July 14 — Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

Listen to this sermon HERE.


Grace, mercy and peace to you this day from Jesus Christ, who meets us along the way in grace, mercy and peace.  Amen.

The Good Samaritan: perhaps the most popular bible story out there.  When was the last time you heard it?  The term Good Samaritan has even entered our secular realms—such a thing as a Good Samaritan Law.  It’s a pretty common term, but it all goes back to this radical story of God meeting us along the way in grace, mercy and peace...and Jesus’ imperative that we now go and do likewise.

This is a good day to get baptized, surrounded by a text like this.  Because this text goes to the very heart and soul of what it means to be Christian: to be kind.  I hope you hear that instruction (to be kind)—parents, sponsors, community of the faithful—in the questions we ask at baptism.  Do you intend to “live among God’s faithful people, to bring your little boy to the word of God and the holy supper, to teach him the LP, the C and the 10 C’s, to nurture him in faith and prayer so that he may learn to trust God, to proclaim Christ through word and deed, and care for others and the world God made, and work for justice and peace in all the earth.”  In short: to be kind.

This is a good day to get baptized (or to come to church for that matter) because it’s all being summed up here:  be ye kind to one another, merciful, and compassionate.  

That might sound kind of “Mickey Mouse”, kind of simple and straightforward and fluffy—be kind—but I’m afraid it is exactly the opposite of the way the world works.

If a country owes us money, we charge them interest on paying us back.  If a stranger is in the ditch, we pass by them because we don’t want to be late for church, or the ball game, or whatever.  If a brother or sister is down and out, well, that’s probably their fault, right?  All those wrong decisions that they made along the way.  The way the world works is that you’re not obligated to stop and help anyone but yourself...and maybe the people you like the most.  How often do we hear it:  “It’s a cold world out there.”  In other words it’s not a kind a place.  As Douglas John Hall points out, we’re driven by competition, greed, and individualism, and even the more ethically minded among us “often seem apt to be more concerned for rights than for forgiveness, for justice than for mercy, for equality than for compassion”.¹ Brrrrr..chilly out there. 

But Jesus, perhaps huddled around a fire, tells a story, and the he sets the characters in the story so diametrically opposed to one another, it would have made his listeners‘ skin crawl.  “A no-good, cheating, alien, lazy Samaritan?!  Really, Jesus?! Did you really have to go there?”  Who would be your modern-day equivalent?  That’s exactly who Jesus would put in the role of the care-giver today.

Jesus tells a story, and he flips the world on its head.  The wounded are healed, the dead are raised, and the unkind are the kind.  The cold world becomes a place where acts of compassion, mercy and hospitality come seeping out of the fabric of society.  And we are made human again — We weren’t created to walk past each other, we were created by God to help one another.  

Jesus tells us a story today, and YES that story challenges us, but it’s more than just a finger-wagging at us and at our children to be kind.  This story, even more importantly, also tells us something great about God:  That God’s love extends over boundaries, beyond difference (even the most volatile of differences like religion and politics), that God’s love reaches out to the stranger and the alien—sometimes that God’s love even comes in the from of the stranger and the alien.  That God’s love turns this cold world on it’s head...and lays out a new path from Jerusalem to Jericho, from suburbs to the city, from the barrio to the country side...where instead of a rocky and dangerous journey, the world becomes a safe and a radically welcoming place for everyone to be.  Imagine that!  

[Vacation and staying with total strangers, and just being totally overwhelmed by their kindness.]

Our little family had just a minuscule taste of the being “in the ditch”, tired from the journey, only to be taken in with open arms, fed, and given a warm place to sleep, to heal.

This is a glimpse of God’s welcome.  And that welcome is waiting for you, sisters and brothers in Christ!  God is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love for you.  God is at the waters edge now as we prepare for another baptism—waiting for little Halo, and waiting for each one of us as we remember our own baptisms and return to the waters this day!  And here God heals you, restores you, forgives you — this is a story about mercy...we don’t know anything about the man who was robbed, but chances are pretty good that he wasn’t a perfect person.  (Maybe the robbers were only taking back what had been stolen from them...we don’t know.)  What we do know is the broken person is restored, loved, forgiven and shown mercy that can’t be repaid, only repeated.    

“Go and do likewise,” Jesus wraps it all up.  “Go and do likewise.”  We can’t repay God’s love and mercy for us; we can only repeat it for the world.  You and me: we are echoes of God’s grace.  

I don’t know what Bible story you think of when you read our congregation’s Vision Statement (Anyone know it? Feb. 2008: "Extending God's welcome to all we meet along the way").  But I always think of the story of the Good Samaritan and Jesus‘ command that we go and do likewise, that we welcome one another, and be kind to one another.  For in so doing we extend a glimpse of God’s love which has been so gloriously poured out for each one of us.  Thanks be to God for this lesson from Jesus today, the powerful story, and this love and mercy and forgiveness that flow to and through you this day and always.  AMEN.  

¹ Douglas John Hall, Feasting on the Word: Year C, Volume 3, “Luke 10:25:37” (Louisville: Westminster, 2010), 240.