Some Thoughts on This Week's Scripture

This Sunday, I'll be preaching on Luke 10:25-37, otherwise known as the Good Samaritan passage.  This is one of those texts that present a bit of a challenge in preaching.  I really enjoy preaching obscure passages that folks have probably never heard a sermon on before (for example, on my last Sunday at my previous church, I preached on 3 John 2-8 - that was fun).  It's hard to preach on a passage as famous as the Good Samaritan because:

1. You're tempted to take shortcuts in preparation, because after all, you probably consider yourself sufficiently familiar with the text already.  To counter this impulse, I've got a note on my laptop dock at work that reads "Read it again - you don't know it as well as you think you know it."  That has helped me on many occasions and is helping me this week.
2. I assume that my congregation also considers themselves sufficiently familiar with the text.  After all, everybody knows this story, right? 
3. A further temptation for me is to try to jostle some obscure detail out of the text that people might not have thought about before.  That kind of gimmick-centered preaching gets old pretty quickly.  I also try to steer away from "The Greek says...".  The "obscure fact" or reliance on the original languages can be helpful, but only if used in very small doses.  (However, I worked hard learning Hebrew and Greek - I'm pretty adamant that it will not go unused.)

Here's what I'm thinking - sometimes we Christians simply need to hear the Gospel proclaimed, in all its shocking, life-altering, world-shaking power.  I can't remember where I read this, but a good preacher once said (basically): "You don't have to jump off the steeple every week in your preaching.  Sometimes what you need to do is to simply preach the Gospel."  That idea has stuck with me and is giving me some encouragement and direction this week.

Regarding this week's text, the story of the Good Samaritan is easily reduced to simple moralism and shallow sentimentality.  But, if you learn anything about Jesus in the Gospels, it's that he doesn't really do simple moralism or shallow sentimentality.  The shallow, surface lesson here is: "It's good to help out people in need."  That's what has stuck in our culture.  A "good Samaritan" is anyone who helps somebody else.  And that's about it.  Well, of course, there's more to the story than immediately meets the eye.

I'd venture a guess that most Christians know this, too.  We might suspect (and probably have heard before) that this story is not quite as simple as "helping people is good".  After all, there is a reason Jesus specifies that a priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan pass by.  It's not general, unidentified people.  We know, too, that the priest and the Levite were representatives of the Jewish religious institution, representing God (supposedly) and the worship of God in Israel.  For Americans (especially those of us in the South), the "preacher" would fill this role nicely (or even the "Christian").

The Samaritan, for Jews in Jesus' day, would have been public enemy #1.  Jews and Samaritans (for the most part) hated each other, deeply.  If you read the Scripture, notice that the Jewish lawyer can't even bring himself to say the word "Samaritan" at the end of the passage, even as he acknowledges that the Samaritan in the story represented the true neighbor. 

This is, on one level, a story about our expectations and assumptions about other people based on their role in society or on their ethnic identity.  This is also a story about our own prejudice and the hatred or anger we harbor in our hearts toward other children of God.  Maybe it's not even hatred, maybe it's simply that we regard "those people" as less than ourselves.  And we all have a "those people".

This story is especially apropos considering the ongoing debate about immigration.  I have heard a good number of people talk about "them Mexicans" or "those illegals" as if they were livestock and not beloved children of the Living God.  A question that I'm hearing from this week's passage - what's more important: following the letter of the law (in the case of the priest and the Levite, it's Numbers 19:11-13) or helping people in need, no matter their immigration status?  Maybe the conversation for us Christians needs to be "how should the Church respond?" instead of "what should our lawmakers do"?

But it's not simply about immigration.  Many Christians, like all other groups, have their own sets of "others" that pose a threat and are cordoned off from the rest of humanity.  Just to run down a list: homosexuals, Muslims/Jihadists, liberals (or conservatives), atheists, secularists...you get the idea, "those people".  I love that Jesus and the rest of the New Testament pushes us, again and again, to not see "those people" but to see a neighbor, a child of God lovingly created in His image.  To not see an enemy, but a child of God.  And that's hard work.  After all, some of those Jihadists would as soon see me and my family killed before they'd offer me a cup of water.  But, going back to Jesus, I'm not responsible for their sin - my part is to pray for them and love them (and that doesn't mean that I should take my family to the next Al Qaeda gathering to hand out tracts).  "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." I'm working on it, if you're a Christian, you should too. 

Apologies for the rambling nature of this post.  I'll attempt to make it up to you with this uplifting and inspiring quote from Kierkegaard: "The matter is quite simple.  The Bible is very easy to understand.  But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers.  We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly.  Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly.  'My God', you will say, 'if I do that my whole life will be ruined.'  Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship.  Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close.  Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of a living God.  Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament."  Chew on that for a while...