July 15, 2007

Luke 10:25-37: "The View from the Ditch"

The story of the so-called "good" Samaritan is so familiar that mental tapes immediately start rolling in our heads (don't they?) when we hear the opening encounter between the lawyer and Jesus. Most sermons on the text scratch at the thin skin of the ego, encouraging the listener to wonder: "Am I like the Samaritan, who saw - really saw -- the injured stranger and stopped to help him...Or am I more like the priest and Levite, who looked down at the naked lump of bruised flesh, weighed the risks to themselves of getting involved, and walked on by without helping???"

Many preachers drive to the deeper question embedded there: "How can I embrace Jesus' call to imitate the Samaritan's merciful hospitality -- "Go and do likewise" - in my hectic life, in this dangerous world?"

This story is a painful reminder of the times we too have passed by on the other side, going out of our way to separate ourselves from someone else's pain when we might have helped...When we could have gone near and helped but gave into our fear of the stranger instead, or made our choice based on disordered priorities.

I know that when I hear this story, I can't help but think of one instance in particular when I passed by on the other side. I'm not sure I want you to know this about me. It's bad enough knowing it about myself.

I had a hospital visit to make on my way home. I had dressed the part of pastor, wearing a clergy shirt with a tab collar (this very one I'm wearing today), which had given me immediate access to the patient I was visiting in intensive care. Back in my car, I had joined a long line to enter the on-ramp for I-94 when I saw a disheveled, unwashed man standing at the stoplight, holding a cardboard sign that read, "Homeless vet, need food, anything will help, God bless." The usual excuses and self-justifications ran through my head as my car inched closer to the man: "This could be a dangerous person. What if he hijacks my car...with me in it? He says he needs money for food. But he's probably an alcoholic. If I hand him money out the window, would I just be fostering dependence, putting band-aids on wounds that need so much more?"And the ever popular self-care rationale: "I've spent my whole day tending to the needs of others. It's OK to take care of myself now. I can't help anybody if I come down with 'compassion fatigue'."

You know the script, I'm sure. But you haven't done what I did next: Just before I got close enough to meet this man's gaze, I ripped the tab from my shirt. "No sense in his knowing I'm clergy," I thought to myself. "It makes the church look bad if I drive by in my uniform without helping. And I don't want to help."

As I passed by the man, and looked into his dull, tired eyes, an intense flush of shame spread from the top of my head to the soles of my feet. Mercifully, the light turned green and I stepped on the gas. "Who is my neighbor? Where do I draw the line?" the lawyer wanted to know. And so do I. I also want to know, "How do I love my neighbor as myself?" Sometimes it's hard to know what to do. Other times we catch a glimpse of an unrehearsed drama of strangers coming close enough to become neighbors.

[Roll Liberty commercial, one minute long.]

There's a great ad on TV these days for Liberty Mutual Insurance. One person is in the right place at the right time to do a kindness for another person - prevent them from getting hit by a car or a tower of boxes, open the door for a mother with a stroller, that kind of thing. That good deed is witnessed by a third person, who is inspired to act to serve someone else in a similar way. And so on. Maybe you've seen the commercial, maybe you haven't. But surely you've caught people in the act of being neighborly in ways both great and small.

What do you see in those random acts of kindness? I see God enlisting ordinary people like you and me to pour oil and wine on the wounds of strangers. Coming near, being "hospital" to them, saving, healing, holding them close to God's heart.

As luminous and numinous as that bit of film is, it doesn't capture the full scope of Jesus' radical teaching in this subversive parable.

We've said that it isn't hard to put ourselves in the place of the priest or Levite, who saw but didn't help, or even the good Samaritan, who saw and did help. But there are other characters in the narrative, each with a distinctive point of view. If we hold this gem up to the light and turn it a bit, we can look through the prism of a different facet...and see something else.

For instance, consider the narrator of the story:Who is telling the tale? It has to be the victim, the unnamed man whom the robbers stripped, beat, and left for dead. Only the man lying along the road could have witnessed the three passersby.

What, do you suppose, was his take? What was the view from the ditch?

I had my own near-ditch experience about a month ago, when I stepped through the drywall "floor" in the attic over our garage and fell 11 feet to the cement floor below. Unlike the man in the ditch, I wasn't the victim of another person's hunger, rage, or envy. I simply stepped in the wrong place and my injuries are my own doing. Mercifully, I didn't break any bones or hit my head. But my right arm took the force of my body slamming against it. I'm still on antibiotics and pain meds, and it's put a crimp in my canoeing, but I'm expecting a full recovery, for which I thank God.

When my daughter Emily found me seconds after the floor gave way, I was on my back, groaning, and covered with broken sheetrock. So that would make Emily the good Samaritan. Well, technically, no.

Like the do-gooder in Jesus' story, Emily came to my aid, spoke consoling things in my ear, dressed my wound and drove me to the ER, even thinking to grab me a glass of cool water for the road. She came near to me, as neighbors do, and brought me to a place of healing and arranged for my bills to be paid...by Blue Cross/Blue Shield (because I am fortunate enough to have medical insurance.) But she was not, like the Samaritan was to the Jewish man in the ditch, my enemy.

Not like an Al-Qaeda insurgent or a suicide bomber would be. Either of them would qualify as my enemy. And I would qualify as theirs.

When I came to myself after my fall, it was to the kind pleading of my daughter who loves me. Imagine how the man in the ditch might have felt, whose attending angel is the villain of his worst nightmare!

Lying in the ditch (or in my case, on the floor), both of us needed help. Getting it was a Godsend.

The oil the Samaritan was pouring on his abrasions and contusions surely felt as soothing as the ice felt on my bruises and the Bacitracin on my scrapes. But I'm guessing that the antibiotics I got worked more efficiently than the wine the Samaritan used to clean his neighbor's wounds!

Jesus spends half the parable elaborating on the Samaritan's actions: He sees (really sees), is moved with pity (literally, feels deep compassion in his gut), goes near to him (the literal meaning of "neighbor" in Greek, Hebrew, and English!), pours oil, pours wine, puts him on his own pack animal, and walks the donkey to the nearest traveler's inn or "hospital." He offers his apparently unlimited resources to cover the cost of this unidentified, uninsured patient. The Samaritan risks all to save a stranger, an enemy who did nothing to deserve such kind treatment, a gutter-dweller so down-and-out, so helpless that grace is really the only remedy.

Does the Samaritan sound like a Savior we know?

Through the parable about the Samaritan and the man in the ditch, Jesus invites us to be healed.

That is, in Patrick Willson's words: "...to tingle with the healing sting of wine, to be calmed under the soothing caress of oil, to enjoy the relief of someone taking charge of what has become a nightmarish situation, and finally to experience the gracious welcome of being checked in at the Hotel Compassion, all expenses paid. Before we "go and do likewise" or go and do anything at all, we are meant to know the care and compassion of the stranger who finds us abandoned, lifts us up and provides hospitality for us...[T]he actions of the Samaritan stranger open a window for us to recognize nothing less than the care and compassion of God."

What does this story say to us?

There are times when we travel the high road, turning strangers into neighbors, coming near to comfort and connect...in places as distant as Virginia, Thunder Bay, and El Salvador and as close as our own grocery store and workplace.

And there are times when we are flat on our backs in the ditch -- crushed by the death of a loved one or a dire medical prognosis, struggling with the pain of a broken relationship, or anxiety around job loss, injured by happenstance, the cruelty of others, or our own poor choices.

These are the times that God sends us care and healing in the ministry of good Samaritans...and we allow ourselves to be bandaged, anointed, and sheltered by those who find us lying by the side of the road - those who recognize that in some way we have been robbed, stripped, beaten, and left for dead. And sometimes, miraculously, from our vantage point in the ditch, we are able to be oil and wine for others who are hurting.

Thanks be to God!

Rev. Kristie Hennig
Family of Christ Lutheran Church
Chanhassen, Minnesota

Patrick J. Willson, "Living the Word: Who we are," Christian Century, June 26, 2007, 19.

Beth Gaede, a sermon delivered at Mount Olive Lutheran Church, Minneapolis, July 15, 2001.