Two stories about young people with two very different endings.
     The first story is set in a small town in Tennessee near Chattanooga with fewer than two thousand residents, a community that lost economic footing more than thirty years ago when the mine was shut down and hasn’t yet recovered. It is a homogenous community, where most everyone is white and protestant and a little more than hundred miles away was the place where the Ku Klux Klan was born. It is also a community that decided to teach about diversity. An eighth grade class with leadership from a teacher began a Holocaust Education project. Most of the students didn’t know anyone who was Jewish and set out to learn about their Jewish brothers and sisters and the horror of the Holocaust. The project grew in ways they could never imagine. Needing a tangible way to grasp the magnitude of the millions of Jews who were killed, the students started collecting a million papers clips. Their project gained momentum as they received letters from Holocaust survivors; invited guests visit their class and collected more and more paperclips. The paper clip project became a permanent reminder of need for diversity when the school received a German railcar used to transport Jews to Auschwitz. The rail car filled with millions of paper clips stands as a Holocaust memorial at the school that welcome visitors daily to see the tragedy of hate and intolerance. The story has been documented in the film, Paper Clips.
     The second story is quite different about a young man that rather than been taught tolerance was taught hatred. As an adolescent this young man had trouble in school, he was a fighter and often skipped school. The truth was is he never quite fit in. He moved around a lot with his mom and without a father figure was drawn to men he thought were strong. Strong they were and often preached a theology of hate. After becoming involved in the extremist Christian identity movement, this young man was drawing Nazi symbols on his notebooks in school, writing papers denying the Holocaust ever happened and socking up the messages of hate from words and literature of the movement of white supremacy. This young man is Eric Rudolph the man responsible for the 1996 Olympic Bombings as well as bombing Abortion clinics that have killed innocent people.
     Eboo Patel, an American Muslim of Indian decent begins his book, Acts of Faithby using these two stories to as examples of religious pluralism and religious totalitarianism. Patel’s book is a call to action for young people of various faiths to serve together. Growing up Patel experienced rejection of various forms and often tried to understand where the paths of his heritage: America, India, and Islam would meet. After being transformed by serving others in high school and college: volunteering at the YMCA, cooking dinner at a women’s shelter, delivering cakes and cookies to the Salvation Army to name a few, Patel was convinced that serving others and teaching tolerance can build bridges of understanding.
     Patel notes that one hundred years ago, the great African American scholar W.E.B. DuBois famously said, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Patel believes that the twenty-first century will be shaped by the question of the faith line. On one side the faith line are the religious totalitarians who believe that only one interpretation of one religion is a legitimate way to believe and belong in this world. Everyone else needs to be converted, condemned or killed. On the other side of the faith line are the religious pluralists, who believe that people who profess different creeds and belong to different communities of faith need to learn to live together. Religious pluralism is not about forced consensus, but rather a form a proactive cooperation that affirms the identity of each. ⁱ
     Patel believes the place to begin is with young people. Young people have always played a role in social movements. His thesis is simple: influence matters, programs count, mentors make a difference, and institutions leave their mark. When we look back into the lives of young religious terrorists, we find a web of individuals and organizations that shaped them. Could our future tell of a different history of young people that make evening news for bettering the world and humanity rather than destroying it?
     The first question the lawyer asked Jesus seemed straight forward, the question about eternal life. And as one who knew the law well, the lawyer knew the answer about loving God with heart, soul, strength and mind, and loving your neighbor as yourself. But then he had to ask a second question.
     We need not put a black hat on the lawyer and spend any time making him about to be the bad guy who dares to challenge Jesus. As we shouldn’t spend any time deciding who in the parable is right or wrong and who we, ourselves might identify with. The priest and Levite were choosing between duty and duty, much like a surgeon who has received a call from the hospital about a patient who is in need, might quickly ride past an accident on 95 not knowing who was hurt, to attend the patient they know is suffering at the hospital. Both the priest and the Levite had religious duties to perform at the Temple.
     We don’t know why the Samaritan approaches the injured traveler, but he does. He saw something different than the other two passers by and was moved with pity and right there on the road bandaged his wounds and puts him on his animal. We do know that the Samaritan has his own ride and he has cash, enough to pay for the wounded man at the inn, and enough trust with the innkeeper that he would repay whatever else was needed to cover his bill. ⁱⁱ
     To make the Samaritan the hero of the parable was radical. For the Jewish lawyer, a man who knew the scriptures, taking a cue from a Samaritan was something hard to swallow. The Samaritans were the wrong religion, having departed from traditional Jewish belief and who believed that God was to be worshipped on Mount Gerizim rather than in the temple in Jerusalem. It is one thing to celebrate diversity, but quite another to recognize the potential for goodness in someone whose basic belief system- in your view- is wrong.
     This is not one of those stories in scripture that is just about God, where we know to move out of the way and to let God in. No, this is one of those stories that try as we might the focus is on us…how WE love God, how WE love ourselves, and maybe most of all how WE love our neighbors. Jesus gives the instructions twice, do this and you will live, and go and do likewise. We are simply asked to go and do and to see something different that others have not.
     One commentator writes, “In the Samaritan’s eyes- the universe is not a closed or predetermined system. The Samaritan is distinguished as much by the way he acts, as by what he sees. He is able to see the possibility that the man might still be alive.”
     A young priest who works in a homeless shelter describes the role imagination, being able to see something that isn’t there…or there quite yet. “Most of the homeless people we encounter want to see their lives transformed. It is not enough to sit with them in their pain. I need to be able to say, ‘I can imagine this person not being homeless, I can dream this person not being addicted, and maybe some of that happening will involve some gifts or resources I bring to the situation.”
     Imagination is key, seeing beyond what is in front of our eyes. It is key for Patel as he tries to imagine how people of various faiths can live together and better the world rather than destroying it. It is key for a teacher in a small town in Tennessee to teach middle school kids about diversity and learning from the pain of history.
     In a powerful speech about the need for action and protest against the Vietnam War in April of 1967 Martin Luther King reminds us…. “We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak; for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
     King continued to say that a true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of our past and present policies. “On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life roadside; but that will only be an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not constantly be beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” ⁱⁱⁱ
     We are called not just to pick up the battered along life’s road, but to pave the Jericho road and others. We might have the change the Jericho road so that people don’t get beat up, robbed, and lay in a ditch wondering if they will die. We are called to put up some streetlights, so others might see something different that they saw before. We are called to teach tolerance to young people of all faiths and traditions so that our world in the next twenty years will be not live in fear from young people who have decided to listen the voices of extremists and give their lives as martyrs, blowing themselves up with bombs and killing innocent people. We are called to imagine a world in which homeless people can one day go to work and then return after a long day to their own home. We are called to serve, however young or old we are, in schools and boardrooms or by serving meatloaf, mashed potatoes to our neighbors on a August day in Trenton or teaching our imprisoned neighbors to read, or learning that our neighbors might be able to teach us something…especially about eternal life.
     Remember this isn’t just about God.
     This is about what we are willing to do by not letting our love stop with God or ourselves, but understanding that our heart, soul, strength, and mind can hold much more and should.

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ⁱ Patel, Eboo, Acts of Faith, Beacon Press 2007
ⁱⁱ Keizer, Garret, HELP: The Original Human Dilemna, Harper Collins 2004
ⁱⁱⁱMartin Luther King addressing clergy and lay leaders April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in NYC