“On the Road”
Luke 10.25-37
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning, Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado
10 July 2022
 
Sometimes the Revised Common Lectionary provides difficult texts for ministers and congregations to grapple with, and sometimes it delivers just the right scripture. Today’s reading is Luke’s telling of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. How many of you know this parable? Some of you could probably recite it from memory — or at least deliver the punch line. Let’s see if you can help me fill in the blanks as I read this familiar text.

A legal expert stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to gain _________[eternal life]?”
Jesus replied, “What is written in the Law? How do you interpret it?”
He responded, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your _________ [neighbor as yourself.]”
Jesus said to him, “You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live.”
But the legal expert wanted to prove that he was right, so he said to Jesus, “And who is ___________ [my neighbor]?”
Jesus replied, “A man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. He encountered thieves, who stripped him naked, beat him up, and left him near death. Now it just so happened that a _______ [priest] was also going down the same road. When he saw the injured man, he crossed over to the other side of the road and ________ [went on his way.] Likewise, a Levite came by that spot, saw the injured man, and __________ [crossed over to the other side of the road] and went on his way. A Samaritan, who was on a journey, came to where the man was. But when he saw him, he was moved with ________ [compassion]. The Samaritan went to him and bandaged his wounds, tending them with oil and wine. Then he placed the wounded man on his own donkey, took him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day, he took two full days’ worth of wages and gave them to the innkeeper. He said, ‘Take care of him, and when I return, I will pay you back for any additional costs.’ What do you think? Which one of these three was a neighbor to the man who encountered thieves?”
Then the legal expert said, “The one who demonstrated __________ [mercy/compassion] toward him.”
Jesus told him, “Go and _______ [do likewise].”
For the word of God in scripture, for the word of God among us, for the word of God within us…Thanks be to God.

This is an important text, and I want to do it justice by not delivering a sermon that conveys the same message some of you have heard since childhood: Be good to strangers and be merciful to those who are injured.

The parable is not a guideline for how to be a good citizen of the empire by being quiescent and nice…it is a countercultural wisdom tale about subversive behavior in the kingdom of God or in Beloved Community, which we hear about both in our strategic plan and in this year’s Leadership Council theme, which is “extending and embracing Beloved Community.” That concept, developed by Josiah Royce and picked up by Dr. King is not about being nice, it’s about getting real and grounding our behavior not in self-interest, which is the American Way, but for the good of all God’s people — whether Jew or Samaritan. It also means speaking the truth in love, even when it’s uncomfortable.

This was a spicy parable for the people who heard Jesus tell it, because they likely thought that the only good Samaritan was a dead Samaritan. Imagine if this parable was set in the Donbas region of Ukraine. An Orthodox priest passes along a war-torn street and sees a man injured on the side of the road, but he is on his way to say the liturgy, so he crosses to the other side of the road. Then a Ukrainian paramilitary is rushing to get a message to his commanding officer, but when he sees the injured man, he also crosses over. But then a Russian soldier sees the wounded Ukrainian man and picks him up, dresses his wounds, and brings him to a small hotel and pays for his care and lodging.

That is what a Jewish audience would have thought about a “Good” Samaritan. A very unlikely hero.

Over the last 20 years of my ministry at Plymouth, I have seen a handful of unlikely heroes in our midst. People who, among so many other acts of compassion, start a kindergarten in Ethiopia. A busy young mother of two and an attorney who makes time to chair our Strategic Planning Team and to be Plymouth’s incoming moderator. An older couple who could have rested on their laurels enjoying their retirement years, but instead chose to invest their time and money in starting girls’ schools in Angola. An old soul who embraces life in spite of a crummy cancer diagnosis and persists in celebrating life and sharing joy with others. Deacons who care so much about your experience of worship and your health and safety that they cleaned all of the restrooms after every in-person worship in the pit of the pandemic. Teams who pursue immigration justice and stand against gun violence. I could go on…there are many examples I don’t have time to cite.

We are a congregation that is filled with unlikely heroes. I have learned so much from some of you about what being Beloved Community looks like: not caring for self-interest, but doing what is right, even when it is costly.

Some translations of this parable use the English word “mercy” as the primary motivation of the Samaritan. But it isn’t “mercy” is it? Mercy is what an authority figure can bestow upon a victim or a wrongdoer. It isn’t mercy that drives the Samaritan or any of the unlikely heroes at Plymouth…it’s compassion. It is acting after sensing the pain, the need, the possible opportunity of others.

My mentor, Marcus Borg, wrote, “Jesus disclosed that God is compassionate. Jesus spoke of God that way: ‘Be compassionate, as God is compassionate.’ Compassion is the primary quality of the central figures in two of his most famous parables: the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan. And Jesus himself, as a manifestation of the sacred, is often spoken of as embodying compassion.”[1]

Marcus went further than that in saying that Jesus replaced the core value of ritual purity in the Judaism of his day with the core value of compassion. The problem is that over the last 2,000 the church universal has a pretty miserable record of showing compassion, especially to people with whom they disagree. Whether it is a Crusade or an Inquisition or quiescence during the Holocaust, many Christians are unable or unwilling to operate out of a sense of self-risking courage to be compassionate.

Courage is an underrated Christian value, and it is a precondition of compassion. Without courage, we won’t keep looking at the wounded man on the side of the road, who could be dead or contagious or violent. Our courage enables our compassion by giving us the drive to risk and to move ahead.

But if compassion is at the heart of God, if it is embodied by Jesus as the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, what keeps us from making it our universal rule of faith? I think sometimes we lack courage. This is true for me and perhaps for you, too: We sometimes get so comfortable with our low-risk lives that we don’t want to rock the boat, or we are overwhelmed by our own fear of illness or death, or we spend our energy on petty complaints that are of no real consequence. Like every church, we’ve experienced some conflicts over the years of pandemic that matter have distracted some of us from being either faithful or compassionate. When we lack courage, when we let fear get the best of us, we resort to pass-through communication, triangulation, and gossip.

Twenty years from now our petty squabbles will be forgotten…but the acts of courage and compassion wrought by members of this church will persist in the lives of people within the church and far, far beyond it. Yours are the examples that warm my heart and the hearts of others. They are the living testaments to courage that inspire me and inspire others to be courageous.

Churches around the country are in a time of transition and rebuilding, and it will take patience, wisdom, and grace to be church in the coming years. That is why the concept of Beloved Community is so critical for Plymouth to remain vital and healthy.

Since I’ll be away for a month of vacation and three months of sabbatical, I thought I’d leave you with three invitations from this parable:

1. Show up. Be courageous. Don’t cross to the other side of the street to avoid something important but painful.
2. Make a friend out of someone whom you perceive to be an enemy or at least someone who is unlike you in some way. Sometimes we need to check our presuppositions about Samaritans.
3. Operate out of two strengths that Jesus challenges us to live: courage and compassion.

My prayer for you in these months is that you will lean into your faith and really work at becoming Beloved Community grounded in the counter-cultural life of Jesus and in the encompassing love of God. Amen.
 
© 2022 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact hal@plymouthucc.org for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.
 

[1] Marcus Borg, Speaking Christian

Luke 10.25-37
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning,
Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado
 
Before I sat down to write this sermon, I called a member of our congregation, Marilu Theodore, who is in hospital in Portugal with a fractured pelvis (and she hopes to have medivac transportation home this week). One of the things that she remarked on was how very compassionate she has found people who are caring for her. Even the family of the woman she is sharing a room with are visiting with her and checking in on her as well. If you don’t know Marilu, observing the compassion of caregivers is very much in character, and she asked me if Marcus Borg hadn’t said something about compassion when he was here seven years ago. I told her that I’d be writing a sermon about the Parable of the Good Samaritan and relying on Marcus’s work for that…at which time she suggested a title for this sermon: “The View from the Other Side of the Bedpan.”

The Erma Bombeck-esque nature of Marilu’s suggestion is a good one. When we attempt to put ourselves into someone else’s shoes, especially in a moment of distress, how can we help but offer a compassionate response? Perhaps the problem is that most of us don’t really want to identify with the person on the other side of the bedpan, because we are subconsciously afraid that if we imagine it too well, we might imagine that it could be us. We don’t want to “go there,” and if we can avert our eyes and our imagining, perhaps we can deny that the problem exists at all.

If we don’t see children in detention centers on our border, being kept in squalid conditions without their parents, we don’t have to suffer. If we don’t see immigrants being rounded up in American cities as if a new holocaust is about to begin, then we don’t have to suffer. If we don’t see the more than 1,000 people who have contracted Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo this year, then we don’t have to suffer. If we don’t ourselves experience being sexually harassed or open our eyes, ears, and hearts to those who have, we don’t have to suffer. If we can just keep our eyes closed … we won’t have to suffer. Or so we think.

The English word compassion has two Latin roots: cum – “with” – and patior – “to suffer.” So, the English word compassion literally means to suffer with. And the New Testament Greek word for compassion is a doozy: splagknidzomai, which is the feeling of being so affected that you feel it in your splagknon, your guts.

Nobody wants to suffer, but to be the helper of those who suffer does not necessarily mean that we will suffer to the same extent. We can stand on the bank of a swift-moving river, hold onto a tree branch, and extend a hand to the person who would otherwise be swept downstream. We can offer to be in solidarity and relationship with someone who has an incurable disease, and though we may not cure the ailment, we may bring a sense of peace and healing. We can show up when a shooting happens and be part of an ongoing solutions to end gun violence, even though we cannot bring victims back to life. But we cannot do any of those things – we cannot be the hands and feet and eyes and ears of Christ – if we cover our eyes or try to look the other way.

Our faith gives us courage to face things that scare us or intimidate us. I was in divinity school before I had seen a dead body (outside of a college anatomy lab), because my family never had open casket funerals or visiting hours when someone died. I was scared to death of death. So, I took a whole course on death and dying in divinity school, and as a lay caring minister, I went to a family visitation and saw the lifeless body of Roy Bramall, the wonderful elderly man I had been privileged to do ministry with as a member of First Congregational UCC in Boulder. If we move toward our fears, rather than hiding from them, we can dispel the intimidation that boxes us in and keeps us from helping, even if that would be our inclination.

We may think of the priest and the Levite who passed the wounded man on the Jericho Road as being heartless or fearful. But there was something else at play…and that is what Jesus was driving at with this most famous of parables. The 21st chapter of Leviticus details the purity codes for priests: “The Lord said to Moses: Speak to the priests, the sons of Aaron, and say to them: No one shall defile himself for a dead person among his relatives, except for his nearest kin.” And according to the book of Numbers, “This is the law when someone dies in a tent: everyone who comes into the tent, and everyone who is in the tent, shall be unclean for seven days.” (Num. 19.14)

We learn from these passages that, especially for priests and their Levites who served God in the Temple, ritual purity was absolutely paramount, so that they could perform the religious rites that were their holy duty. And Luke’s gospel tells us that the victim of the robbers was stripped, beaten, and left for dead. The priest and the Levite were doing what they should have been doing according to Torah. One of the key values in the Temple Judaism of that day was ritual purity, which included all persons, but especially the clergy.

And you may not realize it, but for the audience Jesus was addressing, the only good Samaritan was a dead Samaritan. They were a religious minority group who believed that Mount Gerazim and not Jerusalem was the holy city, and they used only the Pentateuch and saw Moses as the only prophet. Samaritans were personae non gratae for Jews in ancient Israel. So, when Jesus begins to tell a parable that flips our assumptions on their heads, of course he chooses the Samaritan as the good guy in the story.

The Samaritan takes three initial actions in the parable: saw (he saw the man alongside the road), came near (approached the wounded, perhaps dead, man), and experienced compassion (splagknidzomai is used in the NT Greek). Then he does four more actions: bandages the man’s wounds, put him on the Samaritan’s animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And finally, he assures payment to the innkeeper for whatever is spent on the wounded man. Three steps of compassion: seeing and having compassion, acting, and putting your money where your mouth is.

But wait…it is the Samaritan who is acting justly. And if we are taking a religious minority and holding him up as the hero, over and against the religious authorities of Jesus’ day, then we have a problem…a big problem. Jesus in his parables often gets what white men call “uppity” with the authorities. Jesus doesn’t know his place. He is subverting the dominant paradigm with an alternative. He is holding up the holy value of compassion and saying that it is more important than ritual purity, which was absolutely central to Temple Judaism in the first century.

Whether it is the father who welcomes home with open arms the Prodigal Son (he was a pigherd and ritually unclean) or eating with sinners and tax collectors or saying “Blessed are the pure in heart” (as opposed to those who are pure in hands), Jesus was deliberately replacing the central value of what it means to be faithful: it’s all about compassion, not about purity.

Back to what Marilu Theodore remembered about Marcus Borg, he adds a further and really important point about what Jesus was doing with this parable and with other subversive sayings and actions: “For Jesus, compassion was not simply an individual virtue, but a sociopolitical paradigm expressing his alternative vision of human life in community, a vision of the life embodied in the movement that came into existence around him.” [Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. (SF: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), p. 47.]

The transformative power of compassion is limitless. If it became the dominant political ethos of this nation, think what a different world it would be. Imagine a State Department whose primary diplomatic mission was compassion. Imagine a Department of Homeland Security whose key objectives involved dealing compassionately with refugees and immigrants. Imagine a Congress who, instead of gridlock and partisanship, operated together with compassion for one another and for God’s world. When Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God, which you pray for every time you offer the Lord’s Prayer, that’s what he envisioned. The compassion that Jesus places at the center of our faith has the power to change the world, yet it requires that we open our eyes.

Compassion is about more than doing a good deed…it’s about a costly commitment to changing God’s world.

May it be so. Amen.
 
© 2019 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact hal@plymouthucc.org for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.