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A. It was fifteen years ago this
month that Bishop Paup appointed me to Salem First United Methodist. I had completed 4 years of ministry in
Pocatello and was quite pleased to be returning to the Willamette Valley. It wasn’t long after we settled into our new
home here in Salem that I noticed the sirens.
Nearly every day it seemed I heard sirens; blasting out their wailing
sound of emergency, pain, anxiety.
It
was just one of many reminders that we don’t live in a tranquil, pain-free
world. Violence, in fact, punctuates our
existence. We are surrounded by it. It is woven into the fabric of our daily
lives. Flooded with images of violence
in movies and TV shows, saturated with stories of violence in our newspapers,
we hardly notice anymore unless it reaches a degree that it shocks us, grabs
our attention and sickens our stomach.
And it takes a lot to do that anymore.
B. It
wouldn’t be too hard to come up with an example from our own local news, but I
recall a story told a number of years ago by William Willimon, who is now the
Bishop of the North Alabama Annual Conference. I will tell it with his words.
“Recently,
a convenience store in our area was robbed.
The entire robbery was captured on the store’s security cameras. A stickup man entered the store just after
midnight. He pointed a gun at the woman
behind the counter, a mother who had just put her two children to bed for the
night a couple of hours ago. She
complied immediately with his demand for cash.
She handed to him everything she had in the cash register.
“Then
– we saw the whole thing on the camera – he calmly looked at the cash, looked
back at her, and shot her through the chest.
She died before the police got there. The stickup man was still at
large.
“Random
cruelty, pointless death, all on a summer night in North Carolina.
“When
I saw it, I turned away. I flipped the
remote control selector and, within a few minutes, I could no longer see the
sight of the stickup man calmly killing a young mother on a summer night…”
I.
A. Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan reminds
us that random cruelty is not a modern invention. The scene that unfolds on the Road to Jericho
is set with a random act of violence. We
don’t know the traveler’s name. He was
simply another victim, one more casualty heaped on the sidelines of the evening
news. It’s a story to which you and I
are all too comfortably adjusted.
The
man lies stripped, “half dead” in the ditch.
His personal journey has taken a sudden, unexpected turn for the
worse. Evil has intruded into his life,
uninvited and unwelcomed. And because
this is a parable that Jesus is telling, the unexpected happens. It’s a narrative setup, a sneaky way of
getting us to ask the question, “What now?
What will become of this poor, beaten man in the ditch? Is this where his journey ends?”
B. “Now by chance… a priest was
going down the Jericho Road,” Jesus continues.
Notice Jesus said it was “by chance.”
No divine act of God or anything.
He was just there by chance, randomly walking down the road to
Jericho. And there was this man lying in
the ditch by the road. He has had
everything stripped from him, including his options and his ability to help
himself. He just lies there helpless and
“half dead.”
C. We just heard how the story
goes. The priest passed by on the other
side. Then along comes a religious
Levite, another who brings the possibility of intervention, another who bears
the potential of making a difference in the story and where it’s heading. But again, he sees the wounded man and passes
by on the other side.
D.
We roll our eyes and shake our heads at these two religious but
uncompassionate characters. If their
faith meant anything, why didn’t they do anything?
It
helped me to read about a sermon on this passage recently preached by Bishop
Gene Robinson of the Episcopal Church.
Here is how one listener to Robinson’s sermon reports what the Bishop
said:
“It’s
important to remember that though this is called the parable of the ‘Good
Samaritan,’ no word like ‘good’ actually appears in this parable. It’s our tendency to rush to judgment about
something. …we rush to label things good and bad. And part – maybe even most – of what this
story is about is actually about three good people. The priest and the Levite, who come off looking
pretty awful, are actually very good people.
They are religious people, they are upstanding, they take their religion
seriously, they know all the right answers to things, they can recite the
creeds – they do all of that exactly right.
They ‘get it’ intellectually and theoretically. Even, perhaps, theologically. And it seems that Jesus tells this story in
order to show us that it is not right belief, it is not right thinking that
gets us to the heart of God, but actually doing the will of God. That is what actually gets us to know the
heart of God.”
Robinson
continues by pointing out that when the lawyer asks his question about what it
takes to inherit eternal life, he gives the right answer when Jesus asks what
the law says about it. His head
knows the right answer – it’s to love God with all your heart, soul, mind and
strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. “A+, very good!” Jesus says. But wanting the argue the point, the lawyer
asks who his neighbor is and Jesus tells this story to show what our love of
God looks like when it is detached from our love of neighbor. They got the love of God part. They understand that. But the priest and the Levite didn’t connect
that to love of neighbor, which is really the heart of the Gospel. (A good Methodist knows that you cannot
separate personal holiness and social holiness.)
“So,”
Robinson preached, “it is right action, not right belief, not right thinking,
that gets us to the heart of God. The
lawyer asks Jesus ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ Jesus’
answer in this story is love – love in a way that costs. The answer Jesus gives is love that actually
costs us something – costs us time, costs us money, costs us focus, costs us
convenience – love that actually costs us something even when we think we are
depleted. Robinson said it’s like that
tube of toothpaste you throw away only to discover you don’t have another in
the cabinet. So you pull that toothpaste
out of the trash and almost always you are able to squeeze enough out of it to
brush your teeth. Isn’t that the way God
is – just when we think there’s nothing left to give, if we make but the
simplest effort, God provides. God
provides manna in the desert – and maybe just for that day – but it’s
enough. God gives us what we need to
respond in the way the Good Samaritan responded. That’s the real miracle of life in God.”
E.
That Jericho Road is always with us.
It is any place where people are robbed; robbed of their dignity, robbed
of their love, robbed of their food and clothing and shelter, robbed of their
options, robbed of their value as human beings.
It is any place where there is suffering and oppression. We are all on that road together. Maybe you have personally been victimized on
the Jericho Road. Maybe you are simply
walking down the road on the way to somewhere else, minding your own business,
and randomly stumble upon someone bruised and bloodied by cruel circumstances,
systems or actions.
Often,
it’s not the stuff we see on the evening news report…
·
Someone
is fired from his job – and people avoid him as if he has had some sort of
communicable disease.
— Someone has a baby die and you
hardly know how to talk with her – don’t mention it, pretend it didn’t
happen.
— Someone’s spouse leaves them for
another and the friends no longer invite them over for dinner.
It’s so easy to take that remote and
change the channel so we don’t have to watch it any more. We all want to survive, right? Isn’t that the whole point of our journey… to
survive? We may feel bad about the
situation, but we walk by on the other side.
II.
A. “But a third man, a Samaritan, as
he journeyed, came to where he was and when he saw him, he went to him…”
Jesus
doesn’t explain why the other two passed by and he doesn’t explain why this
Samaritan went to injured one, bound up his wounds, and cared for him. All we know is that he does it. The brutally beaten man was powerless to
continue his journey. His story would
have come to an abrupt end had it not been for this Samaritan… (which in our
day would be what – a Mexican? an
Arab? a fundamentalist?)… if it had not
been for this Samaritan who chose to intersect his journey with the journey of
the wounded man. By his action, the
victim once stripped of his dignity, his possessions, his ability to help
himself, his future is now given the possibility of life. The third traveler, the Samaritan, stops his
own journey when he sees the need. He
detours, he risks, he extravagantly responds to the needs of another human
being in the ditch, one who never utters a word.
B. In our numbness, most of us have
learned to tolerate, if not accept, the violence that occurs on the Jericho
Road. Like the two men who first came
down the road, we assume that violence, that Death, has the last word and move
on. Regardless of their belief system,
the priest’s and Levite’s avoidance and their refusal to help in the moment
conferred absolute power upon the present evil.
It raised the status quo – filled as it was with violence and death – to
a sacred status. After all, what can
anybody do?
C.
Well, consider the Samaritan! He
wasn’t a philosopher, a psychologist, a sociologist, a sage. He was what today we might call a “knee-jerk
activist.” He sees, he stops, he goes,
he binds, he cares, he gives. I suppose
many of us would call his action foolish and naïve. But that Samaritan refuses
to bow to the power that has so disempowered a beaten man. He knows evil is real. He knows it is often bloody. It is there. But by the Samaritan’s action,
it is denied the last word in the story.
D.
We never hear what happens to the beaten man, do we? Did he recover? Did he die?
Jesus doesn’t go there in the parable because it doesn’t make any
difference. Even if he didn’t recover,
it in no way detracts from intrusive power of the third traveler who acted to
change the course of the story, to wrestle with Death and Destruction to force
it to give way to life. No. There is no Pollyanna reassurance that
everything will be swell in the end.
That is not the point. The point
is that there is at least one traveler on that Jericho Road who, as William
Willimon puts it, “stops and cares as a free, un-tethered expression of life,
of a deep, clinch-fisted unwillingness to let death have the last word in the
story. He is rich and he wants to
give. His riches, the fullness of his
life, overcome the natural human reaction to turn away, to step to the other
side, to relent to the evil that presses in upon the story.”
E. In our struggle against the violence
and injustice, the power of sin, death and destruction – our struggle to stop
in our journey to help those lying beaten and robbed by the side of the road, we
ask a lot of questions. We all ask
them. I know I have.
—
What
if my helping makes matters worse rather than better?
—
What
if my good intentions actually encourage irresponsibility and abuse?
—
Aren’t
there those more qualified to help?
—
What
if I get taken advantage of?
—
Am
I making myself vulnerable to a lawsuit?
—
What
if I get sucked into something that is more than I want to deal with? Than I can deal with?
—
Shouldn’t
people experience the consequences of their own decisions?
—
What
difference can I possibly make with all of the needs out there?
Questions. Perfectly good, reasonable questions. Questions that any intelligent, responsible
person would ask. And questions that
rationalize and paralyze us to inaction.
III.
A.
It is possible for us to read this story as an illustration of a
helpless victim of meaningless violence and to conclude that life itself is
meaningless. We may decide that the
truly wise person does everything possible to turn aside from the
meaninglessness, to stay firmly on the other side of suffering with our burglar
alarms, our insurance policies, our advanced degrees, our dispassionate philosophical
explanations for why bad things happen to good people. After all, two good people come down the road
– the majority of average Americans – and live their lives in just that
way. They are free to pass by. We are free to pass by. And many do.
B.
But then there are places like Morningside United Methodist Church,
which in so many ways demonstrate that you have decided not to allow reality to
be defined by evil, that Death will not ultimately have the last word in
today’s world and in this community. You
know all of the questions and you know that the answers to these questions are
not easy. But like the Samaritan, the odd one in the story, the one-in-three,
the minority, you are free, rich, gifted, and confident in your ability to make
a difference in the way the story will unfold down the Jericho Road.
C. You have a vision statement that
you recite every Sunday when you gather here for worship. It defines the
essence of who you are as a community of faith.
(Read the Vision Statement). It
makes all the difference how you read reality.
It makes all the difference how you write yourself into the story of
what’s going on in this world. It makes
all the difference.
All the questions and concerns are still
hanging out there. We journey from Jerusalem
to Jericho and find a person beaten and half dead in the ditch. Now what?
Should we stop and help? How do
we “show mercy?” How are we to “go and
do likewise?”
Lots
of questions. Perfectly good and reasonable questions.
D.
Here’s what the poet W.H. Auden had to say about that:
“You
cannot tell people what to do, you can only tell them parables!”