Would you pass a faith sincerity test?

The state of Israel is a small country on the world stage numerically but boasts the most contested real estate on Earth.

With 8.9 million people, Israel has 3 million more people than Missouri yet 4 million fewer than Illinois.

It is a country comparatively few Americans have visited due to distance and concerns about security (read: terrorism).

Israel's most famous city, Jerusalem, is embattled territory.

All three of the world's monotheistic religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- claim the city as sacred.

Each faith tradition has long believed it has a valid, everlasting stake to be there.

Tension seems everywhere present inside Jerusalem's Old City, a place this writer visited with his family in 2009.

The Times of Israel reported last week the report of a respected demographer who said Jews are now a 47% minority within Israel and its territories.

The homeland for Jews created in 1948, if the statistics are correct, is effectively majority Gentile -- yet Judaism has never expressed the kind of evangelical zeal, specifically the desire to make conversions, which has so marked Christianity.

In the Aug. 27 online edition of Jerusalem Post, a rabbi explained the process for a non-Jew to join the Jewish people.

It's a process based on the experience of a Gentile woman noted in the Hebrew Scriptures who joined the Jewish people -- and among whose descendants was counted Israel's greatest king, David.

In part because of Ruth the Moabite, there is a method for joining the Jewish people.

Ruth is quoted as saying, "Your people are my people and your God is my God." (Ruth 1:16).

The process to join, at least in Israel, is governed by a rabbinical court and is based, according to the published account quoted above, on several metrics but mainly on sincerity -- the desire to join, as per Ruth's example.

Sincerity

How does one measure sincerity?

That's a tough one.

I used to have an employee during my pastoral period who liked to say, "I want you to know my heart."

People love that turn of phrase, which is interpreted as indicative of sincerity, I've found.

What matters, though, is not explanation but rather how one's actions display sincerity, or as my long-ago employee put it, a person's "heart."

I've been thinking a lot about sincerity of late.

How would one prove he or she was sincere about a personal faith?

In response, the story of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke is recommended for your consideration.

The tale, found in Luke 10:25-37, offers this moral.

Loving one's neighbor, a command of Christ, means a demonstration of mercy is needed.

Mercy is a path to show sincerity, to demonstrate what one believes at the core.

I don't know how often I've displayed mercy to others.

Some, certainly, but what I do recognize is I've not done it often enough.

Am I sincere, then? Are you?

Perhaps a gut check moment.

Let those with eyes to see, let them see; and with ears to hear, let them hear.

Jesus said something about this, too, I recall.