Sermon Diocesan Council 2017 Trinity Galveston The Inconceivable Good Samaritan Prayer: Heavenly Father as I offer these words tonight, I beseech you to see me as a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock and a sinner of your own redeeming. The Good Samaritan In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya from the movie The Princess Bride, I don't think it means what you think it means. Let us begin with the idea of neighbor Neighbor, in the context of first century Palestine, in a society of tribal cohorts, meant those people who are part of your extended family. Neighbor was another word for brother, sister, family member and was narrowly defined as a member of your group. Certainly, there was diversity, but this diversity was distributed into tribal pods. Anybody outside of your tribal group (lets say a Gentile) was not your neighbor. Samaritans, Romans, Greeks were not considered neighbors to the religiously faithful of Jesus day. Today, we have a similar context 1
Neighbor is defined by the individual We automatically as the hearers, with our buffered selves, project that those in need must be like us in some way. Just a person we might do some good for Today, the neighbor is always an Other who is similar to me Liberal like me Conservative like me Religious like me A member of my tribe In a culture where the demographic facts clearly reveal more and more people live in like-minded communities, go to like-minded schools, watch like-minded news, attend like-minded churches Neighbor has been transformed into something where the meaning itself is about someone who is like me like you just not living in our home And, subconsciously, socially, demographically, and geographically we have completely made this story of the Good Samaritan about moral goodness to those who are just like us This parable does not mean what you think it means 2
Jesus message for us today is the same as it was for the religiously faithful but isolated of Jesus own time As we turn to the Gospel There is a question by a lawyer that gets the parable going, "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus, warming to the conversation, tells the story. A man goes down Down to Jericho From the high land To the low land The man destined to be robbed pre-imagines for us the incarnation. Jesus who descends, the scripture says, before he ascends Jesus, as he is telling this story, is on his way down too On his way to Jerusalem where he will be tried and found guilty and the whole world will fall upon him and kill him. So, again the downward walk into the heart of darkness is, for us, a revelation by Jesus about what is coming. This man, Jesus tells us, falls among thieves. The man, the Christ figure, is taken into the hands of those, "who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now two faithful religious officials walk up Both of the men pass by on the other side. The religious leaders are good religious people. 3
Faithful people. They have done all that is required. They have kept the law. They have made their religious offering that week. They have said their prayers. They have done this, they have done that. They have no need of him as a testsubject To help fulfill thier righteous quota. i The man looks half dead anyway. Jesus now introduces the Samaritan. Samaritans were not of the same tribe as the beaten man or the religious leaders. The Samaritan is part of group that worships in the same tradition but differently. The Samaritans had even desecrated the Temple as an act of rebellion. They do not recognize the religious supremacy of Mount Zion, so they have been cast out of the family. The Samaritan is an outcast But whenever you find them in a Gospel story or in conversation Jesus is usually redeeming them. So it is that this sinner in the eyes of the religious establishment, this outsider, this descirator of the holy shrines of Israel this this Samaritan 4
stops to help. The Samaritan sees him and comes near the beaten man. He is moved by what he sees. The Samaritan finds the man in the ditch. He is not afraid of him but comes near him. He comes close enough to know him, to see him, to see his wounds and the damage done to him by the robbers. Living out Matthew 25.31 The Samaritan enters into the passion of the Christ figure by stopping to help the beaten, and robbed man. The Christ figure, is in the midst of his passion and the Samaritan comes and kneels before him, touches him He bears witness by his physical solidarity in the beaten man s passion. ii The Samaritan now takes up his own cross of comfort and goes down into the passion with the Christ figure. He stops his road most traveled to journey with another. He bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Such an expensive and precious act. We are then told the Samaritan puts, "him on his own animal." A sacrifice of convenience and time, 5
for as now the Samaritan must walk. iii The Samaritan then spends money on the beaten man, and asks the people at a nearby inn take care of the man. It is not enough to simply drop him off The Samaritan again sacrificially offers money to care and feed the Christ-man. Whatever it costs innkeeper, you decide, do all that is needed. I will pay, the Samaritan promises [PAUSE] Jesus then flips the lawyer s question from who is my neighbor to, "'Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?' The challenge Jesus poses to the religiously faithful Is not, Who do you chose as your neighbor But up-ends the question to reveal That God has made us to be neighbors To those most unlike us Even our enemies The old law was: be kind to those who are kind to you Love those who love you Care for those who care for you The higher way of Jesus is that you are neighbor for those who are completely unlike you Such action will jeopardize your comfort and your safety 6
Love those who hate you Care for those who cannot repay you back Serve those who do not deserve service Walk with those who are religiously unclean Dwell not in the high places but in the low places This is the uncomfortable invitation of the Gospel The higher way is to read this parable, and all of scripture, through the lens of the first two commandments The passage is meant to draw us closer to god To our dependence upon the God who reaches across the ditch that divides the clean and unclean The holy and profane The divine and the human Linking heaven and earth We proclaim a God who joins us in our passion A sacrificing God A Self-emptying God And, the passage is to draw us closer to those different than ourselves Inviting us to be like Christ in the world Reaching across the trenches of our divides Jesus upends the notion of neighbor like tables in the temple of the religiously faithful s heart 7
If you are a follower of Jesus You can no longer walk on by tears and sadness Even if you caused them But as Christians Followers of Jesus We are invited to leave the preconceived religious codes of holiness and climb into the ditch of those beaten and left for dead by the world, the powers-that-be, and the church Ivan Illich, an Austrian philosopher and Roman Catholic priest iv, wrote, What the Samaritan does is to step fearlessly outside what his culture has sanctified in order to create a new relationship and, potentially, a new community. He does not seek God within a sacred circle but finds him lying by a ditch. v It is none other than the Christ figure In the world s ditch Outside our church Just as Jesus is going down, to undertake the passion, to lose everything, 8
the Samaritan does the same. Episcopal priest and biblical scholar Robert Farrar Capon reminds us that the passion of Jesus is always to be found in the "least of his brethren, namely, in the hungry, the thirsty, the outcast, the naked, the sick and the imprisoned in whom Jesus dwells and through whom he invites us to become his neighbors in death and resurrection." vi The passion of Christ invites the church to put aside comfort and enter the Way of the Cross. Let us not mince words here: If the world could be fixed by nice people doing kind acts then everything would be fixed by now. This is not the reality of Christ's sacrifice nor is it the reality of the world in which we live. The first followers of Jesus understood this work of crossing the boundaries of received codes of conduct this generous work, this traveling, vagabond work, world rooted work This roll up your sleeves, get into the ditch, with the others kind of work So it is they went out They challenged the authorities like Jesus and they spent the vast majority of their time with the poor and the persecuted Taking Jesus lead they went to every kind of person 9
They went to the non religious, to the idol worshippers, to the people of many nations and with other languages, they went to the widows and the orphans, they went to the soldiers and the politicians, to the beggar, the infirmed, and the leper to the women who ran their businesses and households, and the wealthy and the poor to men and women and the eunuch they went to the clean and the religiously unclean the worker and the ruler Like Jesus they broke the religious boundaries and expectations of their day and like Jesus they were reviled for having been seen with sinners for having crossed the ditch The great divide of accepted religious syllogisms that mandated remaining rooted inside booths, temples, and buildings because that is what community looks like to most was set aside for a call to go out into the world. They took what they received and shared it with others The love they received they gave to others, the wealth they had they gave to others What they did not do is sit inside their upper rooms, inside their houses of worship, and ring their hands about what to do They went like Abram and Sarai, like Moses and Zipporah, like the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, and Esther and Daniel, those first followers got up and went, Andrew went, James and John went, Peter went, Paul went Along went Ana, and Mary, Martha, and Lydia, Junia and Phoebe 10
They all went walking with God, not to a place, but to find another Every one who followed was sent to others Every one who thought they knew what it was all about had their mind changed They were humbled by the work and road before them And by going by going they discovered what it means to depend upon God s grace alone Yes, some died Some were persecuted Some lost a little some lost a lot But they had courage They en-couraged one another Telling the stories of how Jesus went among the people And pulled people from the miry clay They reminded themselves of the truth of the gospel And, where they went new communities sprang up Now you will say, but bishop the scripture says they had houses, places of business, empty store fronts and abandoned religious places where they gathered Yes that is true They set up shop and used abandoned spaces as places where the whole community gathered 11
Where news was shared Where food and shelter could be found And, where people found empowerment to go and share what they had These places of gathering were never meant to be the only places where the gospel had a foothold in the world These places were always stepping stones, altars in the world, for the world, sending people into the world, meant for the world, and most of all for the people of the world They were never meant to be millstones around the gospel s neck If we are not preparing people to be in relationship with people who are different To create communities beyond our segregated church lives Then we have not heard the parable with the ears of our hearts The Good Samaritan was a missionary tale of courage not lost on its first hearers Though it was a notion completely inconceivable to the religiously faithful of Jesus day 12
Jesus meaning While not what you might have thought is quite conceivable, you might even say it is the very foundation and purpose of God s mission in Christ Jesus The question remains for you, Diocese of Texas, As it has for every church, And every Christian community, In every age Who will you be neighbor to And, which ditch are you willing to die in? i Capon, Kingdom, 203. ii Capon, Kingdom, 205. iii Capon, Kingdom, 205. iv I was introduced to Ivan Illich s work through the reading of Taylor s Secular Age. I am using Taylor s treatment of Illich here. A read of his work entitled The Rivers of the North of the Future. See Taylor, Secular, 714ff. v Illich, Ivan, and David Cayley. The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich. Toronto, Ont.: House of Anansi, 2005. Print. vi Capon, Kingdom, 202. 13