Our Neighbors

The Rev. Sandy Selby – St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Akron

Proper 10, Year C – July 15, 2007

Text: Luke 10:25-37

It was quiet and peaceful there. The birds were singing, a breeze tickled the leaves. It felt good to sit down and look across the water, taking in the light, the sounds and the fresh smell of the air. I got up and stood next to Mary, who was leaning on the railing looking down at the water. We remarked on the color of the leaves floating on the surface—a surface so filmy that it was like a light-brown tabletop. We stood there looking for several moments at the solid, filmy surface of the water.

“Oh, a fish”, Mary said. And as I looked down at the water I suddenly saw the film almost melting away before me. What had seemed so impermeable was slowly becoming translucent. “There’s another one! And another one! And another one!” we exclaimed. Just beneath the surface, we saw fish after fish come into our vision—fish that apparently had been there all along but had been invisible to us. We saw others swimming to them from elsewhere in the lake.

We heard the voice of a young girl we had seen earlier on our walk—a three-year old out for a walk with her mother and infant sister. She had come to see the fish. She walked up to the railing, stood a few feet away from us and saw immediately what had been apparent to us only gradually. As we watched, the fish went to her. Drawn by her innocence, perhaps? Or maybe the promise of a piece of bread.

As Mary and I turned away to walk down the path, we looked at each other and said, “Wow.” How easy it would have been to miss the deeper reality that was ultimately revealed to us, absorbed as we had been in our own world while observing the water through veiled eyes.

The ancient road from Jerusalem to Jericho winds along a deep wadi flanked on either side by soaring cliffs and descending more than 3,000 feet in a distance of about 18 miles. For ancient travelers it was a treacherous passage, for in rainy weather there was a threat of flash floods that could wash a traveler to oblivion. In good weather, the danger was from robbers who found ample hideouts in secluded natural caves along the way.

Such was the peril that awaited a man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho who “fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.”

Two travelers came along—a priest and a Levite—and seeing the man lying there they passed to the other side of the road and went along their way. They may have had good reasons to keep on going. Perhaps, as important Temple functionaries, they were on official business. Or maybe they thought the man was dead, and were concerned that they would be rendered unclean by touching him, as the Law said. That man had his own problems, and they had theirs. So they kept walking.

The priest and the Levite saw one part of reality: a man with his own identity and his own predicament, distinct from their own. What they didn’t see is the deeper reality that exists whether on the road to Jericho or on West Market Street in Akron: everyone we encounter is the man in the ditch. For everyone we meet, whether or not he or she realizes it, is dying for us to care for him. Everyone we meet cries out in some way for the healing touch of our forgiveness, our acceptance, or our caring presence. To be really alive, the person we meet along the way needs us.

The even deeper truth is that to be really alive, we need that person too. We need to be merciful as much as he needs our mercy; we need to be healers as much as we ourselves need to be healed. When we come to the rescue of the man lying in the ditch, we come to our own rescue. For we cannot be fully alive or fully human without one another (Frederick Buechner).

That God’s very nature is one of relation--in the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit-- tells us that relationship is built into the structure of Creation. At Creation, the first thing that God said to man in the Garden was “You are not God!” And the second was, “You should not be alone!” As much as our culture places before us an ideal of individualism and autonomy, we were created to be in relationship. We are meant to be in communion with one another. We need one another. In today’s world, is there a more important witness for the Church to make than that?

A third man, a Samaritan of all people, came along the road to Jericho and saw a man in need. He bound up his wounds, took him to an inn, and paid for him to be cared for until he was well enough to go off on his own.

One way to see this story is the way that the traditional name of this parable implies: the Samaritan was “good” and the priest and Levite, in comparison, were “bad.” But we can also look at the parable of the Good Samaritan as a story about the way in which we experience the world around us. The priest and Levite saw the man for what he apparently was—a man lying in a ditch. The Samaritan saw something more—that at the deepest level of their being, he and the other man were not separate selves but part of a greater reality and a deeper purpose, and if he walked away he did so at his own peril.

The author and minister Frederick Buechner sees it this way:

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into waves, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality—not as we expect it to be but as it is—is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily: that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love. This is not just the way things ought to be. Most of the time it is not the way we want things to be. It is the way things are.

The lawyer was able to tell Jesus what he needed to do, according to the Law, to inherit eternal life: to love God with his whole being and to love his neighbor as himself. Jesus showed him--and us--what that really means: that when we open our heart, our minds and our arms to the reality that all of Creation is profoundly interconnected through God, we open ourselves to be transformed by love in action.

It is easy, perhaps, to open ourselves to our neighbors here at St. Paul’s—those who are familiar to us, those whom we call “beloved.” Can we also do that for our neighbors a couple miles away in Central Akron--a third of whom live in poverty; 25% of whom have no health care coverage; and all of whom, if they are African-American, have a life expectancy ten years shorter than our own?

The truth is that to be fully alive we need one another, that in the Reign of God none of us is finally healed until all of us are healed of whatever gets in the way of the abundant life that God desires for us.

Jesus asked the lawyer, “’Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’”