Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Deut 30: 9-14; Ps 25: 1-9; Col 1:1-14; Luke 10:35-37

Rev’d Dr. Deborah Meister, ODM

The apartment in which I live is two blocks from a so-called “safer injection center,” a place where those who live in addiction can take their drugs with some confidence that if the drugs are contaminated, someone will be at hand to help them. That center draws people to it, and so, every day, when I walk out my door, the sidewalk is populated with gaunt men and women, hunched over their works or gyrating to sounds no one else can hear, or simply lying on the sidewalk, lost to the world. I see them, and my heart breaks. I am enraged that we are offering them a way to stay addicted rather than treatment that might set them free. I am appalled that we seem to have accepted a society in which people live in that kind of degradation, selling themselves for the next hit. But they seem to have food and they seem to have drink and I do not know what to do that might help, and so, like the priest and the Levite in today’s story, I see them and I walk on by. Ten times a day, I see them and I walk on by. I am no Good Samaritan.

Today’s parable is one of the most beloved in Scripture, and yet, it is meant to trouble our hearts. Particularly now, the questions it asks are devastating: How do we welcome the stranger: the injured stranger, the needy stranger, the potentially-dangerous stranger, the man or woman from another country, another culture, another race? What do we owe one another? This question haunts our world at a time when human cruelty and ecological crisis are driving millions of people toward rapidly-closing borders, restricted asylum policies, and concentration camps in the desert or in a Florida swamp. Gandhi said, “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members,” but our temptation today is to deny relationship entirely. We are wrestling with the lawyer’s question: Who is my neighbor?, which, in his mind, clearly means, Who is not? Whom am I free to ignore or to mistreat?

How different was the world I entered about a month ago, when I visited the the Monastère des Augustines in Québec City. Founded in 1639 by three nuns who came from France, the convent has been for centuries the home of an order of nuns whose work was to tend the sick. On the ground floor of the Monastère, there is a museum honoring their work, from its barest beginnings to the establishment of twelve hospitals which still offer care throughout Québec. There in the display cases is a history of medicine seen through their work, captured in instruments and pamphlets and letters stained with tears. In the center of the main room stands an iron-framed hospital bed with pristine white sheets, and in the middle of bed, where a person would be, is a five-foot column of extravagant silk flowers. It’s an astonishing gesture: to show that the patient is a person of divine beauty — the sick, groaning, short-tempered, frightened, gangrenous, pus-oozing patient whom the sisters tended as the home of Christ himself. Here is no burden, no task to be taken on unwillingly, but only the pure self-giving of holy love.

That is the world Christ lived and died to bring into being, the world we are meant to inhabit as disciples. Not a world divided into neighbor and un-neighbor, but a world in which that question simply would not be asked. A world in which belonging can be taken for granted. We are the neighbors — not just to one another, but to every person who crosses our path. They are Christ’s gift to us, Christ’s presence and image all around us. And this belief, which is often viewed as the culmination of Christian life, is meant to be its foundation. The place where we start.

If we are asking the question, we have already missed the point. Or, we are trying not to see it. So often, I think, we try not to see it — because seeing it would require us to change our lives. In the words of my former colleague Jim, Christ’s teaching is “simple, but it ain’t easy.” Christ challenges the very roots of our way of seeing the world, because our world is so disordered at this point that only deep transformation can heal us.

Jesus tells us about a Samaritan. We don’t know his name; he’s fictional, just somebody Jesus imagined. (Of course, we are also people he imagined. That’s how we were created: God imagined us.) I find myself wishing he had a name — David the Samaritan or Ahmed the Samaritan or even Jean-Claude the Samaritan — something I could use to hold up his personhood against the reductionist tendencies of a label: “the Samaritan.” Because “Samaritan” wasn’t a pretty label; it was a marker of suspicion and distrust, much like “Muslim” or “Jew” or “trans” today, depending on who was saying them.

Samaritans were a mixed people. After the Assyrians had conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, they exiled the Israeli political and cultural elite, leaving only the “meanest” people — the small farmers and fishermen, the ordinary crafters, the salt of the earth. Then the Assyrians settled among them people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim, who intermarried with one another and with the remaining Hebrews, worshiping both the God of Israel and the gods of their own homelands. In other words, their identities were complex, and rather than accepting the gift of their complexity and the challenge of meeting them person to person, the Hebrews who returned from exile chose to exclude them. They adopted an ideal of ethnic purity as central to their identity, and that meant everyone else was second-class.

Perhaps that’s why the Samaritan was able to show compassion: because he knew what it was to be hurt and to have everyone else look the other way. Perhaps, but I think that’s a bit too facile. Being hurt can teach people compassion, but it can also embitter them, trap them in rage and in fear. Meanness doesn’t cure meanness. Only kindness can do that.

Jesus tells us that the man who was robbed was traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho. Jerusalem, of course, was the holy city, the center of power and the place with the Temple. A walled city, a fortress where beautiful gates could be opened and shut to control who was allowed to enter and who had to remain outside.

I don’t know much about ancient Jericho, although I’ve been there. The only thing we’re told about Jericho is that it became a city without defenses, the place where the walls came tumbling down. The Book of Joshua tells us that Joshua and the Hebrews processed around the walls of Jericho for six days, then, on the seventh, marched around the walls seven times and shouted. I’m not sure that will work for walls that exist in our minds (although if processions will do it, we Anglicans ought to rock this!). But it does suggest a certain kind of dogged persistence: faced with a strong enemy, the Hebrews refused to look away. Sometimes, that’s what faith looks like: standing at the foot of the cross and refusing to walk away. Witnessing to the enduring bonds of love even in a world where cruelty seems to be stronger. Refusing to let cruelty win.

That’s what the Samaritan does: with the little that he has, he refuses to let cruelty win. And Christ’s command, Go, and do likewise is so powerful that it’s easy to miss the full freight of the story. In sermon after sermon, I have heard the preacher assume that the members of the congregation are acting like the priest and the Levite (we all do, at some point), and that they need to learn to be like the Samaritan (we all do, all the time). But if the Samaritan is the neighbor, and the priest and the Levite are the non-neighbors, then the only person in the story itself that we can be is the man lying battered beside the road.

The man lying by the side of the road is naked and beaten, unable even to care for himself. He seems to have no great strength, no special talents that might help him out of his jam and allow him to go serve others. He is able to live only because he has received the help of another, able to continue to love only because he has known the mercy of a stranger.

But, my friends, so have we. There is not one of us who has not been broken, at some time or another. Not one of us who does not know the bitterness of rejected love, who has not tasted the ashes of failure. Some of us know what it is to lose so badly (to addiction, to death, to mental illness) that we did not know how to get up out of the dust and begin to walk again. But we have each known the touch of the true Good Samaritan, our Savior Jesus Christ, who faced down the shame and contempt of his people in order to reach out to us broken strangers, heal our wounds with the oil of anointing and the wine of his blood, carry us on his own cross, and bring us to a church where we might be made whole. “He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” (Col 1:14) He sets us free to make our own journey from Jerusalem to Jericho, from the walled-in life to the unguarded heart.

We do not show mercy because we are strong people reaching down from above. We learn it from those who have tended to us in our hours of need. We do not learn to serve one another because we think we know all the answers, but because we know what it is to live without them.

I do not know how to care for the addicts who live near me, but they sure seem to know how to care for one another. Every day I see them, sharing their food, laying a blanket over someone lost in his delusions, helping one another cross the street when they are too high to do it safely. They seem to sense what the Augustinian sisters knew: that there is no true spirituality severed from the uncomfortable realities of human flesh. We can cauterize our hearts — build walls of law or of stone, bury ourselves in our screens and our busyness to avoid hearing the needs of those around us — but we will only end up cutting our hearts off from God as we cut them off from one another. Because our God is the one who tends the broken — broken in body, broken in spirit, broken by life. If you would find him, seek him there.