A friend, Lester Lee, has sent me a copy of a sermon he preached on January 19th, the Sunday before this year’s celebration of Martin Luther King Day. Professor Lee had been invited by the pastor of his church to deliver the sermon on this special occasion.
He entitled his sermon: “The Good Samaritan: Martin Luther King, Jr. and American Democracy.” The text makes me wish I had been there to hear my friend’s inspiring words, but reading them is enough to touch me with spiritual insight.
A passage that I find especially moving is one in which Lester Lee reaches back into an event in his early history:
“I know in my own personal life that I learned about being a Good Samaritan from my grandmother, Deaconess Earl Virginia Murrell. One day when I was a youngster, walking with her through Central Square here in Cambridge, we encountered a beggar, a disheveled man, lying in a doorway. I started to snicker at him. But before I could utter a disparaging word, my grandmother grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and shook me. She said, ‘Don't you ever laugh at another human being. He, too, had a mother and is a child of God.’ My grandmother had mercy on that man's misfortune and taught me the meaning of mercy.”
Now middle-aged, this man looks back over the decades and targets this incident as crucial in his outlook on the world. His grandmother taught him a lesson that he has never forgotten and continues to live by every day. It is a powerful lesson that goes smack against the temptation to look down on others less fortunate than ourselves. The woman’s words remain beautiful as they testify to the basic dignity of each human being as a child of God.
About the same time, I heard a report of a young teacher in a high school classroom, let’s say in Colorado, who played a similar role to my friend’s grandmother.
One of this young woman’s students said something in class that was derogatory about people on welfare. This boy suggested such people were lazy and undeserving.
Taking the boy aside, the teacher, only a few years older than he, pointed out to him how fortunate he was to belong to a family with adequate money and other resources. It was not his doing that had resulted in his life being so blessed but rather came from the gifts he had been given. The appropriate way to look upon people down and out, she suggested, was with compassion.
I felt buoyed up by this young teacher’s response and I feel glad to know about her intervention. She is a credit to her profession in delivering to an adolescent a lesson that may serve him well for the rest of his life. He is unlikely to learn anything more important in his high school career.
When I was a child, I remember being mystified by seeing people begging in Boston. How could it be, I wondered, that some people had so little while others had so much? What would my father do, as he and I passed a panhandler on the street? Feelings of awe still come over me, so many decades later, that the world remains so unbalanced.
Though large-hearted people will continue to try and right this imbalance, success will not come anytime soon. Meanwhile, the spiritual challenge remains to respect the God-given dignity of people who are dispossessed. Whenever we feel tempted to look down on them, we could not do better than to conjure up the image of my friend’s grandmother and the shaking she gave her beloved grandson long ago, from the scruff of his neck down.
And the young teacher’s lesson given to her student to set his values straight can remind us of our own need to recognize the dignity of others, no matter how reduced in circumstances they may be.
Only at our own spiritual peril can the rest of us afford to forget the call to compassion. When people poor in material goods and troubled in spirit come into view, it may be tempting to look down on them or even despise them for supposed shiftlessness. To give into this temptation, however, is to do harm to both them and ourselves.
Richard Griffin