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One of John Fowles' most interesting novels is the story of an Englishman named Daniel Martin. Forty-five years old, Daniel has long lived in the United States. He returns to England because his friend Anthony is dying and wants to see him, and after Anthony's death, Daniel and Anthony's widow, Jane, renew their acquaintance. Daniel and Jane had been friends in college, but Jane had married Anthony, and Daniel had married Nell, Jane's sister. And the four of them had all been close. But that was twenty-five years ago, and now Daniel, who is divorced, and Jane, recently widowed, are getting to know each other again. The story is about Daniel's and Jane's falling in love when middle aged. It's about their wanting to enter into each other's lives again, about their wanting to enter into each other's stories again, after a long separation of years and marriages and cultures. But it's hard, because they are timid and fearful. There is so much emotional risk in falling in love with another person, perhaps especially when one is middle aged, but also when you are young, as you may remember. And not only that, not only the emotional risk. There are also culture and custom and convention to observe. In what ways is it appropriate and seemly to act under the circumstances? How, they ask, does society expect you to behave when you fall in love with the widow of your friend, who is also the sister of your former wife? Daniel and Jane wonder why they didn't get to know each other twenty-five years earlier, why they weren't closer then. They wonder why they didn't make the decisions then that would have led them to greater intimacy, perhaps even to marriage, for they had considered marriage at the time, but instead, Jane had married Anthony and Daniel had married Nell. And they wonder now, twenty-five years later, if they will have the heart to come to know each other, if they will have the courage to love each other now, now that they have a new opportunity. It isn't certain that they will, because deep inside, they both carry emotional and cultural fears and conventions that tell them to be careful. They are timid, and they are afraid to act boldly; they ache for love, but they are timid and fearful about acting for love. Jesus tells a similar story this morning. It is about a man who was traveling the road from Jerusalem down to Jericho, walking part of the story of his own life, when suddenly, boldly, violently, someone enters his life only for a moment, and then vanishes. The man lies unconscious by the side of the road where he had been left for dead, his head bleeding where the robber had hit him. If ever a person ached for love, if ever there was a person who needed the love of another human being, it was this man as he lay there bleeding to death. Sometime later another man comes down the road. Surely love has arrived. This man is a priest, a man whose business it is to share the love of God with people. But the priest fears the man might be dead, and he thinks about the conventions, about the rules of his society and his vocation, about how it is written in the Law, in the Torah, that a priest must not make himself unclean by touching a corpse, because then he could not perform his duties at God's altar that week. The priest couldn't risk that! Perhaps someone else will come along soon, the highway department or the state patrol, someone whose job it is to take care of such situations. So the priest decides not to enter the other's story, not to enter his life. The conventional expectations of his life lead him not to love the man, because he had his rules and his duties. So he walks to the other side of the road and continues on his way. Then a second traveler, a Levite, comes down the same road, and he, too, sees the unfortunate man lying by the side of the road, bleeding. The Levite hesitates a moment, as if to turn the man over, but he remembers that it is a well-known ruse on that notorious road for gangs of hoodlums to place a decoy feigning injury to entice people to stop so the gang can jump them easily. If this man is really hurt, he thinks, well, it's probably his own fault anyway. Everyone knows this road is full of hijackers. A wise person wouldn't be traveling this road alone. He should have known better. And if his is a decoy, well, the best rule is "Safety First." So the Levite, too, moves to the other side of the road and goes his way, deciding not to enter the man's story, deciding not to risk love. A little later a third person comes down the road, and things look even bleaker for the man left for dead, because this third man is not even a fellow Jew. He's not well dressed, he has darker skin, and he speaks with an accent. He may even be a member of al-Qaida, which, for us today, would be about the best equivalent of a Samaritan for the Jews of Jesus' day... ...because for the Jews who were listening to Jesus' story, there was no such thing as a good Samaritan. You'll notice in the story that Jesus never calls the Samaritan "good." A Samaritan couldn't pass any of the tests of religion or decency and had absolutely no merits for salvation. "Good Samaritan" was an oxymoron, a flat-out contradiction. To a Jew in Jesus' day a Samaritan was as unclean as a corpse, which made good Jews who had any contact with him, dead or alive, as unclean as he was. But the foreigner stops. He decides to enter the story of the man who has been beaten and robbed and left for dead. He picks the man up and puts him in his old car and drives him to the hospital, where he tells the nurse in the emergency room that he has absolutely no idea who the man is and that he doesn't know if he has insurance or not, but that here's some money toward his bills and that he'll come back tomorrow and take care of any additional expense his care might entail. It's an old story, of course. Yet it's as contemporary as this morning, this story of the Good Foreigner, this story about the fears and dangers of entering the life of another human being, this story of love. But let's back up a moment to recall why Jesus told the story to begin with. He told it because a good and faithful man, a fellow Jew learned in the Law, had asked him, "Good Master, what must I do to enjoy eternal life?" And Jesus said, "You know the Law. What does the Law say?" And the man replied, "You must love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind, and you must love your neighbor as yourself." And Jesus said, "Bingo! Right! I knew you knew it, because it's just as we've been told in the Scriptures, of which you are an expert: 'What the Lord expects is not too hard for us. Neither is it far away from us. What's required for eternal life is not somewhere off in heaven or beyond the sea. There it is right in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it. Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.'" But then the lawyer had asked, "But Master, who is my neighbor?" He asked this, Luke says, in order to justify himself, in order to see if Jesus would tell him just who it was exactly that he had to love as himself, because maybe in the Law he could find some definition of neighbor that would mean that he didn't have to love just every Tom, Dick, and Harry who comes along, but only those who live next door to him, the people he knows and respects and trusts. But instead of offering a definition, Jesus told his story. And then Jesus asked the lawyer which of the three he thought proved to be neighbor to the man who had been beaten and left half dead - the two fellow Jews, the priest or the Levite, or the foreigner? And the lawyer knew the answer to that question, too. "The one who showed mercy on him," he replied. "Right again," said Jesus. "Go and do the same, and you will live." The Word of life is not far from us. We know what it is. It is on our lips and in our hearts. It's not too hard for us. It is something we can go and do, if we will. The reason we don't do the Word of life is not that we can't, but that we can't unless we have help. And that's why we pray, as we did earlier this morning, "O Lord, mercifully receive 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 the grace and power faithfully to accomplish them." But, my! How frightening it is! How risky it is to do love! Consider what we risk if we stop to offer assistance. The papers are full of stories of people getting beat up or raped, or getting hit by a driver speeding along the road. That was the fearful word of the Levite. Look at what we risk if we stop to help. We'll miss the appointment at the hairdresser, or we won't make it to the office on time, or to church. We've got commitments, after all, some of them in church where God expects us to be. That was the timid word of the priest. Think about what we risk if we take the plunge of entering someone's life who is bleeding for love, if we stop long enough to enter his or her story. Think of what we risk if we speak a word of love to a friend, or to a child, or to a neighbor, or to a spouse, or to the stranger sitting in the pew right next to us. We might get all personally involved, and that scares the daylights out of us! Consider what we risk when we speak or do a word of love. We might be snubbed, rejected. We might look like a fool. We might get hurt. It's all so awkward, so dangerous. You and I know the Word of life, because it is on our lips and in our hearts. We've already recited it this very morning: "Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself." It is before us every moment. We don't have to go back to the road between Jerusalem and Jericho to hear it and to know it. The choice to act as lover is before you every day, just as it was when you were younger and first bled for love yourself. It's the choice of whether to risk custom or law or convention or self, for your own sake and for the sake the other. It's the choice of whether to take the risk, or not - the choice of whether to risk the time, or maybe a day's pay, or maybe your own sense of self-sufficiency, or maybe your vanity or self-esteem, or maybe even your own righteousness. It's the choice of whether to run the personal risk of doing or speaking a word of love or affection to friend or stranger. Like Daniel Martin and Jane, all of us look back into the past of our lives and wonder about those times when we decided not to act boldly for love, and we wonder how our lives would have been different if we had. We wonder if now - right now, today - we wonder if now we'll have the courage to go and speak and do what we know the Word of life and love to be, and we wonder how our decision today will affect the future life we have before us. Because the choice for life, even eternal life, is always now. It was now for the lawyer in Jesus' story. It was now for the priest. It was now for the Levite. It was now for the Samaritan. And the choice is now for you and me. The choice was now for another lawyer in Camus' fine novel The Fall. The Fall is the story of an important French lawyer who has made a great "success" of his life. He has had a successful practice; he has earned much money and has accumulated power and influence and reputation. He has the world at his fingertips and his life under control - until one day, when he was walking by the river and heard a cry for help. A woman had fallen into the icy water, and she was drowning. And the lawyer had turned and walked away. Years later, despite his "success" and his wealth, he finds himself a ruined man. He finds himself considering the risk of his not risking love. He ends up in a bar, drowning himself in alcohol and talking to himself. And he says to himself, "[Self,] please tell me what happened to you on the River Seine that night and how you managed never to risk your life. You yourself utter the words that for years have never ceased echoing through my nights and that I shall at last say through your mouth, 'O young woman, throw yourself into the water again so that I may a second time have the chance of saving both of us...." That is the choice before all the people in Jesus' story today, lawyer, priest, Levite, and Samaritan alike. It is the choice before each one of us this morning as well. If I'm not mistaken, each of us right now is asking himself, as we always do with Jesus' stories, "Which person in the story am I ?" The lawyer? The priest? The Levite? The Samaritan? But there is an additional possibility as well, another possibility you may not have thought to consider but which I think Jesus is inviting us to consider. Is it possible that more than any of the others in Jesus' story, each of us can identify with the man left for dead by the side of the road, with the one in need of love? Is it possible that you are the one in need of love maybe even from a Samaritan, from someone you'd never even believed could love you, maybe even from someone you yourself have never thought of as good or loving. Is it possible that more than any of the others in Jesus' story, each of us is the one to whom the Unloved Stranger from the foreign land of heaven reaches out his hand and his heart to lift us up? Perhaps, for most of us, it is harder to identify with the one near death than it is to identify with any of the others because we have such an investment in our own need for self-sufficiency, because we have such an investment in our own need not to be needy, in our own need to be in control, not only of this life but also of the next. Most of us, I think, can readily identify with Anne Lamott's impulse, when, in desperation after years of drug abuse and other dysfunctions, she called the suicide hot line one day. And then, when someone answered, she slammed down the receiver and thought, "Heaven forbid someone should think I needed help. I was a Lamott - Lamott's give help." But I wonder. I wonder because, as St. John reminds us and as Jesus knew, it is possible for us to love only because we have first been loved. So I wonder if, in his story, Jesus isn't inviting us also to consider the greatest of all the risks of love - the risk God himself took, the risk God took when God the Stranger, Jesus, walking the road to Jerusalem in the cool of the day, found us near death by the side of the road, and, reaching down to lift us up, he took the risk of love to restore us to life, the life he then invites us to go and do likewise. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. |