2018-10-01
Brooke Strong
Scripture: Luke 10:25-37
Phoenix Affirmations IV
Several years ago, as Mary and I were driving, we came upon a terrible traffic accident. Almost immediately, as we waited in that parking lot of a freeway, Mary got out of the car and went toward the accident. She found a man lying by the side of the road, and tended to him until the rescue unit arrived. As she did so, I couldn’t help but think of her as a Good Samaritan. She literally stopped by the side of the road and helped someone who was lying injured in a ditch.
We all know what a Good Samaritan is, don’t we? A Good Samaritan is someone who stops and helps someone who’s in trouble. While people like me, unnerved by the sight of blood and gore, would just as easily shy away from such a scene, a Good Samaritan jumps in and does what’s necessary, providing food or shelter or medical care.
Jesus’ incredibly familiar story has given a name to a gazillion organizations that help people who are needy—Good Samaritan hospitals and projects and organizations. Federated Church’s emergency fund for people who make financial requests of the church, for food or gas or rent, is, in fact, called the Good Samaritan fund. We know what a Good Samaritan is. Or at least we think we do: a Good Samaritan is someone who heroically helps someone less fortunate.
The thing is, there’s an edge to this story that often gets glossed over. As with many biblical stories, this one has been domesticated; it’s been made to fit into a box in which it doesn’t really fit. Because of how important it is to hear what the story actually says, though, rather than what we think it says, let’s listen to it again, this time in a version called the Cotton Patch Version. Written by Clarence Jordan, the story is told in the language and culture of the mid-twentieth century American South. As a way of really engaging Jordan’s listeners, the Cotton Patch Version uses familiar places and images to grab the imagination of Jordan’s community in Georgia.
Here’s the way Jordan tells it: when a teacher of an adult Bible class asked Jesus who his neighbor was, “Then Jesus . . . said, ‘A [white] man was going from Atlanta to Albany and some gangsters held him up. When they had robbed him of his wallet and brand-new suit, they beat him up and drove off in his car, leaving him unconscious on the shoulder of the highway.
“‘Now it just so happened that a white preacher was going down that same highway. When he saw the fellow, he stepped on the gas and went scooting by.
“‘Shortly afterwards a white Gospel song leader came down the road, and when he saw what had happened, he too stepped on the gas.
“‘Then a black man traveling that way came upon the fellow, and what he saw moved him to tears. He stopped and bound up his wounds as best he could, drew some water from his water-jug to wipe away the blood and then laid him on the back seat. He drove on into Albany and took him to the hospital and said to the nurse, “You all take good care of this white man I found on the highway. Here’s the only two dollars I got, but you all keep account of what he owes, and if he can’t pay it, I’ll settle up with you when I make a pay-day.”
“‘Now’ asks Jesus, ‘if you had been the man held up by the gangsters, which of these three—the white preacher, the white song leader, or the black man—would you consider to have been your neighbor?’
“The [white] teacher of the adult Bible class said, ‘Why, of course, the nig—I mean, er . . . well, er . . . the one who treated me kindly.’
“Jesus said, ‘Well then, you get going and start living like that!’” (Luke 10:29-37, The Cotton Patch Version of Luke and Acts).
The story Jesus tells is a story told by and to Jews. That’s Jesus’ community. Presumably, the person who’s assaulted and left for dead at the side of the road is also Jewish. So as the story unfolds, we can see that a hero is going to come along. And the sure bet is that it’s going to be a hero who’s like the hearers of the story—a Jew, in their case. I, hardly surprisingly, was very much rooting for the priest to be the hero—the “white preacher” in Clarence Jordan’s take. Others surely thought it would be the Levite—also Jewish—the one called the “gospel song leader” in the Cotton Patch Version. A good Jewish hero would be fantastic, wouldn’t it? Or in our world, a good white person, a good heterosexual person, a good American, a good Buckeye fan—in other words, a good person who’s like most of us, a person who’s so much like us that our job is pretty straightforward: it’s just to emulate these good people who are like us.
But no. It’s not a Jew who comes to the rescue in this story. It’s a Samaritan. A hated Samaritan. Jews and Samaritans despised each other. They shunned and scorned each other. Neither had anything good to say about the other. But who should stop by the side of the road to help the beaten man? The one person you can’t stand.
And this just messes everything up, doesn’t it? ‘What do you mean the hero is my enemy? What do you mean the model of human life is the one person I find despicable? Aagh! That just throws me way off. Somebody like me is supposed to be the hero! I’m the Good Samaritan! Not those people I can’t stand! Come on, Jesus!’
What a thing to hear in this week of all weeks, this week when we’ve been riveted by the intense and agonizing set-to of Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. What do you do with that? One of the commentators I was watching said at the end of that wrenching day that she felt virtually stabbed in the gut by it all. Another said succinctly that half of America can’t talk to the other half. It was exhausting and depressing and distressing.
I’ll give you my abbreviated view on the dispute: I found it hard not to believe Dr. Ford, primarily because she had absolutely no incentive to tell that story in the setting she did; why would she make something like that up and endure the abuse it clearly heaps on her? In this sanctuary today, in the presence, almost certainly, of trauma survivors, it’s vital for me to say that we have moved into an era in which it is time to hear and honor women’s and men’s long-suppressed stories of abuse.
At the same time, though, I also know that many of you disagree with that. So having stated my view, one that you and I might well energetically discuss, I am eager to reflect instead on the astoundingly debilitating moment that Senate hearing was in our collective experience. That hearing room seemed filled with disrespect and distrust and what seemed very much like hatred. Republicans despised Democrats; Democrats despised Republicans. Anger and vitriol hung in the air like vicious tornadoes. Which I think is what made the day so exhausting and debilitating.
And I find myself haunted by a question that won’t let me go: where was the Good Samaritan in that whole procedure? Where, in all that distrust and incivility, was there a hint of the Samaritan? Remember: the Good Samaritan is the one who crosses over boundaries, who reaches across aisles, who makes peace where there is no peace. It’s the one who makes an overture to a person generally dismissed as vile and worthless.
And where was that person on Thursday? Where is that person in any discussion of this major issue? Who do you know who can discuss this civilly, both listening well and talking respectfully?
And here’s the real point: to the extent that we are unable to talk healthily about such matters, I suspect it’s because we have left God out of the picture. The Samaritan in Jesus’ story is somehow able to see God in the stranger he finds at the side of the road. He sees past the generations of animosity, of false caricatures, of ugly resentments. Somehow—God only knows how—he sees a flicker of light in this crushed enemy and, inspired by God, extends a caring hand.
This may seem paradoxical and extremely odd, but it seems to me that the only way to get past the terrible divisions and hatreds that mar our landscape is for us to stop seeing ourselves as the Good Samaritans, and instead to identify in the story with the injured, forsaken person who’s been left for dead. When we see ourselves as the Good Samaritans, we see ourselves as the Lone Ranger riding to the rescue, attempting to do something heroic that is darn near impossible. If our job as Christians is just to imitate that long-ago Samaritan, then it’s all a matter of our willpower. Just buck up and do what needs to be done.
The trouble is, that’s the stance that has failed us so miserably. There is nowhere near enough willpower in most human beings to overcome the fear and loathing that so characterize contemporary communities and nation-states. Willpower, or the lack thereof, is precisely our problem. We find it almost impossible, using just our own engines, to make happen the thing we know needs to happen. The apostle Paul put it this way: “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Romans 7:18-19).
Which is Paul’s way of saying: only God can enable in me what I am not able to do on my own. Just as the Jew in the story of the Good Samaritan isn’t the one who gives mercy, but is, instead, the one who receives mercy, so also the deepest truth is that you and I aren’t the originating agents of life and love. God is. Or as a friend and colleague of mine, Cynthia Jarvis, puts it: we are not so much the actors in this story as we are those who are acted upon, “by a love whose limitless goodness we cannot fathom” (Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 3, p. 240). In the story, it’s not people like us riding in heroically on the white steed. It’s the Samaritan—the hated one—who has the Godlike role. The truth of the matter is that we are not so much the heroes as we are the wounded, not first of all givers of mercy but receivers of mercy—needy ones who simply soak up holy love.
The story whispers in our ear that we are beloved, that we are sought by the Hound of Heaven. One of the few winning moments of the Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday was an exchange between Judge Kavanaugh and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. The two of them were talking about alcohol and drinking, and Sen. Klobuchar revealed in passing that her father had been an active alcoholic for much of her life. And then she talked about the amazing transformation he had undergone. Her father, she said, had been “pursued by grace.” What a magnificent phrase: “pursued by grace.” The wounded traveler lying at the side of the road in Jesus’ story has, too, been “pursued by grace.” It is grace that has brought him to the place in which he is deeply cared for. It is grace that heals him. It is grace that saves his life.
You and I are all, first of all, that needy traveler. And in a world as divided and pained as ours is, this is what God does for us, as well: cares for us, heals us, saves our lives. Are you worried about something today? God is with you and cares for you. Are you carrying a wound or bearing a scar? God is healing you. Is something in you dying, or are you in fact coming close to physical death? God is, this very moment, saving your life.
And it’s this, and only this, that has a hope of healing the terrible brokenness that infects us at so many levels. As Eric Elnes points out in his book on the Phoenix Affirmations, the work of God has healed and reconciled in countless ways over the eons. By the power and Spirit of God, enslaved people have been set free, women have chipped away at glass ceilings, LGBTQ people have found a greater degree of acceptance and now can marry, and sexual assault has come out of that hidden place where it has so often lurked crushing lives.
The only way these notable gains can happen is as enemies are turned into friends, as we come to see that there is something deep that connects us even across all the starkest and most acrimonious lines. The only way this can happen is as we take in God’s stunning and limitless love for us, and then realize: this is the only real way to live. As Eric Elnes says, “If we cannot perceive that at base we are more the same than different, we will not gain what we seek most urgently” (The Phoenix Affirmations, p. 95).
What we forget all the time is: in the same way God has loved us, we can love others. We are all part of one single gorgeous strand. “We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord,” as the song goes. David James Duncan, one of my favorite authors, says, “Christ’s words ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’ . . . demand an arduous imaginative act. These peculiar words order me, as I look at you, to imagine that I am seeing not you but me, and then to treat this imaginative me, alias you, as if you are me. And for how long? Till the day I die! Christ orders those who are serious about him to commit this ‘my neighbor is me’ fiction until they forget, for good and all, which of the two ‘me’s’ to cheat in a business deal or punch in a fight or abandon in a crisis or shoot in a war” (cited in The Phoenix Affirmations, p. 95).
Does a friend or neighbor make you want to TP their house? Does Brett Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford send you into a rage? Does a relative disgust you? There’s medication for that. And that medication is God. This doesn’t mean that that other person hasn’t done something awful; someone may well have caused deep hurt or told a substantial untruth. It only means that under no circumstance may we demean and belittle them. They are holy children of God. They too have been blessed. And our role is simply this: to look upon them with eyes of grace and to hold them in God’s light. And having ourselves been the recipients of incredible blessings, it’s to heed Jesus’ words: “Well then, you get going and start living like that!” And indeed we shall!