Wence Comes Our Help?

 This is the text of a sermon I'm going to give tomorrow, via Zoom, for St. Paul's UCC in Seattle. It's a church that could use a good deal of help.

Whence Comes Our Help?

A Sermon for St. Paul’s United Church of Christ

Seattle, Washington

July 10, 2022

 

Scripture: Luke 10:25-37

 

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

 

 

Here’s a truth for this morning. No matter how strong we are, no matter how self-reliant we like to be, we all need help from time to time. No individual lives an entirely isolated life. Neither does any human institution, including the church. We all have difficult times in our lives, and so do our institutions. The formerly mainline Protestant churches have been having a difficult time for the past several decades. I imagine that we all have places we might look for help—family, friends, the government, or even the church. There is no shame in needing help. It is a perfectly human thing to do.

In our scripture for this morning Jesus tells a parable about a man who needed help, the well-known and well-loved Parable of the Good Samaritan. We all know the primary moral of this parable—help people in need. Don’t pass by on the other side of the road. That lesson certainly is there, and it is important. It may, however, be less well-known that there are a lot of other lessons in this parable too. To get those lessons out of it, however, we need to understand some things in the first century CE context in which Jesus told the parable that many people don’t understand. So if you do know these things, bear with me while I give a bit of a history lesson for those who don’t.

There are four characters in this parable we need to know something about. Two of them are clergy from the Jerusalem temple. One is a priest. The priests were the top of the Jewish hierarchy at the time. They worked only in the temple. They were the ones who performed the animal sacrifices that were Judaism’s primary form of worship at the time. Another of them was a Levite. A Levite was essentially an assistant priest. They also worked only in the Jerusalem temple. Then there is the man called only “an expert in the law.” There were such people who were not priests. The law in question is the Torah law, and all three of these characters would see themselves as the keepers, teachers, and defenders of that law.

Then there is the Samaritan. Samaritan doesn’t mean here someone who does a good deed for another. It designates the man as a member of a certain ethnic group. The Samaritans were a people who lived in Palestine more or less between Judea and Jerusalem to the south and Galilee to the north. They were the remnant of what centuries earlier had been the northern Hebrew kingdom of Israel. The Assyrian Empire conquered that kingdom and exiled most of its residents in 722 BCE. A few of the Jewish people of the kingdom remained. They evolved into the Samaritans, one of whom appears in this story.

Here's the thing you need to keep in mind. The Jews of Jesus’ day hated Samaritans. The Samaritans traced their heritage back to the Jewish patriarch Jacob and through him to Abraham. But faith was different from orthodox Judaism in a few ways. Those ways don’t matter to us, but they mattered a lot to Jesus’ first century Jewish audience. Jews avoided Samaritans, probably considered them to be ritually unclean. The Jews had no time for the Samaritans at all.

Now the parable itself. In it a man identified only as “an expert in the law” asks Jesus a question. We’re told he does it to “test” Jesus. He asks: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” (I wish Luke had told us here what he means by “eternal life,” but he didn’t). In response Jesus does what he so often does. He doesn’t give an answer, he asks a different question, a habit of his that I imagine sometimes drove people nuts. He asks the lawyer what he finds in the law relevant to his question. The lawyer responds by reciting what we know as the Great Commandment—basically love God, neighbor, and self. Jesus says yes, you’ve got it. But the lawyer isn’t satisfied. He asks Jesus who his neighbor is. This time Jesus doesn’t respond with a question. He responds with a parable, the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

We’re told that a man traveling the road from Jerusalem to Jericho was robbed, beaten, and left on the side of the road half dead. He obviously needs some significant help, and he needs it now. So first a priest and then a Levite, both clergy from the Jerusalem temple, come walking down the road. Jesus’ audience very probably would have expected them to stop and help the man. They were supposed to be the good guys. They don’t stop and help the man. They pass by on the other side of the road.

Then the parable takes what would have been a shocking turn to Jesus’ audience. A Samaritan sees the beaten man lying by the side of the road. Jesus’ audience is Jewish, and, as I’ve already said, all of them hated Samaritans. They would have been shocked when Jesus says that it was the Samaritan who helped the beaten man. They expected nothing good from a wretched Samaritan. Yet he is the one who stops to help the man. He cares for him and is generous with his money in providing for him. Surely Jesus’ audience thought, “Really? A miserable Samaritan? You’ve got to be kidding!” But Jesus wasn’t kidding. In his parable the beaten man’s help doesn’t come from the people his audience would have expected. It comes from a Samaritan, the last place in the world most Jews would have thought it would come from. Some of Jesus’ listeners probably thought he’d gone mad.

But you know, that’s how it works sometimes in our lives. I’ll give you an example out of my own life. I used to be a lawyer, but starting in about 1994 I started to burn out on law big time. I’d hit a wall. I couldn’t go on as I had been living, but I could see no way around the wall. I was getting pretty depressed about it. I had developed a strong interest in good Christian theology by then, and I served as Moderator of Richmond Beach UCC, but I couldn’t construct a way forward. I was, metaphorically speaking, like the beaten man in Jesus’ parable.

Then not just help but salvation came to me from a totally unexpected source, Seattle University. It’s a Roman Catholic university. It’s even a Jesuit university. I’m not Catholic. I have never been Catholic. I guess I knew that SU granted a Master of Divinity degree, the ordination degree in the UCC and other Protestant denominations, but it had never occurred to me to go earn one. Then in the summer of 1997 Seattle University’s School of Theology and Ministry, the part of the university that provided the MDiv and other pastoral programs, announced the creation of something called the Institute of Ecumenical Theological Studies. They’d work it out with representative of several different Protestant denominations, including the UCC. IETS as we came to call it, was meant specifically for Protestant divinity students at that Catholic University. Somehow, I knew I had to enroll in IETS’s MDiv program. I didn’t really know why, but I knew. Seattle University, a school of a type of Christianity that was not mine, unexpectedly became my way out of no way. It is a big part of the reason I’m sitting here preaching to you today.

I think there’s a profound lesson here for all of us as individuals and as people who love our Christian church and want it to thrive beyond its current difficult condition. When things get tough, trusting in God, we can have good hope for a better future. The thing is, though, that we very probably won’t know how that future will happen until it happens. They say God works in mysterious ways. One mysterious way God works is by providing God’s people help from entirely unexpected sources.

So our lesson this morning is that when we’re in trouble we must keep our eyes and minds open. We must look for help in places where we think there’s no help to be had. There aren’t any Samaritans around, and, sadly, Seattle University has closed its School of Theology and Ministry. But help can still come to us from totally unexpected places. So, if we are wise, when we’re in trouble we’ll trust in God, pray without ceasing, and open ourselves to the totally unexpected. The help we all need may well come from a source that will shock us the way Jesus’ good Samaritan shocked his audience so long ago. We might be shocked, but we just might also find salvation. May it be so. Amen.