July 14, 2013 – Luke 10:25-37
Luke 10:25-37
Loving the Neighbour
8th Sunday after Pentecost [Lectionary 15] – July 14, 2013
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
The lawyer in the story is smart, right? He knows the right answers.
When he asks Jesus a question about what he must do to inherit eternal life,
Jesus – as he frequently does – responds with a question in turn.
“What does it say in the Bible?”
And the guy immediately responds with the right answer:
Love God. Love your neighbour.
I’m sure he was also burning to give Jesus the references, just to show how much he knew:
“Deuteronomy 6:5. Leviticus 19:18.”
What does he expect? A pat on the head?
Instead, Jesus gives him a command: “Do this, and you will live.”
Jesus means, “Do this and you will really be livin’. You’ll be participating in the life of God.
In eternal, fullness of life. When you love God and love neighbour, you will be fulfilling
the function for which you have been made.
You will be restless until your heart and your body rests in this life.”
But this is a tall order.
The guy is wondering who, exactly, Jesus expects him to love. Surely not everybody he meets?
I mean, he’s Jewish after all. Which Jewish neighbours of mine do I have to love, Jesus?
How do I know which neighbours I should love? How do I know who is worthy of my love?
How do I narrow down which neighbours to love out of all the neighbours around me?
He’s a lawyer, right? He wants a legal definition of the term “neighbour.”
I know a lawyer who won what appeared to be a totally hopeless property case by carefully and
painstakingly defining the word “contiguous.” Really.
“Who exactly do I have to love, Jesus? Define neighbour for me.” That’s his question.
And maybe it’s ours, too.
So Jesus, as he also frequently does, answers the question with a story,
perhaps the most famous story he tells, the story of the Good Samaritan.
Now you all know that Jews and Samaritans hated each.
They were feuding cousins,
for the Samaritans were descended from the 10 lost northern tribes of Israel.
They held as sacred the first five books of the Old Testament and they worshipped God not
on the temple mount in Jerusalem, but on Mount Gerizim in the North.
The Jews felt they had been politically betrayed by the Samaritans in time of war,
and so there was no love loss between them.
Nothing good could come out of Samaria.
Anyway, Jesus tells his story.
A man in need lies at the side of the road: beaten, bloodied, lying for dead.
And not just any road, but the road between Jerusalem and Jericho,
famous for being filled with thieves.
If you stopped and helped someone on this road, you put yourself at risk,
because the bloodied man might be the bait to lure more people to their doom.
A Jewish priest of the temple in Jerusalem comes by, and surely he will stop and help the man:
he’s the guy who should know.
He’s the Lutheran pastor, the Roman Catholic priest, the United Church minister.
Surely he’ll stop. But he doesn’t.
Then a Levite comes by, a Jew who was intimate with and served the temple in Jerusalem.
Frequently the Levites were scribes, specialists in the law:
surely he knows Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18.
But no: he passes on by.
And then a Samaritan comes by.
Well surely the man on the road is doomed because
we all know nothing good can come from Samaria.
But he stops. And kneels down.
And inspects the man’s wounds and treats them and bandages them.
And asks him if he can be lifted.
And then he puts him on his donkey, brings him to an inn, takes care of him and
tells the innkeeper to look after him and tells him he’ll cover all the expenses.
So: Jesus looks at the lawyer and says, “Who was a neighbour to the man?”
And – since it is not exactly rocket science – the lawyer states the obvious:
“The one who showed mercy.”
Right says Jesus. And then he gives him another command: “Go and do likewise.”
You’ll notice that Jesus, as usual, doesn’t really answer the question, “Who is my neighbour.”
Rather, he answers the question, “Who proves to be a neighbour.”
Neighbour is never defined by Jesus: did you notice that?
The man on the road could be anyone: could have been Jewish, but could also have been
Samaritan, or Parsee, or Norwegian, or Congolese,
or Ethiopian, or Muslim, or Cree, or Ojibway.
To Jesus, our “neighbours” are simply those who need us.
The Samaritan presumably knows his Deuteronomy and his Leviticus as well as
the priest and Levite. Maybe better.
The Levite knows that God has a special concern for strangers and foreigners.
In Deuteronomy we read, “God loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing.
You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Deut. 10:18-19)
And what is left unsaid is, “And I loved you enough to take you out of there.
So go and do likewise.”
It’s one thing to know something, right? And a completely different thing to do it.
It’s one thing to know the right religious answers, and another thing to live them.
Presumably the priest and the Levite know the right answers.
They’ve been intimately involved in the worship of the God of Israel for their whole lives.
But they are not living their worship,
and they are not allowing their worship to shape their day to day lives.
Their worship has not formed them to love their neighbours in need.
Martin Luther was deeply concerned with this question of how best to love his neighbour.
He didn’t think the church was doing a very good job of it at the time he lived.
The poverty rates were through the roof in late medieval times,
with at least 50% of the people living in poverty and perhaps as many as 80%.
Luther thought that if worship didn’t form people for serving the hungry poor,
then there was something deeply wrong with the life of faith.
He saw social concern for the stranger and for the poor as inextricably bound up with
service to the neighbour.
Our work as Christians, he wrote – in the home, at our jobs, in our communities – is the mask
behind which God hiddenly works to continue creation and
give every person what is necessary for life.
(Carter Lindberg, Beyond Poverty: Reformation Initiatives for the Poor, 110).
Christians work as if everything depends upon them,
but in faith they know that it is God who brings all things to completion.
In worship, God’s gifts of forgiveness, new life, bread and wine, peace and hope and
strength and faith are given so that we might take them and share them with the world.
As I have said many time, worship is the engine of mission at First Lutheran Church,
a very Lutheran notion.
As the scholar Carter Lindberg has written, in Luther’s view, Worship creates the community,
and the community serves others. The [liturgy or] the work of the people does not stop at
worship, but rather begins there as the work of the people for the benefit of others
– in what has been called “the liturgy after the liturgy.” (Ibid., 164)
The priest and the Levite have forgotten “the liturgy after the liturgy.”
But the Samaritan has not. And neither have you.
The community at First Lutheran Church is being formed by worship to serve others.
You have become a community that is served by God here so that you may serve God out there.
We’ve been serving community meals all year every other Wednesdays,
and that’s been an amazing thing to be part of.
A few weeks ago, one of the people who regularly comes asked me with incredulity,
“Why are you all doing this?”
And I said, “Because this is what our worship of Jesus forms us to do.”
It is becoming as natural and as organic as breathing for us,
this connection of worship and service.
As the Samaritan knows, you can’t have one without the other.
Being served by God will lead to serving others.
God gives us fullness of life, here at this table, and so we live it and find it and
take it with us beyond these walls to a world that needs it, and share it with
every friend and every stranger in need of it.
And so we find eternal life, which means, according to the preacher Barbara Brown Taylor,
“enjoying a depth and breadth and sweetness of life this is available right this minute and
Not only after we have breathed out last.”
(quoted at http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/july-14-2013.html)
God’s life is rooted in mercy, and when we participate in mercy,
we participate in something that is eternal: the very heartbeat of God’s life.
The thing is, we are the ones who find ourselves beaten at the side of the road.
And while others wander past, Jesus, the Good Samaritan, stops, at the risk of his own life,
speaks a word of comfort, tells us we belong to him, sets us upon his donkey and
carries us to safety, and feeds us until we are well.
In this word this morning you have heard him speak again: you are mine.
At this table this morning, you will again be cared for and fed.
In this worship, you will have been served by the living God of all mercy.
God will have proved to be a good neighbour in Jesus.
So go, now, when you leave this place: go now, and do likewise.
Go and, in an increasingly alienated world, go and – as the Old Testament scholar
Walter Brueggemann says – go and orient the world toward increasing neighbourliness.
Go – and live. So together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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