Won't You Be My Neighbor?Luk

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, it’s good to see you all here. Thank you for joining us in worship this Sunday morning.

Let’s go through your bulletins very quickly for some announcements. The mens’ group will meet tonight at 6:30, and we’ll also be having our church council meeting tomorrow night. If you’re on the council, please try to attend.

Today is the last day for our Annie Armstrong Easter Offering. We’re very close to meeting our goal, so please give as you are led.

I’ll remind you that we’re collecting clothing and clothing accessories during the month of April for Operation Christmas Child. We’ll be collecting some new items starting next week, so please stay tuned for that.

You’ll see Judy Fox listed under the prayer list as in hospice care. Judy is Ellen Balsley’s daughter, and unfortunately she did pass yesterday. Please keep her family in your prayers. We’ll pass along details of her funeral arrangements as they become available.

Ola Mae Coffey is in the hospital for kidney failure. I believe she’s also having a toe amputated. Please keep her in your prayers, and please continue praying for Hutch Hutchens as well.

Lastly, I’d like to thank you all for the love and support you gave to Pastor Harris last week. He greatly enjoyed the opportunity to bring God’s word to you and was very appreciative of how much you made him feel at home. And I very much enjoyed my time at While Hill too, which is a great church with a great pastor and great people. Certainly every pastor who participated in our pulpit swap was blessed, and our prayer is that every church was as well. That said, it’s good to be back home.

Jesyka, do you have anything this morning?

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Let’s pray:

Father we’re so thankful for another day of life, and for another Sunday morning to come and worship you together as your church. We come to you as a community of believers united in in our love for Christ and love for one another. A community of neighbors who strive to see every person as a neighbor, because they are made in the image of you. We pray that our worship this morning is filled with praise for who you are and for who you made us to be, sinners growing into holy saints to serve both you and your kingdom. For it’s in Christ’s name we pray, Amen.

Sermon

In 1864, a priest from Belgium was about to be sent as minister to the people of Hawaii when he became sick and couldn’t make the trip. His brother, also a priest and named Father Damien, offered to go in his place. I’m sure that was done out of much love and selflessness, but you have to think at least part of Father Damien said, “Serve God in Hawaii? Sign me up.”

But as it turned out, there was plenty of hardship. Father Damien was ordained two months after his arrival in the islands. Seven years later, he realized where God was truly calling him. The Catholic church decided that the residents of a leper colony on the island of Molokai needed spiritual care as much as physical care. Because this assignment was obviously so dangerous, the church would only take volunteers. Father Damien volunteered.

Imagine that — being a healthy person charged to care for a leper colony. Being sent by God to live surrounded by the most frightening disease imaginable. Charged by Him to tend to those considered the most unclean. Knowing every day that your own life would be in danger. But when Father Damien arrived, he gathered every leper in the colony and said, “I will be a father to you, and who loves you so much that he does not hesitate to become one of you; to live and die with you.”

And he was true to that promise. Father Damien did more than provide spiritual comfort to the leper colony on Molokai. He established leadership in the community. He taught the people to read and write, built churches and roads and even hospitals. He changed the lepers’ dressings. He built their coffins and dug their graves. He shared meals with those who were literally rotting away and preached that no matter what the world thought of them, they were precious in God’s eyes.

One morning in December of 1884, Father Damien drew himself a bath. He accidentally put his foot into scalding water but felt nothing. He spilled more water on the other foot. That was had gone numb as well. Father Damien understood what that meant. Every morning for the past eleven years, he would meet worshippers in church and say to them, “Welcome, fellow believers.” But on that December morning, Father Damien met them and said, “Welcome, fellow lepers.”

Even as his own body began wasting away, Father Damien worked harder than ever. He passed into the arms of Jesus five years later on April 15, 1889, and was buried alongside his fellow lepers on Molokai. There his bones rested until 1936. The Belgian government requested that Father Damien’s body be returned to his native land to be honored. And do you know what the lepers of Molokai said? They said Fine, but let us cut off his right hand and keep it here. You can take Father Damien’s body, but leave us his hand. That hand is precious to us, because that’s the hand he touched us with.

It’s an amazing story, isn’t it? One of my favorites, and I’ve shared that with you before. I bring it up again because I thought about Father Damien a lot this week. I thought about him this past Sunday when Joanne and I were greeted with warmth and love by a denomination and a church that thirty years ago was considered our competition, even as this church greeted Pastor Harris with that same love.

Because that’s what we’re called to do as Christians, isn’t it? To love. That’s our faith shown outward. The world can only marvel at a love like Father Damien’s, but we can understand it. We can understand this man’s devotion to people he didn’t know, at least not at first. People who weren’t his family, at least not by blood. People who could offer him nothing, at least by the world’s standards. Yet his love and mercy were poured out upon the very people the world lived in fear of for a very simple but powerful reason — Father Damien loved God, God loved those lepers, and so Father Damien would love those lepers too.

When Christians live out their faith using that same formula — I love Christ, Christ loves them, therefore I love them — incredible things happen. Lives are healed. Roads are built, whether between cultures, towns, or nations. Bonds of friendship are formed. In other words, by our love God’s kingdom gains a foothold in the world. But when that love is missing, the shadow over this world grows a little darker.

I thought about Father Damien again this past week when I heard of a woman in Waynesboro who was seen walking naked on the streets before finally wandering into the CVS. It’s hard to believe that in all that time, she never passed a single Christian. I’m sure there was at least one. But aside from calling the police, no one offered her help. No one took that poor woman aside. No one tried to cover her. No one showed her love or mercy. What they did do was take a lot of pictures and post them on social media for other people to mock.

You might expect something like that to happen in a big city, never around here. But that’s where we stand now, even in our quiet corner of the world. So how are we to respond to that level of callousness as God’s people? Do we shake our heads and say, “I’ll pray,” thinking that’s enough? Or are we called to roll up our sleeves and do whatever we can to love even the unlovable?

Scripture records a moment in Jesus’s life when he’s asked the ultimate question — “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus’s response would shock a lot of Christians today. He says that our place in heaven depends just as much on how we love others as it does on how much we love God. Turn with me to Luke chapter 10. This morning we’ll be reading verses 25-37:

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”

He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?”

And he answered, “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 your neighbor as yourself.”

And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”

But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?”

He said, “The one who showed him mercy.”

And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.”

And this is God’s word.

This isn’t the first time Jesus is asked this question. In Matthew 19, a rich young man comes to Jesus wanting the same answer, but for a different reason. That rich young man was asking sincerely — he really wanted to know how to get to heaven. But the man here in Luke 10 isn’t asking this question because he wants to know the answer. He’s a lawyer, which is a special kind of scribe whose job it is to explain the laws of Moses. He already knows the answer. He’s asking this question because he’s testing Jesus’s knowledge of scripture.

Again, this is the ultimate question, isn’t it? “How do I get to heaven?” is the greatest question we can ask, and eternity depends on the answer. Jesus responds to the lawyer’s question in the same way that he almost always does in scripture. Very rarely in the gospels do you find Jesus directly answering a question. Instead he’ll answer with a parable or, with a question of his own, or in this case multiple questions. That’s what he does here. He answers the man and asks, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?”

Jesus has a very specific reason for answering in this way. I can picture him asking these questions and pointing to the lawyer’s arm and head. That’s where religious leaders would wear little leather boxes called phylacteries that contained scripture from the Old Testament. There’s little doubt that the first part of the lawyer’s answer — You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind — is written on a piece of parchment in one of those boxes he’s wearing. And given how quickly he gives the second part of his answer — to love your neighbor as yourself — it’s possible that verse, which is from Leviticus 19:18, is also written there.

When Jesus answers the lawyer in verse 28, he’s saying that this is exactly what is required for eternal life. Here is the answer to the greatest question. But then Jesus says something else. He sees into this lawyer’s heart and knows what’s there. More to the point, Jesus knows what isn’t there. There’s no love in this man, only knowledge. That’s why Jesus adds the words, “This do.” He’s saying to this lawyer, “You think you have the answer, but you don’t. Eternal life means more than just knowing what God says to do. Eternal life means actually doing it.”

It’s those last words Jesus speaks — “Do this, and you will live” — that pricks the lawyer’s conscience. He thinks to himself, “Does this man think that I don’t love God? Of course I love God. My entire life is devoted to God. So does he think that I don’t love my own? Of course I do. I know who my neighbors are.” So he asks Jesus, “Who do you think my neighbors are?”

Another question, and this time Jesus responds with a parable that’s aimed at piercing not just this lawyer’s heart but also our own in order to make us see that very often our vision is much too narrow, and our love much too small.

In a lot of ways the story of the Good Samaritan seems more than a story. The characters and the setting are much more specific than is usually found in Jesus’s parables. In fact many scholars believe this is an event that actually happened at some point, and Jesus had heard about it during his travels.

He begins by saying, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho.” We’re not told who this man is, who his ancestors are, or what God he worships. He’s just a man, just a human being. But given the people Jesus is speaking to here and the flavor of the whole story, it’s a safe bet to say this man is likely a Jew.

He’s on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. That was a distance of about twenty miles, and Jesus says the man is going down because the city of Jericho is actually in a valley. This wasn’t the only road between Jerusalem and Jericho, but it was the most direct route. It was a busy road through a rough and rocky desert country filled with caves, which made it a perfect place for robbers. In fact, so much violence happened on that road that a name had been given to it. It was called The Way of Blood. What happens to this man only adds to that name. He’s set upon by a band of robbers, stripped, beaten, and left for dead.

But remember, this road between Jerusalem and Jericho is well-traveled. Not long after, a priest arrives. There’s a beautiful little phrase at the start of verse 31 that describes the way he came — “by chance.” This is the only time that phrase is used in the New Testament, and Jesus uses it with almost a sense of irony. This priest thinks it’s chance, but of course there’s no such thing. There are no accidents. God oversees everything, and just as with this priest, we’re often tested the moment we forget that.

This priest was one of many religious officials who walked that dangerous road. Jericho was known as a city of priests. They would travel to Jerusalem to serve at the temple and then return to their home city when their residence was over.

Here’s help coming, then. Because this priest is a holy man. He’s a man of God. His earthly purpose is to instruct the people about what God’s commands are and how they are to obey them.

So here’s the priest, praying as he travels because he knows the way is dangerous. And in the distance he sees something lying along the side of the road. His steps grow a little slower, his senses a little sharper. Then he gets closer and realizes it’s the body of a man. He’s bloodied. Naked. Not moving. Already the flies have started to gather around him.

The priest stops at a distance. His fingers tighten around his walking stick. He’s looking at the body but he’s also looking to either side of the road, scanning the rocks and the shrubs for robbers. Behind him in the distance he sees someone coming. Is that the robber who did this, now coming for me? In a whisper, he prays to Yahweh again, asking for the strength to move his feet. But when his feet move, it’s not toward the man lying naked and broken in the road, it’s away. It’s far away and as fast as he can move.

“Because he’s dead,” the priest says. Maybe he says it to God, maybe to his own conscience. He says, “That man is surely dead, and the law forbids me as a priest from touching the dead. I would be defiled. I would break the law, and God would punish me. And these terrible robbers! They must be nearby. They could have laid this man here as a trap for me. I can’t put myself in danger. That would be selfish. I’m a priest! People depend on me! How can I serve God and His people if I’m dead?”

Remember a couple weeks ago when we talked about Jesus cursing the fig tree? How we make all sorts of excuses for not bearing fruit? That’s what this priest is doing. He has great excuses for not helping this man, but not one single reason. I don’t know what scripture was written in the small leather boxes on this priest’s arm and head, but I can guarantee you what scripture wasn’t.

Let me read you Isaiah 58:6-7:

“Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?

Not to hide yourself from your own flesh. How powerful is that phrase? But that’s exactly what this priest does. He runs away and hides himself from someone who’s just like him in every way that matters, a human being, a person made in God’s image.

The person the priest sees coming along the road in the distance behind him isn’t a robber, it’s a Levite. Levites were every bit as revered as priests, and were considered just as holy. Their job was to help the priests in the temple, and this man too has finished his service and is going home to Jericho.

In verse 32, we see a repeat of what the priest did but with one important difference. The Levite “came to the place and saw him.” The priest keeps a distance and then quickly moves on. The Levite stops beside the man. He comes and looks. But then he runs away too, leaving the man still bloodied, still naked, and still alone.

The Levite’s probably thinking much the same as the priest. “There are robbers nearby. If I pick this man up and take him, he’ll slow me down. Then we’re both dead. And I can’t stay here with him. Someone else will come along, and they might think I’m the one who did this. I can’t be seen with this man. I have to save my reputation.”

And don’t discount this possibility too: what if that priest looked behind him and recognized that was a Levite coming in the distance? And what if the Levite recognized that the man way ahead of him was a priest? How easy would it be for the priest to say, “I don’t have to stop, the Levite will care for this man,” and for the Levite to say, “Since the priest had reasons for not caring for this man, I don’t have to either”?

No matter the case, what the Levite does is both better and worse than what the priest did. It’s better in that the Levite actually does stop. He does show a little pity. But it’s also much, much worse.

The priest never even approached the hurt man. The Levite does, which means his first thought is to help. But his second thought is to run away, and that’s the thought he surrenders to. The Levite proves that he has more of God’s light when he stops. But that just means he sins more against that light when he runs away.

There’s still hope for this poor half-dead man, though, and it comes in the form of a Samaritan. As he journeys, verse 33 says, he “came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion.”

It’s hard to put into words just how much the Samaritans and the Jews hated each other. What made it worse was that they were all once one nation of Israel. But then the nation divided into the northern and southern kingdoms, and both of those kingdoms ended up being invaded, and things went downhill after that.

The biggest difference between the Samaritans and Jews was where each thought God should be worshipped. The Jews thought it was the temple in Jerusalem. The Samaritans thought it was Mount Gerizim in Samaria. By Jesus’s time, the worst name a Jew could call anyone is a Samaritan.

But here is this Samaritan, who isn’t traveling from Jerusalem but is probably going to Mount Gerizim to worship, and he sees this man who is likely a Jew nearly dead on the side of the road, and he has compassion for him. He sees behind what this man is — a Jew — to see who he is — he’s a person who has value simply because he exists. A person in need of help, and his need of help far outweighs any difference, no matter how great, that’s between them.

The priest and the Levite have homes nearby. The Samaritan doesn’t. He has even more excuses to pass by on the other side of the road. But the Samaritan doesn’t give in to excuses. He does more than rescue this Jewish enemy. The Samaritan cares for him.

He goes to him in verse 34, not thinking of the danger to his own life of being met by robbers, or to his reputation of meeting another traveler on the road. He binds up the man’s wounds. He pours out the oil and wine meant for his own refreshment to clean the man’s wounds. He even gives up his own animal, placing the hurt man there so they can travel. He takes him to the safety of an inn and cares for the man all that night. And on the next day as he was leaving, the Samaritan makes sure the man was comfortable and healing and paid two days’ wages to the innkeeper, enough for the man to be fed and cared for until he was well.

This filthy Samaritan, this enemy of God’s people, put himself in a position of discomfort so he could soothe the pain of another. He let himself be physically discomforted by going that long way to get this wounded man to safety. He let himself be emotionally discomforted by trying to keep the man alive while watching the road for the very robbers who had nearly killed the man he saved. He let himself by financially discomforted by giving his own money to provide for someone who could never repay him.

He could have just as easily been like the priest and the Levite and put himself before this man. He could have said, “I’ll pray for you,” and went on his way like many Christians do today. But instead the Samaritan says to himself, “God put me here with this and I am God’s instrument. I can refuse and walk away, thinking no one is on the road to see me. But that would mean disobeying the God who sees all things.”

You have to wonder what the Jewish man thought when he woke to find he had been taken to an inn and given medicine, food, and lodging, only to learn that he had been saved by a Samaritan. Was he thankful? I’m sure he was. If he’d been conscious on the road, would he have refused the Samaritan’s help? I’m sure he wouldn’t. If we’re in deep need, we don’t care who helps. We just want help, don’t we? That’s why Jesus says to focus on the person in need rather than whomever that person may be, and that’s why he then turns back to the lawyer and asks in verse 36, “Which of these proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?”

And what else can the lawyer say? He’s tried to expose a hole in Jesus’s knowledge of the law, but the only thing that’s exposed is the hole in his own heart. The Pharisees in particular and the Jews as a whole believed they only had one neighbor to look after, and that was their fellow Jews. The kindness and love that God demanded they show didn’t extend to anyone else. Everyone else didn’t live like them, or believe like them, or worship like them, and so everyone else was less than them. This lawyer lived much like the priest and the Levite did in the story Jesus told — he made excuses for not loving others the way God said he should.

Jesus asks, “Which one of the three was the neighbor to the man who had been hurt?” And in verse 37, the lawyer gives the only answer he can. He says, “The one who showed him mercy.”

And we think, “Yes! Finally Jesus finally punched through this man’s prejudices.” But he hasn’t. The lawyer’s still hanging on to his prejudice, and how do we know that? Because when he answers Jesus’s question in verse 37, he can’t even bring himself to say the word Samaritan. All he says is, “The one who showed him mercy.”

That’s why Jesus doesn’t say, “Well done.” Instead at the end of verse 37, he says, “You go, and do likewise.” Sounds a lot like what Jesus told him back in verse 28 — “ . . . do this, and you will live.”

He’s saying to this lawyer, “You know what God says to do, but then you try to get around it by bringing His commands down to your own standard. What you should be doing is using those commands to raise yourself up and become more godly. Your faith isn’t in what you know, it’s in what you go and do because of what you know.”

And that’s what Christ is telling us as well. You’ll sometimes hear this parable preached in a different way. You’ll have some preachers say that this parable is really about Christ and us. We’re the man along the road, set upon by sin and the devil and left for dead. Religion won’t help us, and neither will the law, but only a Savior who comes along, heals us, and brings us to a safe place.

That would make for a good sermon, and a true one, but it would also be a sermon that comes close to taking the responsibility off us as Christians to go out and make a difference in this world. Because this story could be a parable of what Christ does for us, but it’s for certain a warning that the ones who really possess love and mercy are the ones who go out of their way to provide it to others.

Who is our neighbor? Whoever is in need. But if we think the only neighbors in need that we’re to care for are the ones who look and act and believe like us, we’re no better than the lawyer who approached Jesus. If the only neighbors we should help are the ones who won’t put our own comfort at risk, we’re just like the priest. If we think we can’t help someone because helping them might make us look bad, we’re just like the Levite.

But if we listen to what God said in Isaiah — “Don’t hide yourself from your own flesh” — we won’t become those sad people who stood around and took pictures of that poor woman in Waynesboro this week. Instead we’ll become our own versions of Father Damien, maybe smaller but no less useful.

Our nation is so divided between politics and beliefs and race and gender. We celebrate what makes us all different so much that we’ve forgotten what makes us all the same. We’ve placed ourselves into so many boxes that we judge the worth of our neighbors not by the God who created them, but by the opinions they have.

And the only people who can fix that, the only ones who can help the world remember what love and mercy are, are the people who cling to a Savior who showed the ultimate love and mercy by hanging on a cross. A Savior who denied himself for others. A Savior who gave what he had to those who had nothing. A Savior who says to us, “You go, and do likewise.”

Let’s pray:

How wonderful it is, Father, to know that in the care of this world and of the people in it, you involve your people. Those who love you must love those you have made. Help us to see past the appearances, the opinions, and the choices of others to see the spark of your divine nature in them, and help us to understand that the mercy and grace that you continually give us is the mercy8 and grace we should show to every person. As you bless us, Father, so make us a blessing to all people and especially to those in need. Help us to always be good neighbors. For it’s in Christ’s name we ask it, Amen.