The Good Samaritan

Race cars roar outside, as St. John's Speedway worships inside Brickyard Crossing.

Sermon preached on the sixth Sunday after Pentecost (July 14, 2019) at St. John's Episcopal Church, Speedway IN. Readings: Deuteronomy 30:9-14, Psalm 25:1-9, Colossians 1:1-14, Luke 10:25-37

Audio file

Show me your ways, O Lord, and teach me your paths. Lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, mother to us all. Amen.

Twice in recent days, I have come across one of those inspirational quotes that you see all the time on Facebook or Instagram artfully displaying the phrase “Everything happens for a reason.”

We’ve all probably had these words spoken to us at one time or other when we’ve been in grief or hardship, and we have probably spoken them ourselves as well. They’re meant to be comforting, but at best they gloss over the complexity of human existence in a world whose forces are ultimately out of our control, and at worst they ascribe malevolence and evil to the great ruler of the universe, whoever that may be.

But given its presence on greeting cards, inspirational posters, jewelry and keychains, “Everything happens for a reason” is as much an industry as a sentiment. So it’s not going anywhere, and it will remain a go-to phrase indicating sympathy and a sort of casual spirituality, part of the cultural background noise in the midst of grief and sorrow.

But what caught my attention in the two made-for-Instagram social media posts was not the phrase itself, but the attribution.

As near as I can tell, no one knows who first said, “Everything happens for a reason,” so I was surprised to see two posts that attribute the quote to scripture. One says it’s Genesis 50:20, and the other says it’s Psalm 37:5. I’ll let you look these up on your own later, but - spoiler alert - “Everything happens for a reason” is a boneheaded paraphrase of either verse.

I don’t know who created these posts - they just sort of seem to have sprouted like mushrooms after a rain in Facebook feeds and on Pinterest boards, but I do worry about the character of their creators’ faith, one that squanders the riches of scripture by shoehorning it into a shallow and sentimental secular platitude.

We run a similar risk with the parable of the Good Samaritan. The risk, fortunately, is not the scripture is outright misconstrued as in the “everything happens for a reason” stuff.

But this is a super well-known story, and we can sometimes be too comfortable in thinking we know what it means. Even outside the church, it has cultural currency in the naming of countless hospitals and other non-profits, and has even worked its way into our legal system, in the form of Good Samaritan laws that protect those who in good faith offer aid to an injured person from being sued in the event that such aid should cause unintentional injuries or other damage.

In American culture at large, the Good Samaritan is a helper, a healer, very often a hero - the sort of person we might aspire to be.

But Jesus tells us the Good Samaritan is a much more mundane kind of person: a neighbor.

Now, I might just be overly picky about vocabulary here, but I don’t think so. The trouble with the conception of the Good Samaritan as a heroic figure is that we can easily enough absolve ourselves of the responsibility to be heroes. I mean, who am I to be one? But it’s hard to say you don’t have the responsibility to be a neighbor, when pretty much by definition, you are one.

Not that that stops the lawyer who kicks off this story from trying. The lawyer asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?”

This is not a genuine question. As a student of the law, the lawyer has in his mind the 19th chapter of Leviticus, which sets the standard for how you should treat your neighbor: by leaving the edges of your fields unharvested, so the poor and the foreigner can have enough to eat, by having honest business dealings, by telling the truth to one another, by paying wages promptly, by judging fairly in the event of disputes, by seeking reconciliation rather than revenge.

Luke tells us the lawyer asks this question not out of genuine curiosity, but “to justify himself.” In other words we can safely assume that in his life perhaps he has had dishonest business dealings, or has held grudges rather than pursue forgiveness, has lied or held back wages - he wants to get off on the technicality that the people involved weren’t neighbors. Maybe they weren’t Jews, or they were foreigners, or Roman occupiers, so he’s held to a relaxed standard of behavior, he hopes, until Jesus gives him the gold standard of a neighbor in the form of the enemy dwelling in their land - a Samaritan.

Think back to the Gospel two weeks ago. It’s only been about 30 verses since Jesus himself was refused entry to a Samaritan village, and his disciples asked if they could destroy that village with fire from heaven.

And it’s not just the lawyer who has looked for a way out of the responsibility toward the neighbors we love, and the neighbors who make us uncomfortable, and the neighbors we despise, that God lays upon us.

Many of the early church fathers gave the story an elaborate allegorical interpretation. In one version, the man making the trip from Jerusalem  (representing heaven) to Jericho (representing earth) is Adam. The robbers stand in for sin, the priest is the law, the Levite stands for the prophets, and the Samaritan is Jesus Christ himself. Jesus drops Adam off at the inn, which stands for the church, and promises the innkeeper he will come again - the second coming. (Origen, Homily 34.3, paraphrase)

It’s actually pretty elegant, and there’s nothing wrong with viewing the text this way, unless you assert, as some have, that the allegorical reading is actually the truest reading of the text.

Because then you’ve just done what the lawyer did: found a way to avoid loving neighbors you’d rather not see, let alone love: Indifference built on a scaffolding of pious intellectualism.

That can’t be the way of our church, least of all now, today, when migrant families are being ripped apart, and ICE raids fill communities with fear; when friends and neighbors live in the grip of addiction; when children in this city go to bed without mattresses and sleep on the floor.

The law of love that Jesus describes in the parable of the Good Samaritan is not an abstract sentiment but concrete action: meeting a man down in the dust, binding his bloody wounds, heaving him on a pack animal, carrying him to an inn, putting up a little of your own money to see that your neighbor is cared for. It’s a messy business.

It’s no wonder we put so much effort into avoiding it.

Even though I’m not a big fan of the elaborate allegorical reading of this parable, there’s nothing wrong with spending some time with it, as long as you keep it in the appropriate perspective. Because there’s one thing it gets really right: the concept of the church as the innkeeper - the place where a wounded soul can heal.

Because “Love God, Love Neighbor” is the heart of what we’re supposed to be about in our time here on earth - and if it were easy - well, we’d have a much shorter Bible, for one thing, because that business is covered in the first five books.

But it’s not easy. Being busy makes it hard. The need to make a living makes it hard. The blindness of sin makes it hard.

And let's face it - for as much as we might like to cast ourselves in the role of the Good Samaritan (set aside whether or not we actually want to do it), just as often we're the guy in the ditch.

And so God gives us the church, this inn where sinners can heal, and week by week be restored to the image ff our gracious, loving creator. It is a credit to you, St. John’s, that even over all the uncertainty and change of the last year and then some, you have faithfully continued to gather to ready your hearts for the transformation and salvation our Lord Jesus Christ promises to us.

"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul,  and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself."

“Surely, this commandment is not too hard for you,” Moses says, “Nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, neither is it beyond the sea. No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.”

Do this, and you shall live.

Let us not consume one another

"Amazing Grace Mural" by 1Flatworld, distributed under a CC BY-ND-NC license.

Sermon preached on the third Sunday after Pentecost (June 30, 2019) at the Episcopal Church of All Saints, Indianapolis. Readings: 2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14; Ps. 77:1-2; Gal. 5:1, 13-25; Lk. 9:51-62

“The whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.” (Gal. 5:14-15)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Early on in my life as a newly converted Christian, I worshiped with a woman who, whenever “Amazing Grace” came up as one of our hymns. would change one of the words.

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,” she would sing, “that saved a soul like me.”

“That saved a soul,” rather than, “that saved a wretch.”

She told me she didn’t like the word “wretch” because of what it implied about her worthiness, about her standing with God. I don’t begrudge her that decision, necessarily. God knows certain of our fellow Christians have so emphasized human sinfulness at the expense of our belovedness, and the fact that at the creation God called us good, that when an opportunity comes to surface from the toxicity of such an expression of our faith, that it can do one’s soul good to leave a word like wretch behind.

But as a new Christian, I took the wrong lesson from our conversation. Back then, as now, I relied on the members of the church as a guide to living the Christian life. But I was inexperienced enough that I didn’t understand that what this person was telling me was about what she, as one person, needed to do to protect herself from past harm the church had done. The lesson I learned - or thought I learned - instead, was that in churches that valued the leadership of women, and were at least willing to have the conversation about the standing of gay people before God - my own minimum standards for a church I would join - people weren’t wretches, full stop.

And so all this unpleasant judgment business was just some parasitic narrative that had clung like a barnacle to the super-nice warm and fuzzy “love thy neighbor” heart of the gospel.

When you’re 20 years old in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, amidst the first glimmers of hope in the form of effective HIV treatments that removed a simmering dread, with months yet to come before the revelation of Bill Clinton’s Oval Office affair (and with no small measure of compartmentalization of the Rwandan genocide), it was possible to believe such things, that there was no need for a day of reckoning, that there was no judgment due.

But we do not have the luxury of believing such things today, if we ever did.

Beloved, we are beloved, we are created in God’s image, God did call us good. And in our belovedness, in our goodness, God entrusted the world to our care. How have we done? How have we been our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers? How well have we let the little children come to us?

Others have said better the things I might say about how we as Christians should respond to the stain of our nation’s response to the migrants seeking asylum on our southern border, and most especially our treatment of the children.

On those matters I commend to you Bishop Jennifer’s message  delivered on Friday, and the message from the Bishops of California  delivered yesterday. If you can’t find Bishop Jennifer’s letter in your inbox, chances are you aren’t subscribed to the Diocese’s newsletter, and as the bishop’s canon I am duty-bound to remind you that you can find her message and subscribe to the newsletter at indydio.org.

Also today, at 4:00, St. John’s Episcopal Church in Lafayette is hosting “Never Again is Now,” an interfaith gathering to resist the cruelty our country is visiting on toddlers, and to call us back to the values America claims to hold dear. Bishop Jennifer and many people of faith and others of good will will be there, and I likewise commend it to you.

We live in angry, dispiriting times, justifiably so, and who knows if we have seen the worst yet? But we are a people of hope, a people of resurrection, a people who know that when the stone of the tomb eclipses all light from sun, moon, and stars, a yet more powerful spark remains.

There is another side to these times.

But who will we be on it?

From the looks of it, whatever side of the political spectrum we fall on, it appears we will all be like James and John, saying to Jesus, “Hey those Samaritans weren’t so welcoming – is it cool if we command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”

We don’t traffic in brimstone the same way we used to, but the vitriol and the scorn of our present age burn nearly as hot.

The impulse to destroy our enemies and those who do harm to us and to those we love is perfectly understandable, and scripturally supportable, even, if you look in the right places. But Jesus calls us to a harder thing. I’m not talking about making peace with injustice: that’s appeasement, and we’re all too good at it. I’m talking about making peace with people.

How I wish today’s gospel were longer - like three times longer. Because today and for the next two Sundays, St. Luke gives us an extended lesson on making peace. Today, we have Jesus’s scouts sent ahead to a Samaritan village to find a place for Jesus to stay and teach, and the Samaritans in no uncertain terms reject him. The disciples want to take vengeance, but Jesus rebukes them. We don’t quite know what he says, but next week’s reading gives us a hint.

That’s the sending of the seventy, two by two, into all the places Jesus intended to go as he made his way back to Jerusalem. He instructs them to bring the news that the Kingdom of God has come near, and they are to bestow their peace upon those they meet - only, if they are not received hospitably, they are to move on, yet telling even those who reject them that the Kingdom of God has come near. In a curious aside that is left out of the lectionary text, Jesus says that on the day a town rejects them, “It will be more tolerable for Sodom than for that town.” Though with no fire from heaven, no brimstone, no pillars of salt, It’s not quite clear what he means: only that it is clear that the judgment of those towns belongs to God, and not to the disciples who would rain down fire.

And then the next week, a lawyer challenges Jesus - seeking to justify himself he asks, “Who is my neighbor?” And Jesus tells the parable of the man beaten by robbers and left by the side of the road, passed over by a priest and a Levite, only to be rescued by a man of the very Samaritan people who rejected Jesus just some 30 verses earlier. In the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus not only reaffirms the expansive notion of neighborliness commanded in Leviticus, but in its placement so soon  after his own rejection by the Samaritans, Jesus affirms that alienation and enmity need not be the end of us.

The development of the Samaritan people in Luke’s Gospel from the rejecting enemy to the literal gold standard of a good neighbor is a mystery in some ways. After all, the Good Samaritan isn’t even a real person, but an imagined possibility. But part of the point of that story is to provoke us to seek the good in those who in actual fact or merely our perception are our enemies today.

But the way of making that shift happen becomes comprehensible if we acknowledge that in the aftermath of our sins against each other - whatever the rightness or wrongness of our past actions and positions - that we have all along been looking through a glass, darkly, and on the basis of our faith’s twin treasures of repentance and forgiveness, we can be reconciled one to another by the grace of God in Christ.

Loving our neighbor means loving the one who is nice to us, the one who has wronged us, the one who reviles us, the one we revile, the one we have wronged - all while upholding the justice, mercy, and righteousness of God. It’s a messy business.

And it’s a messy business we can duck. It’s optional, Paul advises, writing to the Galatians. We do have the option to proceed down the spiral of biting and devouring - just be careful, Paul writes, that in the process of devouring one another you don’t consume one another…as if devour and consume weren’t synonyms.

I have faith that the darkness of the present hour is not our end, but on us is whether the character of the time to come is revenge, blame, and recriminations, biting and consuming, or a yet more excellent way.

It is tempting every day to call for a rain of fire rather than reconciliation to God and to one another in the promised reign of God.

Let us not be led into that temptation.

So, beloved, discipline yourselves, be alert. Your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith. (1 Peter 5:8-9, paraphrase)

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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