Transcript
From Luke's Gospel: “But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where He was. And when he saw Him, he had compassion and went to Him and bound up His wounds pouring on oil and wine, and with his own animal, he took Him to the inn.” I speak in the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Our English Bibles say a lawyer came to Jesus. That’s not a good translation. We need good lawyers, but this man isn’t practicing jurisprudence. He’s a Torah scholar. And he comes to Jesus with an honest question: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”
There’s a stripe of piety—maybe we have something of it in our own hearts—that doesn’t like the idea that somebody would test Jesus. There’s no such piety in Jesus himself. He’s comfortable with this man’s question. He accepts it on face value. Why? Because this Torah scholar is doing exactly what the Torah commanded all God’s people to do. Deuteronomy, in the 13th chapter, says if a prophet arises among you, especially one with miracle-working power, test him.
He tests Jesus. I encourage you to do the same. First of all, come to him. And challenge him. Do what Edgar does in the penultimate line of Shakespeare’s King Lear. “The weight of this sad time we must obey. Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” Come to the Lord with your honest questions and the Lord will deal gently with you as He does with this biblical scholar.
“What must I do to inherit eternal life?” We don’t respond well when someone puts words in our mouths. But that doesn’t keep us from doing it, and sometimes we do it to people in scripture. This Torah scholar asked, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Yet we hear him as if he asked, “What must I do to earn eternal life?”
That is not the question he asks. Nobody earns an inheritance. It is the very nature of an inheritance that you don’t earn it. Embedded in the concept of inheritance is the concept of grace. An inheritance is a gift, given in love.
On another occasion (Matthew 19), Jesus says, “Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake, will receive one hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.” Notice the emphasis on doing. There’s Jesus, the Lord himself, combining the concept of inheritance with eternal life.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is an example of what Plato and the Greeks called mimesis, art imitating reality. In Exodus 3, God appears to Moses at the burning bush. “Then the LORD said [to Moses], ‘I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land.’”
God sees. God hears. God knows. God comes down. That’s the Lord’s way with us. That’s the pattern. And not just two thousand years ago, but now.
Because it’s his way, God has a thing for people who are easily distracted, who notice the affliction of others and come to their aid. God loves to use people who have what we think of as a disability. We call it ADD or ADHD. Moses, the son of a Hebrew mother and the son of an Egyptian princess, goes out one day and he sees something which, had he not noticed, nobody would have faulted him for it. He sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave, and he intervenes, and soon he’s on the lam from his own grandfather, fleeing Egyptian law. That ability to be distracted though it’ll cost you accelerates the whole plot of the biblical story.
There’s another example of distraction. Moses sees a bush burning off in the distance. It’s not in front of him. We know that because he says, “I’ve got to turn aside to see this strange sight.” God uses people who don’t stay stuck on what’s in front of them, who can see something not in their plans, and go to it. So he asks Moses, “What is in your hand?” And Moses says, “A stick.” And God says, “I’m going to use that stick in your hand to save my people.”
I want to close with a personal story. Trees figure significantly in it as they do in the Bible. From the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, to the ram caught in a thicket of trees on Mt Moriah where Abraham bound Isaac, to Absalom caught hanging by his hair in a tree, to Haman’s gallows or etz meant for Mordecai, to Golgotha and Jesus hanging from a cross, what every Jew would have called an etz, a tree.
It was an Aspen regeneration project. I was in college. I had bid successfully on a US Forest Service contract to clear-cut 56 acres in the Hiawatha National Forest. My father helped me. He and I would eat a good breakfast, head out to the deep woods a good 45 minutes away, work all day, and at the end of it, load up hardwood stringers in the bed of the pickup and drive home.
It was a perk of the contract that we could take out whatever wood we cut. At the end of the day we trimmed the branches off the trunks, and loaded up eight-foot ‘stringers’ in the pickup to go home. You have never met an Episcopal priest who has hugged more trees than I have.
Your arms are weary at the end of a day lumberjacking. We loaded the stringers and got in the pickup. It had been raining. The elevated road was slick, and the truck slid into the ditch. We unloaded the stringers in order to push the truck back up onto the road. We reloaded them, got back into the truck, and it slid into the ditch again.
We didn’t have enough strength to get the truck back onto the road. So we walked several miles out of the deep woods toward the highway.
When you work in the woods like that, you tell ... well, we had told my mom and my then girlfriend Victoria, “if we are not home by dark, worry about us. Call Uncle Rod and send him to come get us.”
So we’re walking out of the woods. I’m feeling sorry for myself. But Dad and I are thinking Rod will be coming to get us. We learned later that he wasn’t called.
This is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We got to M-28, a lonely stretch of highway. Do we hitchhike east toward Merriweather where my uncle Rod was, or west toward home? We went west.
It had been pitch dark for hours. We’re hitchhiking. And I cannot tell you how many priests and Levites passed us by. My dad put me in mind, “Son, it’s midnight. We’re a mess. Every person driving by takes one look at us and sees nothing but trouble.
And I’ll never forget it. I can feel it in my bones right now. The car that drove by us, the turn signal, the sight of those brake lights and that car pulling onto the shoulder to pick us up. A man took pity on us, drove us to a late night diner in Wakefield. And there we called my mom and Victoria who came to get us.
Today we inaugurate our annual Feast of Title. When you’re the Church of the Good Samaritan, hearing that parable read once every three years is not enough.
You don’t have to have ever handled a chainsaw, you don’t have to ever have been a lumberjack, to know what it’s like to be deep woods, as it were, in the dark, and to know your need of God.
At Good Samaritan, we know what it’s like to be in the darkness we make for ourselves. And we can’t forget the God who sees us and comes down. Who pulls over, as it were, pours on our wounds oil and wine, lifts us up, and brings us to the inn.
We don’t earn the grace of God. To receive it, to inherit it by grace, makes you the kind of person who can’t drive by people in the ditch. We want to be like Jesus. To go and do likewise.
Grace and effort are not in competition with each other. We do what we do, we come to you Lord, just as we are doing right now, with hearts open to you, not to earn your attention but because we’re responding to your attentiveness to us, your coming down, your slowing down, your coming to get us. We see the mercy in your eyes.
In the darkness we were waiting / Without hope, without light / ’Til from Heaven You came running / There was mercy in Your eyes / To fulfill the law and prophets / To a virgin came the word / From a throne of endless glory / To a cradle in the dirt // Praise the Father, praise the Son / Praise the Spirit, three in one / God of glory, Majesty / Praise forever to the King of Kings
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
