Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
Service Date:
11 July, 2010
Luke 10:25-37
Our Gospel reading this morning is a very familiar story, so I want us to use our imaginations to understand it freshly. Listen, and fill in the details for yourself.
I was hitchhiking, but no one turned up to give me a lift, so I had to use shanks' pony instead. It's a bad road, with a reputation for accidents and muggings, but I couldn't help it. So I kept a sharp lookout, and tried to listen out for noises that might mean somebody bad was coming, so I could get out of their way. Even so, I walked right into trouble. A big group of men who looked as if they meant no good to anyone. I tried to walk past confidently, the way they tell you to do in bad parts of town, but it didn't work. First the whistles, then the name-calling. I tried to ignore it, but when I didn't respond they got angry. Then they surrounded me, so I couldn't move on. And I don't want to think too much about the next bit. It hurt, that's all I need to remember. And when it was over, I was horizontal with my bag gone, and they were nowhere to be seen. I crawled over to the edge of the road, but that was all I had the strength to do. In the end, someone had to come along, didn't they?
I must have fainted at that point, because when I came to again, it was several hours later, and I heard the sound of footsteps again. Oh no, not again, I thought - you've taken everything I had anyway. But it wasn't the muggers back. It was much better news than that, or so I thought. It was a cleric, dressed for some major festival. I could hear him muttering as he came closer; trying out his sermon, it sounded like. I'd have quite liked listening to him, but I had other things on my mind. So I cleared my throat, meaningfully. Then he came out of his dream, and noticed me lying there. But if I'd looked for any help, I was going to be disappointed. ‘Terribly sorry to see you in trouble,' he exclaimed as he picked up his pace. ‘But I'm late already, and as you see it's a pretty important occasion. I can't risk getting blood on my vestments. I'm sure someone will come along to help you soon.' And off he went, top speed.
I was a bit sorry to see him go. After all, no one knows what clergy do when they're not in services. I'd have liked to think they went round helping people. But evidently his congregation and getting to his service on time meant more to him than I did. So I went on lying there in the road, drifting in and out of consciousness, till another set of footsteps woke me up again. This time it was someone going to a meeting. She had all her notes with her, and was ready with all her arguments against so-and-so who was going to oppose his plan. She looked efficient and organised, so I had high hopes of her help - but it was as bad as with the cleric. It just took one look at me and the state I was in, and she veered off to the other side of the road. This one didn't even look at me. It was as if unless she decided to stop and notice me, I didn't even exist, so if she didn't look, she wouldn't have to change her priorities and do something about my problem.
I was getting worried now. It was growing late, and the air was getting colder. What would happen to me if I had to lie here all night? Would the next band of muggers think it was a real laugh to kill me? Or would pneumonia do it for them?
The next bit seems like a bit of a dream to me, even now when I look back at it. Because to be honest, the next person to stop was someone I'd have pretended to ignore if I'd seen him in the street. You would have ignored him too! It was embarrassing the way he dressed. His accent was really weird. And it was anyone's guess what he'd been doing beforehand and with whom. But to me, just then, he seemed like an angel.
He picked me up and helped me walk over to his transport. He got me to a hotel. He actually paid for me to stay the night - heaven knows where he got the money from. And I heard him telling reception, ‘Don't worry about the money. I'll be good for the bill. Just contact me if you need to spend anything else.' And I realised that out of all the people in the world, this impossible man had been my saviour. I'd never have believed it, not in a million years.
We often tell the story of the Good Samaritan as though we are or should be the Samaritan, looking for ways to help people out when they are in trouble. The word ‘Samaritan' has come to mean someone who's a good neighbour, and Jesus ends his story answering the question, Who is my neighbour? with the words: Go and do the same. But when Jesus' friends heard the story, they would not have been identifying with the Samaritan. Samaritans were weird. They got God wrong, they didn't live right, they were an affront to any right-thinking Jew. So to understand the story right, before we're the rescuing Samaritan, first we have to imagine what it was like to be in need of help, and to be rescued ourselves by one of these peculiar characters.
Our Gospel reading this morning is a very familiar story, so I want us to use our imaginations to understand it freshly. Listen, and fill in the details for yourself.
I was hitchhiking, but no one turned up to give me a lift, so I had to use shanks' pony instead. It's a bad road, with a reputation for accidents and muggings, but I couldn't help it. So I kept a sharp lookout, and tried to listen out for noises that might mean somebody bad was coming, so I could get out of their way. Even so, I walked right into trouble. A big group of men who looked as if they meant no good to anyone. I tried to walk past confidently, the way they tell you to do in bad parts of town, but it didn't work. First the whistles, then the name-calling. I tried to ignore it, but when I didn't respond they got angry. Then they surrounded me, so I couldn't move on. And I don't want to think too much about the next bit. It hurt, that's all I need to remember. And when it was over, I was horizontal with my bag gone, and they were nowhere to be seen. I crawled over to the edge of the road, but that was all I had the strength to do. In the end, someone had to come along, didn't they?
I must have fainted at that point, because when I came to again, it was several hours later, and I heard the sound of footsteps again. Oh no, not again, I thought - you've taken everything I had anyway. But it wasn't the muggers back. It was much better news than that, or so I thought. It was a cleric, dressed for some major festival. I could hear him muttering as he came closer; trying out his sermon, it sounded like. I'd have quite liked listening to him, but I had other things on my mind. So I cleared my throat, meaningfully. Then he came out of his dream, and noticed me lying there. But if I'd looked for any help, I was going to be disappointed. ‘Terribly sorry to see you in trouble,' he exclaimed as he picked up his pace. ‘But I'm late already, and as you see it's a pretty important occasion. I can't risk getting blood on my vestments. I'm sure someone will come along to help you soon.' And off he went, top speed.
I was a bit sorry to see him go. After all, no one knows what clergy do when they're not in services. I'd have liked to think they went round helping people. But evidently his congregation and getting to his service on time meant more to him than I did. So I went on lying there in the road, drifting in and out of consciousness, till another set of footsteps woke me up again. This time it was someone going to a meeting. She had all her notes with her, and was ready with all her arguments against so-and-so who was going to oppose his plan. She looked efficient and organised, so I had high hopes of her help - but it was as bad as with the cleric. It just took one look at me and the state I was in, and she veered off to the other side of the road. This one didn't even look at me. It was as if unless she decided to stop and notice me, I didn't even exist, so if she didn't look, she wouldn't have to change her priorities and do something about my problem.
I was getting worried now. It was growing late, and the air was getting colder. What would happen to me if I had to lie here all night? Would the next band of muggers think it was a real laugh to kill me? Or would pneumonia do it for them?
The next bit seems like a bit of a dream to me, even now when I look back at it. Because to be honest, the next person to stop was someone I'd have pretended to ignore if I'd seen him in the street. You would have ignored him too! It was embarrassing the way he dressed. His accent was really weird. And it was anyone's guess what he'd been doing beforehand and with whom. But to me, just then, he seemed like an angel.
He picked me up and helped me walk over to his transport. He got me to a hotel. He actually paid for me to stay the night - heaven knows where he got the money from. And I heard him telling reception, ‘Don't worry about the money. I'll be good for the bill. Just contact me if you need to spend anything else.' And I realised that out of all the people in the world, this impossible man had been my saviour. I'd never have believed it, not in a million years.
We often tell the story of the Good Samaritan as though we are or should be the Samaritan, looking for ways to help people out when they are in trouble. The word ‘Samaritan' has come to mean someone who's a good neighbour, and Jesus ends his story answering the question, Who is my neighbour? with the words: Go and do the same. But when Jesus' friends heard the story, they would not have been identifying with the Samaritan. Samaritans were weird. They got God wrong, they didn't live right, they were an affront to any right-thinking Jew. So to understand the story right, before we're the rescuing Samaritan, first we have to imagine what it was like to be in need of help, and to be rescued ourselves by one of these peculiar characters.
Hymns:
R&S 90, words and music, comes from the pen of Patrick Appleford, one of the co-founders of the Church Light Music Group, which published three collections of Twentieth Century Hymns, this one in 1965.R&S 475 is also a contemporary hymn, written by Glen Baker of the United Church of Canada. It reminds us that while we as Christians are servants of others in need, we can also be helped by other people in our own healing.
R&S 318 is another twentieth-century hymn, but one based on no fewer than seventeen biblical quotations; if your mind wanders during the sermon, you are invited to track them down to their sources! The tune Cornwall is from the nineteenth-century composer S.S. Wesley.
R&S 95 comes from the Mirfield Community, a Yorkshire Anglican community of monks, and was written by Bishop Timothy Rees, at that point the Principal of its ordination training course. The tune Blaenwern comes from the Welsh revival of 1904-05.
Sermon:
Deuteronomy 30:11-20; Psalm 82; Luke 10:25-37; Colossians 1:1-14
Our reading from Deuteronomy this morning sounds like a no-brainer. It's not even like Deal or No Deal, that you don't know exactly what's in the box you're being invited to open. Rather than a sum of money, small or large, the people of Israel are being invited to choose life rather than death. Well, it's obvious, isn't it?
But maybe not. Maybe when you get into a real-life situation, it's not so easy as having a choice of boxes, Noel Edmonds on hand and the banker on the phone to advise you. To start with, Deuteronomy, like our psalm, has the wisdom of hindsight. It was written during the Exile, when the people of Israel had decades to work out what could have gone wrong for them, that they had been defeated in battle and driven out of their land. The writer of Deuteronomy is pretty sure what it was: they'd not obeyed God, kept God's laws, and this was why they were in such a state now. So he urges the people: don't make the same mistake twice. Keeping God's laws means life, breaking them and turning away to other gods means death. It's like the choice between Compare the Meerkat.com and Compare the Market.com. As the meerkat on TV says: Simples! But to the Israelites who had crossed the desert and entered the Promised Land, what it meant in practice to keep God's laws, to serve God and not other gods, may not have been so simple. And I suspect that may be true for us, too.
Think about the villains on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho; not the muggers, but those who saw the person in need and turned away again. They had good reasons not to stop. Both priest and Levite would have been contaminated by touching a dead body, and the victim had been left for dead. Both would have had important responsibilities to their own communities, which could not have been fulfilled had they turned aside to help this stranger. It might even have been a set-up with more robbers lurking in the background. So in their minds, their priorities were obvious. Yet from the victim's viewpoint the outcome was evidently wrong.
I wonder whether it was hard for us to enter into the mindset of the victim waiting to be helped, rather than the other travellers on the Jerusalem-Jericho road, those who passed by or the one who stopped to help. Our tradition approves of people who work hard, whether in their own affairs or on behalf of the church. St Andrew's has set up many organisations to do good works, helping others directly or raising funds for charitable causes. We are conditioned into being either Good Samaritans, or people who feel guilty when they pass by on the other side.
Last week I said, If God's kingdom only comes as a result of our efforts, then we are back to earning salvation by the sweat of our brows, or more likely by endless committees, fundraising events and petitions we feel we have to organise so that God's work is done. And we're back to the prospect of powerlessness, guilt and failure, since we are not God but human. Is it possible, though, that God is quite capable of doing God's work? That our task is to look and notice when this is happening, and to say to others, as the psalmist does, ‘Come and see what God has done'?
This invitation for us to be people who are witnesses to what God does, not people who kill ourselves trying to fill in for God, drew a response from one person, But we do too much already. We can't do more. And for many of us, that is true. Torn between the demands of family and of church, we may hear the story of the Good Samaritan as a call to further action, and to despair; because we can do no more. But what if, instead, we are the ones in need of help, which may be offered to us from an unexpected and unwanted quarter?
The victim on the Jerusalem-Jericho road had to choose between death and life: death from exposure on the road, or life from the hands of a Samaritan. It was a no-brainer; yet I could imagine a different choice. ‘Hands off me, you dirty Samaritan!' exclaims the victim, defiantly. ‘If I die, I die, but you're not going to touch me! You know nothing about God or our culture! I refuse to be helped by you!'
Ridiculous, a response like that. Surely God had sent the Samaritan. How could such help be refused? Well, I'm sure you all know the story about the man hanging off a cliff, who refuses offers of help from a mountaineer, a boat and a helicopter because he wants God to save him, and hasn't recognised God's help in those who pass by.
Deuteronomy reminds us: God's word is not in heaven, that you should say, "Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?" Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, "Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?" No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.'
What word is this? Deuteronomy sees it as God's law. According to the letter to the Colossians, it is also ‘the gospel that has come to you.' But of course God's word is not only the law or the Gospel. For ‘God's word' is also one of the many names given to Jesus. In our church meeting on Wednesday, we talked about some of the names we use for God; our prayers of adoration and of confession this morning have come directly from the words chosen by people at that meeting. Somebody asked me how we can give God any name, since God's reality is so far beyond our understanding. And that is quite true. Yet this all-powerful God whom we praise and serve chose to become human, to be translated into a word our tongues could speak and our hearts could recognise. That is why God's human word is so near to our everyday lives. Yet God turns our everyday expectations upside down. Jesus is both friend and stranger, the victim lying helpless on the road and the despised Samaritan coming to his rescue. This is the shock of his story. It is good news for us, in need of help; but, like most of Jesus' stories, it has a sting in the tail. Would we agree to be helped by God, not just to be weary helpers? And would we recognise, say, a hijab-wearing refugee, or a tattooed biker or - well, you fill in the blanks - as someone sent by God to our aid? For after that, we could not stay the same.
