6th Sunday after Pentacost

Jesus really is exasperating at times. This morning a lawyer asks Jesus what he must do to gain eternal life, and Jesus tells him the story we call "The Good Samaritan." Then Jesus tells the lawyer to "go and do likewise," and he will live. But next week, right on the heels of this story we call "The Good Samaritan," Luke tells about Jesus' visit to the home of Martha and Mary, where Martha is banging the pots in the kitchen, "doing" like crazy to welcome Jesus. And when she complains to Jesus that her sister Mary isn't helping her and is just sitting and listening to Jesus, Jesus tells Martha that she's doing too much, that she is distracted by too many things, that Mary "has chosen the better part," and that perhaps Martha should just sit and listen for a while, like Mary.

So which is it? Are we supposed to do, or are we supposed to sit and listen?

Well, maybe it's both. Maybe, as is usual with Jesus, it's a case of "whoever has ears, let him hear." Maybe sometimes some of us are so much like Martha, always banging the pots in the kitchen, that we forget what we are doing, and why. Maybe sometimes we use our "doing" to avoid the truth, so we need to sit and listen and hear. And maybe others of us, like the lawyer in today's story, are sometimes so fond of talking a matter to death as a way of avoiding the truth, like the truth of who our neighbor is, that we need to do a little "going and doing."

Hear once again the prayer we prayed earlier this morning: "O Lord, mercifully hear the prayers of your people who call upon you, and grant that they may know and understand what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them, through Jesus Christ our Lord...."

Notice that we prayed for two things: that God might grant us to know and understand what we ought to do, and that he might grant us grace to do what we know we ought to do. How can we know and understand what we ought to do unless we sometimes sit and hear? And how can we accomplish the things we know we ought to do unless we "go and do likewise"?

It's helpful to be reminded, as we were today, that God's expectations for us are not difficult things, but things within our reach. We can know them and do them, because, as God says, "What I am commanding you today is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, 'Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us, so we may do it?' Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, 'Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us, so we may do it?' No, the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you may do it."

The expert in the Law was trying to make life and salvation more difficult than they are, as the lawyer in every one of us often does. "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" he asked, as if he didn't have a clue, even though he was an expert in the Law.

"Well," asked Jesus, "what's written in the Law? You're the expert. What do the Scriptures say? How do you read them?" And the lawyer knows the answer. It's not too difficult for him, because, unlike Martha, he has sat and listened and heard them and read them a lot! The answer was right there in his mouth, right there on the tip of his tongue, and he brought it right out: "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 you shall love your neighbor as yourself."

"Right," said Jesus. "I knew you knew it all along. Do that, and your will live."

"Yea," asked the lawyer, wanting to jaw and define and argue the matter to death, "but just who is my neighbor?"

He wanted a definition, you see, so that he could know just exactly who it was he had to love as himself, so that he would also know who it was he didn't have love as himself, because that way, if Jesus replies that his neighbor is obviously the good, clean-cut, healthy, middle-class White-American-Protestant-Male living in the house next door, then of course the lawyer knows that he's off the hook, because he has always liked that guy. Why just the other day he had been neighborly to him. He had taken part of his own day off to go over and help that good, clean-cut, healthy, middle-class White-American-Protestant-Male clear some brush in his back yard. And therefore, if Jesus gave a good definition of "neighbor," such as "the person who lives in the house next door to you," then the lawyer would know that he was in right relation with God because he was in right relation with the definition, which he had obeyed. And therefore he could pat himself on the back and know that he was justified, and saved.

But Jesus doesn't give him a definition of "neighbor." Jesus tells him a story, perhaps the best-known story in the Bible, and then asks him another question.

A man was going down from Colorado Springs to Pueblo, and he got waylaid, Jesus said. He was beaten up and robbed and thrown into a ditch along I-25, and he was left there half dead. And later that night a priest was traveling that way, on his way to a church meeting or something, and the priest saw the man in the ditch, but he quickly looked out the other side of the car and tried to pretend to himself that he hadn't seen what he had seen, and he sped on toward his meeting.

And then, said Jesus, a vestry member came by, and the vestry member, too, saw the man. But he also needed to get on with other things, so he, too, passed by on the other side. (A cynical reader of this story once suggested that the reason the priest and the levite passed by on the other side was that they could plainly see that the poor duffer had already been robbed.)

But Jesus didn't suggest that. All Jesus said was that there was a third guy who came by, and this third guy didn't pass by on the other side. He stopped. And this third guy was a Samaritan, which, to the Jewish expert in the law who was asking the question about who his neighbor was, was like saying that the third guy was a big, dark-skinned guy with a black leather jacket and long greasy hair who was riding a motorcycle with a front wheel six feet in front of him and who hadn't seen the inside of a church in years, or maybe ever, and who was sniffing coke on his way to pick up his government check before going to the meeting of the local Communist Party. To the good "middle-class" Jewish lawyer who asked Jesus the question about who his neighbor was, a Samaritan, a no-good foreigner, was rock bottom!

"Good Samaritan" is an oxymoron. That's a name we've given to the story when we weren't listening carefully. Listen carefully; Jesus never calls the man good. In fact, when someone in a similar situation in another Gospel calls Jesus good, Jesus tells him to take it back, that not even Jesus himself is good, that only God is good.

Well, anyway, this Samaritan who was not good got off his motorcycle, and he bandaged up the man's wounds with his dirty shirt. And then he slung the poor duffer over the seat behind him and took him to the Doubletree Inn where he checked him into a room and paid for two days of R & R for him and told the manager to have a doctor check the man over. And then he told the manager that he would come back in a couple of days -- or just as soon as he came down from his "high," whichever came first -- and when he returned he would pay for any additional expenses the manager had incurred.

And it's at this point that Jesus turned to the lawyer and asked his next question: "Which of these three do you think was neighbor to the man who had been beaten and robbed?"

And again the answer was right on the tip of the lawyer's tongue. "The one who had mercy on him," he said. "Right again," said Jesus. "See, you knew it all along. Go and do likewise, and you will live."

Knowing and understanding what we ought to do really isn't difficult. All we have to do is sit and listen. It's right there in the Bible for us, the same Bible the lawyer had. And that's why we have Sunday School and Bible classes, and why we read the Bible at home, because God has already granted what we asked for in the first half of our prayer. God has, as we say in the Episcopal Church, already "caused the Scriptures to be written for our learning," so that we might know and understand what we ought to do. All we have to do is a little reading and a little study, a little sitting and careful listening and hearing. It's not difficult. In fact, for anyone who has spent any time at all in church, it's already in his own mouth and in his own heart. All he has to do is to do it, and he will live.

And that's where the second part of our prayer comes in, the part where we pray that God will grant us grace and power, the grace and power actually to do what we know we ought to do, grace and power actually to be a neighbor like the guy on the bike from Samaria.

Perhaps the grace and power to do and to live come from the sitting and listening. Perhaps the grace and power to do and to live come from the hearing. As you sat and listened this morning, as you heard this story for the umpteenth time in your life, who in the story did you identify with? Were you the priest or the vestry member who passed by on the other side? Maybe. Sometimes. Or were you the Samaritan himself, the one who stopped and helped? Maybe. Sometimes. Or were you the lawyer who asks the question in the first place and who just wants a simple answer to life? Maybe. Sometimes. All of us can probably identify to some extent with each of these people in Jesus' story.

But, you know, I think the one the story is really about is the poor, sad guy in the ditch, and about God. It's a story about the guy who was really down and out and who was just about to take his last breath, the guy who was just about out of hope, when help arrived. And it's a story about One who was "despised and rejected," like the Samaritan, and who "bore our iniquities," like the Samaritan, and who, as Paul says, "rescued us from the domain of darkness and brought us into his kingdom of life."

This man in the ditch, you know, wasn't just an innocent victim. He wasn't without responsibility for his own situation. Part of his plight was his own doing, his own fault. The road from Jerusalem to Jericho was notorious. We are told that no one in his right mind ever traveled that road by himself, because there was always danger there. People were always being robbed and beaten and killed on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, just as they are on the road of life. And yet this guy stupidly took the road by himself, and you just want to say, "Well, then, he got what he should have expected and what he deserved. He should have acted differently and been smarter and listened to advice and lived right and minded his mother, and he should not have done what he wasn't supposed to do."

Have you ever been in that situation? Ever been the man in the ditch, down in the depths, down in the pits, almost without hope, when grace comes?

It's all right there in the Bible -- how when we were at our wits' end, when our attempts to travel the risky road of life alone had ended in disaster, and when we were all but dead and without hope because we had not lived as we ought but had taken the road by ourselves instead of taking it with God, how when we were lying there bleeding and weeping and not knowing what to do, and not able to do anything to help ourselves even if we had known what to do, how at that point God sent his own Son to rescue us and to pay for our care with his own blood and to promise to return to see us back to health and life.

Where does the grace and power to "go and do likewise" come from? Sometimes maybe it comes when we hear the whole story. Sometimes maybe we need to sit and listen, listen carefully, before we can really hear what the story means for us. Perhaps we need to listen carefully enough to realize just how lost we are, lost like the guy in the ditch in Jesus' story, before we can realize that it's only by grace that we live at all. Sometimes, maybe, it's only then, when we realize that we are the ones who have been "neighbored," that we receive the grace and power to "go and do likewise."

It's so easy, through a casual hearing, through a casual reading of life itself, to identify ourselves with the priest or the levite, to identify ourselves with the ones the world calls good, with people with whom there isn't too much wrong and who are just too busy sometimes to "go and do," or who are just a little timid or shy or fearful. It's even easy to identify ourselves with the lawyer, who just wants a clear-cut, simple answer to the questions of life, and who really wants to live by those answers, if only someone will tell him what they are. Good people who just score differently on the Myers-Briggs and who just have different personality types.

But it takes some careful hearing to see ourselves in the ditch, to see ourselves as the one who is lost, the one at death's door, the one without hope. Until grace comes.

Sit and listen. It's not too difficult. It's all right there in the Scriptures, all right there in your mouth and in your heart. The grace to "go and do likewise," the grace to go and do what we know we ought to do comes from our hearing, and from the spiritual sight the hearing provides. It comes from our seeing that it is you and I, not someone else, who have been rescued from the ditch, and not, of course, because we deserve it, but just because that's what Samaritans and God do.

The story of the Samaritan who was not good, and of the man in the ditch, is not a story of human niceness or human goodness. The words "good" and "Samaritan" are contradictory; "Good Samaritan" is an oxymoron. The story about the Samaritan and the man in the ditch is a story about the grace of God, the story of one who was "despised and rejected" and wounded and the story of another who shared that rejection and those wounds. It's the story of compassion and mercy and love, the story of loving God and loving your neighbor, the story of Calvary, the story of how life happens, the story of how life happens there in the ditch, and on a hill far away, on the Cross outside the city gate where all the refuse is and where no good person ventures, the story of where the need is.

Listened to carefully, it's our story. It's the story of grace, the story of grace needed and grace given, grace to "go and do likewise," so that we might live.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.