Journey (sermon, July 25, 2010)

Today's passage from the gospel of Luke is one that is familiar to many of us, the parable of the Good Samaritan. Today, as you read this translation from Eugene Peterson’s The Message, I want you to notice which character you most identify with in this story. So read now Peterson’s version of Luke 10:25-37.

So, in which character did you most clearly find yourself? The Levite and priest who cross to the other side of the road? The Samaritan himself who risks safety and sacrifices financial resources to help the injured man? Or perhaps you identified with the religious scholar who questions Jesus, hoping for some clear answers about how to best follow him on this journey of faith?

Well, if you found that you immediately identified with the priest and the Levite, who crossed to the other side of the road to avoid the injured man, you certainly would not be alone. In our culture we’ve had to go so far as to enact so-called “Good Samaritan” laws to protect those who help strangers from litigation. In an age of known and unknown diseases, we have been conditioned to think twice before allowing ourselves to come into contact with the blood of a stranger. The Levite and the priest are often depicted as the “bad guys” of this parable, or at least as the ones who obviously made the wrong decision. But could it be that there was more to their decision than can be contained in this brief story?


Early on in the Democratic Primary season in 2008, Barack Obama’s record appeared squeaky clean. He had attended some of the best schools in the country, worked in community organizer, civil rights lawyer and law professor, and served eight years in the Illinois senate before being elected to the U.S. Senate. He had a beautiful, smart and talented wife and two young daughters. And he had attended the same church in Chicago for twenty years.

But in March 2008, his church connection became no longer an asset but a liability; well, actually, not his church, but his pastor. It turns out that Jeremiah Wright, who had just recently retired as pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ after 36 years, had, over the years, made some inflammatory statements in his sermons. When the videos of these remarks came out and went viral on television and internet, they prompted Obama to make a speech dedicated to the subject of race in America. In the speech, Obama said quite plainly that the harshest remarks made by Reverend Wright weren’t just misguided, they were wrong. These remarks, said Obama, “expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country — a view...that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America...”

If you saw the clips of the Rev. Wright preaching at his most heated and angry, it was hard not to find it disturbing. It was one thing to hear that kind of rhetoric from Islamic jihadists, but from an American preacher? Likewise, it is appalling to us to think that two religious men, men with high standing in the community, one a priest and the other a Levite, a kind of Temple assistant, actually chose not to show compassion to a dying man. These are men who presumably know God’s laws as well as the religious scholar whose question prompted this story. They know that the most important command in all of scripture is to love the Lord with everything you are and love your neighbor as yourself. And yet...they not only walk by the dying man, they cross the road to the other side to avoid him.

Barack Obama’s speech didn’t end with his rejection of Rev. Wright. Instead, he took the time to explain that there was another side than the one the world had seen on television and You Tube. “The truth is,” Obama went on to say, “that isn't all that I know of the man. The man I met more than 20 years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another, to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a United States Marine; ...who for over 30 years has led a church that serves the community by doing God's work here on Earth — by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.” (1)

Maybe there was more to Reverend Wright than we could glean from a three-minute video clip of a 30-minute sermon. And maybe there is more to the priest and the Levite than we can see in their brief appearance in this parable. You see, not only would the priests and Levite been aware of laws that called them to love their neighbors, which surely meant helping someone in need; because of their particular religious duties, they were also bound by strict purity laws. One of these forbade religious leaders to fulfill their temple responsibilities if they had contact with a corpse--and it would be impossible to know if the man by the side of the road was dead without making contact. So although it might be tempting for us to see the priest and the Levite as hopelessly misguided when it comes to their journey on this road and their journey with God, the truth is, they were making complicated decisions of the kind we make every day.

Would you stop and pick up a hitchhiker if you had your children or grandchildren in the car? No, because at that moment, your primary responsibility is the safety of the children in your care. Would you approve if your parents or grandparents gave all their life savings to a charity that provided food, vaccinations, and mosquito nets to impoverished African children? No, because it means your parents or grandparents will not have the resources to provide for themselves as they age. Life is full of such decisions and calculations, and in that respect we are all perhaps more like the Levite and the priest -- and maybe even Jeremiah Wright -- than we would care to admit.

Okay, so how many of you saw yourselves in the religious scholar, peppering Jesus with questions? As Eugene Peterson indicates in his translation, the scholar, who was actually a kind of religious lawyer, an expert in Jewish law, was doing what lawyers do best -- parsing, defining, looking for a loophole -- when he ask Jesus to clarify exactly who was his neighbor. He knew the importance of loving God and neighbor, but he was looking for a way to make caring for his neighbor seem more manageable. He’s hoping, in other words, for a straightforward answer. Your neighbor is everyone who lives on your particular city block...or within a one mile radius of your house...or all the people you encounter between your workplace and the temple. He wanted something concrete. He wanted to know who he had to care for so that he would also know who he wasn’t responsible for.

But as most of us have no doubt discovered, Jesus doesn’t usually give straightforward answers, and this parable is no exception. Because after the priest and the Levite pass by the beaten man, the one who comes along next is none other than one who is in every way an enemy of the Jews: a Samaritan. If you identified most with this character, then that’s great, but you should know that to depict a Samaritan as the good guy in a story told to a group of faithful Jews would be like saying to a group of Americans that Osama bin-Laden or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came walking down a desert road and saw an American lying in the dirt half-dead. And instead of laughing or ranting about how he deserved what had happened to him, instead of finding a rock and finishing him off once and for all, this mortal enemy kneeled in the sand, cleaned the man’s wounds, put bandages on him, gently lifted him into a car, took him to the nearest luxury hotel and paid for his recuperation. Jesus wasn’t just pointing out that the Samaritan did the right thing by showing mercy, he was defying all expectations by making a Samaritan the hero of this story.

In North Carolina in 1963, a Methodist minister named Vernon Tyson invited Dr. Samuel Proctor, a black man and college president to preach in Vernon’s all-white church. Proctor accepted.

When the church leaders found out about the invitation and word trickled into the community, Rev. Tyson began to receive death threats. Despite his best attempts to smooth over the situation and encourage his parishioners to open their hearts and their minds, the majority of his congregation remained firmly opposed.

The night before Dr. Proctor was scheduled to preach, an emergency meeting of the church’s board was held, during which members of the board asked Rev. Tyson whether this one service was really worth tearing the church apart. Then, Miss Amy Womble, an elderly schoolteacher who had taught most people in the room, told this story. “Recently up near Chapel Hill, a teenage boy was killed in a car crash, or so they thought. He was by the side of the road and they were waiting for an ambulance to come and take him to the funeral home. But then an airman from the air force base stopped. He saw the boy lying there and ran to him and opened the boy’s mouth. He saw the boy’s tongue stuck in his throat, so he pulled it out and then gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. By the time the ambulance arrived, the boy was walking around alive. The next week they had a big community dinner for the airman, celebrating how he’d saved that boy’s life.

“What I haven’t told you,” Miss Amy continued, “is that the boy in the wreck was white and the airman was black. And I want all you fathers to tell me something. Which one of you would have said to that airman, ‘Now don’t you stick your black fingers on my boy’s tongue’? Which one of you would have told him, ‘Don’t you put your black lips on my boy’s mouth.’?”

The board voted to stand with their pastor and welcome Dr. Proctor the next day. After that late Saturday night meeting at which Miss Amy Womble spoke, three different members of the board, all white males, called Rev. Tyson in tears, repentant of the prejudice that had gripped them. One of them told his minister, “Something happened to me tonight. When Miss Amy was talking, something happened that ain’t ever happened before. Old Love just come up in my heart.” (2)

We are on a journey and Jesus -- Old Love -- is walking with us. Sometimes we will be the priest and the Levite and make a calculated decision to cross over to the other side even though we know deep down in our hearts that compassion is needed. And Jesus will see us and Jesus will forgive us. Sometimes we will be the Samaritan -- whom, incidentally, Jesus never actually calls “good” -- who responds to the needs of another human being, even if it is someone we could barely be civil to if we met under any other circumstance. And Jesus will nod and smile. Sometimes we will be the religious scholar, questioning Jesus, desperate for some clear answers to life’s most perplexing questions. And Jesus will answer, but the answer will only lead to more questions. Then there will come a time for each of us on this journey -- if the time hasn’t come already -- when we will look around, only to discover that we are traveler in the ditch, in the wrong place at the wrong time, bleeding and hurting and in the depths of despair, and someone, maybe the person we least expect, maybe even the person we least want, will show us mercy. And in that person, whoever they might be, we will see the face of Jesus, and we will know for sure that we are not on this journey alone. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. Read the entire speech here.
2. Tyson, Timothy, Blood Done Sign My Name. Three Rivers Press, 2005.