Sermon preached by the Reverend Nicholas Lang, Rector

St. Paul’s on the Green, Norwalk, Connecticut

7^th Sunday after Pentecost - July 15, 2007

The story of the Good Samaritan has been allegorized, analyzed, and moralized. It has been the fodder for three point sermons, been dramatized, and puppetized. Its characters are probably familiar to all of us. The Good Samaritan might be Good News, but its also very old news.

Yet we have been given a gift called “imagination” which is our ability to find new insight and see everything from a new perspective. Perhaps we will discover another point of view even in the telling of this old tale. For starters we should remind ourselves that the shock value of the story is lost on us who are reading it in the twenty-first century. I’m not referring to the fact that the priest and the Levite pass this dying man by and cross the street to avoid him. No, the shock here is that Jesus would introduce a Samaritan as the role model – as the “good guy” who does what the priest and Levite should have done.

Considered half-breeds by homeland Jews, Samaritans were the most despised of all peoples. They were marginalized and shunned. Calling someone a “Samaritan” was considered a huge insult. So if we want to hear this message the way the lawyer did and the way the crowds in Judea did we might change the identity of the Samaritan to one that reflects prejudices with which we are all too familiar. Who is the last person that the world’s conventional judgment suggests we trust with our life if we were lying in a ditch bleeding to death as the result of a brutal beating and robbery? That’s the slant on the story as Jesus originally told it.

Note as well that the victim has no name. He is one of a number of characters in the Gospel who remains anonymous. Jesus has nothing to say about him except that he was on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves who beat him and left him half dead. He doesn’t tell us that he was a decent person or that he was a scoundrel. All he says is that the man deeded help desperately. Let’s reflect briefly on one classic interpretation of the Good Samaritan narrative.

This story is the foundation for the well known maxim “Do unto others as you would have them do to you.” The dialogue between Jesus and the lawyer ends up with a working definition of just who is my neighbor. But really speaking, Jesus does not answer the question “Who is my neighbor?” but rather the question “Whose neighbor are you?” and the answer is “Everyone” because Jesus does not limit the commandment of love to a few as the lawyer probably wanted him to do. I don’t want to put words into his mouth, but my guess is that he hoped that Jesus would let him off the hook by telling him that his primary obligation was to those tied to him by blood or communal association – the confines of family or local village.

But that’s not where the action of the story takes place. It happens on the road and when we are on the road there is no telling whom we might meet. The audience to whom Jesus told the parable lived in a time when the road was more the exception and most people lived in the confines of community. New York University Law Professor Jeremy Waldron notes that we do not live in such an era. “Much of our life,” he says “is lived on the road or lived in circumstances where we are often unavoidably side-by-side with strangers, with people alien to what we fancy are our traditions or our community.”

Yes, we are everyone’s neighbor, but the sermon Jesus preached to the lawyer and the crowd around him was not meant so much to instill guilt about what they do or don’t do, but rather to remind us not to confuse our philosophical or theological discourses about love with the doing of love. In more contemporary terms, this story tells us not just to talk the talk but to walk the walk by helping the other, the stranger we meet on the road of life, especially the most needy and even the unlovable. The real issue is not so much who is my neighbor but who acts like a neighbor.

There is deeper meaning to this Gospel if we continue to use our imagination. The extravagance with which Jesus describes the way the Samaritan cared for the man left to die is an invitation for all of us to be healed and caressed and comforted by the extravagant love of God. The victim has no name because he is all of us – who among us has not felt like we were left by the roadside at some point in our lives? The Samaritan is Jesus whom the religious authorities of his own time rejected and ridiculed.

The inn is the church, the place of refuge for everyone – no matter who we are or on what road we are walking. It is the place where broken sojourners may rest and be refreshed; where those of us who have been beaten up by the world or robbed of our peace and security, or who sometimes feel more dead than alive can check in and be bathed in the compassion and care of its sanctuary and of the community that lives there with us.

This is yet another Gospel in which Jesus proclaims the radical hospitality of God and which opens up a window for us to recognize the depth and breadth of God’s compassion for each of us and the extent to which that commodity is so freely given to all.

The church has from its earliest days employed sacred art such as icons to teach us to use our imagination to understand some of the truths of the Gospel. As you entered this morning you may have noticed the icon of the Good Samaritan on the table near the font. The wounded man is seated on a donkey and in the distance you can see the inn where he will convalesce. The Samaritan, however, is actually Jesus.

Once we have experienced the tender care of our God who finds us abandoned, lifts us up, soothes our pain, calms our fears, and embraces us with healing touch, it is then, and maybe only then, when you and I can truly “go and do likewise.”