Is there any Bible story more widely known or
frequently quoted than The Good Samaritan? It is enshrined in the names of countless
hospitals and care centers. Good Samaritan laws protect us from liability suits. If you
take all the preachers in this sanctuary and multiply by the times we have preached on
this familiar Bible story, then how can anything new possibly be said about it?
A lawyer in the crowd was listening to the rabbi share God's wisdom.
"Teacher," asked the lawyer. "What must I do to inherit eternal life?"
Perhaps recognizing that the lawyer was ready for an argument, Jesus met his question
with a question. "What is written in the law? What do you read there?"
The lawyer answered with a worthy response. He was good at passing exams. He'd passed
the bar with high honors and his answer was a good answer, a great answer, the great
commandment: "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."
But Jesus didn't shake his hand and hand out a diploma. Instead he said, "You have
given the right answer; do this, and you will live." "Do this and you will
live." Act on the truth you know. It's the difference between acing the written
driver's exam and flunking freeway rush-hour traffic in a rainstorm. The lawyer had the
right answers in his head, but would he do the right thing? He had all the information,
but would he have the character formation?
The attorney was not finished. As is the apparent disease of his profession, he does
not back away from an argument, but seems to bait Jesus. Luke reports that the lawyer,
"wanting to justify himself," asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus
responds with a story.
A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. He was robbed, beaten and left for
dead. Two travelers went by, a priest and a Levite. Let's not be too hard on them. The
road to Jericho was a dangerous stretch. Maybe they were wondering if the man was a decoy
or a plant for thugs, or maybe the man was too far gone, or maybe something else. How many
of you would go up a dark alley in a strange neighborhood in the middle of the night to
help someone crying for help? It may have been like that. Let's not be too hard on them.
We might have to be hard on ourselves.
A third traveler comes down the road, a Samaritan. When we hear "Samaritan"
we think of hospitals, compassion and mercy, but when First Century Jews saw a Samaritan
they thought enemy, filth and fear. The young lawyer listening to Jesus would have been
shocked. The audience hearing the parable would have been shocked. The poor guy lying in
the gutter with the bloody face would have been shocked. When a Samaritan walked by you
locked the doors, shut the windows and held onto your children. Here he comes - a
Samaritan. He'll probably finish you off.
It's like telling the story to a group of Albanians and saying, "A third man came
down the road and he was a Serb, a no-good, murderous Serb." Jesus continued,
"The Serbian bandaged the man's wounds, put him on his donkey and took him to an
inn." If we live in South Central L.A. it's like a white person coming in, holding
our head, and giving us a sip of water. If we're white it's like having a flat tire on the
freeway, and before AAA comes, a black person comes to our car window and offers to change
the flat tire for free. If we wear a three piece-suit, maybe it's a teenager with nose
rings, a skateboard and pink hair asking if we are okay. If we're a skateboarder of that
description, it's a suit bending down offering to take us to the doctor.
You get the idea. It's the parable of the good Klansman, the good Communist, the good
Nazi. When everyone we thought would help walks on by, it's the stranger, the unexpected
person, the one we fear, who stops to care, to help and to save us. It's a story of one
man breaking tremendous barriers of ethnic hatred, religious stereotyping and centuries of
biblically sanctioned bigotry rooted in fear who had the courage to be a healer. It's a
story of a broken man on the verge of death seeing the very face of God in a stranger who
blows away his stereotype in a rush of dazzling grace.
"A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. He fell among robbers, was beaten
and left half dead along side the road." A woman fell into loneliness when after 50
years of marriage her mate died. For 30 days friends and family paid special attention to
her but then they seemed to disappear as they went on with their busy lives. They weren't
insensitive people. Let's not be hard on them. They simply were doing what most of
American culture does with grief and loss. We sympathize for a few weeks and then hope all
that pain will go away. But for those who know, for those who have been there or are
there, it doesn't. It doesn't go away for a long, long time.
A man fell among robbers and the grieving woman, too, felt like she had been pummeled,
beaten and left for half dead. But she kept coming to church. She kept coming to church,
singing the hymns, praying the prayers, and Samaritans like you and me listened, beyond
the expectation of our culture, so that in time the pain didn't go away but it did lessen.
Wounds were bound up, hands held, brows brushed with the caress of Christian love and
hospitality. The woman had been taken to an inn - the church, a place where you would hope
such care would be found, but too often such care is not found, and she found it again and
again. The church: a community of the broken, a community of healers.
"A man fell among robbers and was left half dead." Another man on his own
journey was not robbed but fell into a depression. The depression was deep, so deep that
it seemed like nothing anybody said or anybody did could do any good. It wasn't like he
could just pick himself up and shake himself off and go on with the journey. It wasn't
like that at all. You don't choose depression. It apparently chooses you, whether it's in
your genes or your childhood or some trauma. But what depression does is that it robs you
just as surely as that man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho was robbed. It robs you.
This time the holy man and the holy woman did not ignore the cries for help. Indeed the
whole congregation prayed for this man and others like him who are weighed down with this
horrible curse. With the help of counselors, modern medical miracles, prayers and hard,
courageous, painful work, the healing has begun. The church, the gracious, hospitable
community where we weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice, is an inn
for such broken as these: the depressed and the recovering. We are both Samaritan and
broken, care givers and care receivers, sacred space for you and for me.
A man fell among robbers and a woman's marriage broke up. She feared that the church
that she had always known as a place for families of one woman, one man, and 2.2 children
would no longer be there for her. Would she be accepted? Could her healing begin here?
Could what she had done or what she had left undone in her broken marriage be forgiven and
forgotten? Could she be set free?
Here she did find the freedom to heal. She picked up the pieces and gained direction
for her life. New relationships were built on mutual trust and respect. The church became
for her not a club for the perfect, but an inn for the broken, and for healing, a
community of both Samaritans and those who fall along side of the road, a community of
care so that those in need of healing are healed and become healers sometimes all at the
same time. Sacred space for you and me.
A man fell among robbers and a set of parents watched their gay son reviled by the
church just one too many times. Oh sure, the good church people all said that they loved
everybody. Jesus loves everybody. And if their son didn't repent of his sin he would rot
in hell. When that kind of so-called love kept hurting, kept stabbing, kept rubbing Bible
verses into their raw wounds like salt and knives and clubs, it was like that man being
beaten up beside the road, bloodied and left like some kind of pile of human refuse.
That's what it was like. Refuse.
When you love your own child enough to really listen, so that you come to know in your
parent's heart, in your Christian heart that your son or your daughter is created the way
he is, the way she is; when you really listen so that a still, small voice comes to you
and your conscience is free and your faith is strong and you know that your son or your
daughter or your friend's son or daughter is beautiful, then you know what it's like to be
bloodied and beaten.
Lying beside the road, somewhere between Jerusalem and Jericho you say to yourself will
anybody come, will a holy person come and pick me up? Will the church of Jesus Christ pick
me up? Will the bearers of the Gospel of love pick me up or will they walk on by?
Then you discover that this church - our church - has formed a support group for family
members of gay and lesbian persons and you discover sacred space. The Samaritan comes,
unexpectedly, stunningly, beyond our wildest expectation of care and compassion and bends
down and lifts us up and carries us into the church the inn the place of God's
unimaginable hospitality.
A man fell among robbers and maybe your son or daughter, despite a solid upbringing in
the church will have nothing to do with its teachings and the values that you cherish so
much, and it pains you. Or maybe you carry with you a secret burden, a loss, a
disappointment, a struggle, a shame. Or perhaps you are experiencing a physical loss, a
loss of vision or the ability to walk.
Will the church be for you a community of Samaritans, a community that sets aside
cultural expectations and good old fashioned Presbyterian propriety with the same courage
that led a Samaritan long ago to cross over to the side of the road, to cross over
centuries of stereotypes, centuries of ethnic bigotry, centuries of Bible blessed-hate and
indifference? Will the church be willing to cross on over to the side of the road and bend
down?
We look at the broken man lying beside the road. We look in our conscience and review
our traditions and how we have been taught to fear and hate and typecast.
I look pleadingly, half dead and losing hope, and I see you and wonder whether you will
turn away and go on like the others.
We hear his moans and we can't turn back. In a moment of dazzling grace we cross on
over to the other side and bind up his wounds.
I see you and you and you crossing to my side and binding up my wounds and your face
shines with the dazzling radiance of God.
"Teacher," said the lawyer, "What must I do to inherit eternal
life?"
"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."
"Do this and you will live."
