Going Somewhere With Nothing

Going Somewhere With Nothing

Luke 10:25-37
July 15, 2007

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit
eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He
answered, “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.” And
he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” But wanting
to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man
was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who
stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest
was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So
likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.
But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved
with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on
them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him.
The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care
of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of
these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the
robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do
likewise.”

I was thinking this past week that preaching on this particular passage was going to be
fairly rough, because the Scripture here tells the story of the Good Samaritan, the
wonderful parable that Jesus tells to show us what it really means to love, to care for
another human being, even an enemy. We all know the story—or at least most of us
do. It’s one of those classic moments in the Gospels that have simply become part of
the larger culture—we all know the story, and I think most of us “get it.” I mean, Jesus
simply uses this beautiful story to remind his Jewish audience that the neighbors we are
called to love come in all shapes and sizes, and they can even come to us as our
enemy, as our most despised and worst enemies.   So, I ask you, how does a preacher
say something new about this is very old and familiar story?

Well, I want to take on that task by sharing a story with you about a young boy sitting in
his 3rd grade classroom who, all of sudden, finds a puddle between his feet and the
front of this pants are wet. He thinks his heart is going to stop because he cannot
possibly imagine how this happened. It had never happened before, and he knows that
when the other boys find out, they’ll never speak to him again as long as he lives, or at
least that is what he believes. The boy believes his heart is going to stop; he puts his
head down, and prays this prayer,: “Dear God, this is an emergency! I need help now!
Five minutes from now I am dead meat. He looks up from his prayer and here comes
the teacher with a look in her eyes that says he has been discovered. As the teacher
is walking towards him , a classmate named Susie is carrying a goldfish bowl that is
filled with water and surprisingly, she dumps the bowl of water into the boy’s lap. The
boy pretends to be angry, but all the while he is saying to himself, “Thank you, God,
Thank you God!” Now all of a sudden, instead of being the object of ridicule, the boy is
the object of sympathy. The teacher rushes him downstairs and gives him gym shorts
to put on while his pants dry out. All the other children on their hands and knees
cleaning up around his desk. The sympathy is wonderful. But as life would have it, the
ridicule that should have been his has been transferred to someone else—Susie. She
tries to help, but they tell her to get out—you’ve done enough, you klutz! Finally, at the
end of the day, as they are waiting for the bus, the boy walks over to Susie and
whispers, “You did that on purpose, didn’t you?” Susie whispers back, “I wet my pants
once, too.” (Homiletics 29-30, July 2007)

You know, that story is all about being given the gift of having someone else place
themselves in our shoes because that little girl knew what it meant to be in his position,
and that made all the difference for her, and it made all the difference for him. Today, I
want us to place ourselves in the shoes of the Samaritan, to do what the little girl did
with the little boy so that we can maybe have a hint of what this Samaritan was thinking
and feeling as he passed his wounded enemy on the side of the road—and how his
compassion, his feelings of compassion, became something more than a feeling in that
moment he decided to bind the wounds of his hated foe, his hated enemy, and take him
to an inn so that he could heal. Sometimes we get lost in this story, I think, we often
talk about how the Samaritan were seen as unclean and how they were a group of Jews
who, centuries earlier, had intermarried with some of Israel’s conquers, the Assyrians,
and now were seen as dirty and polluted by the larger Jewish culture. It seems we
always see this story from the side of the Jewish people, and we fail to recognize that
the hatred and bitterness flowed both ways—that the Samaritan who passed that day
had every reason to loathe the wounded Jewish traveler on the side of the road, as
much as the Jewish listeners of this story 2000 years ago had to loathe the idea of a
“polluted” Samaritan becoming the hero of Jesus’ story here.

The hatred flowed both ways—and it had begun hundreds of years earlier when the
Jewish king of the time destroyed the sacred temple of the Samaritans in 109 BC. And I
suspect that the Samaritan in Jesus’ story who stopped by the road that day carried all
of this history in his blood, those memories and that like all people who feel themselves
powerfully oppressed, the bitterness became something to feed off, the bitterness and
hatred became the food their parents fed them as children and it was what they fed
their own children even now. Bitterness and hatred seems to have a way of
perpetuating itself, forever seeping into the lives and stories of the people from which it
flows. We only have to look at the recent history of the Middle East to see how deep
the wounds of hatred have gone and the mess they have left behind. Still, we know
that this Samaritan was no stranger to the ancient commandment to love one another—
he knew the same theology and commands as the priest and the Levite who passed
the wounded traveler by the road. Both Jews and Samaritans practiced the same
religion, but they just disagreed on some of the details, much like Christians disagree
with each other and form little separate churches and denominations.

When Jesus said to this lawyer that he must love God with all your heart, and all his
soul, and his strength, and his mind, and his neighbor as himself, it would have been
something that the Samaritans too would have learned as well on the knees of their
parents, at the feet of their teachers; it would have been something they learned along
with the hall that hatred and bitterness towards the Jews, ironically enough. But its not
so far fetched, is it? Many of us grew in homes and families and communities that fed
us these two very different things—on the one hand, we were fed love, and then we
were fed hatred; we were fed this command to love one another, and yet on the other
hand, the bitterness and hatreds of racism were fed to us as well. Some of us were fed
both love and self-loathing, both love and a spirit of judgementalism, love and racism,
love and misogyny, whatever. Much like the ancient Samaritans and the ancient Jews,
we too sometimes have that experience of being fed two very different and conflicting
meals, meals that don’t always agree with each other, especially in the depths of the
soul. And like these ancient peoples, we have often lived with the disconnection
between our those lessons about love and respecting others and the actions we saw in
our teachers, actions that spoke more of different values than the good ones were
taught. Eventually, we came to see that disconnection in ourselves, and so....

So the Samaritan that day was stewing in all of that history and in all of the
disconnection between his diet of love and hate, between his actions and his words, his
beliefs about love and the hatred he had been taught by his parents towards the Jew, a
people like that wounded traveler he was about to pass on the side of the road. And
yet somehow, something stopped him. A decision, perhaps. Maybe he had decided
that the hatred had to stop somewhere and he was going to do something about it in
that moment and he allowed himself to feel the human gift of compasison for this man,
this wounded enemy. Or maybe the disconnect in his life between his words and his
actions got to be too much—and he re-connected the meaning of the words about love
to the actions that it called for. Maybe the burden got to be too much—this steady diet
of hatred will make a person grow large with hatred and bitterness, causing our hearts
to struggle for more air, for more life, when the veins themselves are clogging up the
very pathways to life and to love. Maybe he got the truth Martin Luther King, Jr.
reminded us only a few decades ago—the choice to love was an easier burden—
because, you see, hate is too great a burden to bear.

Whatever made him stop that day, whatever made him decide that enough was
enough, that his life needed to be reconnected, that he could not claim to love God and
yet hate this wounded Jewish man by his doing of nothing to help him—whatever
caused him to stop will be forever be one of the reasons we too must stop on the side
of whatever road we are traveling on, and when the choice presents itself, we must
choose love, we must choose to make the seemingly impossible choice that love will be
the food that sustains us, rather than the bitter food of hatred. It means being able to
see a wounded enemy on the side of the road and connecting the truth that to say we
love God and doing nothing to help this one, is to say nothing at all.

Maybe one of the things we can learn from this story is that the disconnection between
our words, and the best of our values, and our lives, our actions, will not do, will not be
settled for, in the present and coming realms of God. It is not enough to say, I love
you, and to somehow think that love requires nothing more than words. Some of us
have been told our whole lives that love was a feeling—certainly, that is how we see it
portrayed in our romantically love obsessed culture. And romantic love is partly that,
especially in the beginning, but as it grows it becomes less of a feeling and more of a
daily choice—the choice to do the kind and graceful thing when we don’t feel like it, the
choice to continue to work hard when all you are feeling is tired. Don’t get me wrong—
sometimes the action that love requires is to leave a relationship, but the point is that
mature love always understands that love is ultimately something that goes beyond the
moment, beyond our feelings, into concrete moments of care and presence. The
Samaritan chooses to enact love by taking care of this Jewish stranger, the girl in the
earlier story chooses to love by saving the boy from a humiliating moment, because
she too knows what it means to be scared of be found out, and that Samaritan does the
same thing, because I suspect he too knows what it means to be hurt and wounded and
have no one around you care for you because you are not of the same religion, or
whatever other categories we use to separate ourselves.

And the interesting thing is that we are never told that the Samaritan felt differently in
any long-term way about his enemies. It never says that he gave up his feelings of
being unjustly oppressed—or that he stopped believing that what was done to his
people hundred of years ago was wrong and unjust. He simply felt compassion for his
enemy and he did the right thing, whatever the rightness and justness of his cause.
The compassion he felt became love when he did something—when he bound up the
wounds of this beaten traveler and put him on his traveling animal and took him to an
inn to recuperate. He could have felt compassion and gone on—but that is not love—it
is simply pity. To stop and do is to love another person, to love our neighbor and
enemies.   Finally, the words he learned on his mother’s knee about loving your
neighbors became a reality for him when did something about them.

The choice to love, to make the words we say become the words we live, is always
before us, in a million different moments in our everyday lives. It comes up when a
coworker once again undermines us, or when a loved one betrays us, or even when a
fellow church member says something painful and hurtful. It is not to pretend that we
are not hurt, but it is to choose actions that show love rather than bitterness—it is to
choose to meet behavior that undermines us with behavior that is loving and graceful—
it is to choose to meet betrayal with faithfulness—it is to choose to meet words of death
with our own words of life. It is choosing to be a people that recognize that love means
doing something—that words are simply not enough, and they cannot replace our
actions. Let us, as people called to life, choose to make our love of God and love of
each other something we live, like that surprising Samaritan on that day some two
thousand years ago, who finally chose to make his passion for God connect with his
compassion for other people, even the most unlikely of persons, this Jew, this hated
Jew, who lay by the side of road, wounded and beaten.   Amen and amen.