The Good Samaritan Muslim

Before this past Sunday, I hadn't given the word "Samaritan" much thought. A Samaritan is someone who does good deeds, is kind to others, we should all strive to be one, etc., etc., and I think there's probably something about it somewhere in the New Testament. It's just a word, right?

Apparently not.

I spent a few days this past weekend in my hometown of Manhattan Beach, CA, catching up with friends and family and enjoying the annual Hometown Fair. A tradition of mine, whenever I'm in town on a Sunday morning, is to go back to the church I grew up in - Manhattan Beach Community Church - for services, which I was happy to be able to do last weekend as well. My beliefs aren't 100% in line with what MBCC preaches, but I spent a large portion of my childhood and adolescence there and going back to a community that's open and welcoming to everyone, whatever their beliefs, always feels like going home. Being greeted warmly, whether by new members of the church I don't know or by members who remember me from when I was eight years old, is as comforting a sensation as curling up by a fire on a cold day.

I was especially excited to be there this past Sunday, since a friend of mine who also grew up at MBCC, Joe (now Rev. Joe Zarro!), was giving the sermon. It was titled "The Good Muslim," and as Joe is one of the most compassionate, kind, thoughtful and inclusive people I know, I was eager to hear what he had to say about the haze of intolerance toward people who hold differing beliefs and particularly toward Muslims that seems to be spreading throughout much of the U.S.

Joe read the parable of the good Samaritan from the book of Luke, about a man who is set upon by thieves, beaten and left on the side of the road. A priest and a Levite (a man from a particular Hebrew tribe) each see the man and each passes by on the other side of the road, leaving him there to suffer. A Samaritan happens by and is the one who helps the man, tending his injuries and taking him to an innkeeper, whom he gives the equivalent of about two days' pay to care for the man until he can return.

Today, that doesn't seem like an exceptional story: the Samaritan is so called because he helped the man who was injured - he was a good Samaritan - right? Wrong. Joe explained that Samaritans were actually part of a religious sect (and they number about 700 worldwide today), one that was reviled by Judaism and treated with the same intolerance and fear with which Muslims are met in much of the world today. For the skeptical Jewish lawyer who asked "Who is my neighbor?" when Jesus instructed "Love thy neighbor as thyself," the idea that the Samaritan was his neighbor and deserved to be treated with fairness and respect was as radical as suggesting to a member of the Tea Party that a Muslim is his or her neighbor today.

The takeaway from this is that if a Samaritan, a man widely hated just because of the personal beliefs he held and not because of anything he had said or done, was the only person with humanity enough to stop and help a man who couldn't help himself, what does that say about prejudice and intolerance? If the Samaritan - or the Muslim, to use a modern example - hadn't existed, as the injured man himself - let's update him to a Christian - may have wished at some point in his life before that day on the road, what would the man's fate have been? The priest and the Levite - a pastor and a rabbi, in our modern example - would have passed him by and he would have continued to lie there, bleeding. The Samaritan (Muslim) demonstrated more compassion than anyone else in a society where he was regularly scorned and we remember his good deed, having long since forgotten that we ever despised or mistreated him.

This may be a parable from the Bible, but it also sounds a lot like common decency.

When it comes to organized religion and worship, I'm not a particularly active participant. My beliefs are my own and I usually prefer to keep them private. What I do share is my faith, a word I think is sadly under-utilized: my faith in the strength of community, my faith in the love of my friends and family and my faith in the basic goodness of humanity. In all of the shouting matches the past few months about how terrible it is that masjids (mosques) and Islamic community centers are being constructed around the country, amidst all the slander against Muslims as a single evil entity rather than a diverse group of people like any other, I haven't heard one critic mention a single Muslim he or she knows personally. And I have to wonder how anyone can hate more than one billion individuals they don't know - it seems to embody the very extremism these critics profess to stand against.

This wave of intolerance, hatred and bigotry worries me. But I have faith that neighbors will stand together against the mob and not only protect the people that mob seeks to cast out, but speak out on their behalf. I have faith that, if one person in that mob, and then another, and then just one more, stops shouting long enough to meet one of the people they've been shouting about, that they'll fall silent, realize that this person is their neighbor and turn to stand with, rather than against, him or her. I have faith that every one of us who shares space in this society can coexist, more or less peacefully. That faith has nothing to do with religion - mine or anyone else's - and everything to do with believing that people are basically good and, when face-to-face with another individual, whatever they look like or believe, will usually choose to accept, rather than hate, one another, because the commonalities that unite us almost always far outweigh the differences that we choose to let divide us.

If you're reading this, you're my neighbor and, although we may not always agree, I believe that we're more than capable of respecting one another for who we are. And I promise that if I see you bleeding on the side of the road, whoever you are, I'll stop and do what I can to help.