In A Ditch

Common English Bible Chapter 10

25 A legal expert stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to gain eternal life?”

26 Jesus replied, “What is written in the Law? How do you interpret it?”

27 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.”

28 Jesus said to him, “You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live.”

29 But the legal expert wanted to prove that he was right, so he said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

30 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. 31 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. 32 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. 33 A Samaritan, who was on a journey, came to where the man was. But when he saw him, he was moved with compassion. 34 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. 35 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.’ 36 What do you think? Which one of these three was a neighbor to the man who encountered thieves?”

37 Then the legal expert said, “The one who demonstrated mercy toward him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

Introduction: The Anchor

I was reading a book this week by an old professor of mine, and it had a great story in it.

My prof, his brother, and his grandmother rowed a tiny boat out on a lake to a small island.

They were fighting headwind the whole way to the island.

They finally got there, and they explored for a while, but then it was time to go home.

My professor was excited to get to row back, because he assumed that he would have a tail wind.

But no matter how hard he rowed, the boat simply wouldn’t move.

Eventually, his grandmother and brother started laughing.

They had thrown the anchor overboard while my professor wasn’t looking.

Disordered Attachments

Saint Ignatius coined a term for when we have things in life that act as the anchors around our spiritual journey.

He called them disordered attachments.

We’re all attached to all kinds of things.

But when those attachments become unhealthy, when they get in the way of our walk with God, they become disordered.

And as a matter of fact, I think that this morning’s text speaks directly to disordered attachments.

Disordered Attachments: The Priest and the Levite

In Jesus’ parable, which we need to name from the start, is all about figuring out who our neighbor is, and how best to love them, we meet two people who decide not to help the guy in the ditch.

There are lots of guesses as to why these two decide to just keep right on walking, and all of it points to disordered attachments.

Attached to a ceremonial reality: to help the man might have made them unclean.

If a priest of a Levite was on their way to Jerusalem on this tiny road, it’s a fair guess that they were going to serve in the temple.

Serving in the temple as a priest or a Levite was on a rotational system, and you might be lucky to serve two times in your entire life.

It was a huge honor, a huge opportunity, and an incredible gift to give the community.

But, there were strict laws around being ceremonially clean.

If you would have come in contact, say, with a dead body, you would have become ceremonially unclean.

If you’re ceremonially unclean, you wouldn’t be able to serve in the temple when your rotation came up.

You might miss out on a once in a lifetime possibility.

So we have to ask: Are these guys so attached to their ceremonial responsibilities, to serving in the temple, that it would get in the way of them showing mercy and compassion to this poor soul in a ditch?

Attached to money: to help would probably cost them something.

Sad to say, as much as priests and Levites were the serving class of Isreal, they were also pretty independently wealthy.

If this poor guy in a ditch was going to get help, it was probably going to cost the caregiver something.

Hotel stay.

Hospital visit.

Insurance wasn’t super great back then!

The truth is, compassion always costs us something.

But if we have a disordered attachment to our cash, our material goods, our sense of what we’ve earned, then that too can get in the way of these guys helping out the guy in the ditch.

Attached to safety: the guy in the ditch might be bait for a trap.

The leading guess I’ve read from scholars that these guys would have not wanted to stop is that this guy might have been bait for a trap.

The road that this guy is left in a ditch on was known for bandits.

Bandits would frequently use the bodies of their previous victims to lure in more compassionate souls, who they would then attack.

Wisdom suggests that you should just keep right on moving, lest you be the next one to fall in to the trap.

So perhaps this priest and this Levite are worried about their safety.

Maybe they have families to get home to.

Maybe they are carrying a fair amount of cash and don’t want to have it stolen.

And chances are as a priest and a Levite, they’re not carrying weapons to defend themselves.

Attachments and Disorder

Nothing is wrong with any of the disordered attachments these guys are hold on to on their own.

There’s nothing wrong with ceremony, particularly religious ceremony.

There’s nothing wrong with wealth or cash or possessions on their own.

There’s nothing wrong with safety, and trying to keep yourself and those you love safe.

But in each of these examples, for the Levite and the priest, these attachments got in the way of compassion, love, mercy, and the call of God.

In that way, they were disordered attachments.

They were anchors on the boat of these guy’s spiritual lives.

But of course, Jesus offers a different example

The Samaritan: No attachments

The Samaritan is not attached to safety

The Samaritan, I assume, is not dumb!

He would have known as well as anybody else that there was a likelihood that he himself would be attacked.

He charges ahead anyway.

He is moved by compassion, and he goes right to the wounded man in a ditch.

The Samaritan is not attached to ceremonial realities.

The text says that the Samaritan bandages the poor soul’s wounds with oil and wine.

We can miss this, because the oil and wine in question would have been vital to the rituals of the temple.

To bandage someone’s wounds with oil and wine would be like tending to someone’s wounds with this parament and some communion juice.

The Samaritan won’t let the ceremonial nature of these items get in the way of looking after someone who needs healing.

The Samaritan is not attached to money.

The generosity of the Samaritan is kind of crazy.

Essentially, he gives the inn keeper enough to drop everything he’s doing for the next two days to take care of a stranger.

Two days wages doesn’t refer to the Samaritan’s wages, whatever they might be.

He has essentially paid for a personal assistant.

Would you be willing to pay a hotel staff for 2 days to take care of someone you’ve never met before?

Like I said, this is total generosity.

It’s the kind of generosity that only comes when you aren’t attached to money in a disordered way.

Pulling up attachments lead us to freedom

It is amazing to me what pulling up the anchor of our disordered attachments can free us up for.

Freedom for compassion

Again, the Samaritan is moved by compassion for this guy in the ditch.

Compassion is strong enough that it allows him to act. It’s the fuel for what his life is doing.

He is able to do this because he is unattached.

We might look around our world, and notice a supreme lack of compassion.

We don’t have compassion for each other.

We don’t have compassion for the strangers in our lives.

And sometimes, we even have a hard time having compassion on ourselves.

If that lack of compassion exists, we can reverse engineer things and discover our disordered attachments.

If we don’t have compassion for each other, perhaps we have a disordered attachment to winning first place for ourselves?

If we don’t have compassion for strangers in our lives, perhaps we have a disordered attachment to safety and the fear that drives that kind of thinking?

If we don’t have compassion for ourselves, maybe just maybe, we have a disordered attachment to the voices in our heads that tell us we don’t measure up?

Pulling up the anchors of those disordered attachments can give us the freedom to be moved by compassion.

Freedom for worship

Sometimes, I have to be honest with you, I’m not in the right head space for worship.

I’m thinking about what’s going on in the life of the church.

I’m thinking about who won the Penguin game the night before.

I’m thinking about how cranky I am at the guy who moved so slowly in front of me at the Dunkin Donuts that morning.

There’s a lot that can be going on up here!

I wonder in this moment what happened to the priest and the Levite after they left this guy in the ditch?

Did they both go to the temple?

Were they able to focus on the worship right in front of them?

Or were they second guessing their choices?

Were they thinking about how they did or did not respond to the guy in a ditch?

I don’t know, but I’m betting they had a hard time focusing in on worship that day.

If we pull up the anchors of our disordered attachments, it frees us up to have more meaningful worship experiences with Christ.

Maybe I need to let go my disordered attachment to money to truly be able to celebrate God’s abundance when the plate comes along.

Maybe I need to let go of my disordered attachment to my own world view to be able to allow the Scripture readings to captivate my attention.

Maybe I need to let go of my disordered attachment to pride and fame so that I can recognize it’s not me that belongs on the throne, it’s Jesus Christ himself.

Freedom for listening to the Spirit

Last night Sarah and I drove to my parent’s house, and predictably there was a homeless man standing on the corner of 19 and 51, right before the Liberty Tunnel.

As often as we are able, we’ll give him some food or a couple of dollars, something that we can offer up.

But there is always someone there.

The person may change, but there is just about always someone there.

And sometimes, probably all the time if I’m honest about it, I wonder if the Holy Spirit has put that person there to see how I’ll respond.

This tends to be the days that I am crankiest.

The days that I am most focused on my own world.

The days I’m most focused on my own disordered attachments.

Those are the days that a homeless person will wander by my window, and I can almost hear the Spirit as the question:

Are you going to keep worrying about your stuff, or are you going to respond to what I’m putting in front of you?

When we pull up the anchor of our disordered attachments, it gives us the freedom to go where the Spirit is calling us.

And yes, sometimes that is scary.

Sometimes that is new.

Sometimes that is crazy adventure type stuff.

But it’s always good.

Apprentices

Name your attachments

Naming things is powerful.

Naming disordered attachments is kind of tricky business.

Because again, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the disordered attachments.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with posting on Facebook.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with money.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with feeling proud of yourself.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with ceremonial responsibility.

The thing that makes those disordered attachments disordered is when they get in the way of our walk with Christ.

What does your Facebook profile do to your relationship with Christ?

What does your money do to your walk with God?

Is your Pride allowing you to see the movement of the Spirit.

And this is super tricky, because what might be a disordered attachment for you might be absolutely no big deal for me!

There is no one size fits all approach to this.

But…and I know this from experience, we know our disordered attachments without much thought or effort.

We can name them pretty quickly.

Share the load: Share with a friend

One time I was out hunting with my friend Ed, who loaned me this anchor this morning, and we used this exact anchor to sit still in our boat and do a bit of hunting.

As is way too frequently the case in Pittsburgh, our day was a bust, so we decided to pull anchor and head for home.

Except our anchor caught itself on a tree root or something under water.

I tried to pull it up, and couldn’t. (Which was no surprise)

Ed laughed and tried to pull it up, and couldn’t (which made me feel slightly better about myself for a bit).

In that case, in that instance, it took two of us to pull the anchor out of the water and be on our way.

There is a feeling out there among Christians that we struggle alone, and that if we confess where we’ve strayed that we’re weak.

That’s just plain silly!

Once we’ve identified our disordered attachments, one of the best things we can do for ourselves is to share that burden with a friend we trust.

Where are you likely to get held up in the Spiritual life?

What is going to keep you from being moved with compassion?

What can your friend be on the look out for to help you not fall in to the same old traps?

This is again, something that is scary.

It shouldn’t be, but I understand that it is.

When you’re ready, grab a friend that can help you pull the anchor up together.

Use freedom for compassion

It’s so fascinating that the marker Jesus uses for defining our neighbors is compassion.

Your neighbors aren’t the ones closest to you.

Your neighbors aren’t the ones who look like you.

Your neighbors aren’t the ones who vote like you do.

Your neighbors aren’t the ones who believe what you believe.

According to Jesus in this story, neighbors are people who show compassion to others, even complete and total strangers.

If you’re able to name your disordered attachments, if you’re able to pull that anchor up with the help of a friend,

Then it’s time to be moved by compassion.

Do something that is outrageously kind this week!

Do something for someone that no one in their right mind would do, just because it feels like the kindest thing you can think of.

Just know that it’s contageous.

You’d be surprised how much fun it is to row a boat without the anchor down.