ON THE WAY DOWN TOBACCO ROAD.....

Luke 10: 25-37
Steve Lindsley
August 23, 2009

It was a sermon that I'll never forget.  It was preached one sunny fall morning at the seminary chapel – we had half-hour services Monday through Friday, led by students and faculty.  On this particular day a good friend of mine was leading worship; a friend whose depth of faith was matched only by his playful nature.  The title for his message that morning, printed on our half-page bulletins, was “Pray, Pray, Pray.”  It went very nicely with the scripture that preceded it – the one from the sixth chapter of Matthew, where Jesus says, And whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door, and pray to your Father who is in secret.  

To this day I don't know whether our friend, our colleague in ministry, just happened to be in one of his playful moods, or whether he had actually forgotten he was scheduled to lead chapel that morning.  But after finishing the scripture and saying the obligatory prayer, he preached his sermon, which went exactly like this:

Pray.....Pray.....Pray.  Amen.

And that was it.  I kid you not.  The organist launched into our concluding hymn and we all suppressed our laughter and shock as much as we could while trying to sing “God of the Sparrow.”  It was a classic memory of my seminary experience.  It was the sermon that I'll never forget.

Now you may be glad to know that Danny did, in fact, graduate from seminary and has faithfully served three congregations, most recently as the Pastor/Head of Staff of a church about this size in Tallahassee.  I hear he's doing great down there and I don't doubt it a bit.  What I do doubt, though, is that he's ever given serious thought to recycling his legendary “Pray, Pray, Pray” sermon.

Although would it be a bad thing if he did?  I mean, it pretty much says it all, doesn't it?  There's no problem with being direct and to the point!  Sometimes scripture is like that – sometimes it is straightforward and says it all.  This may come as a surprise, but occasionally we ministers have a hard time coming up with 15-20 minutes of stuff about the scripture we're preaching on.  Sometimes the message can pretty much be summed up in just a handful of words.

There are those who feel our scripture reading today – what's known universally as the parable of the Good Samaritan – is pretty straightforward as well.  It's easily one of the most well-known stories in the Bible – known not just in Christian circles but in our culture in general.  Our children become familiar with this parable at the earliest of ages.  There was a Sunday school teacher who was teaching the Good Samaritan story to her class; about how a man was beaten and robbed, about the two men who passed him by; and about the “Good Samaritan” who stopped to help him out.  When the teacher finished the story she asked the class what they would do if they saw someone lying on the side of the road, wounded and bleeding.  One little girl emphatically replied, “I think I'd throw up!” (http://homileticsonline.com/subscriber/illustration_search.asp?keywords=samaritan&imageField2.x=0&imageField2.y=0, visited on 8.17.2009).

That seems reasonable!  What also seems reasonable is the generally-accepted summary of the parable's message; and, much like Danny's three-word sermon, it too can be captured in just a few words.  Something like, “Help people who need help.”  That sounds all “Good Samaritan-y,” doesn't it?  Or how about “Stop to lend a helping hand.”  I mean, who can argue with that?  It's in line with Biblical thinking; it's reinforced elsewhere in the scriptures.  Jesus wants us to care for the less fortunate, the downtrodden, the “least of these.”  So what's wrong with that?

Well, besides the fact that it would make for a pretty short sermon, and I know you'd never want anything like that, I'm also wondering – and perhaps you are too – if there's more to it.  It's not that the short message is wrong, it's just incomplete.  And at some level, if we're honest with ourselves, we know that there's more to this parable than just helping people. 

But it's difficult, isn't it, to get beyond that basic understanding; because the phrase “Good Samaritan” really has taken on a life of its own.  There are tons of hospitals all over the world that use that expression in their name; you can find “Good Samaritan” food banks or “Good Samaritan” homeless shelters.  There are churches out there like “Christ Good Samaritan Church” or “Good Samaritan United Methodist Church.”  We've even adopted the term as a way to refer to someone who does some altruistic good deed – so the boy scout who helps the elderly lady across the street becomes a “good samaritan.” 

Which is really interesting, if you think about it; the way we understand and use these two words together.  It's interesting on one level because the phrase “Good Samaritan” isn't found in the story – in fact, it's nowhere in the Bible.  It's an expression we made up ourselves.  What's also surprising is that the word “samaritan” is not synonymous with the word “good,” as we often assume.  It's not describing the nature of a person's acts; it's describing who a person is.  And right here is where we begin to see that the traditional reading of this parable, and the three or four word sermon idea, probably isn't going to suffice.

Right here is where we come to understand that Samaritans were actually a race of people in Biblical times, kin to the Jews.  They were descendants of the Northern Kingdom that broke away from the South right after the reign of King Solomon; forming their own capital city and building their own temple.  Now there was plenty of history between Samaritans and Jews, and very little of it was good.  Jews saw Samaritans as the “black sheep” of the family tree, traitors to the true faith of their ancestors, B-list invites at the banquet table of life.  Samaritans, on the other hand, saw Jews as obnoxious cousins who thought way too much of themselves, who made a big deal of their “original” temple in Jerusalem, whose piety and arrogance served only to distance them from everyone else.  It's classic rivalry stuff here, folks.  We're talking Capulets and Montagues, Hatfield and McCoys, Democrats and Republicans, Gryffindors and Slytherins and, dare I say for all you “Twilighters out there, vampires and werewolves.  It was deep-seeded, hard-core division; for which there was seemingly no middle ground.

So imagine – imagine that we are part of the crowd of Jews gathered there to hear Jesus that day; to hear this lawyer guy pose the question that would start it all: Who is my neighbor?  Imagine the scene that Jesus then paints for us – a solitary man beaten and robbed and left for dead.  And when we hear where this travesty takes place – “on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho” - we automatically know something about this person: that he was, like us, a Jew; traveling on a busy and sometimes dangerous road in his homeland.  This unfortunate soul, the subject of Jesus' story thus far, was one of us.

And then imagine the anger and disgust that wells up inside us when Jesus tells us that a priest and Levite walked right by him – without even stopping to help!  Imagine that we are infuriated by this; not because both are religious types and should be the first to lend a helping hand.  No, what upsets us is that they are Jews, just like us, just like him.  And instead of doing what they absolutely should've done – help a fellow Jew, a fellow son of Abraham – instead they walked by and just left him there. 

But nothing prepares us for the real shock that comes next:

But a Samaritan came hear him.
He bandaged his wounds and brought him to an inn
and took care of him.

Can you feel the hair rise on the back of your neck, the tightening of the pit in your stomach, the blood boil in your veins?  Can any of us put into words how we feel when Jesus tells us a story about a Jew like us being helped by a hated, despised, maligned, God-awful Samaritan?

Can we?  Probably not.  But here is something we can relate to. In the New Testament college class I teach, I ask students to rewrite the parable of the Good Samaritan in a modern context – to get the same message across with characters and situations of our day and time.  This is what one of my students wrote, and he got an “A” for it:

On the way down Tobacco Road, a Carolina fan in a Tarheel t-shirt and cap was beaten up and left for dead.  By chance, Roy Williams happened upon him; but he kept walking.  Likewise Tyler Hansborough came his way, but he didn't stop either.  

You know where this is going, right?

But then Mike Krzyzewski saw this poor Carolina fan, and he put him in his car and took him to the hospital, where he paid all the bills to help him get well. 

Now I gotta say – as a Wake Forest fan with no real stake in the Duke/Carolina rivalry, I love the fact that some of you let out that gasp or started shaking your heads or laughed nervously.  I love that – because I promise you this – that is the exact same reaction that Jesus' crowd would've had that day.  They would've been mortified that of all people, of all people, it was a hated Samaritan who stopped.  They would've been appalled that this Jew had any association with someone like them, much less be in the position of having to accept help from him.

But he did.  And I think it's notable here that Jesus doesn't go into a lot of detail about either of these men.  He simply ends the story and asks the lawyer – remember him? – he asks him who his neighbor is now.  And the guy can't even bring himself to say the word “Samaritan!”  All he can say is, the one who showed him kindness.  To which Jesus suggests that he go and do likewise.

Go and do likewise.  Man, that's hard, isn't it?  I mean, it's one thing to just help people.  We can do that, no problem.  We've got that down-pat.  But that's not what this parable is about, is it?  When we create for ourselves an understanding of how our world operates, of right and wrong, of who is in and out, of who is acceptable and who's not – when we delicately fashion all of these things into a comfortable and familiar structure to base our life upon, it is as if Jesus comes in with a sledgehammer and smashes it to pieces.  And that cannot help but force us to view things differently – and not just see differently, but act differently.  To go and do likewise.

That's why at its deeper, more meaningful, more spiritual level, this story Jesus tells in the 10th chapter of Luke is about confronting our innermost fears, our darkest prejudices, and the walls we've so carefully constructed that separate us from someone.  It's about confronting them in our most vulnerable state, and then doing away with them.  It's about coming to terms with what writer Anne Lamott 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.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Lamott, visited on 8.21.2009)

This parable is about asking ourselves key questions, like: who is the Samaritan for you?  Or to put it another way: who is the person or persons you least want to associate with; who in your hour of greatest need you least want to be by your side?  That is your Samaritan.  What is the Samaritan for you – what are the perceptions and biases and beliefs that you hold onto not because they're right, but because you don't know how to let them go?  What are those parts deep within you that keep you from experiencing the fullness of God's grace, and from sharing that grace with everyone else? 

Maybe the parable of the Good Samaritan was Jesus' little sermon on big things – his “Pray, Pray, Pray.”  Maybe in the form of a story so simple a child could understand, Jesus wants to reveal to us something about the all-inclusive, all-transforming nature and power of God's love – a love so great that a hated Samaritan could put behind centuries of ridicule, and a beaten Jew could accept what had previously been unacceptable.  And maybe the message to them, and to us, is this: no one is so exalted to be in a position to denigrate another; no one is too lowly to be denied everlasting grace; and no act is greater than living out the radical, dangerous, and joyful ramifications of God's great love.

It is what you and I encounter every time we find ourselves on that road from Jerusalem to Jericho, or Tobacco Road, or the many roads of life.  It is a journey that changes not only us, lying there on the ground, but changes the one who helps us up.  It is a journey that leads to one simple, profound conclusion: Go and do likewise. 

In fact, there's your four-word sermon, folks. Thanks be to God.  AMEN.

Comments

[Air Jordans]

The man who has made up his mind to win will never say "impossible".

[abercrombie fitch shirts]

no one is so exalted to be in a position to denigrate another; no one is too lowly to be denied everlasting grace; and no act is greater than living out the radical,

[business alarms]

He is truly an intelligent guy. I admire him so much.