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"Eat, drink, and be merry. I do. Just don’t be fooled. Don’t forget that there are the riches that matter and the riches that don’t. Choose wisely. Be rich toward God."

7/31/2022

RICH TOWARD GOD
Sunday, July 31, 2022
First Congregational Church of Cheshire
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell

Luke 12:13-21

Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

Let me tell you a story about my big red chair.

Recently I was at the famed Chautauqua Institution in far Western New York for some continuing education.  One afternoon, my friend Jim and I sat out on an antiquing adventure.  We ended up in a rather rough-around-the-edges little town on the shores of Lake Erie, where we knew there was a particularly good antique store.  The first floor was sort of a bust, but on the second floor, toward the back of the room, sat the big red chair – its deep crimson leather unbroken, its workmanship unquestionable.  And I was smitten.  Of course, I had no idea if it would fit in the SUV or if it would fit in our house.  But it was so beautiful and the price was right.  Of course, I went to find the owner to see if I get a better price.  And surprisingly, the man agreed.  His wife, however, looked on with cool detachment, before informing me that the Jamestown Royal Furniture Company, who had made that chair, used to supply the White House.  I guess she wanted me to know that I really was getting a bargain.  And then the big red chair was in the back of the SUV and on its way to life in Connecticut.  It now lives in my church office if you’d like to stop by sometime and say hello.

I have a story like that for every painting and vase and rug and knickknack that we own.  Each piece has its own history and carries its own meaning.  And together these treasures and their stories make up the patchwork of our life story.  But the hard truth is that one day, when are no more, people will take our things and divide them and sell them and fight over them, or maybe just throw them away.

One day, someone in a crowd called out to Jesus: “Rabbi, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.”  This was likely a younger brother who was unhappy with the unequal distribution of assets based on Jewish inheritance practices of the day.  It was customary for the oldest male child to receive 2/3s of the entire estate, leaving 1/3 to be divided between however many other males there were.  Maybe the man in the crowd that day hoped that this rabbi, with his radical new ideas, would say something fresh about dividing money more equitably.  But apparently, Jesus didn’t do probate.  Instead, he used this dramatic moment as a jumping off point to tell a story about how we usually measure riches and how we ought to measure riches.

And he said: Once upon a time, there was a very rich farmer who had a bumper crop – so great that his old barns just would not do.  So, he decided that he would tear them down and build much bigger ones.  Then he would kick back for the rest of his life, take an early retirement, and sail around the world.

But the party took a sudden turn when God spoke up.  “You fool!  This very night your life is demanded of you.  And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”  Jesus ends this most unsettling story by saying: “So it is with everyone who stores up treasures for himself or herself, but is not rich toward God.”

This is a difficult lesson because it flies in the face of ideas that we hold dear: things like pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps; like saving for a rainy day; like enjoying the fruits of your labor – values that my folks raised me with.  I was taught to work hard and save my money – the more you saved, the better because you didn’t know what the future would hold.  And that sounds exactly like what the farmer was doing.  Surely Jesus wasn’t disparaging being prepared.  What was so wrong with the farmer enjoying his success?

Well, to understand Jesus’s criticism, you have to understand that this was no ordinary farmer.  This man was a major landowner.  And his farm was an agribusiness.  And that made him significantly different from almost everyone else.  Historians tell us that in the time of Jesus, 80-90% of all people either worked on or benefitted from others working on someone else’s land.  In other words, they were serfs or tenant farmers.  They worked for “the man.” And all of those non-land owners bought their daily bread, their staples, from “the man.”  His success or failure was essential to the entire community’s success or failure. He was, quite literally, his brothers’ and sisters’ keeper.  So, he had a major responsibility.

Therefore, when that bumper crop came, what he could have done – what he should have done - was to sell his surplus grain to his neighbors at a reduced rate.  In that way, it would have meant a blessing of abundance for everyone.  The farmer would still have made a profit just by the sheer volume of his sales.

But greed does awful things to us humans.  It confuses our thinking and messes with our morals.  And so, this man, who knew better, hoarded the daily bread of others.  One biblical commentator has suggested that by doing so, he could dole out that grain bit by bit, creating a demand that really wasn’t there and thus driving up the price – making large profits on the backs of the poor.  – Some stories never get old.

In addition to that, notice the way that the rich man speaks of his success.  It’s all about him.  In the four verses it takes to tell the story, he uses the words “I” or “my” eleven times!  Not once does the man mention the God who created the sun and the soil and the seed.  There is no prayer of thanksgiving for the blessings of a bumper crop.  There is no recognition of his responsibility to his neighbors.  Instead there is the selfish and a singular attention to what this wealth will mean for him and him alone – to hell with everybody else.

And that’s why God speaks up.  This is the only time in any of the parables of Jesus that God actually says anything.  And what God says should give us all pause.  “You fool, your time’s up.  You’re planning for your future at just the moment that your life is over.  And all these things you have accumulated, (like your big red chair!) whose will they be once you’re gone?”  Or, as the writer of Ecclesiastes put it: “one who has worked with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave all to be enjoyed by another who did not work for it.” (Ecclesiastes 2:21)

And then the farmer died and left it all behind.  And one day, I will too.  But how he lived and how I live and how you live will be the legacy by which we are judged.  We can choose greed and selfishness, and that can be our legacy.  Or,  we can choose justice and kindness and generosity.  It’s about planning for our retirements… and or expirements… all at the same time!

There is a lot of blustering going on in the world right now – a lot of ego and blow-hard-ism and fear.  And one thing fear will do is make you selfish.  And when you are afraid, then all those constant calls to stockpile and hoard and build walls of suspicion against your neighbors sound like good ideas.  If you believe that the world is going to hell, then selfishness is the natural response because you never know when you’re going to need all those barns full of your treasures.

But the challenge of the Gospel of Jesus has always been to live by faith, and not by fear.  And what is true for people is also true for institutions.  The call to live by faith is true for this church, as we consider what God is calling us to do and be in a world so radically changed in the last few years.  And if we are to live by faith, then we have to exercise that faith muscle, that generosity muscle, that justice muscle, something Jesus called being “rich toward God. “

So, friends, by all means, enjoy your lives.  I do.  Eat, drink, and be merry. I do.  Just don’t be fooled.  Don’t forget that there are the riches that matter and the riches that don’t.  Choose wisely.  Be rich toward God.

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"...as we emerge from our mother’s wombs, we are praying. And as we die, our very last act will be a prayer."

7/28/2022

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TEACH US TO PRAY
Sunday, July 24, 2022
First Congregational Church of Cheshire
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell

Luke 11:1-13

He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.’ He said to them, ‘When you pray, say:

   Father, hallowed be your name.
   Your kingdom come.
   Give us each day our daily bread.
   And forgive us our sins,
    for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
   And do not bring us to the time of trial.’

And he said to them, ‘Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, “Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.” And he answers from within, “Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.” I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.

‘So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!’

I struggle with prayer.  I do it in great fits and starts – sort of like exercise or a new diet.  But like exercise or a diet, when I pray, I am easily bored; easily distracted, never quite sure if it’s having the intended result.

I very often feel conflicted about this because, as a child, I was surrounded by prayer.  My whole family prayed – a lot.  My paternal great grandmother used to spend hours on her knees in prayer every day –despite her severe arthritis.  My grandmother, with a flair for the dramatic, would sometimes take on the air of an Old Testament prophet when she repented of her sins, dressing in tattered clothes and letting her hair fall down around her face as a sign of her sorrow.  My parents were and are a little tamer than that, but they are still serious pray-ers - remembering me and Marcos and this church every day – without fail.  And when the people in my family pray, they actually believe that God answers prayers in ways that are observable and verifiable.

As a young adult, I too prayed often and earnestly.  I used to carry around a list of people in my wallet - dozens of names – that I prayed for every day. And I kept a record of when those prayers were answered – and dutifully moved those names from the “needs list” to the “thanksgivings list.”

But over time, I found that these intense daily prayers often felt one-sided.  And then one day, I had the most uncomfortable realization that most of my praying was really about me trying to convince the Almighty to do what I thought best. And that sort of made me God, if you think about it.  But God is God and I am not.  And that stark discovery left me without a reason or a way to pray.

One day Jesus was praying, as he often did.  And maybe his disciples, for all their good intentions, were like so many of us - not quite sure about how to do it.  And so, they asked the Teacher to teach them how to pray.

And here we should pause for just a moment because there is in some American Protestant piety this notion that one should automatically know how to pray.  When I was a child, I was told: “It’s just like having a conversation with a friend.”  Well, there is some truth to that – with this glaring exception: none of my friends are not invisible.  And all of my friends have something to say in return.  So, in that way, prayer is not just like having a conversation with a friend.  And that means that most of us need to learn how to do it.  Which begs the question: why isn’t the church teaching God’s people how to pray?

So, Jesus taught his friends how to do it, using words we now call the Lord’s Prayer.  And this prayer - which is a model, not an idol - contains the essential building blocks of prayer: praise – that is, acknowledging the greatness of God; petition – asking for what we need; and confession – naming our failings and asking for forgiveness and a new beginning.

Perhaps you noticed that Luke doesn’t have our beloved ending: “For thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” He doesn’t have it because those words are not in the most reliable and ancient manuscripts.  They were likely added, centuries later, by monks who didn’t like Jesus’s abrupt ending.  But we like it and we’re not about to get rid of it now!

And then Jesus told them a parable about being persistent in the practice of prayer.  And here is where I should really pay attention, since persistence is where I struggle.  And Jesus ends the parable with these memorable words: “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.  For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”

And that, at first glance, seems like an invitation to ask for anything, as if God is some sort of Santa Claus, dispensing wishes to those who are persistent and haven’t been too naughty.  And that, I suspect, is how many folks actually think of prayer.  It’s a reward system for being good.  And you have to keep at it.  -- But if that is your understanding of prayer, then when you are in real need - and you don’t get what you ask for - then the logical conclusion is that God is capricious and temperamental… or maybe even cruel.

Over the course of many years of ministry, these uneven ways in which prayers seem to be answered bring more people to my office than most anything else.  Think about it: we pray for those we love – and some people get well; but many don’t.  Some poverty is relieved; most isn’t.  God seems to favor one part of the world over another.  And that process of asking and waiting and hoping and being disappointed over and over again just keeps swelling the ranks of those who have given up on the church and God.

But a careful examination of this passage leads us to very different conclusion about the aim and purpose of prayer.  Because these verses do not end with a promise that if you are good, and persistent, then God will give you anything you ask for.  Instead, what Jesus said was, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask!”

When we pray, what we are promised is what we actually need – the presence of God.  The answer to every prayer is more of God – deeper understanding, further revelation, intimacy, belonging, and ultimately a deep, deep peace.  That does not mean that we cannot ask God for what we need or others need.  After all, the Lord’s Prayer teaches us to ask for our daily bread.  But the measure of an answered prayer is a deeper communion with the One to whom we pray.

And that kind of connection doesn’t always need a lot of words.  In the early church, a contemplative name Macarius the Great, was asked how to pray.  He replied: "There is no need at all to make long discourses. It is enough to stretch out one's hands and say, 'Lord, as you will, and as you know, have mercy.” And if the conflict grows fiercer,” Macarius continued,” say, 'Lord, help!'  In modern times, another contemplative, the writer Anne Lamott, has said that all prayer can be boiled down to these three essential words: “Help!” “Thanks!” “Wow!”

And then, sometimes, words are superfluous to prayer.  Prayer is like the silence between lovers – full of meaning.  It is intention, attitude, yearning, desire, tears, laughter, music - or even breath.

A wise rabbi once said that the Jewish name for God – Yahweh – is not spoken, but breathed.  Its correct pronunciation is an attempt to imitate the sound of inhalation and exhalation.” (Yah – weh, Yah –weh…) -- And if that is true, then with every breath, we are saying the divine name.  And if that is true, then with every breath, we are, as St. Paul put it, “praying without ceasing.”   And if that is true, then as we emerge from our mother’s wombs, we are praying.  And as we die, our very last act will be a prayer.

Lord, teach us to pray.  And the Lord replied: take a breath.  In - Out.  Live - Love.  Laugh - Cry.  Believe - Doubt.  Strive - Rest.  Breathe - Pray.  Pray.  Pray…

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The late great scholar and rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “Awareness of the divine begins with wonder.”

7/18/2022

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GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER
Sunday, July 17, 2022
First Congregational Church of Cheshire
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell

Luke 10:38-42

Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

As much as I would like to be, I am not an easy host.  I hope my guests are not aware of that, because I work very hard to give the opposite impression; to appear as if dinner parties and weekend company are things that I can organize effortlessly.  But the fact of the matter is that it all makes me a nervous wreck.  It makes me nervous – not because I don’t like entertaining people - but because I am a perfectionist.  And because I am, I want everything about those events to be perfect.  And that means that I need a lot of time to plan; a lot of advance notice.  But very often, true hospitality doesn’t allow for the luxury of planning.

That was certainly the case for Martha, who had a dinner party hoisted upon her without much notice at all.  Now there are some significant differences between Martha and me – perhaps most significantly, Martha lived in a culture that deeply valued and continues to value hospitality.  Any stranger who showed up at the door was fed and given a place to lodge for the night.  That continues to be a bedrock value of many Middle Eastern cultures to this day.

And so, it was a no-brainer that when Martha heard that Jesus of Nazareth, the rising star preacher, was in town, she invited him to dinner.  That doesn’t sound so bad.  Even I can add one plate to the table without too much complaining.  But if you read closely, you will see in the verses that precede these that Jesus was traveling with 70 of his new disciples.  And we have every reason to believe that they came to dinner too.  So, it was actually 71 people for dinner!   And trust me, I could have six months’ notice and that would still make me a nervous wreck!

This Martha had a sister named Mary.  And even though the Gospel of Luke doesn’t mention it, they also had a brother named Lazarus, whom Jesus had raised from the dead.

Jesus had settled in another part of the house and had begun teaching those who were gathered there.  And Mary, eager to learn about the Kingdom of God, found the perfect spot right at Jesus’s feet.

Now, this detail is noteworthy of several reasons.  The first is that one would expect to find Mary in the kitchen helping her sister, Martha.  That certainly seemed to have been Martha’s expectation, given her reaction later on.  The second is that Mary, in the simple act of sitting at the feet of a rabbi, shattered cultural gender expectations.  She assumed the position of a male in a society that was strictly ordered on perceived biology.  Only men were taught by men.  But Jesus treated her for what she was – a disciple – showing everyone that in Christ there is no male or female, Jew or Greek, slave or free.  But trust me, it was the talk of the town for weeks afterwards.

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, there was a lot of door-slamming and pot-rattling and heavy sighing.  Martha was so distracted that she cut herself while chopping onions.  And then three pots started to boil over at once.  And the lamb was roasting too slowly.  And the bread wouldn’t rise.  And every time she walked past the doorway, there was her lazy sister – just sitting there.  And frankly, it was driving her crazy.

Finally, Martha just couldn’t take it anymore.  You know that point of no return - just before you do something you are going to regret for years to come?  That’s the moment she was in.  Suddenly, she burst out of the kitchen, strode into the parlor, and didn’t even look at her sister.  Instead, and rather shockingly, her anger was misdirected toward the guest of honor.  In a classic case of triangulation, putting everyone else in the room on edge, she blurted out: “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do all the work? Tell her to help me!”  In other words, “Hey Lord, how about a little justice?  Hey Lord, how about a little fairness?”  Not a bad prayer, really.

For a moment, no one breathed.  And then Jesus smiled and said her name… twice.  Commentators say that this is likely an indication of compassion and tenderness.  He was recognizing her humanity and her emotion.  “Martha, Martha… you are worried and distracted by many things.  There is need of only one thing… and Mary has chosen the better part.”

The better part… There are all kinds of ways that this passage has been interpreted, some of them better than others.  Let’s start with the not so good.  The first is to pit action and contemplation against one another, as if, in the Christian life, we have to choose one over the other.  In this interpretation, we are told that the life of contemplation is superior because Jesus commends Mary for sitting quietly and listening to him.  But he chides Martha for being busy trying to get a meal together for 70 plus hungry people.

But this interpretation doesn’t really hold water because the story just before this one is the story of the Good Samaritan, which is all about action and doing the right thing.  And that tales ends with these words: “Go and do likewise.”  Don’t think about it; don’t contemplate it.  DO IT.

Pitting action against contemplation also ignores the fact that somebody has to make dinner.  Somebody has to make the coffee.  Somebody has to clean the church and pull the weeds and set up church school class rooms and organize backpack drives and youth mission trips and rehearse the music and pass out bulletins and write the sermons and visit the sick and take communion to the home-bound.  Someone has to make sure that the mechanisms are in place so that contemplation of the Word of God can actually happen.

And then, in more recent times, feminist theologians have rightly pointed out that pitting action and contemplation actually propagates gender stereotypes.  Notice that the one working in the kitchen - doing traditional woman’s work - is criticized, but the one who has assumed the role of the man – sitting at the feet of a great teacher – is valorized.

So maybe the truth of this passage is not so much about what the women are doing but much more about howthey are doing it.  Notice that when Jesus spoke to Martha, he actually said nothing to criticize her essential kitchen.  He certainly didn’t tell her to stop.  His belly was rumbling too!  Instead, he reacted to her angry outburst.  And what he said was, “Martha, Martha… You are worried and distracted by many things…”

And because she was worried and distracted, Martha was unable to be present to the glory revealing itself in her house.  But Mary, in being quiet and attentive and open, understood, on some level, that God had come to dinner.

This week, the whole world was dazzled by the amazing images, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope and released by NASA.  These images are absolutely stunning, for they show us more clearly than ever before the shadows of our own beginnings.  In these images, we are reminded of the immensity of the Universe; of all that is unknown to us.  We are reminded of our smallness and the smallness of our concerns and the smallness of our opinions and the smallness of our ideas.  And perhaps best of all, we are reminded that unbearable beauty exists for beauty’s sake alone.

Did you slow down at all this week to take any of that in; to ponder those images; to contemplate what they mean; to tremble at the Power of God; to sit at the feet of Wonder?

The late great scholar and rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “Awareness of the divine begins with wonder.”

What did Mary see and hear that day that filled her with wonder?  How did her life change because she paused long enough to see it?  How might our lives change by staying in moments of wonder; in the presence of God; at the feet of Jesus – something our Lord himself once called “the better part”?

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"Maybe we’re the ones in the ditch, bruised and battered by our willful ignorance and dearly guarded privilege and our unyielding opinions about everything."

7/18/2022

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IN A DITCH
Sunday, July 10, 2022
First Congregational Church of Cheshire
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell

Luke 10:25-37

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

It was Christmastime, 1966. I had just seen a commercial about Santa Claus appearing at a local shopping center, and determined to go, I pestered my parents until my father finally relented. That same night, my dad and I got into the car and started off to see Santa.  We were traveling down a two-lane road in rural Louisiana when all of a sudden, there were headlights coming right toward us.  My dad swerved wildly as he shouted “Hold on, Jimmy!” and threw his arm over me, a sort of human seatbelt. There was the tremendous sound of breaking glass and grinding metal, and then absolute stillness. My next memory is of my dad’s heavy body pressing against mine, and my body pressing against the passenger door.  Our car was upright, resting on its right side, in a deep ditch.

My dad climbed out of the driver’s door and then reached back in to pull me out. The ditch was in front of a small, simple house.  We knocked on the door and an elderly couple answered.  We asked if we could use the phone to call the police and my mother.  And then the old lady, in an attempt to comfort a shaken child, went into the kitchen and came back with a bowl of Circus Peanuts, those marvelous spongy, neon orange candies in the shape of oversized peanuts.  I was delighted.  They delight me still!

My father and I were very lucky to have walked away from an accident that totaled our car.  A drunk, hit-and-run driver, the son of a local judge who was never prosecuted for this incident, had literally knocked us into a ditch and then left us for dead.  But some Good Samaritans with Circus Peanuts and some basic human kindness tended to us in our distress.

One day, a young hot-shot lawyer approached Jesus and asked: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” It was actually a trick question meant to put the peasant Jesus in his place and to demonstrate his ignorance of Jewish law. But Jesus wasn’t ignorant of the law at all, and so he turned the tables and asked: “What is written in the law?  What do you read there?”  And the lawyer rattled off the answer that any good Jew would have known: “Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.”  “That’s it,” said Jesus.  “Do that and you will live.”  But this lawyer was not about to be shown up by a peasant.  And so, he asked a more probing follow-up question: “So just who is my neighbor?”

And Jesus replied: Once upon a time there was a man, who against the wise warnings of his wife, walked the dangerous Jericho Road all alone.  He was rounding a corner when suddenly robbers jumped out from behind a boulder, stole everything he had, and beat him half to death.  For the next few hours he lay there, in and out of consciousness, under the brutal sun, wondering if he would ever see his wife and children again.

After a while, a priest happened by, but he pretended not to see the man and passed by on the other side of the road.  Then along came a Levite, another professional religious person, who also caught sight of him and feigned being in a bigger hurry than he actually was. Finally, a Samaritan came along and when he saw the bloody man, he was moved with pity.  He knelt down, cradled the man’s head and whispered that everything was going to be OK, even though he wasn’t sure it would be. And then he cleaned and bandaged the man’s wounds, gave him some cool water, put him on his donkey and took him to an inn, where he sat by the man’s bed all night, as a fever rattled his body.   The next day, when the man was a little better, the Samaritan paid the innkeeper for two more days of lodging and said, “Take care of him.  And when I come back through, I will pay you anything else that is owed.”

We know this story as the Parable of the Good Samaritan.  And we think of it as a morality tale about our responsibility to those in need.  And there is truth in that.  How much better this world would be if we all remembered that we are our sister’s and brother’s keepers.  It’s just that this is not the whole truth of this tale.

First of all, you have to understand the characters to understand the story.  It’s hard to overstate just how hated the Samaritans were in first century Palestine. They were half-breeds and traitors, who practiced a perverted form of Judaism. They had refused to participate in the rebuilding of Jerusalem after the exile.  They had helped the Syrians wage war against the Jews.   By the time Jesus told this tale, the hatred between Jews and Samaritans was 1000 years old.  To anybody listening to Jesus that day, there was no such thing as a “good Samaritan.”  It was an oxymoron.

Secondly, in telling this story, Jesus is underscoring something we Americans seem to have forgotten in 2022.  And that is simply this: that people and kindness and decency are always, always, always more important than political opinion.  Despite the ancient misunderstandings between Jews and Samaritans, Jesus doesn’t address it at allHe doesn’t use his very powerful platform to engage in historical analysis.  He doesn’t argue about who’s right and who’s wrong.  There is no time for that because this is the story of human crisis.  As theologian Debie Thomas writes: “… all tribalisms fall away on a broken road.  All divisions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ disappear of necessity.  When you’re lying bloody in a ditch… what matters most is whether or not anyone will stop and show you mercy before you die.”

Thirdly, there is good reason to believe that this is one of Jesus’s famous role reversal stories that Luke is so fond of - you know, one of those tales where the first are last and the last are first.  Maybe Jesus isn’t simply suggesting that the lawyer act like a Good Samaritan and give help to those in need.  Maybe, and far more provocatively, Jesus is suggesting that the one in need of help is the lawyer.  He’s in the ditch, bruised and bloodied by his pride and privilege. Maybe the shocker of this tale is that for Jesus, the ones in the world who need the help are the ones who think they don’t.  They’re in a ditch and the ones who can help them are the “others” they so often ignore or… despise.

There was a 12-year-old Palestinian boy named Ahmad who was tragically shot and killed by Israeli soldiers during street fighting near his home in Jenin, the West Bank. He had been playing in the street with a toy gun, and you can imagine...  Still alive at first, Ahmad was rushed to an Israeli hospital, where he died after two days. His heart-broken parents could have turned the whole sad spectacle into a political moment.  It would have been very powerful.  But instead, they made the decision to allow Ahmad’s organs to be harvested for transplant to Israeli people. A total of six Israelis received Ahmad’s organs.  Ahmad’s mother later said, "My son has died. But maybe he can give life to others."

Ahmad’s mother could have been the one in a ditch of grief and bitterness.  That’s the role we expect her to play – the victim; the supplicant; the weak one.  But how this story changes when we see Ahmad’s mother as the strong woman she is, who reaches into the ditch and pulls others to safety, perhaps even some who would have despised her because she is a Palestinian.

The last shall be first and the first shall be last.  Maybe we’re the ones in the ditch, bruised and battered by our willful ignorance and dearly guarded privilege and our unyielding opinions about everything.  Maybe our life-blood is draining away and we don’t even know it.  Maybe our help is close at hand, but from the very people we hold at arm’s length and silently despise.  Maybe we’re in the ditch.

But thank God that is not how this story ends.

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"Eat, drink, and be merry. I do. Just don’t be fooled. Don’t forget that there are the riches that matter and the riches that don’t. Choose wisely. Be rich toward God."

"...as we emerge from our mother’s wombs, we are praying. And as we die, our very last act will be a prayer."

The late great scholar and rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “Awareness of the divine begins with wonder.”

"Maybe we’re the ones in the ditch, bruised and battered by our willful ignorance and dearly guarded privilege and our unyielding opinions about everything."

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