This year for Lent, Christ the King and Living Hope are using a theme from A Sanctified Art called Everything [in] Between: Meeting God in the Midst of Extremes. Each Sunday’s message will explore two seemingly opposed binaries, but as we look at stories from Luke’s Gospel, we’ll find that God is present in between, in the full spectrum of life, not merely the black and the white. For this first Sunday in Lent, the theme is Stranger & Neighbor.
The Scripture readings for this week are Galatians 3:23-29, Psalm 25:1-10, and the Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25-37. The first two-thirds or so of this sermon are adapted from my sermon on the Good Samaritan parable from July 14, 2019, for which I found helpful this column from David Lose. This year, I also found helpful (and quoted from) a prison sermon The League of the Guilty by Nadia Bolz-Weber.
Here’s the livestream and sermon podcast audio from Living Hope.
Powered by RedCircle
Grace to you and peace from God our Creator and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen
How many of you have heard of the “Good Samaritan” before?
Right, we just read it in church a few months ago. It’s one of the most famous parables in the Bible. And as I think about it, I don’t get it. This so-called good Samaritan might be the most famous example for how Christians ought to act, and I don’t see what’s so great about this guy.
Really, what he does is basic human decency, right?
I hope every single one of us would do what he does. If you see a beaten up guy lying on the ground, I hope we’d all have the decency to stop and check on him, or at least call 911 and report there’s a guy having what’s clearly a medical emergency.
In fact, our society expects this enough to we have laws protecting people who stop to help others. We even call them “Good Samaritan laws.” So why is this story so exceptional?
I think it’s because so often, people fail to help. Good people whom we’d expect to stop and help—good religious people like the priest and the Levite—really do just walk by when there’s a stranger on the other side of the road.
In 1973, two behavioral scientists at Princeton University wondered why sometimes people don’t do what we all agree is the basic human response. They set up a study with seminary students from Princeton Theological Seminary – people who were studying to be pastors. Generally, that’s a group of people who put a high value on helping others.
The students were told to prepare a sermon about the Good Samaritan story, then to walk to a different building to deliver their sermon. A third of them were told they were ahead of schedule and had plenty of time to make it over to the building and preach their sermon, another third were told they were on-time but needed to go right away, and the last group were told they were running late and needed to hurry.
To get to the other building, each seminarian had to walk down a narrow alley, where there was a stranger lying on the ground looking like he was in need of help. Remember, they’d all literally just prepared a sermon on the Good Samaritan parable!
In the first group, the ones who were told they were early, 63% stopped to help the stranger. In the “on-time” group, it was 45%. And in the group who were told to hurry, only 1 in 10 stopped to help.
I guarantee within the next week, every one of you will encounter someone in need. Hopefully it’s not as dramatic as someone beat up and lying on the side of the road, but I’m sure you’ll have some opportunity to help someone. Maybe it’ll be someone in need of physical help, or maybe just a conversation, or someone to listen. There’s lots of ways of loving neighbors. And if you’re like me, it’s pretty safe to say you’ll miss some opportunities.
So if it’s basic human decency to help, why do we miss those opportunities?
That Princeton study says being in a rush is a huge factor, not paying attention. I know I’ve had times when I’m trying to get somewhere and don’t want to stop and talk, so I’ve walked more briskly and tried to look focused when I go past people. I’m constantly tempted to treat people as part of the scenery, rather than as real neighbors.
What can you do this week to slow down and notice when people are in need? And then when you notice, to actually take the time to help them?
What else might stop us from being good neighbors?
Too often, it’s that the person in need is different than us. Sometimes, it’s judging someone based on assumptions and stereotypes, sometimes it’s fear of the other, sometimes it’s just not liking something about the person in need. Sometimes we just write off whole groups of people, because that region’s always at war, or that’s just a poor country. It’s easier to ignore people who are different, or who are far away.
Jesus is very intentional in who he picks as the hero of this story. The one who is a neighbor, Jesus tells this Jewish lawyer, is a Samaritan. For Jews at that time, Samaritans were strange people. They’re weird. They’re different. They don’t worship right, they don’t follow all our laws, they even eat different things. There are lots of rumors about them. They’re a shady group of characters. I imagine you can think of folks who might be similar in our society.
Yet, it’s the “other” who is a neighbor, says Jesus. We are called to love them too, whoever they are.
So far, I’ve talked about this story as though we are the ones passing by on the road, deciding whether or not to help. We all want to identify with the good Samaritan, right? We want to be the hero in the story, the one who crosses the road to help, and sometimes God gives us opportunities to do that. But what if we change perspective?
Can you put yourself in the place of the man the robbers attacked? He’s lying there, injured, bleeding, hoping someone will stop and help him. And look who stops: Not the people he thought were his neighbors, not the good people he expected to help, but that other guy. The Samaritan. The one who’s not like him.
“That is a rough position to be in; receiving mercy from your enemy.
I mean, imagine being on the street and someone beats [you up] and steals your wallet and phone. And you’re in so much pain you cannot move. Then you see someone who used to be your roomie and she just walks on by. Then you see me and I literally do nothing but cross to the other side of the street.
And then imagine whoever the worst person possible is to you: a [MAGA] Republican, or a Muslim, or an Evangelical, or a Trans person – whoever it is that you would least like to have help you, and they stop and gently bandage your head with their own scarf and put you in their car not even caring that you’re bleeding and they take you to the ER and give the front desk their credit card so that you don’t even have to pay for it.
OK, now at this point how important is their political party, or [church denomination,] gang affiliation, or sexual orientation to you? Not at all right? Because when things are that bad, and we are in that much need none of that…matters anymore. And I ask you, if it doesn’t matter then does it really matter now? I mean really?
And yet in our sin we hold on to so much garbage about other people. And they hold on to so much garbage about us. But God’s mercy is not bound to our garbage opinions. Thank God.”
The question Jesus is asked is about eternal life. But he answers with a parable about how to live in this world. And the message of the parable is more than just be nice and help people in need. It’s a story about breaking down barriers, crossing the boundary between neighbor and stranger.
It’s about opening our eyes not only to see those other people as worthy of receiving help, but as able to offer help to us. It’s about seeing and acknowledging the humanity of other people. Loving our neighbors as ourselves.
We like to make divisions, to categorize people into boxes so we know how to treat them. That’s what stereotyping is, right? It’s a psychological shortcut so that once you realize someone is a liberal, or a gun person, or a tech guy, or a construction worker, you don’t have to deal with their full humanity.
You can make assumptions about them and move on. As soon as you’re asking the question “But who is my neighbor?” you’re looking for a loophole to get out of loving them as yourself. You’re looking for a way to distance yourself from them.
Jesus says no. Whoever they are, they are just like us, made in God’s image. As we talked about on Ash Wednesday, they are in the same pit of sin as we are, and they have received the same forgiveness and love.
In Christ, we are all children of God through faith…”there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28)
I wonder why this is so hard, why we can’t just recognize our neighbors as humans like us. I wonder how many times we need to hear Jesus tell us to love our neighbors as ourselves before we believe it, and how many more before we can live it.
I wonder why we keep looking for loopholes, why this “Good Samaritan” is exceptional. I wonder why we believe we are neighbors, but they are strangers.
God, forgive us for the walls we build and the ways we separate ourselves from people you love. Change our hearts, in Jesus’ name. Amen