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The writer and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib published an essay in The New Yorker this morning. He wrote about an extraordinary, truly unbelievable experience he recently enjoyed. It happened on June 28, a couple of Saturdays ago, at the Beacon Theatre in New York City. That same evening, many of us were here celebrating the notable accomplishments at this parish over the past three years.
But the celebration in New York, at the Beacon Theatre, was vastly more important and wondrous, by several orders of magnitude. Ramy Youssef was there: Youssef is an actor, comedian, and producer. His presence alone enraptured the largely-Muslim audience. Their souls were soothed and delighted by his humor, and in his essay, Abdurraqib shared some of the inside-group humor that rallies and strengthens Muslims in this time of spiraling Islamophobia.
But surprise and delight stole across the room when the audience became aware of two more guests: Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York; and Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University graduate student who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for more than three months. Khalil was released just eight days before this triumphant evening. His detention, in Louisiana, prevented him from witnessing the birth of his first child. Abdurraqib was struck by how young Khalil is — just thirty years old, he is a brand-new father who is only now learning how to hold his infant son. Abdurraqib also admired how quickly and fiercely Khalil resumed his public advocacy for Palestine, unafraid of government reprisals.
In his essay about that evening, Hanif Abdurraqib shared some of his favorite sayings, or Ahadith, of the prophet Muhammad. This is my favorite Hadith from among his favorites: “A Hadith that I love,” Abdurraqib writes, “[a Hadith] which underpins many of my actions, states that ‘the believers in their mutual kindness, compassion, and sympathy are just like one body. When one of the limbs suffers, the whole body responds to it with wakefulness and fever.’”
“‘The believers, in their mutual kindness, compassion, and sympathy, are just like one body. When one of the limbs suffers, the whole body responds to it with wakefulness and fever.’”
Abdurraqib goes on to reflect on this Hadith: “I love the Hadith about a collective body because it is not just about pain—it is about sharing the full spectrum of human feeling. I am not drawn to action only because people have suffered or are suffering; I am drawn to action because I am distinctly aware of every inch of humanity from which suffering keeps people.”
“I am drawn to action because I am distinctly aware of every inch of humanity from which suffering keeps people.” I think what Abdurraqib means here is this: suffering keeps people from parts of their own humanity: suffering interferes with laughter and joy; suffering diminishes the human imagination; suffering bends humans low, sometimes quite literally, beneath a great burden of anguish, anger, and fear.
But even in the midst of suffering, humans do laugh; we do sing. And this night at the Beacon Theatre was a night of beautiful, curative comedy! Abdurraqib noticed the laughter of these famous and accomplished men, and it’s worth quoting him at length:
“It was a delight to catch a glimpse of [Mahmoud] Khalil in the throes of laughter. He laughed as though each laugh were a physical vessel urgently exiting his body, or a secret he’d held for so long that it had forced its way out. Khalil’s body jerked forward when he laughed — his laughter was more of a kinetic event than a sonic one. He rocked, he shook slightly, and he smiled wide. One seat over, Mamdani laughed, too, with a bit more volume; his laughter seemed to arrive less like a long-held secret than like an idea that he couldn’t wait to share. Most of the audience didn’t know [yet] that the two men were in the room, and because of this most of the audience missed out on the small miracle of watching them share their joy at the scene before them.”
If Muslim “believers,” as the Hadith calls them, are “just like one body,” then when one of them suffers, all of them suffer; but all of the emotions are felt this way, including laughter, sweet and salutary laughter. If one person laughs, the whole body of believers laughs. Of course many in the Beacon Theatre also wept, wiping away tears of surprise, relief, and hard-won joy. This was a nearly unbelievable inbreaking of hope, this wondrous event on a hot night in New York. Could the city of New York actually be poised to elect a Muslim mayor? Could the United States actually be raising up an advocate for Palestine who can inspire millions more, and finally throw off the dull and dreadful wet-wool blanket of bigotry and cruelty that still nearly smothers our Muslim compatriots and companions?
If so, then one strong way for all those here in this room who might have felt a little out of place at the Beacon Theatre that night — out of place not because we are not allies, but because we are not Muslims — one strong way for us to lock arms with our companions there is to affirm that our faith tradition also treasures teachings about the Body — the Body of Christ, the Body of this assembly, the Body of believers. But more crucially, our faith tradition extends our hand in peace to those who do not share our faith, and especially those who have been harmed by our faith — those who have been harmed by us.
This morning, we need look no further for this teaching than the wisdom we find in the deeply familiar parable of the man who traveled from Jerusalem to Jericho. Jerusalem to Jericho: this is a perilous road, both in our time and for those who first heard the teachings of Jesus. Jericho today is a city in the West Bank, in the middle of an inhumane conflict involving mass Palestinian displacement by Israeli settlers. In the time of Jesus, various factions turned the Jericho road into a dangerous path of violence.
For help in our effort to open up this parable, and to push past some of the easier, more obvious interpretations, I like to turn to Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish scholar of the Christian New Testament. Dr. Levine points to the fraught and complicated ethnic and cultural differences among the characters. The person who falls victim to robbery is traveling from Jerusalem: perhaps he is a faithful Judean man returning from pilgrimage at his holy city. The priest and the Levite are headed back to that city, presumably to take up their vocations in the temple. But if the robbery victim had been conscious enough to notice who was coming to his aid, he might have recoiled in anger and shock: it is a Samaritan. Judeans and Samaritans are geographical neighbors and ethnic-religious cousins, but they are not friends.
But this encounter is more nuanced, and troubling, than a kind gesture shared between estranged neighbors. Amy-Jill Levine brings this cultural conflict into sharp relief for us. “To hear the parable today,” she writes, “we only need to update the identity of the figures. [Let’s say] I am an Israeli Jew on my way from Jerusalem to Jericho, and I am attacked by thieves, beaten, stripped, robbed, and left half dead in a ditch. Two people who should have stopped to help [instead just] pass me by: the first, a Jewish medic from the Israel Defense Forces; the second, a member of the Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. But the person who takes compassion on me and shows me mercy is a Palestinian Muslim whose sympathies lie with Hamas...”
This breaks open the surprising wisdom that Jesus is teaching. Who is our neighbor? A person who comes to our aid. Okay, sure. Who is our neighbor? A person we approach to give aid. Yes, of course. Who is our neighbor? Sometimes our neighbor is the very last person we might expect to stop and offer assistance. Sometimes our neighbor is the one person we have identified as our enemy.
Like most parables — like all parables — this deceptively simple story disrupts our expectations, disturbs our contented, self-satisfied takes, upends our understanding of the world around us.
But back to that glorious evening in New York, late last month. I wasn’t there, and in a real sense I did not belong there: Beacon Theatre on June 28th was a truly safe space for Muslim mourning, healing, bonding, laughter, and love. The parables of Jesus we treasure stand proudly alongside the Islamic Ahadith, and with our own voices, with our own votes, with our own faith, we can work ever harder to be allies for those in greatest peril right now. But there is a difference — a healthy, natural difference — between allies and members of an oppressed group.
We can, however, hold another glad event, and in fact we do that week by week. We practice the celebration, over and over, knowing we won’t really get it all right until God’s dominion dawns for every single human person on Earth. We lay this Table; we pour wine into one cup; we break one bread into many fragments; we watch and listen to be sure everyone is nourished; we send the gifts out from here to those in our Body who can’t be physically present with us today. Week by week, we do all of these good things.
This meal is God’s balm for the wounds of this world, some of them inflicted by us, some of them inflicted in our name. This meal is God’s answer to that nagging question, “What can we do?” What can we do? We can feed the hungry world. We can run to the assistance of the ICE victim. We can relax and check our privilege when the person we never expected to help comes to our assistance. We can just keep at it, week by week, with God’s presence and power, until that weary road from Jerusalem to Jericho blossoms into a broad avenue of justice and peace.
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Preached on the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 10C), July 13, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Amos 7:7-17
Psalm 82
Colossians 1:1-14
Luke 10:25-37