Date: July 11, 2010
SUNDAY: Ordinary 15C
SERMON: Righteous Plumbing
Text(s): Amos 7:7-17; Luke 10:25-37
© 2010 Rachel Small
Some of you were here a few weeks ago when the children performed “The Parable Trail,” a detective story in which Joe Friday, Columbo, Bond, Holmes and Watson listen to Jesus’ parables to try to discern their meanings. My reading this morning can do no justice to that acting troupe’s presentation of the parable of the Good Samaritan, complete with Alec Bader as the robbed and beaten man plaintively calling out, “I’m not dead yet!” and Cecelia Tueber as the innkeeper announcing that the Jericho Holiday Inn has a special, in which a night’s stay only costs 1 denari and your donkey can stay for free. I was hoping we’d be able to reprise that portion of the play today, but alas, it is camping and vacation season and the kids are gone, so we’ll have to make do with the memories.
When I saw that the Parable of the Good Samaritan was slated for today’s lectionary, I admit I had to sigh a bit. This parable has been dogging me since we started working on it in church school in February. It haunts me as I make my way through the streets of New York, encountering on every street corner someone who could easily be as beaten up as the man in the story. While not wanting to give away my life savings, and not wanting to enable people in addictions that they may or may not have, I have been consistently reminded that I, the recently ordained minister, am passing by a lot of wounded people – just like the priest in this story. I suspect many of you – ministers in your own right – experience the same quandaries, whether in the streets of the City or among the communities here in Westchester.
We are all faced constantly with people in need, and some of us have even taken a turn as people in need ourselves. It’s this relationship – that of the giver and the one in need – that I’d like to explore with you today.
On the face of it, this story seems pretty cut-and-dried. As one of the most famous and oft-referenced parts of scripture, it is often used as shorthand for an illustration of kindness and mercy. Many of us learned it as children. It’s in almost every children’s Sunday school curriculum because it’s one of the few bible stories that is easy to understand and has a clear moral compass: be kind to others, love your neighbor. It’s made it into popular culture, too: there’s a Good Samaritan law that protects us from being sued if we risk performing CPR on a sick person. Hospitals, nonprofits, and countless ministries have named themselves after this saintly Samaritan. It’s so frequently cited, in fact, that the story’s punch frequently gets overlooked.
You see, the Samaritan is no saint, certainly not in the eyes of Jesus’ Jewish followers. Judeans (of whom Jesus and his audience were a part) had feuded with Samaritans for centuries. Each group claimed to have come from the line of Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham, but Samaritans, who inhabited the northern part of Israel, claimed to descend from Jacob’s son Joseph, while the Judeans in the south claimed to descend from a different son, Judah. Over the centuries they developed different methods of worship, different forms of holiness and cleanliness, and they looked up each other with utter disgust. The antagonism was present even in the writings of the Hebrew prophets; Amos, from whom we read today, spent his career prophesying in Samaria against its great wealth, its poor treatment of widows and orphans, and its oppression of the poor. His vision of the plumb line of righteousness was aimed squarely at the wealthy cities of Samaria, places that archaeologists have found significant material wealth, like ivory mosaics and inlaid wooden paneling.
Amos was only one of many Jewish critics of the Samaritans. Hosea and Isaiah also condemn them for their pride, wickedness, oppression and exploitation of the poor. By Jesus’ time, it was common practice to travel around Samaria rather than through it, even though the journey was much longer, because the dangerous antagonism could lead easily to violence. Samaritans who were traveling through Judea, like the hero in Jesus’ story, were seen as vile foreigners. Even though they shared a religious heritage, they were not allowed in the temple in Jerusalem; they were scorned and derided. Just before this scene in which Jesus tells this parable, Jesus was traveling and tried to stay in a Samaritan village, but the Samaritans refused to receive him. The disciples ask Jesus if they should pray for fire to rain down upon the village, but Jesus rebukes them and moves on to a different village.
All this is to say, that when Jesus tells his tale of the man robbed and beaten on the side of the road, and it was not the two Jewish religious leaders who stopped, but a Samaritan, it had to sting. It may have been similar to the way modern Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims feel about each other. We could also envision it closer to home. Imagine yourself having fallen in the ditch on Garth Road after a bicycling accident, your leg screaming in pain. A policeman walks by, ignoring you. Then, heaven forbid, one of your ministers walks by and doesn’t stop. Finally, a homeless man who has clearly not had a shower in months sees you from his campsite on the Bronx River Parkway. As he pulls you out of the ditch and onto his grocery cart, he’s warning you to be careful of the spies that are all around us, and they’ve implanted microchips in his head. He uses his rags to bandage your broken leg to a board from his cart. He pours a little alcohol in your stings and cuts, then nips back a drink for himself. He pushes you on the cart all the way to White Plains Hospital, where he wheels you into the emergency room and tells you what to say to them to get service for free. With one more reminder not to let them put microchips in your head, he’s gone…
For some of you, the Samaritan might be a speaker of a foreign language who may or may not have immigration papers, but carries with her a first aid kit because she’s afraid to seek health care in a hospital, and uses this kit to help you. For others, the Samaritan might be someone within the same race or class, but of a different ideology. Perhaps you Rachel Maddow fans out there might find yourselves being aided by Rush Limbaugh, who summons his limo and offers his credit card to pay for your hospital bills. We all encounter Samaritans regularly; we can recognize them because our blood pressure goes up a little just by seeing them. Sometimes it’s a person whom we know as an enemy; often it’s simply a member of a group that we subconsciously perceive as an enemy.
The 2004 film Crash has several scenes of Samaritans saving the day. It follows groups of people through two days in Los Angeles as their lives intertwine and crash into each other, sometimes quite literally. The film is a complex and beautiful tapestry of the interconnectedness of human lives, but I’m going to try to isolate two examples for you.
In one, a wealthy, white wife of the state attorney general has just been carjacked by two black men. When she is back at home, she has the locks on her apartment changed. The locksmith is a Hispanic man with tattoos. Still frightened from the day, she ends up yelling at her husband to get the locks changed again, because she’s sure that the man is going to keep a copy of the key and distribute it to his gang so they can rob her. She says this loudly, in front of both the locksmith and her Hispanic housekeeper, Maria. The next day, she slips and falls down a flight of stairs. She phones her husband and friends, but reaches none except one, who says she can’t come to help until after her massage. Finally, the Hispanic housekeeper finds her, takes her to the hospital, and brings her home safely. As the housekeeper then brings her a cup of tea in bed, the woman hugs her and says, “You wanna hear something funny?” The housekeeper replies, “What is it, Ms. Jean?” She says, “You’re the best friend I’ve got.”
In another storyline, a black television director and his wife are pulled over by two white cops, one of whom had earlier had a bad encounter with a black woman. This cop with a chip on his shoulder orders an unnecessary search on the black couple, and while searching the woman, puts his hands in inappropriate places – in the clear sight of her husband, who stands helplessly witnessing this assault. Fast forward to a day later, when the woman, still distraught from this experience, crashes her car and is trapped in the car upside down, gasoline leaking everywhere. The cop who shows up to the scene is none other than the one who molested her the day before. She starts screaming, begging for him to get someone, anyone else to pull her out. Finally, he screams back at her that he is the only one there who can help, and the fire is approaching fast. With great fear, she assents, and allows him to help her. He pulls her free, just before the car goes up in flames. As she is taken off to an ambulance, she simply looks over her shoulder at him, shaking her head in wonder.
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| The scene in Crash just after the woman is pulled out of her burning car. Photo Credit: Lorey Sebastian |
When we hear this story read or paraphrased, it is natural for each of us to ask ourselves, “do I have what it takes to be the Samaritan?” Can I love people no matter what, in the midst of whatever troubles they are enduring? And we often try very hard to embody the command to love our neighbors; we have programs of feeding and housing; we give money generously. We try our best to go and do likewise.
But if we look at Jesus and his audience, we can realize that there is another part of the story. It’s one thing for people of privilege – and all of us are, in several or more ways, privileged – it’s one thing for people of privilege to offer help to hurting people on the road. It’s another thing when WE are the ones hurting on the road, to let ourselves be helped. If that man in the ditch was a good, law-abiding Jew, would he have wanted the Samaritan to help him? Surely he would have called out, like the woman trapped in the burning car, for someone, anyone else to help. But in the act of humility of allowing himself to be cared for, the man got more than he could have imagined. He received help for physical wounds, but also help for spiritual wounds. In the act of receiving the gift of help, he becomes one with the giver, the Samaritan. He becomes more whole, having broken down another wall separating the human body of people.
In the book of Acts, Paul quotes Jesus as saying that it’s better to give than to receive. Indeed, this story of the Samaritan can easily back up this sentiment if we see it from the position of the merciful Samaritan. But if we also look at it from the ditch, which is where many of Jesus’ listeners might have put themselves, watching the priest and the Levite walk by, feeling their blood pressures rise as the Samaritan crossed the road, if we look at it from there, we realize that there is at least as much grace in being able to receive as to be able to give. Being in need is a way that we are each, no matter how privileged we might be, given the experience of being an outsider. Being in need allows us to identify with outsiders like the Samaritans, and opens up a chink in the wall between us. From the viewpoint of the ditch, we begin to see our sameness rather than our difference.
Jesus asks the lawyer in this story to identify the “neighbor.” The word “neighbor” implies mutuality, equality. There is no “better neighbor” and “worse neighbor” (although you may have some of those in your neighborhood!). The word “neighbor” itself is neutral, and has no hierarchy. In becoming neighbors to one another, people perform a dance together that requires movement from both parties, the giver as well as the receiver. The dance of giver and receiver becomes a dance of oneness, of leveling the playing fields between race, class, ideology, and belief. It is a frightening, vulnerable dance. It requires us to let down guards that have been up since we were toddlers first learning how to differentiate between different types of people. But it is a dance that ultimately leads to healing.
In Amos’ castigation of the Israelites, he shares his vision of God standing beside a wall built with a plumb line. God says to Amos that “this is a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel.” He pronounces judgment on them because the walls of their city have become morally crooked; they have continued to oppress and subjugate the poor and downtrodden. They have violated God’s law of righteousness, which can be defined as the “quality of life in relationship with others… that gives rise to justice.”[1] It has become too late for the Israelites, and they will be destroyed.
What if, though, instead of a judgment device, the plumb line had been set before them as a guideline? As the lawyer answers Jesus’s question about eternal life, we see that it had: in a spiritually fit life, one’s walls are built straight up toward God, with all our hearts, souls, strengths and minds pointed toward God, and with level floors, on which we are on the equal footing of love with our neighbors. In the story of the Samaritan, God has lowered a plumb line into the lives of the Samaritan and the man in the ditch. By risking the chance to give and to receive help, they have straightened out their spiritual standing in God’s eyes. They have seen each of God’s people as human beings rather than labels. They have risen to the challenge of the plumb line.
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| Image borrowed from Epiphenom blog |
By the end of the story, we see that the lawyer gets it. When Jesus asked the lawyer who was the true neighbor, the lawyer did not say the words, “The Samaritan.” He did not reduce the person to racial labels. Instead, he said, “the one who showed mercy.” In so doing, in seeing the Samaritan’s humanity in the story, the lawyer, too, became a neighbor. His eyes were opened to new possibilities beyond the traditional barriers erected by time, prejudice and culture.
As we close today, let us hear Jesus’ final words to the lawyer, words of bewildering challenge as we face a world of needs – others’ needs, and our own deep wounds. We have heard the story of the one who reaches into the ditch. Many of us are in ditches right now. Others of us are walking along the road, with the choice of whether or not to look in the ditches. We have heard Jesus’ story. And now we hear his charge: “Go, and do likewise.”
[1] Tucker, Gene M. Note on Amos 5:24. “Amos.” The Harper Collins Study Bible. New York: Harper Collins, 1993. P. 1304.
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