sermon-July 15

July 15, 2007
Ah, the Good Samaritan! One of Jesus’ best known parables, perhaps because it is so basic, so foundational to our faith. Love God all the way, and love your neighbor as yourself. And who is my neighbor? Anybody in need. It doesn’t get any clearer than that.
To be honest, I’m not terribly fond of the parable of the Good Samaritan, and I’ll tell you why. I keep identifying with the priest and the Levite. Then I feel really crummy about myself. How often do Jesus’ parables leave us feeling crummy about ourselves, because we don’t measure up? We’re never good enough. I grew up thinking that this story has a very simple moral: if we are good people, we help other people who need it, no matter who they are, no matter how inconvenient it is for us. Bad people turn their heads and keep going. With all the needs in the world that I am not responding to, which camp does that put me in?
But I’m not sure it’s that simple. Jesus’ message was never, “You’re not good enough.” Jesus message is good news. It’s all about God’s wondrous, delighting love for us, no matter what. Jesus is not telling a parable about good people and bad people here. He does not say that the priest and the Levite were evil. They may have felt a real tug at the heartstrings as they went by, thinking, “Poor guy! I wish I could help!” But they couldn’t risk ritual uncleanness, which could make them lose their jobs; or they feared for their own safety; or they had other ministries to attend to – who can say? It wasn’t necessarily malice or hardness of heart that caused them to pass the wounded man by. However, in that particular place and time, they placed their own needs – quite possibly valid, worthwhile needs – above his need. They failed to see the connection between their lives and his. And so they failed to be neighbors.
As we all fail in some way. If my neighbor could be anybody, I have about 6.6 billion neighbors. And way too many of my neighbors are lying by the side of the road, in all kinds of conditions. I really care about the various crises going on in the world. And yet, I can’t respond to all of them.
Last week I spent a couple days with my friend Ruth. We go way back together. 25 years ago we were fresh out of college and living in community at Church of the Messiah in Detroit, full of idealism and trying to change the world. She was a nurse and I taught in the day care center. As we reminisced about those times, Ruth recalled a memory that pains her still. One night about midnight she was driving home from her late shift through nearly deserted inner city streets. There was one car ahead of her, stopped at a traffic light, also driven by a woman alone. Suddenly three young men came off the sidewalk, jumped on the car in front of Ruth and crashed a brick through the windshield.
This was before cell phones, mind you. Ruth had no idea what she could possibly do to help. She didn’t dare stop. She drove around the car, home as fast as she could and called 911. She never did find out what happened after that. To this day she cannot forget the fact that she drove away.
As I thought about the parable of the Good Samaritan, I couldn’t get Ruth’s story out of my head. I know Ruth is a good person. And I don’t think God was calling her to risk her own life in a situation where she probably couldn’t have made a difference. Our community was already doing so much in that neighborhood – a day care center, a school, meals for elderly people, work on housing issues – and we had made a pretty intense commitment by choosing to live there. Ruth was living the Good Samaritan lifestyle. Was it enough? No. Ruth was doing what she could do, and she couldn’t help that woman being carjacked.
So we live with this ongoing tension, trying to figure out which needs God is calling us to respond to. We choose the people we will help, and how much, and we know that it will never be enough, that always there will be more we could have done. It’s tempting to be overwhelmed, to be paralyzed into inaction, to give up and not do anything. But that is not living in Christian faith and hope, and that is not loving either our neighbor or ourselves in the way that God calls us to.
You know, this is really a sermon for those of us going on pilgrimage this week. But the rest of you can listen in.
We are going to another country, one vastly poorer than our own, to help out in an orphanage. There isn’t anything more Biblical than taking care of orphans. For a week, we will do some good work, make friends with people who are different from us, probably see poverty like we have never seen before, and hopefully grow closer to God and to our own souls through all of this. And when we leave, there will still be orphans and there will still be poverty. It will be tempting to think that our one week’s work in Jamaica wasn’t really all that important. I urge us to not fall into that trap, because God will be there making sure that we make a difference, even if we can’t measure or quantify it.
Being a neighbor isn’t always easy. Jesus calls us to continually stretch the outer limits of what we think we can do for another, and it’s almost guaranteed that we will be stretched on this trip. With every act of love, Jesus says, “Oh, that’s wonderful! Beautiful! Now go and love some more.”
Remember that the Jews hated the Samaritans, and vice versa. Jesus, having set his face toward Jerusalem, had just come through Samaria on his way from Galilee, so those hostilities would have been fresh in his mind. What made the Samaritan in the parable a neighbor, as he traveled in a hostile foreign country, was his ability to find a connection with the beaten man and act on it. That’s the kind of stretching Jesus is calling us to.
I’m going to read you a little bit from the Cotton Patch Gospel of Luke. This was written in the 1960s by Clarence Jordan, a Georgia farmer and New Testament Greek scholar. He translated the Gospels from the Greek into a paraphrase, with Jesus living in Georgia in the middle of the 20th century. In this parable, the two who pass by are a white preacher and a white Gospel singer, and the Samaritan is a black man.
"Then a black man traveling that way came upon the fellow, and what he saw moved him to tears. He stopped and bound up his wounds as best he could, drew some water from his water-jug to wipe away the blood and then laid him on the back seat. All the while his thoughts may have been along this line: ‘Somebody's robbed you; yeah, I know about that, I been robbed, too. And they done beat you up bad; I know, I been beat up, too. And everybody just go right on by and leave you laying here hurting. Yeah, I know. They pass me by, too.’"
The one who proved to be a neighbor was the one who could look at another, no matter how different, and see himself. And seeing himself in great need, he put aside his own plans and helped to the best of his ability. And when he had done all he could do, he left the man in the care of another good neighbor, the innkeeper. We will go to Jamaica as Samaritans, open to helping however we can help, seeking the connections between ourselves and the people we meet, and trusting God to make it matter. We may never know what impact we have, but we know that God will make the most of our gifts of time and energy.
And, for the folks who are listening in, we already know that it isn’t required to go to another country to act with love and mercy. We celebrate the neighborly things we are already doing, even as we keep stretching those outer boundaries of who we will respond to with love. It may feel as if what we do is never enough, but that’s simply not true. The Christian faith and hope we live in reminds us that every act of love is holy, blessed by God, and Jesus smiles and says, “Oh, that’s wonderful! Beautiful! Now go and love some more. I will make it be enough.”

Rachel Stivenson, seminarian