C 10 Sermon Who is my neighbor?

 

You might remember a story that aired on Good Morning America during the Hurricane Katrina disaster.  Fed up with the government’s slow response in rescuing residents of the flooded city, David Perez of San Diego, launched his own effort.  He chartered a Boeing 737 at his own expense. Perez took the plane with as many supplies as he could purchase at Costco to New Orleans.  There he reloaded the plane with 86 weary hurricane victims and took them back to San Diego where he had organized families to take them in.  Many called Perez a Good Samaritan, and there were some others who even risked their lives by going into the city to help survivors.  We call them all good Samaritans, but the problem is Jesus has a different meaning for Good Samaritan.  Let’s take a closer look at today’s Gospel.

 

The Gospel is about a Jewish lawyer, an expert in the law, a theologian; you might say.  This gutsy lawyer actually quotes Jesus to Jesus on the great commandment:  “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.”

 But it’s the Lawyer’s follow up question that contains the trap.  “But wanting to justify himself," he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”  For the lawyer, God is the God of Israel, and neighbours are Jewish neighbours.

 

Jesus’ parable gives a different answer: ‘the Samaritan’ by which Jesus meant the heretic and the foreigner, the one who pollutes the very air of God’s own country and who the Jews would gladly liquidate if the even more ungodly Romans would let them.  In our cold war days Samaritan would have been the equivalent to communist and nowadays Samaritan might be illegal alien.

 

 But we do not discover the real point of the Gospel until we notice that there is something unexpected about the question Jesus asks.

 One would have expected the moral of the parable to run something like this:  “the Samaritan recognized the victim of the robbers as his neighbor.  One would have expected Jesus to ask this question, which one the three passersby were you like, the priest, the Levite or the Samaritan?  Here comes the twist; Jesus flips the question and turns the tables on the lawyer: “which of the three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the Robbers.”  The question that Jesus asks makes the Lawyer put himself in place of the man who fell into the hands of the Robbers:  "Put yourself in the place of the half dead man in the ditch, now tell me who is your neighbor?"   The lawyer came to put Jesus on the spot, to smoke out Jesus’ supposedly heretical views on God’s wider plans for the whole world, and so to show that the lawyer was right to practice some one-upmanship and to challenge Jesus.   All Jesus does is tell a little story and ask a question.   A question that leads the puffed up lawyer to realize he is standing in the need of prayer, that he is really the half dead man on the side of the road.  The lawyer came thinking that he was better than Jesus  and to trap him, but he left knowing that he himself is one of God’s little ones and not a day passes that he does not receive the gifts of mercy and blessing from the Lord.  Jesus poses the same question to us.  "Who does one who is lifted out of the ditch and given tender care call his neighbor?"  As I thought about the lawyer, I thought, I too am like that poor half dead man.  When it comes down to it, aren’t we all down and out?  As we pray in the prayer of humble access:

We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy. Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.

I think that the real point of this story is that we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under the Lord’s Table.  We stand with every rejected and cast off person before God and we give thanksgiving for every moment and every time we are lifted out of life’s ditches.  If this lawyer, if we for that matter, could realize our total dependence on God, our total indebtedness to God, we would find that we could not only recognize our neighbor but also we might begin to love him.  The grace of God extends from end to end of this world and it is not ours to say who is worthy or even which church is a true church.

        What is at stake then and now, is the question of whether we will use Jesus’ revelation of love and grace as a way of boosting our egos and our own sense of isolated security and purity, or whether we will see it as a call and challenge to extend that love and grace to the whole world.  No church, no Christian, can remain content with easy definitions which allow us to watch most of the world lying half-dead in the road. Let us pray, Father, send us out to do the work you have given us to do, to love and serve you as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord. To him, to you, and to the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen