On The Street Where You Live

July 18, 2004

Luke 10: 25-37

I am going to tell a story on myself.

A few years ago when I was living in Duluth, I was late for a lunch meeting - never happened to you, I am sure, but it happened to me on that day.

The church I served sits on the top of a goodly sized hill in Duluth. You can see it from anywhere in town, pretty much, if you look up.

Well, I needed to go down the hill in order to get to my meeting. So I jumped into my car, zoomed down the hill, drove around the block what felt like a zillion times (as I watched the clock in my car tell me worse and worse things about my inability to get to this meeting on time) looking for a parking place.

Finally I found one, at what felt like a ninety-degree angle pointing up, but I parallel parked and got out of my car, still furious with myself about cutting my life so close. Well, I was parked at a spot with a meter. It was expired. I dug in my purse, mined the floor of my van - many amazing things can be found there - but alas, no quarters to feed the meter.

So I took a chance. I walked away, hoping that just once I would get lucky - parking enforcement seems to find me always.

My meeting went well. It was a great and filling lunch and conversation and I was feeling much more relaxed as I left.

Until I looked up the hill and saw someone in a uniform walking away from my car. I hoofed it. It thought if I could catch up with the person I could somehow plead for mercy. My dignity stopped me after the first half block. It was hot summer, I was clearly in the wrong, and so I did what so many of us do in just that sort of situation.

I said a bad word.

As I said that bad word, a taxi was passing by me, window open. He heard clearly the choice word I used to express myself.

"Hey"! He yelled out to me. "Watch your language!"

Well, there I was. The minister of the church on the hill - and I had to be taught by a taxi driver to watch my language.

Sometimes the most unlikely teachers are the most powerful.

Certainly Jesus was an unlikely teacher. Born into poverty, not one of the temple elite, a carpenter by trade with a questionable legitimacy status, Jesus is an unlikely person to be instructing the lawyer whose question prompts the telling of the story of the Good Samaritan.

But teach he does, unlikely or not.

Jesus is in conversation with a religious elite. A lawyer. Who incidentally was not a lawyer, as we understand them. In the time of Jesus, a lawyer was one who studied the law of God. Both Jesus and the lawyer and all those gathered who were familiar with Jewish teaching knew the answer to the "how to inherit eternal life" question well. The answer is so clearly spelled out in the teachings- the way to inherit the kingdom of God comes through loving the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul, and with all our strength, and with all our mind, and our neighbor as ourselves.

Taking it a step further, the lawyer asks: "So, who is my neighbor?"

Jesus teaches by telling a parable. This unlikely teacher tells a powerful story with an unlikely hero.

All of those listening to the parable would have been able to picture the story. And all of those listening to the story would most likely have heard the message Jesus was sharing through the first characters that walked past the man in need.

Both were religious elite. People whose very job it was to study the word of God and live the word of God through loving God and self and surely neighbor and everyone listening to the story would have appreciated the fact that so often those charged with tending God's law are some of the most heartrending breakers of God's law.

So Jesus is making the lawyer wince a bit by portraying the two religious elite as so cold hearted.

And he is speaking to a crowd who knew the truth of that all too well. They had to be relishing the discomfort of the lawyer.

And then Jesus hooks them all by selecting an unlikely teacher.

In order to know how profoundly shocking it is that the Samaritan is the hero of the story; we need to know that at the time of Jesus, Samaritans were despised. Hated. They were descendents of a mixed population occupying the land after the Assyrian conquest. They opposed rebuilding Jerusalem and the temple and instead built their own place of worship - a deeply offensive choice for the Jews.

Jews and Samaritans had learned the ways of hating each other for generations.

So who was it that was willing to climb into the ditch and take on the problems of the man so brutally beaten and left for dead?

It was not the trained religious folk. People who knew the teachings of God in the socially correct way.

It was the outcast. The religious enemy. It was the Samaritan who knew that being a person of God is about living and doing the word of God.

That matters more than the soul choking death of preferring social correctness over compassion.

Who was the true neighbor? The one the crowd had been taught to despise.

Jesus taught then a lesson that can still stopper up any sort of self-righteous piety we might be tempted to spout.

He taught that unless we are willing to wade into the ditch and rescue our enemies, we are not the people God created us to be.

Although he had been so well schooled through generations of fear and hate stoking, the Samaritan embodied the law of God through having compassion on his neighbor.

Can we not do the same?

There are so many people languishing in ditches, too torn up by the violence unleashed in their lives to have the energy to get up and seek help. And so often those most called to be compassionate toward them - that would be you and I, the people who call ourselves followers of Jesus - so often we pass by and pray to God that no one will notice that we don't want to see and we surely dear God do not want to stop and lift the wounded onto ourselves.

We want to believe that how they got into that ditch doesn't concern us, and we want to believe that how they are going to get out of that ditch doesn't concern us either.

So we pass by.

A few years ago there was a picture in the paper that took my breath away. Maybe you remember it. It was a picture of an African American woman cradling to her self the body of a Ku Klux clan member.

There had been a rally in her city. The clan members had exercised the right they claim to gather and share their hate. There was a counter demonstration during their gathering.

The two forces met, and a riot broke out. This white clan member had fallen, and was being brutalized by the anti clan people who so despised all that this clan member stood for. He was being kicked and beaten and into the midst of that violence the African American woman took it upon herself to cradle that enemy to herself and use herself as a shield so that the clan member would be spared.

She waded into the ditch of all of that violence and hate and fear and lifted that man to safety.

Now, who was the neighbor? The one who showed mercy.

Next Sunday we will hear a presentation about the need for low income housing in our neighborhood. Representatives from Micah - Metropolitan Interfaith will be here to let us know the realities of the housing situation in our neighborhood.

We have neighbors who cannot afford decent housing. We have neighbors, children - 6,000 - who were homeless in our county last year. We have neighbors bleeding in the ditch. Whatever we have been taught to call them, however we have been taught to look away, they are our neighbors.

And we are theirs.

May God grant us the courage to open ourselves to those who would teach us.

May God grant us the grace to see our neighbors.

Amen