Love God, Love Neighbor, Love Self | Good Shepherd Lutheran Church (ELCA) Manchester MO

Pastor:

Pr. Tom Schoenherr

Sermon audio:

“Love God, Love Neighbor, Love Self”

July 10-11, 2010

Pr. Tom Schoenherr

This story of the Good Samaritan is very familiar to many of us. We hear the expression used in relation to acts of mercy and kindness that strangers may do to help another person. You may remember the astonishing account in 2006 of a construction worker in New York City named Wesley Autrey who was standing on a subway platform waiting for a train with his two young daughters. Suddenly a man on the platform with them, maybe suffering from a seizure, stumbles and falls off the platform down onto the tracks. At that same moment the headlights of a rapidly approaching train appeared in the tunnel. Wesley jumped down onto the tracks to rescue the stranger, but he immediately realized that the train was coming too fast and there was not enough time to pull him off the track. So Wesley pressed the man into the space between the tracks and spread his own body over him to protect him as the train passed over the two of them. Wesley did not know the man, but there was another human being in desperate need of help and he did what he could to save him. One newspaper headline read “Good Samaritan Saves Man on Subway Tracks”.

Why did Jesus choose a Samaritan as the hero of this story in Luke? If this is a story about doing acts of mercy to our enemies, then maybe the man who is left to die by the side of the road should be the Samaritan. The Jews and Samaritans were enemies. You will notice that the lawyer in the story who is asking Jesus questions can’t even say the word “Samaritan”. He says;”the one who showed him mercy.” Samaritans were the people who lived in the region known as Samaria. The Jews who remained of the northern tribes, after the rest were taken into exile, intermarried with other races and cultures of people. They were considered half-breeds by orthodox Jews. They had perverted the race. They worshiped differently from other Jews and Mt. Gerazim, not Jerusalem, was their holy place.

Those Jews who were listening to this parable would not identify with the Samaritan in the story. Since the Jews would not want to identify with either the priest or the Levite who do not help the man, Brian Stoffregen, a Bible commentator, says that they were left to identify with the man wounded and bleeding by the side of the road. So from this viewpoint what Jesus is saying is that to enter into eternal life we need to receive the grace and healing care of God and others. The Samaritan, whom the Jews cannot allow to touch them and who avoid even walking in the Samaritan territory, now becomes an instrument of God’s grace.

With whom do you identify in this story of Jesus? Maybe it is helpful for us to listen to this story from the viewpoint of the man who is by the side of the road. What is it to be waiting for help, passed by, neglected, rejected? Everything in our culture says that we ought to be productive, stay busy, “do” something. Even in relation to our faith, somehow, like the lawyer who comes to Jesus with a question, we ask, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” If we think we need to do something in order to gain eternal life, then we don’t need grace, we don’t need Christ and we may be left by the side of the road. We don’t recognize the great need we have of God’s grace and love. We have become blind to our own sinfulness, and the fact that we are the ones who are on the side of the road in the ditch, beaten and wounded by our own pride, our own sin that keeps curving us in on ourselves.

A friend of mine was the first car to come across an accident that had just happened ahead of her. She immediately stopped and raised the hood of the car to let following cars know to stop. She called 911 and gave the location. Then she went to the woman in the car who was bleeding from her head that had hit the windshield as a result of the impact of the other car hitting hers. My friend was moved by the bleeding that she saw, but when the ambulance got there the first thing that the attendants did was to ask the woman, “Where else are you hurting; where else are you wounded?”

Jesus Christ is the Good Samaritan who comes into the ditch with us by the side of the road. He gives his life on the cross so that all of our wounds, all of the places where we are hurting in our bodies and souls, in our relationships with God and with others, can be cared for, listened to, bandaged, and healed. Jesus is the one we need, the gift of God’s grace, who loves us so deeply that he also connects us with other people who can help and bring healing to our wounds. He has paid the price with his own life, so that we may be set free.

Sometimes when we are hurting and broken, it is hard to reveal our wounds with a person whom we don’t know. We may hold things in, but sometimes there is something deeper going on that is not at the surface that also cries out to be shared. Maybe we don’t even know what it is. Jesus Christ is there to hear and to care for those deeper wounds. Stephen Ministers and others who care are the good Samaritans whom God sends to us to get into the ditch with us and listen and dwell there for a while to bring us the healing God promises.

In this story, we are always the one by the side of the road needing healing, and we are also the innkeeper who cares for the wounds and hurting of others. We are always in need of God’s grace, and we are also the ones sent to share that hope and care with people.

At the end of 2006 I had surgery on my feet that called for me to be a patient, in need of care from others. There was nothing I could do but to let Barb and other people do for me what I could not do for myself. That was not easy to be cared for, but Jesus may be saying to us that it is key to our life relationship with God that we rely on God’s promise, and our need for God’s grace and healing love. When we come to the Lord’s Table we receive the bread and wine or grape juice as the Body and Blood of Christ, there to be poured into our wounds for healing. Through God’s grace we are sent to be good Samaritans, and innkeepers to the world that is beaten and broken by the side of the road. Maybe that is eternal life. Amen.