Recognizing Our Neighbors 7/14/19 Pentecost 5C

Rev. Dr. Rebecca L. Kiser

RECOGNIZING OUR NEIGHBORS

7/14/19   Pentecost 5C

A preacher asked on a clergy Facebook site, “Did your seminary teach you that Jesus is the Good Samaritan, or that Jesus is the good innkeeper?” The question got a lot of replies, because the common lectionary for this Sunday is what we just read, the parable of the good Samaritan, and many congregations are hearing sermons on it today!!!.  Some answerers noted that interpretation of the parables has become a lot more fluid these days, and that most interpreters have moved beyond assigning each element of the story a particular meaning (ie the allegorical method).  Parables are meant to make us think, …reflect, ….and ponder. Where we are in our lives can affect whether we see ourselves as the guy left by the side of the road, beaten up and ignored; OR whether we see ourselves as taking on the role of the good Samaritan because we see suffering all around us, we know what it’s like, and we cannot help but respond; OR perhaps we see ourselves as the innkeeper, caring for people after the immediate crisis is addressed.  Rarely will we immediately see ourselves as the religious bad guys, although at some point we may confess it.  So usually there is no one right interpretation of a parable - the Holy Spirit may move our heart in different ways at different times.   Like I said, it’s kind of fluid.

I thought it might be interesting to share other perspectives of sermons I’ve heard about this parable, from people in other places in their lives and who have come to this text identifying with the various characters  - and so seen other things in this story. 

I heard a man take the perspective that we are like the guy beaten up and left for dead by the things we’ve suffered and endured in the world.  We may be wrecked by our failures in our sins, OR beaten up by the competition for position in power in this world, OR overlooked because of some kind of difference or disability, OR at the end of our ability to cope with a significant loss and grief.  There are surely times when we have each felt this way.  I have - several times, and for different reasons.  Things that happen to us can be devastating, and we can see no way forward.   Then a totally unlikely person says or does something that starts us on our way to healing.  That’s what happened in my own story, when I felt my ministry and life were over, and I was invisible to others, left alone. My sister offered me to come live with her.  We had not had a good relationship since we were teenagers, so I did not expect this kindness from her.  She had an extra room and she offered it, so I had a place to live while I regrouped and recovered. She was my Good Samaritan.  Then I found additional caring people in a local church, who nurtured me and saw good in me yet.  I guess they were the innkeepers for me.  Think for a moment about a time when you were suffering and devastated - who was your Good Samaritan, your innkeepers? 

            Another good sermon I heard emphasized the fact that a person from Samaria, a Samaritan, was not considered a good person by the original hearers of this story.  Those hearers would have been shocked to hear a story where the dreaded Samaritan was actually a good guy - an unexpected person to do a good thing.  A person from Samaria, to the first hearers of Jesus’ story, was a half-caste, a person whose parentage was a mix of Jew and something else - they had intermarried, not kept to their tribe.  I’ve read that after the Korean war, the children fathered by a white American GI with a Korean woman was an outcast there - neither fish nor fowl, not pure.  I imagine that’s been so after other wars as well.  The first interracial children in this country were not accepted well, either. 

            Of course, there are other reasons why certain people would be considered surprising heroes - say, a person who looked like a stereotypical gang member, for example, would be an unlikely helper in our modern version of the story. We’d likely be scared if a person like that stopped to help us when our car broke down - male or female - people of whom our expectations and our stereotyping lead us to see as unlikely to act caringly.  In the same way, people who we would expect to be caring, according to their professions and our stereotypes, cross the street to avoid the man.  A religious professional, for example, we would expect to be caring - but think of the times a battered woman has come to her pastor for help and told that God wants her to go back and submit to her husband.  Think of the children abused by a priest or a pastor.  Criminals use the assumption we make about their niceness and normalcy and okay dress, to take advantage of others all the time. 

            To help us ponder the 2 that passed by, I recalled that in one of my Brother Cadfael mystery novels (by Ellis Peters), there was a murdered pastor who demonstrated this kind of disregard of hurting people.  One event that gave his parishioners reason to dislike him involved a couple with a sick newborn, who came to him to baptize the baby quickly before it died.  But the priest wouldn’t go until he completed his prayer time - and by the time he got there, the child had died.  Then he wouldn’t bury it in the sanctified ground.  He chose his own personal holiness over the needs of this family, which is probably what the two religious folks in the story did, too - on their way to Jerusalem, they were most probably going for religious rituals, and had to stay away from blood and death, which would make them ritually unclean.  Their own religious practices kept them from a compassionate response.

            If we think this is only in stricter religious systems than ours, let me tell you about a pastor in Charleston who told me about a parishioner who objected to their custodian joining the church, saying that he wasn’t like them and should find his own church with others like himself.  I think about the way I am fearful of speaking out about the awful way our sisters and brothers at our country’s borders are being treated, and how it hurts my heart to see the lack of compassion shown to them ---I keep myself from expressing what my heart says in fear that I will be reviled or labeled a radical, and all my Scriptural insights ignored.  I think about the way we are fearful of prison ministries, or of going into rough parts of town. 

A commentator on this passage suggested that the church is to be the innkeepers after God has reached out to those in need, and the Spirit has moved them to seek healing from God.  That is, that the church is where God sends the broken and the suffering, like the Samaritan man left the beaten up guy at the inn, and paid for his care until he came again.  The church is where the healing continues, which may be a pretty good look at the church and our ministry. It asks us to look at the people who come to us in a different way – not to see them as ‘giving units,’ not to look at them as somebody who will bring us some prestige. But rather to see people who come to where churches is God sending them there for the kind of care they need to heal, and therefore asking us to do the work of a healer or provide the work of healing whether we are the healers or not.  See, the innkeeper was a person of business, not necessarily a doctor him or herself. But the Samaritan left enough money and left orders that this person be taken care of until he returned, and the innkeeper could certainly use that money to find the resources that the guy needed. So then the church would be a place of resources for healing, various resources i.e. support for finding addict fighting addictions, support  for turning her life around, support for trying to change bad habits and hurtful attitudes, love and acceptance for those the world rejects and who are tempted to end their lives and suffering.

So there’s a few different takes on that parable.

For myself, this time around I noticed that Jesus doesn’t really answer the lawyer’s question. The lawyer, who is probably a religious scribe, tries to nail Jesus down on this “love your neighbor as yourself” thing, like, how do we get an A+ in neighborliness?  What are the details?  Who exactly do you mean?  What exactly do I need to do to keep this law?  Jesus has just stated that the whole Law of Moses is summed up by “love the Lord your God with all your heart soul mind and strength, and your neighbor as yourself.”  Its a summary statement about the purpose behind the content of the Law of Moses. This guy, though, wants to nit pick details when Jesus is talking heart attitude and mind attitude.

People today are no different. Rules are an easier way to determine compliance than saying we need to love our neighbors as ourselves.  That’s too nebulous for us sometimes - when we have to determine our own heart and evaluate it.  Just about any church I’ve been in, I’ve had somebody come up to me and ask, “So does God want me to tithe on my net income or my gross income?” Like giving to God is kinda like taxes, with deductions and loopholes. That’s begging the question – in Jesus’ view we give to God because of our love and our gratitude, and because we know that everything we have comes from God in the first place, and there’s no higher good that we can do with the blessings that God has given us. And the idea of a 10th, or a tithe, is a concept from under the law of Moses - and that Law is summed up by Jesus in loving God with our whole being. No details are given.  Some people adopt the concept of a tithe because its measurable - but then it becomes a rule they can argue about.

            People have also asked me, “How many times a month do I have to go to church?” The answer from scripture Old and New Testament together is that we would rather be in the house of the Lord than anywhere else! That gathering to give God praise and worship wherever two or three are gathered together, is pure joy. It can’t be quantified or qualified. The only instruction I recall reading from the New Testament is the challenge to, “forsake not the assembling of yourselves together;” beyond that its not defined either. 

            See, Jesus change the emphasis in his answer - he moves the emphasis from what are called the jots and the tittles of the Hebrew text - which are like the serifs on our type fonts, like what makes Times New Roman look different from Arial, those little teeny decorations on the strokes of a letter.  Those teeny details are not the point, Jesus says - I want your heart transformed by love, by compassion, until you feel the suffering the way God does, and you want to respond as God does. 

Jesus wants to give us a vision of the kindom of God; he wants our imaginations opened to a way to live that God actually intended and desires as best for us, rather than the way we see around us.  Our imaginations have to see beyond what we accept in this world, to the way things could be if we lived into that vision of God’s kindom.  God’s ways and values have to be brought into the messy middle of life here, and not just pushed over on the side for church and Sundays.  (This is based on Bonhoeffer’s writings)

So to get back to our parable! The guy asks his picky question, but Jesus doesn’t give into the temptation to try to define. Instead he tells a story, and at the end of it he asks the lawyer guy to see for himself which one of these acted as a neighbor.  See, Jesus wants us to recognize for ourselves what a neighbor does, and then our own answer will lead us - or convict us, as may be.  Jesus take the question about who is our neighbor, and turns it back on us,  to ask, “Are YOU a neighbor to the hurting and suffering?  What do YOU do when you see the suffering people around you?”

This is a timely question - it probably always is, actually.  It is not a political question except in the sense that all Jesus’ teachings have political implications.  Its inescapable - we can’t preach Jesus without it having implications for our own settings and situations. 

Friends, as believers in God through Jesus Christ, we belong to Christ’s kindom ahead of any national realm - we are citizens of heaven, living out the will of God in a world that is run by various governmental styles.  Consider the current item in the news about all the families and children seeking to make a better life in this country - this parable from 2000 years ago asks us what a neighbor would do when seeing suffering people.  Its not a Democrat, Republican or Independent party thing - its a compassionate neighbor thing. God’s heart is always with the suffering and the wronged. So this parable is a challenge to us - which of those who saw the beaten up guy by the road is the neighbor?  So what are we called to do?  AMEN.