan sees the half dead man lying on the road and, according to Jesus, is “moved with pity.”  Samaritans were an ethnic and religious group who, for a variety of reasons (including intermarriage with non-Judeans) were regarded as Gentiles, as outside the scope of God’s chosen people.  And what does the Samaritan, who the lawyer would have viewed as an enemy, as an outcast, do?  He bandages the man’s wounds, puts him on his animal, and takes him to an inn to care for him.  “Who do you think was a neighbor to this man?” Jesus asks.  “The one who showed him mercy,” the lawyer responds.  The one who put love into action.  The one who dared to deviate from the recipe.  The one who recognized that the rules, the customs and conventions of the day, were blinding people to the needs of their neighbors.  The one who lived out what we heard in this morning’s reading from Deuteronomy: that the life God calls us to is not directed toward some far-off world “in heaven” or “beyond the sea” but right here in front of us.

            In this beloved parable, Jesus turns the recipe of the day on its head and challenges the lawyer, and us, to expand our definition of who our neighbor is, of who we are to love.  As I studied the texts and prepared my sermon this week, I also heard Jesus issuing me, issuing us, another challenge.  I suspect that for many of us, the temptation to be like the priest and Levite is far greater than the temptation to be like the robbers.  The priest and the Levite are very much with us.  We are not people who like to be found on life’s extremes.  By and large, we are middle-class, middle-income, middle-brow people who follow the middle road.  Like the priest and the Levite, we church people love the rules.  We have a recipe, and come hell or high water, we are going to stick to it!  We take pride in the fact that, in this place, even as much changes around us, the preaching of the Gospel and the administering of the sacraments remain at the center of our life together.  Each week, we gather around this table to be fed by Christ.  In baptism, we gather around this font; God claims us as God’s own, gives us our vocation, and weaves us into an assembly, the church.  With good reason, we read and study Scripture; we take seriously the Confessions and other teachings of the Church.  They are central to who we are.  But, to what end?  Do we do so in order to bolster our own sense of pride?  To keep those who look different than us, speak different than us, or believe something different than us at a distance?  Do we do so just because we’ve always done it?  Or, on the other hand, do we allow ourselves to risk being challenged by what God is doing in this place, at the table and the font, through Scripture, by the tradition?  To be shaped by the call to place love of God and neighbor at the center of our lives, even when doing so goes against the rules?  Like the priest and the Levite, is what we teach and confess, is what we do here in church each week, causing us to “pass by [our neighbor] on the other side” of the road, or, like the Samaritan, is it causing us to be “moved with compassion” and to “show mercy” to our neighbors in the world?

            Jane Strohl, one of my favorite contemporary theologians, writes, “There was for Martin Luther no special religious realm . . . set aside for the deliberate cultivation of spirituality.  There was only the world and an endless proliferation of human vocations within it.”[1]  In other words, “the religious life,” that is, what we do and teach here in this place among ourselves, is to be “integrated completely into the diverse, commonplace . . . tasks of daily life in and for the world.”[2]

            God’s vision for us challenges the predictability and comfort that we from always doing things the same way.  God blurs the neat lines that we, like the priest and the Levite, draw between the church and the world.  In baptism, and each and every day, God rewrites our recipes.  In Christ, God does not pass by us on the other side of the road but instead draws close, calling us out of our self-centeredness, our idleness, our indifference and into the world, in love for and service to our neighbor.  May we be open to this call, and to the new recipes that God is writing for us, here in this place and in the world in which we live.  Amen.