dancing with robbers

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St ALBAN’S, KUROW

FIFTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (July 10^th) 2022

 

 READINGS:

 

Amos 7:1-17

Psalm 82

Colossians 1: 1-14

Luke 10: 25-37

 

There is something deeply humbling – a reality check if you like – about preaching on the Jesus parable of the Good Samaritan in 2022. It’s an incredibly vivid parable, and as our Gospel Conversation panellists all noted, It is so vivid it basically needs no explanation in order to extract meaning.

But there is another dimension in 2022. When I began my ministry, it was a well-known parable, in some ways awkward to preach on precisely because it was so well known. What was there that was new to say? Vibrant young preachers – I was far too dry and boring – attempted to bring an old story to new birth by reinventing the characters and perhaps the ploy did no harm. I well remember one in which the Samaritan was a punk rocker. Each generation has found its Samaritans – those like us, but not quite. Just a little other to us. The good Muslim. The good transgender. The good Russian. The attempts tend to reveal our own prejudices.

Do I digress? Maybe. But if we were to take a quick survey down the Main Street (and I’m not brave enough) we would find, when we asked about the Good Samaritan, that while some would vaguely know the phrase, increasingly few would know the story or from where it came.

It is a vivid story. Few of us are arrogant enough to believe we are the Samaritan. Most of us recognise our propensity to walk by on the other side. Busy-ness, compassion fatigue, fear of attack on ourselves as we help a victim – a sort of modern day “Billy don’t be a hero” syndrome. We know we are the walkers, most of us, and those that don’t probably are.

Can the parable speak to us? We are painfully aware of our short-fallings. Yeah, yeah Jesus, we know.

There are a couple of warnings. The similarities between Jew and Samaritan are deep, deeper than the differences. We see that in John’s story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. So near, and yet so far. Put me in a room with a group of Sydney Evangelicals – there – my biases are showing – and all my resentments will emerge. Yet if a militant extremist from Mars were seeking to eradicate all Christians it is doubtful they would bother to differentiate between us.

There is the subtle issue, too, of the hard yards. I might give a busker or a beggar some loose change, but to my shame I have to admit that I would not put in the hard yards to see them restored to wholeness. I might pick up a hitchhiker covered in obvious prison tats, but I might wonder if I really wanted that person in my car, and quickly drive on. While I have from time to time worked with the disadvantaged including prisoners I have usually found excuses soon enough to run to the comfort and safety of my world. Here, Mr Beaten Up Guy, here’s 10 bucks for some Aspro and good luck for the walk home.

Beaten, stripped, left for dead. As Jesus told the story did he know that this description and worse would soon be his fate? Yet there is a bit of Jesus, no a lot of Jesus, of course, in that other character, the hated outsider, the Samaritan.

If we tell this story to strangers today we might decide that we and they are all alike the broken person in the gutter. For we live in a rather beaten up world, and we are beaten up with it. Beaten and beaters, for we are the robbers, the victim, the embarrassed passers-by. Not the Samaritan. We get that.

But we whisper a word of hope. Because none of us would be here today if we had not been touched by the one who gave us aid, medicine, a donkey, and the glorious hope of resurrection. Let us do likewise. We can whisper a word of hope in deed and word.