“The Samaritan Standard”

                                “The Samaritan Standard”
                                Luke 10:25-37
                                Rev. David Hutchinson
                                Sunday, July 11, 2010

    A lot of things have changed since the 1960s.
    Think just for a minute of all the ways the world is different now…
    If you were NOT alive in the 1960s, or even the 1970s, there’s a chance you may have embraced the more recent nostalgia - for these decades - in one way or another:
 Through clothing, style and colors, music…
If you lived through it the first time, maybe you have not…
    Anyway, the point is that times change.     Like it or not.
        Lots of things change.
    And I think that the question this morning’s Gospel reading gets me asking is:
What doesn’t change?
 Are there standards that remain constant?
Are there truths? 
    The lawyer who we read about in the Gospel according to Luke seems to be asking this kind of a question. He comes up to Jesus and wants to know what to do to inherit eternal life. He wants to know what the standard is. He seems to assume that there is some kind of unchanging standard of behavior that he can achieve. So he asks what it is. What does he need to do - to attain life that is “eternal”.
    “Eternal”…            Meaning something like “always”…
    Eternal and always - seem a lot like “unchanging” to me.
    Unchanging life?   Eternal life?
    How can that be - in a world where so much about life changes all the time?
    SO - - I’ll come back to that question in a minute.
    But first - I want to think a little bit more about the changes in our world in the past few decades. One specific example might be - the place of hitchhiking in our culture.
    Hitchhiking was once very popular.     But - not so much any more.
    The popularity of hitchhiking could arguably be traced to Jack Kerouac. In 1957 his book “On the Road” told the story of his trips back and forth across the United States in the late 1940s. In the late 1940s and 1950s America was falling in love with the automobile. Meanwhile, Kerouac set hitchhiking at the center of his defining work of the postwar Beatnik generation.
    For the next 20 years hitchhiking made its way into American culture.
    In the early 1970s Joan Baez popularized the practice of sticking your thumb out and waiting for a ride with the “Hitchhiker’s Song”, meanwhile Jim Morrison creeped listeners out with the amazing Door’s song “Rider’s on the Storm”.
    Later in the 1970s came the novels Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,by Tom Robbins and Douglas Adams.
    And then it all …..changed.
    Hitchhiking evaporated in the 1980s
as if it had fallen into a Hot Tub Time Machine.
    What happened?       
Times changed.
    The 2001 book, The Neglected Art of Hitchhiking argues that it was: 1. the perceived risk combined with 2. the high-profile cases of hitchhikers who were murdered, and 3. the increasing access to car ownership. In about the 1980s everybody started talking about ‘second cars”. And people who hitchhiked were no longer popular cultural icons, but freaks and deviants. Hitchhikers were marginal outcasts.
    Who would want one of them in your car?
    Who would want to be one of them?
    Nobody…
    A friend of mine who is a Presbyterian minister was recently walking along the Banfield Highway because his water pump went out. The only offer of help he reported getting came from a homeless man. And when he finally got to his office a member of his congregation said, “Hi there…hey…by the way…didn’t I just see you walking along the highway?”     
    So if we won’t even pick up a hitchhiking minister anymore…times have changed.
    Danger - - - has entered the equation.        Fear.
    We might even WANT to stop and help, but we are afraid.
    And so the question is: what are we supposed to do?
        What is the standard of behavior?
        How do we help?
        How do we do the right thing?
            Which, as I said earlier, was the question of a certain lawyer.
    He asked Jesus: What is the standard of behavior?
    What must I do…….?
        What must I do to inherit eternal life?
     We, like the lawyer, want to DO something.
    We want to help.    We want to do good.    We want to do the right thing.
    AND…..
    And we THINK that this Gospel story as about THAT.
    We think that this story in Luke is about what to do to help. We think it’s a kind of pep talk for people - to encourage them to help others out instead of walking by on the other side. We think it’s mainly a story about “doing GOOD”. We even call it “the Parable of the Good Samaritan”.
    That’s what I usually call it.
    And that’s how I usually read it.
    I read this story about a Samaritan who stopped and tended to another man’s wounds, and I think the main point is Jesus’ advice: “go and do likewise”.
    Go be good.
    We even name hospitals after this reading of the story:
        How many of you have been to the Good Samaritan Hospital downtown?
      But the thing is - - that the TRULY amazing thing about the story - - - the thing that would have knocked the socks off the people who HEARD it when it was FIRST WRITTEN was NOT the fact that this guy was GOOD.
But RATHER, that he was a Samaritan.
    And he helped a Jewish man.
    Many of you probably know this already: Samaritans and Jews didn’t get along. Samaritans were outsiders, marginal, outcasts….yadda…yadda…
    Many of us who are familiar with the text, know it….
    But we’ve lost the SHOCK value of it.
        Because WE don’t HATE Samaritans.
            We don’t really know what a Samaritan IS unless we think about it.
    We call Samaritans “GOOD”.
    We names Hosptials after Samaritans.
        Well……times change…..it turns out.
    I know of one Presbyterian Church that has a “Good Samaritan Endowment Fund”.
        Not in Jesus day!       
So…times change. And as TIMES change - - we have to be careful - - as we search for the unchanging, and eternal truths in Biblical texts.
    Let me ask you this:
    How many of you would take your loved ones to the “Good Afghanistan Hospital”?
    How many Americans in the 1960s would have given their money to the:
        “Good Communist Endowment Fund”?
            That’s what I’m talking about!
    That’s what this story is about.
    Who……is my neighbor?
    It doesn’t say ANYWHERE in the Bible to call the Samaritan in this story “good”. Jesus didn’t call him good. WE called him good…..
    And THEN we focused on the word “GOOD”…
        …instead of the word “Samaritan”.
    And the REAL problem with that is that it sets up a nearly IMPOSSIBLE standard. Because it makes it about doing GOOD - - - alone. 
It becomes good - without grace.
    And the story is about grace…too.
    But we read it and think, “Oh no, I could never be as good as that Samaritan”. ESPECIALLY when we realize that he helped out someone who thought he was marginal outcast and nobody. 
    It would be like a story about a “good hitchhiker” who helped out a stranded motorist, gave him money for gas, and didn’t rob him.
    But we think, “Oh darn it, I’m just not that good….I’m still afraid…and anyway this is the real world.  People are dangerous. Times have changed…. ”
    Or maybe even worse….we DO think we can be good.
    We think that if we are good enough we will be OK all by ourselves.
    We don’t need help…just need to be good….
    Which….is EXACTLY what the lawyer was thinking…which led him to come up to Jesus…wanting to be justified.  The lawyer who asked, “What must I do…?”
    But Jesus pushed back. Jesus asked the lawyer why he even bothered to ask the question:
        “You know the answer already…why ask me!”
    Well, the lawyer said, “The answer is, I should love my God and my neighbor?”
    “Exactly”, Jesus responded.
        Now go and do it, and leave me alone.
    “But…”, the lawyer persisted, “WHO is my neighbor…?”
    And Jesus told the story about the Jewish man who fell among robbers and was helped out by his arch enemy, a Samaritan. And the story…TURNS everything around.
    The story ends with Jesus asking who the neighbor was to the man beside the road. Not, who is the neighbor you should HELP? But who is the neighbor who helped YOU?
    Not who should you help?
    But FROM WHERE….does YOUR help come?
    “Who was the neighbor to the man beside the road?”
        The OUTCAST.
        The one who you might have rejected.
        Now…go and be like that.
            And remember that it’s more about receiving grace than doing good.
    In your mind…imagine…laying down on the side of a dusty road.    Try it. 
        Get into the body of the bruised man in the story.
        Look up though the blood and sweat.
        See the face of the one helping you.
            That’s what grace is about.   The heart of the Gospel.
    Then…later…it is about doing good…too.
    The Old Testament reading for today, the story paired with this one, which it is intended we hear today…is interestingly…about a standard…of sorts.
    It is a reading from Amos the prophet.
Amos was a guy how told it like it was.    Told the truth.    Tough love.    
            Not very popular…
    Amos told Israel that the Lord was holding a plumb line next to a crooked wall.
    A plumb line is a string tied to a weight…like a pendulum.  It is a line that because of gravity will hang perfectly straight.  And if the WALL…does not match the line of the string…GUESS which one is crooked?
    You guessed it…the wall.
    Now guess why the Lord…would hang a plumb line next to a wall?
    My guess is that it is NOT that Lord…was all that into construction work.
    Despite the great things done by Habitat for Humanity…this plumb line hung there to make a point. Which was: If you hang a plumb line next to people…a plumb line that measures goodness…the people do NOT measure up.
    That’s what Amos said: you don’t meet the standard.
        It was a warning.
        And that’s all Amos offered.    Yikes.
    Well…maybe sometimes that’s what it takes.  We need to be held accountable. 
    I certainly wouldn’t want all this talk about “receiving grace” to let us all off the hook.
    This is certainly NOT about letting us off the hook the next time we come across someone in need. But it is to say that our help for one another is ROOTED in our having been helped.
    No this is certainly not about being let off the hook.
    Look up from the road side and you’ll know that.
    And I certainly wouldn’t want us all to feel let off the hook the next time…
        …we come upon someone in need
            Someone beside the road.
            Someone with a broken water pump.
                 Me…with a broken water pump!