Readings
Amos
7:7, 8 The Plumb Line
This
is what the Sovereign Lord showed me:
the Lord was standing by a wall that had
been built true to plumb, with a plumb
line in his hand. And the Lord asked me,
"What do you see, Amos?"
"A
plumb line," I replied.
Then
the Lord said, "Look, I am setting
a plumb line among my people Israel; I
will spare them no longer.
Luke 10:25-37 The Parable of the Good
Samaritan
On
one occasion an expert in the law stood
up to test Jesus. "Teacher,"
he asked, "what must I do to
inherit eternal life?"
"What
is written in the Law?" he replied.
"How do you read it?"
He
answered: "'Love the Lord your God
with all your heart and with all your
soul and with all your strength and with
all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor
as yourself.'"
"You
have answered correctly," Jesus
replied. "Do this and you will
live."
But
he wanted to justify himself, so he
asked Jesus, "And who is my
neighbor?"
In
reply Jesus said: "A man was going
down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he
fell into the hands of robbers. They
stripped him of his clothes, beat him
and went away, leaving him half dead. A
priest happened to be going down the
same road, and when he saw the man, he
passed by on the other side. So too, a
Levite, when he came to the place and
saw him, passed by on the other side.
But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came
where the man was; and when he saw him,
he took pity on him. He went to him and
bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and
wine. Then he put the man on his own
donkey, brought him to an inn, and took
care of him. The next day he took out
two silver coins and gave them to the
innkeeper. 'Look after him,' he said,
'and when I return, I will reimburse you
for any extra expense you may have.'
"Which
of these three do you think was a
neighbor to the man who fell into the
hands of robbers?"
The
expert in the law replied, "The one
who had mercy on him."
Jesus
told him, "Go and do
likewise."
Sermon
Jesus
said, "Go and do likewise"
(Luke 10:37)
It
is an honor and a pleasure to be here
with you today, offering you some
thoughts and, I hope, some inspiration
on the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
Your pastor (the Rev. Janet Wallace) and
I came to Bridgewater about the same
time, and we have been good friends and
co-workers on the Bridgewater Council of
Clergy and in the Bridgewater Clergy
Group ever since. I also very much
appreciate the friendship and support
that some of you have given to various
members of the New Jerusalem Church over
the years.
I
understand that my colleague, the Rev.
Andy Stinson of the Elmwood New Church
(also a Swedenborgian Church), just
preached at the West Bridgewater
Methodist Church a week or two ago; and
now here I am preaching at the
Bridgewater Methodist Church. This could
be the beginnings of a Swedenborgian
invasion! Really, though, you have
nothing to worry about. I figure you've
got far more Methodists in Southeastern
Massachusetts than we've got
Swedenborgians in the entire country.
But
seriously, it is one of the wonderful
developments in Christianity today that
we can feel fellowship not only with
people of our own church and
denomination, but with many other kinds
and varieties of Christians, and even
with people of other faiths. In a way,
we are finally listening to what Jesus
taught us in the Parable of the Good
Samaritan.
As
many of you know, in the time of Jesus,
Samaritans were despised by the Jews
largely due to their religious and
cultural differences. And one of the
Lord's clear messages to his Jewish
listeners in this parable was that we
are all equal in the sight of God--Jew
and Samaritan alike--and that what really
counts is whether we live by our
faith, and show kindness and mercy to
one another. Today we Christians are
finally getting the point. We are
finally realizing that God loves all
people, whatever their background and
beliefs--and that we should "go and
do likewise." So our sharing with
one another this morning, across
denominational lines, is one of the
benefits of living truly in the way
Christ taught us.
However,
today I would like to look at the
Parable of the Good Samaritan in a
little different way. Instead of
considering the broad implications this
parable has for our ecumenical and
interfaith development, I would like to
explore with you some of the messages
the Parable of the Good Samaritan may
hold for us on a very individual,
personal level. What does this parable
tell us about our own spiritual life?
What does it tell us about our own inner
struggles and our growth as Christians?
First,
it helps to remember that although
Jesus' story about the man who fell
among thieves had characters very
familiar to his listeners, and could
have happened just as he described it,
this was actually a parable--a story
Jesus made up to carry a meaning greater
than appears simply from the story line.
Of
course, one way to interpret the story
is to treat it as a fable, in the best
sense of the word. Yesterday I read
through all of Aesop's Fables. These are
wonderful, brief, pithy tales, many of
them involving animals with human
characteristics, and almost all of them
having a clear moral. Who can forget
"The Tortoise and the Hare,"
with its concluding moral, "Slow
but steady wins the race." Or the
boy who cried "wolf," and the
inevitable destruction of his flock when
the villagers did not believe him that this
time there really was a wolf. Or
the goose that laid the golden eggs, and
the foolishness of its owners, who
killed the goose thinking they would
find a greater treasure inside. These
fables--stories with both a punch line
and a moral--have become a part of our
every day common sense.
Similarly,
the parable of the Good Samaritan has
worked its way into our cultural
consciousness as a "fable"
whose moral is that it's not those who
simply claim to be religious, but
those who live according their
religion by showing uncommon kindness to
others who will be considered worthy of
God's kingdom. And this is a good moral
to hear and heed.
But
let's look even deeper, and even more
personally. Let's consider what this
parable would mean if we think of it as
Jesus speaking directly to each one of
us, as a parable about our own lives.
Isn't this when the Word of God comes
most alive for us?
The
psychologist Carl Jung had a similar
mode of interpreting his clients'
dreams. In addition to his well-known
archetypal theory of symbols in
dreams--an idea he probably derived at
least partly from reading Emanuel
Swedenborg's Scripture
interpretations--Jung focused on helping
his clients to see every character and
event in their dreams as applying, not
to outward people or events, but to
emotional and psychological events
taking place within their own minds and
hearts.
For
example, if we were to dream of our
mother wagging her finger at us,
chastising us for something we had done
wrong, the image of our mother in the
dream would not refer literally to our
mother, but to the "mother" in
us (perhaps internalized from our actual
mother)--the part of us that
"scolds" ourselves whenever we
do something wrong. Or if the dream was
of our mother serving us a slice of her
delicious apple pie, it would refer to
the part of our own spirit that gives us
nurture and comfort, a sense of being
loved and cared for.
If
we look at the Parable of the Good
Samaritan in this way, we can discover
that every part of it speaks directly to
our own experience. And just as this
parable was part of a conversation
between the Lord and an expert in the
Jewish religious law, so it becomes a
conversation between the Lord and our
devotion to our religion--to being
Christians.
First,
let's personalize the setting. The
parable starts with a man going down
from Jerusalem to Jericho. Let's assume
this man means us. What is our
Jerusalem? This is not too hard to
discover. Yes, Jerusalem was the
political center of the Jewish people.
But even more than that, it was their spiritual
center. Now, since you are here in
church today, I am going to jump to the
conclusion that this church is
your spiritual center. Church is the
place where we churchgoers especially
learn about God, the life and teachings
of Jesus, the Bible, and how to live in
a Christian way. This is our Jerusalem.
However,
we don't spend our whole lives in
church. After the service is over, we go
back home, and spend most of our week in
our ordinary, everyday tasks: working,
taking care of our homes and families,
taking time off to rest and relax. Just
so, the man in the parable was going
down from Jerusalem--the spiritual center
of the Jewish people--to Jericho--an
ordinary, working--class town. Perhaps
Jericho was where he lived and worked,
and he was returning from religious
ceremonies at the Temple. We don't know.
What
we do know is that somewhere along the
rugged and dangerous road that covered
the eighteen miles from Jerusalem to
Jericho, he fell into the hands of
robbers. Whatever fine experience he had
in Jerusalem, it was all destroyed on
his way to Jericho.
Of
course, very few of us fear that we will
be set upon by robbers on our way home
from church! But there's another way we
can be robbed, right in the privacy of
our own minds and hearts, as we make the
transition from our Sunday mornings
spent in church to our everyday lives in
the world. Let's face it: it's pretty
easy to feel religious and have high
ideals here in church. We're singing
hymns, listening to Bible readings,
praying to God, hearing a sermon full of
all sorts of spiritual wisdom, and
enjoying fellowship with others who
share our faith. The tough part is
keeping that same spirit of Christian
love, unity, and closeness to the Lord
once we get back home.
Sometimes
we don't even make it home before our
inner robbers get us. Let's say we're
driving home from church, and some
rotten so--and--so pulls right out in
front of us and cuts us off. It would be
nice to think that when this happens, we
would smile blissfully at the person in
the other car and offer up a little
prayer for him or her. But I suspect
that what happens more often is that a
few choice words escape our lips, and
only our sense of social propriety keeps
us from shouting out the window and
making rude gestures.
Oops!
Our inner robbers have gotten us! Only
minutes before, we were immersed in high
ideals of Christian living; and already
we're feeling anger and resentment at
someone who has quickly become our
"enemy" by crossing our path
in the wrong way. Of course, this is a
fairly trivial example. Things get even
harder when we get home into sometimes
difficult home or work situations, and
fall right back into our old patterns of
dealing with the people around us--our
loved ones, family members, friends, and
co-workers--patterns that aren't anywhere
near as Christian and idealistic as we
aspire to when we're in church.
Sometimes
we get ambushed by our own impatience,
our faulty attitudes, our frustration
with our situation and the people around
us, or simply by despair over whether
our various struggles and emotional
pains will ever get any better.
And though we may have started out with
good intentions for the week when we
left church, we may find ourselves
spiritually lying by the side of the
road, beaten and bloody, with little
hope left.
This
is where our religious beliefs should
come to our rescue. We ought to be able
to recite some of the verses we've
learned, or recall one of those pithy
spiritual teachings, and have it lift us
up out of the emotional gutter we're in.
Alas, in this case, both the priest and
the Levite walk right by. Yes, we know
Jesus loves us. We know the Golden Rule,
and the Ten Commandments, and many other
fine guides to spiritual living. And
yet, too often these become matters of
rote repetition--lifeless rules that we
think of simply as things to do to prove
we are Christians, and to make people
think well of us. The priest and Levite
in the story, like the religious lawyer
who "wanted to justify
himself," were religious more for
outward show than for living by the
inner spirit of their religion.
This kind of formulaic, mechanical,
self-justifying religion will not pull
us out of the ditch that our own inner
thieves and robbers have thrown us into.
What
does pull us out? In the story, it was a
Samaritan. It was one of the hated and
despised people who mixed Jewish
religious practice in with their own
semi-pagan practices, thus, in the Jews'
eyes, desecrating the sacred things of
the Jewish religion. And yet the
Samaritan, and not the priest or the
Levite, was the one who helped.
We
can think of our inner Samaritan as
those parts of ourselves that may not be
all that clear on the finer points of
theology, but are determined to be kind
and helpful, and do the right thing,
whether or not our actions would pass
muster with the theologians. The
Samaritan is our simple, gut-level
concern and caring for the people around
us. It is our desire to treat people
fairly, with respect, with
thoughtfulness, and with kindness.
Just
when we feel that our religious beliefs
are abandoning us--or we are abandoning
our faith--what often picks us up and
gets us back on track is noticing that
there are people out there who need our
help and our love. We may not be able to
make fine doctrinal arguments as to
exactly how we should treat particular
people in particular circumstances, and
why. But we know that we have a job to
do.
So
our inner Samaritan pulls us out of that
ditch of despair and self-pity, and gets
us going again. As we focus on the
people around us, and what we can do to
make their day just a little bit better,
our own troubles and worries don't seem
quite so difficult and painful anymore.
As we help others out of their
mental and emotional ditches, we find
that we ourselves are gaining more and
more strength. As we heal others'
wounds, our own wounds are healed at the
same time.
And
then we find that after all, our
experience in Jerusalem did come with us
to Jericho. As long as our religion was
all in our head, we didn't get anywhere.
But as soon as we open up our heart to
others, and begin living by the deeper
spirit of Christ's teachings, our spirit
revives. Then the healing touch of the
Lord's love has come into our lives, and
through us into the lives of those
around us. Jesus tells us,
"Go and do likewise."
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