The Risk of Mercy

Sermon

Well, here we are, on this lovely summer day, once again hearing that very familiar story that Jesus told about the Samaritan who did a good deed by helping an injured man. It is a story worth hearing again and again, I think, because it is both anchoring and challenging.

It is anchoring because it grounds us in the basics of faith. What are we to do? Love God, love neighbor, love self. And it is challenging not because we need to know who God is, who neighbor is, and who self is, but because loving these three at times feels impossible.

I do wonder if the commandments in the Bible are more aspirational than literal. Are we really supposed to do things like honor our mother and father, and not covet what our neighbor has, and love not only that same neighbor but also our enemy? Really, some of those commandments feel impossible. But as Anne Lamott put it, “…Jesus is quite clear on this point. He does not mince words. He says you even have to love the whiners, the bullies, and the people who think they’re better than you. And you have to stick up for the innocent.” (Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, p. 250-251)

Now we might say that some of the characters in this parable are more lovable than others. Those bandits who stole from the man and beat him up and left him naked and half dead – not lovable. The priest and the Levite who ignored him? Nope. The Samaritan who helped? Totally lovable, as is the innkeeper who took the guy in. And the victim – well, since we know nothing about him, since he’s a rather passive character in this little drama, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he’s lovable too.

Yeah, Jesus says, you really have to love them all, the good guys and the bad guys, because every one of them is your neighbor.

Hmmph.

Although this is my fifth time to preach on this parable, I did my due diligence with the hope of gleaning something new to say to you today, to offer an insight. And in the midst of that study, I was having conversations with various staff members about some interesting things I’ve read about how the pandemic is affecting the life of the church. And I wondered if the parable might say something to us today in our very particular situation.

And here’s our situation: a lot of people are feeling powerless. We’re like that guy lying on the side of the road, unable to move, unable to help ourselves. Forces greater than ourselves have been at work. That tiny, wee virus known as Novel Coronavirus has disrupted the entire world – supply chains, hospitals, schools, etc., etc., etc.

For some of us, recent decisions by the Supreme Court have left us feeling like our vote doesn’t matter, our voice doesn’t matter, our stories don’t matter. Another mass shooting, this on the Fourth of July, has left us feeling like gun violence will eventually win. There’s a recession looming.

Powerless. Between politics, pandemics, and economics, we’re lying in the proverbial ditch and no one has come to save us. No one seems to be fixing what is wrong.

A few years ago in a committee meeting—it might have been the Mission Committee—a member of the committee was talking about one of the endeavors we were working on and said something to the effect of “Americans like to fix things. There’s a problem, we fix it. Only some things can’t be fixed.” That has stuck with me. Some problems can’t be fixed. God does not always intervene, and we can’t fix that.

In terms of today’s parable, there are fixable things. The Samaritan rescues the injured man, applies first aid, takes him to a safe place, and pays for him to stay there. But the dangerous nature of that 17-mile stretch between Jerusalem and Jericho remains dangerous. The conditions that conspired for the thieves to become thieves—and who knows what they are, but we might imagine poverty being one of them—those conditions aren’t remedied. The story could happen again, and maybe next time, there would be no Samaritan who sees the injured man and out of mercy, out of compassion, out of kindness, comes to his aid.

Jesus does not want the lawyer or any of us to walk away from this little drama thinking that we are to go fix all the things. The moral of this story, the point of this parable, is found in the words that Jesus speaks to the lawyer who set this whole thing up. Be a good neighbor. Show mercy. Have compassion. Be kind.

Is that simple or simplistic? Do we make living faith way too complicated, or do we make it too easy? One could argue either way.

Sometimes we might make faith too complicated. To be honest, I don’t really understand the mystery of communion, how that bit of bread and sip of juice—or God forbid, those impossible Celebration Cups—feed our soul. But I still offer the bread and cup and pray that the Spirit makes everything right.

I don’t know what God thinks of the constitution of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Book of Order, and the Book of Confessions. I haven’t read either in their entirety since seminary. I don’t know what it means to blaspheme the Holy Spirit, which Jesus says is the one unpardonable sin. I don’t know if when we die we go to Heaven or Hell or Purgatory.

Don’t get me started on theology which I love until I don’t, on transubstantiation and supralapsarianism and all those big words that dead guys loved to talk about.

Love God. Love neighbor. Love self. It’s that simple.

It’s that simple but I fear we make it simplistic.

Anne Lamott (my spiritual director for today) once said, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” We simplify loving God by making God a people-pleaser, a sycophant to the flawed human being, a God who ignores the pain of the world and offers us chocolate and bubble baths.

We simplify loving our neighbor, too, when our neighbors look just like us, when our neighbors think just like us, when our neighbors act just us. Our neighbors share our taste in music, books, and movies. Our neighbors are the people we like. Our neighbors don’t demand anything of us. It’s that simplistic.

And we can be simplistic about loving ourselves, too. One way is by never acknowledging that there could be a few things we need to work on. The other is its opposite—we may never love ourselves because we think we will never be good enough, but that’s another sermon for another day.

So what do we do with this parable and its message? The message is to love, and we all know that choosing to love someone comes with risk. Showing compassion, kindness, mercy is risky business. Our love may be rejected. We may be mocked for being soft. We can even put ourselves in danger by stepping out. But loving and showing compassion, kindness, and mercy are the only ways we will grow. Doing nothing is not an option, not if we really want to live in faith.

Scholar Luke Powery notes that this parable “is not simply a story about one human being, a stranger, helping another human being. It is a story about the kind of community Jesus envisions for the world.”

If this story is a model for the kind of community Jesus desires, what does that look like? It looks like having compassion for the stranger, as the Samaritan does. It looks like doing the right thing even when the wrong kind of person asks for it, as the innkeeper does with the Samaritan’s request. It looks like healing.

If this is a community that Jesus envisions, what do we do about the dangerous roads, about the uncaring priest and Levite, about the bandits who kicked this story off in the first place? That’s tough, because there are so many reasons why places are unsafe, and so many people who have good reasons—and good excuses—to cross over to the other sides of the roads. There are reasons people steal and are violent, factors that sometimes begin at birth.

I am encouraged by something bell hooks once wrote. “For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?” Jesus envisions a world where no one is judged by their worst day, where the potential to do right the next time, to change, to grow, to repent is always out there. Just as the nameless victim can be healed, so can the bandits, the thieves, the priests, and the Levites. So can we.

This whole parable comes about because a guy asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. We might update and say he wants to know the bare minimum of what he has to do to go to Heaven when he dies. I don’t know about you, but I don’t really think about that—though I have hopes, I don’t really know what happens when we die, and if there is a Heaven, I think that is up to a merciful, gracious God. If I understand Paul, then grace and things like Heaven are not conditional, things we earn, but are gifts from a gracious God.

So why do good, if there is no reward? Why show compassion, mercy, and kindness if all it does is inconvenience us and leave us with fewer denarii than we had when we started?

Why do good? Not to get into Heaven. Not to win the Good Samaritan award. I think we do good because we know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of compassion, mercy, and kindness. We do unto others because we know how life-changing it can be, how healing it can be, to receive those things. We do good because we believe that drop by drop, bit by bit, step by step, all those small and great acts of compassion, mercy, and kindness will slowly change things, change people, change the landscape of the future.

May it be so. Amen.