Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
Neighbors – Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Colossians 1:1-14/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Luke 10:25-37/NRSVUE)
When they were in high school, my two daughters worked at the same place, about five miles from home, which made for a pretty good commute. And it was an even better commute when they were scheduled for the same shift and could drive there together because they shared a car.
It was a fourteen year-old Saab that had many quirks, and one of them was that the key fob no longer operated the door locks. And while you could unlock the doors from the outside with the key, for reasons unbeknownst to anyone, you couldn’t lock them from the outside with the key.
So, when you got where you were going, you had to get out, go back in through any door other than the driver’s door, lock the car using the switch (which was on the center console between the driver’s and passenger’s seats), get out again and close the door behind you. It was a whole lot of trouble to go through, but the inability to lock the car from the inside while the driver’s door was open was a intentional design feature — one meant to prevent you from locking your keys in the car. It probably seemed like a failsafe system to those Swedish engineers when they came up with it, but they probably should have hired my daughters to test it before they rolled it out.
One Friday night my daughters were a little slow getting out the door and were rushing to get to work, which was pretty typical (they may have been born a few weeks early, but neither of them has been on-time for anything since). Valerie and I had just sat down in a restaurant and ordered dinner when her phone rang; the number on the caller ID was for the kids’ workplace, which would have been enough to make any parent’s blood run cold. When she answered, my daughter Hope was on the other end of the line, talking a mile a minute and loudly enough for me to hear from the other side of the table.
Apparently, they were in such a hurry to get to work that they executed the Saab’s peculiar door lock procedure, but had left out one essential step — that being turning off the car before you execute the procedure. The result: they locked the keys in the car with the car still running.
Hope went into work to use the phone to call us (because they had also locked their cellphones in the car), leaving her sister Tess to stand watch over the locked and running car in the parking lot. I’m not sure who got the worse end of that deal: I mean, Tess had to stay out there with the car and be late for work but Hope had to tell her boss what happened and then call her parents to come save them from this mess they’d gotten themselves into — we had to be the last people she wanted to call in that situation.
We cancelled our dinner order, ran home to get the spare key and headed off to the rescue. In the midst of all this panic, Hope couldn’t remember where they’d parked, which dialed up the degree of difficulty a bit because the lot they used was the one for Gillette Stadium, which seats sixty six thousand people. So searching for that Saab was like looking for a needle in a haystack. But we eventually found Tess, unlocked and turned off the car, and sent her on her merry way. She was absolutely mortified (as was her sister), we reacted like many parents would (with eye rolls and disbelief) but all was set right in the end.
Despite the fact that there was and still is a little bit of judgment and some good-natured kidding in our family about what transpired that night (I am, after all, telling you this ridiculous story ten years after it happened and still rolling my eyes), they did what you’d want and expect kids to do in that situation — call their parents for help (even though that was not an easy thing for them to have to do); we did what you’d expect parents would do in that situation — help their kids out of a jam (even if it was entirely self-inflicted). That’s the way it’s supposed to go.
Today’s reading from Luke’s Gospel, on the other hand, isn’t exactly the way it’s supposed to go — at least by the standards of our world, anyway.
This is, of course, one of the Bible’s greatest hits: the Parable of the Good Samaritan. We’ve all heard this story before and the term “Good Samaritan” is now widely used to refer to someone, anyone, who goes out of their way to show kindness to someone else — generally, a stranger. But it’s actually way more complicated than that.
As the story begins, a lawyer asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life: “Just tell me what I need to do, give me a checklist.” Jesus responds by asking the lawyer what the law says, and the lawyer’s answer is straight out of the Torah: “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.” This is, of course, the right answer. But the lawyer decides to push things a little further (because apparently he still needs a procedure to follow): “And who is my neighbor?”, he asks. And Jesus, being Jesus, chooses to share a parable.
A man is headed from Jerusalem to Jericho in the land of the Israelites and is attacked by some robbers and left by the side of the road. Anyone hearing this story back then would have known that it was a really bad idea to walk that particular path alone because it was a notoriously dangerous place. So, many in Luke’s original audience would have thought, “What on earth was that guy thinking? He kind of brought this on himself,” which isn’t really fair (victim blaming never is).
As this guy is lying there half-dead, a priest and a Levite — two representatives of the religious establishment — pass by, going out of their way to avoid him. And this kind of makes sense in a weird sort of way; you see, if this man were, in fact, all-dead and not just half-dead, it would have been a violation of the law for the Levite and the priest to come into contact with him because it would have made them ritually unclean. But in an another sense — in a gospel sense — this makes no sense at all. Jesus chooses to make this point by summoning, of all people, a Samaritan — an out-of-towner, an outsider — to help the victim when no one else would.
The significance of this is likely a little lost on us now, but in those days it would have been quite provocative. You see, there was no love lost between the Jews and the Samaritans — the actual historical reasons for their strained relationship remain unclear but, despite the fact they worshipped the same God, they absolutely hated each other.
And so when Luke’s early readers see a Samaritan coming to the wounded traveler’s rescue (the assumption is that he was an Jew) they understood that this is not the way it’s supposed to go. You see, in that culture, this was not just a case of someone showing the wounded man kindness; it’s a case of the other, the outcast, the enemy putting all of that stuff aside and showing the wounded man kindness — and doing so when the man’s own countrymen had let him down.
The Samaritan treats the wounded man with the kind of unquestioning concern that a parent would show a child, though I bet the wounded man was a little conflicted about this — sure, he was happy that someone came to his rescue but he probably wasn’t too happy that it was be a Samaritan (kind of like my kids were probably less than thrilled that their parents had to come to their rescue when they locked the keys in a running car).
And then, to top it all off, Jesus tells the Jewish lawyer who started all of this that he should be like the Samaritan — the whole point being that this is the way it’s supposed to go in God’s world. And that would have gotten everyone’s attention for sure.
But, like I said a few minutes ago, the social context for this gospel story might seem a little remote to us now — two thousand years later and half a world away — so let me frame it in a more immediate way.
I, like all of you, have been horrified by the astounding loss of life in Texas over the past couple of weeks. And adding to the awfulness of this situation has been the abundance of finger-pointing and lack of responsibility-taking on the part of certain folks who were charged with being good stewards of our abundant resources (environmental, financial and human) — folks who were supposed to keep us safe whenever possible and care for us in the aftermath when they couldn’t.
Just to be clear: I’m not talking about those who are on the front lines doing the actual work, I’m talking about those who are making decisions that affect other people’s lives and livelihoods without understanding (or necessarily caring) about such things.
In the midst of all this, I stumbled upon a news story that warmed my heart and broke it at the same time. Thursday before last, in the city of Kerrville, Texas, the water level of the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in just 45 minutes. The resulting flash floods killed dozens and left many others missing. That Sunday a group of volunteer firefighters from across the border in Acuña, Mexico arrived in Kerrville to assist in the search and rescue efforts.
And this is pretty incredible because, as of late, the people of Mexico really owe us nothing in terms of goodwill. American politicians have tried to make us believe that they are the other, the outcast, the enemy; they’ve described them as “drug dealers, criminals and rapists”; they’ve tried to convince us that they are less-than in every possible respect — and the fact that they’re in power means that they got a whole lot of Americans to buy into this too. Yet, when all hell broke loose in Texas — due in no small measure to the failures of those same politicians — look who showed up to help — and who didn’t.
The parable of the Good Samaritan, like so many other of Jesus’s teachings — turns everything upside down, challenging our understanding of how things are supposed to go. The lawyer asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. The answer, which he comes up with himself, is to love God and neighbor. He then asks, “Who is my neighbor, just tell me who I have to love and I’ll make sure to love them.” But, rather than doing that, Jesus replies with this parable.
Just stop and look at what’s really going on here. The lawyer is essentially asking Jesus to give him a list of who his neighbor is (which is, of course, then, also a list of who his neighbor isn’t). And instead of giving him that list, Jesus chooses to change the entire paradigm: It’s not about who is and isn’t your neighbor, because everyone is your neighbor; it’s about you being a good neighbor to everyone. That’s the way it’s supposed to go in God’s reign.
And who is a neighbor? The one who shows mercy — not just to their family, not just to their kind, not just to the people they like, not just to the people they deem worthy, but to everyone.
Make sense?
Good. Now go and do likewise.