Sermon for Sunday, July 1, 2007

Crossing the Boundries:  A Good Samaritan

4th in a series on The Subversive  Parables of Jesus

by

Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

Scripture: Luke 10:25-37

²⁵And now a lawyer stood up and, to test him, asked, 'Master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?' ²⁶He said to him, 'What is written in the Law? What is your reading of it?' ²⁷He replied, 'You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.' ²⁸Jesus said to him, 'You have answered right, do this and life is yours.'

Parable of the Good Samaritan

²⁹But the man was anxious to justify himself and said to Jesus, 'And who is my neighbour?'³⁰In answer Jesus said, 'A man was once on his way down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of bandits; they stripped him, beat him and then made off, leaving him half dead.³¹Now a priest happened to be traveling down the same road, but when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side.³²In the same way a Levite who came to the place saw him, and passed by on the other side.³³But a Samaritan traveler who came on him was moved with compassion when he saw him.³⁴He went up to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring oil and wine on them. He then lifted him onto his own mount and took him to an inn and looked after him.³⁵Next day, he took out two denarii and handed them to the innkeeper and said, "Look after him, and on my way back I will make good any extra expense you have."³⁶Which of these three, do you think, proved himself a neighbor to the man who fell into the bandits' hands?'³⁷He replied, 'The one who showed mercy towards him.' Jesus said to him, 'Go, and do the same yourself.'

We had a terrific week of Vacation Church School this week with 192 kids and 77 volunteer leaders including some of our youth. I had a chance to visit the classrooms almost every day, and when I was in the drama room where the Bible stories were acted out, that day we were seeing the story of Mary and Martha.

Mary and Martha were getting their home ready for a visit from Jesus and I found myself very moved when Jesus knocked on the door and they greeted him with these words: “Come on in Jesus; we are so glad you are here.”

I thought about that as a summary of our faith and our wanting to be open to this subversive, unsettling teacher and Lord and prophet. We know the importance of his words, we want to follow him and identify with him and live the full life he offers of kindness and compassion and justice for the outcasts. And if we really open our hearts to all this, we will find ourselves in ferment and feeling a little unsettled—because that is what he does.

 We invite him into our hearts and our lives and he starts to rearrange the furniture. He asks us to give up some cherished ideas that have been our thoughts and not God’s thoughts. He asks us to be skeptical about what our culture says it means to be a “successful” person and he redefines success with words like compassion and kindness and humility. He turns some of our ideas upside down and asks us to think about things with the basic perspective not of our country, not of our political affiliation, not of our race, but first to approach things as a disciple of Christ and citizen of the kingdom of God.

He challenges our smallness and our complacency and our excuses and our bigotries and asks us to put our relationship with God in first place in our hearts and he promises that when we do that, THEN we will find the best kind of life possible, the abundant life or life eternal as this story tells us.

But if we really invite Jesus in, it is unsettling at times and uncomfortable at times. He begins to rearrange our internal furniture and our long held shallow values. Or as South African minister Peter Storey says in one of our Disciple video tapes –when we invite Jesus into our hearts, he says he will come in but he is also bringing all these other people with him! And they are people we tend to ignore or think we are better than or have nothing in common with or have discounted or even have written off as less than us.

That is what is happening in this story today, and we will have to work hard to see how shocking this story is because we have heard it so often that we have domesticated the story and domesticated the wildness of its message.

There was no such thing as a GOOD Samaritan in Jesus’ time. Why not? Because Jews and Samaritans were enemies—some would say, mortal enemies. It would be like us calling someone a good terrorist, a good Islamic fundamentalist. For some extreme partisans it would be as radical as the term a good Democrat, or a good Republican, a good liberal. It was a shocking thing to think about because the two groups had hundreds of years of bitterness and enmity and hatred between them.

Who were the Samaritans? They were considered by the Jews to be a mongrel race because when the Assyrians conquered the Northern kingdom of Israel over 700 years before Christ was born, some of the Jews intermarried with the Assyrians and they came to be called Samaritans. They and the Jews did not worship at the same place. Do you remember a Bible story about that? In the gospel of John, Jesus does the radical thing of traveling through the region of Samaria to get back to his region of Galilee—most Jews would not do that. He stops in a village at noon at the well and asks a woman for a drink of water; she is a Samaritan woman. She is shocked. Why? Several reasons. Men did not talk to women in public. And Jews did not drink from the same vessel as Samaritans. He sees her life story and talks with her about her five husbands and she changes the subject quickly and talks about the difference in how Jews and Samaritans worship God. They have different places and ways of worship. They are enemies. They know that the other is deadly wrong.

Jews and Samaritans are like the two ministers from different faiths who were arguing about religion and one said, “Well, we obviously disagree, so I suggest you go on worshiping God in your way and I will worship God in his way.”

Their relationship was even more intense and more hostile because when the Jews came back from captivity in Babylon in 522 BC and tried to rebuild the temple and the walls of the city, the Samaritans attacked them and tried to prevent the building, so the animosity goes back a long way.

Let’s go back to the parable. Jesus is asked a question by a lawyer. (We could now do lawyer jokes but we will just stop with the minister jokes for today.) Is it a sincere question? Luke tells us that the lawyer asked the question to test Jesus, perhaps to trap Jesus.

What must I do to have eternal life? He is not asking about how to get to heaven, he is asking about having the most meaningful life, the most successful life, the GOOD life starting right now. There is common misunderstanding when we first come to the Bible, a misunderstanding that says all this religion stuff is about what happens after we die, that salvation is only about getting into heaven at some later time in our life. That is not what Jesus means by it and we see it here.

Jesus responds to the question with a question. Have you noticed that rabbis often do that? Ministers sometime do that. One comic tells about a man who asked his Rabbi, "Why do Rabbis often answer a question by asking another question. The Rabbi thought for a moment and said, "Why shouldn’t a Rabbi respond to a question with a question?"

Jesus responds to the question about what to do for the best life possible by asking, "What is written in the Law/the Bible?" The lawyer answers, “Love God with all your heart mind, soul and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.” It is written on the walls of our building. These are words to live by. Put God first in your life—most of us are still working on that—and treat other people just the way you want to be treated, and your will have the GOOD life, you will be a successful person. That is what Jesus tells him. It is still true.

The lawyer says, “Thank you very much; I will work on that, and he goes away. Right?

No. He is a lawyer. He does not want to extend concern and compassion to anyone undeserving. He wants to know just who is in and who is out, who he can leave out and draw the boundaries around. So he asks another question—Just who is my neighbor?

By the way, when the verse says Love your neighbor as you love yourself, this is not about liking people or being good friends with all persons, it means having the same concern for their well being as our own. It gets us beyond our selfishness and our ego and our greed. Most of us are not there yet.

Who is my neighbor? Jesus tells a story. A man was walking from Jerusalem to Jericho when he fell among thieves. Everyone who heard the story nodded their heads. They knew the road—one of the most dangerous roads in all of Israel dropping almost 2000 feet in a couple of miles, containing blind corners and twists and switchbacks and lots of places for bandits to jump out and ambush a traveler. Many muggings and robberies occurred because of the topography.

We have been on that road the first couple of trips we made to Israel and now it is so dangerous the tour company busses don’t even try to travel on it. Think Trailridge road with twice the switchbacks and no guardrail.

The man was robbed, beaten and left for dead. But there was hope. Two different religious leaders happened to pass by him and might have offered help. They did not. Why do you suppose? They should have. If they had a living faith, they should have. Yes, if they touched a dead person they risked being defiled according to the purity laws of Judaism but there were other laws about compassion that took precedence. And they were not on the way to the temple to perform their duties; they were coming back from the temple and going back down to Jericho where many priests and Levites lived.

Why did they not stop to help? Why did they go on? We don’t know. But the way Jesus set the story up, the crowd knew who the next person would be! They just knew this was going to be an anti clergy story and that the next person was going to be a common Jewish layperson who was really faithful to God—unlike these phony hypocrite clergy, and that the lay person would really practice compassion and kindness and mercy and bind up this poor wounded man.

The crowd was shocked when Jesus told them that the hero of the story was a mortal enemy of the Jews—a Samaritan. They would have gasped. And they might not have been able to even hear Jesus tell about how the Samaritan tended to the Jewish man’s wounds and took him to a hotel and paid for him to stay and recover.

I don’t know what the right parallel example of this boundary smashing behavior would be today. It would be like a story of Ted Kennedy being the wounded man lying on the road and two people pass by—Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama but don’t stop, but the third person who stops and helps is Bill O Reilly. Or it would be like one of you is injured and bleeding and Harvey Martz and Cindy Bates walks right by you but the persons who stops to help you is a tattooed member of the Hell’s Angels.

Jesus’ parable is about breaking down the boundaries and stereotypes and racism and political hatred we operate with and asking us first of all to see each other as persons. It is a troubling story.

Why did the Samaritan stop? Jesus gives us the answer. When he saw the man his heart was filled with compassion.

The translation of the Greek word here is important. Some of your Bibles say, he was filled with pity and that is a terrible translation of the Greek. Pity implies condescension. Compassion is being able to hurt with and empathize with someone who is hurting and then doing something about it.

The Greek root word means being moved inwardly in our gut. It has to do with feeling something inwardly in our heart, in our gut. When we talk about a gut wrenching experience, we are getting close to what this word meant when the Bible uses it. His heart was moved and affected and so he stopped.

When has that happened to you? We have 45 youth and college student and some adults in Belize right now doing some additional construction work on a preschool there connected with the Methodist church in Belize. We have developed this relationship over several years. I think we will hear some stories when they come back about them feeling deeply moved, experiences of compassion. I think most of them went there because they have felt in their heart, in their gut, that we are so blessed and so fortunate and that God expects us to make a difference, to be a blessing and not just to settle in our blessings.

You might think about and discuss with someone today when you have experienced what the man who stopped and helped experienced: when recently have you felt inwardly moved by seeing someone’s need. And if you haven’t felt that, think about what that might mean as well. There are some things that should be touching our hearts, even breaking our hearts.

The larger question is what do you think is touching God’s heart and breaking God’s heart? What do you suppose God is most concerned about, most compassionate about right now, and should not that be what we feel the same way about if we are doing what God asks—putting God at the center of life and letting everything else fall into place after that?

The Samaritan in the story takes the injured fellow to a hotel, pays for his stay and promises the innkeeper more later if that is required. Jesus ends the story and then turns the lawyer’s question around—did you notice that? Jesus asks the lawyer, “Which of these was a neighbor to the injured man?” Which of these acted neighborly to the injured man?

Jesus does not allow the lawyer to draw any more boundaries, any more neat little lines and say, I can care for those persons but not these other persons. I can separate people into groups, neighbor and not-neighbor, and limit my compassion now. Jesus says that our practice of drawing lines and boundaries so we can still close some folks out and demonize them has to stop. He does that when he makes an outcast, an enemy, the hero of this parable. When people left Jesus after hearing that story, how did they feel? Comfortable? Complacent? Unsettled? Upset? Angry?

I hope they and we felt addressed and sobered because the last words Jesus says to the lawyer and to us are these:  now you go and act in the same way. Go and show compassion and mercy to people whom you think are very different from you, even when there may have been centuries of enmity between races. Try seeing each other’s humanity, try seeing each other as brothers and sisters and not as stereotypes and enemies.

Go and practice compassion and mercy and kindness. This will not be easy or convenient. It will be difficult right now in our own country where there is a bitter, bitter partisan divide and where the challenge of racism is still very strong. Many of us Caucasians will be skeptical of that statement but ask your friends who are African American or Native American or Asian or Hispanic or…. if racism is still a problem and then brace yourself for the answer.

Come into my heart Lord Jesus. And Jesus says, “OK, but I am bringing all these other people with me.”

Which one of these three was a neighbor to the wounded man? The one who showed him mercy and kindness. Then, you go and do likewise.

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