Where are the Samaritans?

Amos 7:7-17; Psalm 82;Colossians 1:1-14; Luke 10:25-37

I want to focus upon two of our readings from the Word of God today. One is familiar; the other is a story rarely mentioned. These stories are straight from Holy Scripture, and as such, they carry the weight of God’s Word – God speaking directly to us about two related subjects. Let’s talk about the rare story first. Let’s look at the first reading this morning.

The kingdom of David and Solomon had been divided into two parts about two hundred years earlier. In the south were the large tribe of Judah and the small tribe of Benjamin. These two formed the kingdom of Judea, based in Jerusalem. The people of Judea worshipped at the Temple built by David – They had a high priest descended from Aaron, and many men from the tribe of Levi were priests in the Temple on a rotating basis. Eventually, the people who lived here would become known as Judeans or Jews.

In the north, in the land known as Samaria, there was another kingdom, the kingdom of Israel that was composed of the other ten tribes. They were ruled at this time by King Jeroboam II, they worshipped at Bethel and at Dan and in high places on the tops of the mountains. Their priests were men that Jeroboam appointed – they might be from any tribe, they might have been farmers or smiths or shopkeepers, their fathers and grandfathers might have been Levites – or not. Furthermore, many of the people of Israel worshipped Baal, a disgusting god that demanded infant sacrifice. They did not worship God, they did not worship at Jerusalem in the Temple, they worshipped evil itself and called it good.

And into this walks Amos the prophet.

Amos was not born a prophet. Amos did not ask to be a prophet. Amos didn’t ask to teach. He wasn’t highly educated. He wasn’t trained in seminary. He was a shepherd and he pruned sycamore fig trees. But one day, the Lord took Amos from his farming and herding duties and told him to prophesy to Israel, an entire nation of people, a geographic area the size of an American state. AND AMOS LISTENED! Amos left his herding and Amos left his fig trees and Amos walked north into the land of Israel and began to preach to people. What confidence! What trust in God! What an example of following God’s will! What did Amos tell the people of Israel?

7 This is what he showed me: The Lord was standing by a wall that had been built true to plumb, with a plumb line in his hand. 8 And the Lord asked me, “What do you see, Amos?”

“A plumb line,” I replied.

Then the Lord said, “Look, I am setting a plumb line among my people Israel; I will spare them no longer.

9 “The high places of Isaac will be destroyed
and the sanctuaries of Israel will be ruined;
with my sword I will rise against the house of Jeroboam.”

You see, when you build a wall, you hang a lead weight from a line – Plumbun was the latin word for lead – in chemistry the symbol for lead is still Pb. So a plumb line is a string with a lead weight on it. You hang the lead weight, the plumb line, and from this you can measure just how far each brick is from the line. If you keep them all the same distance from the line, you have a vertical wall that won’t easily fall over. But without such a plumb line, your wall will most likely be built on a very slight slant and fall over. The plumb line is your absolute standard for what is good and perfect and right.

The Lord had shown Amos that God had a standard for right and wrong, an absolute standard, and because Israel no longer followed the standard – in this case by worshiping at Jerusalem, lead by priests from the tribe of Levi, people worshipping other gods – God was going to allow Israel to be destroyed. The problem, you see, was that God demands attention be paid to God.

9 “The high places of Isaac will be destroyed
and the sanctuaries of Israel will be ruined;
with my sword I will rise against the house of Jeroboam.”
And so, Jeroboam’s priest at Bethel tells Amos to go south, to go home to Jerusalem and to stop preaching at Bethel.

But Amos, the former shepherd and fig-tree pruner, responds:

You say,

“‘Do not prophesy against Israel,
and stop preaching against the descendants of Isaac.’

17 “Therefore this is what the Lord says:

“‘Your wife will become a prostitute in the city,
and your sons and daughters will fall by the sword.
Your land will be measured and divided up,
and you yourself will die in a pagan country.
And Israel will surely go into exile,
away from their native land.’”

Twenty-four years later, the Assyrians came and took away many of the people of Israel into captivity in Assyria, what is now northern Syria and Iraq. Many more of the people fled south into Judah. Others fled the land, never to return. The prophecy of the shepherd and fig-tree pruner had come to pass.

Let’s fast forward almost 800 years.

An expert on Jewish law, an expert on Jewish religion, a man who understood very well what Judaism was all about stood up to question Jesus. He asked a fundamental, basic, very important question: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

And in typical Jesus fashion, Jesus answers the man’s question with a question. “How do you read the Law?”

The man answers: “‘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, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

And Jesus applauds him! “Do this and you will live!” Jesus says.

For this is what God commands. We are to love God with all our hearts and with all our souls and with all our strength and with all our minds. And at the same time, we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. And so we look at the plain meaning of these commands and we realize with a sick feeling in the pit of our stomach what this would mean – we would need to spend our mornings studying scripture, we would need to spend our afternoons doing good deeds for our neighbors, we would need to spend our evenings talking with our neighbors about God. We would become religious fanatics, we would give away many of our material goods, we might even become preachers! And so we begin to look for the exits, because we realize that God is not asking us spend an hour a week paying attention to Him, Christ is not asking for a tenth of our income, God is not asking us to invite people to church once or twice a year, but God and Jesus Christ are both saying: Give your life to me! AND THIS IS WHAT THE TEXT SAYS IS NECESSARY TO INHERIT ETERNAL LIFE!

Let’s go back and read it a second time:

25 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

26 “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”

27 He answered, “‘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, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

28 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
That’s tough talk. That’s really, really tough talk. That’s the sort of tough talk that only Jesus could give us and us listen to, because, you see, we’ve lived our lives around people who were lukewarm about God, our relatives have been lukewarm about God or even a bit cool to God, and even the people in the church around us have been lukewarm, but…

When you decided to get married, was your love at room temperature? Did you look at him or at her and say, “looking at him or her does absolutely nothing to me?” Or did you look at him or her and say, “what a hot girl” or “what a cool guy!” Room temperature love is no love at all, is it?

When you go out to eat at a restaurant, how many of you order room temperature ice tea? When you order a drink, how many of you order your Coke to be at room temperature? When you have a coffee, how many of you like room temperature coffee?

How about your meat? How many of you like your fried chicken to be served at room temperature? How many of you like your steak at room temperature? How many of you prefer your BBQ to be at room temperature? How many of you like ice cream at room temperature?

Why is that?

Because when a chicken is at room temperature for while, it is dead and beginning to rot. When a cow is at room temperature for a few hours, the cow is dead and beginning to rot. When a pig is at room temperature for a while, the pig is dead and beginning to rot. You can keep your meat cold and preserve it, or cook it hot and kill the rot-causing bacteria, but if you leave it at room temperature it will soon be worthless.

Why do you prefer to keep your love of God at room temperature? Luke-warm, not hot enough to kill the rot, not cold enough to honestly say, “I don’t believe in God”, but room temperature. The temperature of death and rot.

Oh I pray that your love of God would be hot and passionate, like the love of two people that leads them to get married! Oh, I pray that your love of God would be hot and sizzling, like steaks cooking on a grill on high! Oh, I pray that your love of God would be boiling hot like the water you just took from a whistling kettle on top of a stove!

The guy that has been talking to Jesus, he also can’t stand the plain meaning of Jesus’ answer – loving God completely and loving other people as yourself is too much for the guy. The guy couldn’t stop there. The guy, just like many teachers and professors and others who can’t just take a simple answer, decided that he needed to go another level.”And who is my neighbor?” he asked. He couldn’t just accept that anyone could be his neighbor. Instead, he wanted to define the word, he wanted to categorize the word, he wanted to very carefully split some hairs and come up with a way to decide who was a neighbor and who wasn’t a neighbor. He wanted to make it easier by narrowing down the number of people he was supposed to love.

You can almost hear the many ready to ask, “And so, if someone is living in the neighborhood, but only rents, is he a neighbor? Or if someone is a foreigner and has only been here for a month, is he a neighbor? Or if someone is visiting his Aunt Sally, but will leave next month, is he a neighbor? And what about his children? And what about the people who live in the hotel? And what about the people in the nursing home? And those at the campground? “And you can hear the questions and the exceptions developing and developing.

Jesus appears for a moment to change the subject.

Jesus tells a long story. It is the story of a man who travels from mountaintop Jerusalem down the long, steep mountain road down, down, down to Jericho by the Dead Sea in the Jordan Valley. He walks downhill through very rough terrain down over 3300 feet – more than three times the drop from the top of Seneca Rocks to the valley below.

And on the way down, suddenly from behind some rocks jumps out some robbers, who attack him, beat him, strip him and leave him to die on the road, like the way some people are attacked by life – they lose a job, they find themselves injured in a car wreck, their spouse runs off to be with another, and they are left alone on the highway of life. And the man lies there, bleeding out in a pool of blood, lying in the hot sun with no water, getting sunburned and baked and the flies are buzzing around.

A priest walks by, a Sunday school leader, a minister, a man who is holy and respected and works in the Temple on a regular basis. The priest is on important business, because all the business of a priest is important business, and when he sees this man he just walks right by because his time is too valuable, he has his own family to take care of and there might still be robbers around and so he walks faster and passes by on the other side of the road. He stays away so he won’t get any of the icky blood on him.

Soon, a Levite comes to the man lying bleeding in the road. The Levite is not a priest, a minister, but he could have been, his father or his grandfather was a priest, a leader in the Temple, a minister, but this Levite hasn’t yet been called to the ministry, yet he is important, because all Levites are important because they are good Jews, they know about God’s rules, and they attend Temple services once a week, and besides there are the king’s guards and the soldiers and the police and the rescue squad. It is their job to take care of people, they are the professionals, he is still waiting for his call, perhaps if he were a full-fledged priest he’d stop what he was doing and take care of the man, but he isn’t trained, he isn’t capable, he doesn’t know what he’d say or do and he walks on past.

And finally, along comes a man from Samaria. His ancestors had worshipped Baal, his family had worshipped God at Bethel, his family had been punished by God and taken away to another land and so he looked different, he spoke differently, he even smelled differently because he ate different food. The priest and the Levite looked down upon this man, the priest and the Levite and all the other good people from Jerusalem looked at this man and stayed away from him because his ancestors were mixed up about God and who to worship, and because he ate different food he was dirty and good Jews did not mingle with Samaritans, they were the wrong type of people, they were from across the tracks, they were foreign.

But this Samaritan sees the traveler lying there in a pool of his own blood, with the hot desert sun beating down on him, his bruises on his body beginning to form. The Samaritan doesn’t know this man, he’s never met him before, and this Samaritan recognizes that it could just as easily be the Samaritan lying on the ground for he had known verbal beatings as words were hurled at him. He had felt the hot desert sun beating down on him as he worked hard for a few coins. The Samaritan had bled pools of tears from his own body as he had fallen asleep many nights for the mistakes his ancestors had made, the mistakes that had sent Amos to his land with the dreaded Word of God. And the Samaritan took pity on the man in the road, recognized him as a fellow human, and lifted him up and put him on his own donkey, bandaging his wounds and putting disinfecting wine and healing oil on those infected cuts and abrasions, treating him as though he were a brother, a beloved servant or master, or as his neighbor friend.

And the Samaritan did not stop that day, but he took the man to a place of safety. He took the man into a safe, clean room at the inn, he paid for the room and food, he watched over the beaten man that evening, and then, because he really did have important business, he left the man at the inn, but not until he gave the innkeeper two days worth of wages, the equivalent of a couple hundred dollars, and a promise to pay for any additional expenses when he returned.

And Jesus asked the man in front of him that day, he asked the expert in the Law, the expert in Judaism, the expert on the Bible – “who was neighbor to the hurt man?”

Well the answer was clear, so the expert said, “The one who had mercy upon him.”

Jesus said “Go and do the same”.

And now for the real question. Where are the Samaritans today? Who today is a Samaritan in our world?

But pastor, in what sense to you mean? If you are talking about the Samaritans as the nice people who stop and help other people, then I’m one of them! Surely, if a man was lying stripped and naked, bleeding on the road, I’d stop to help him.

And yes, indeed, we have some Samaritans in this church. Two weeks ago, Terri Jo and Bud Boyer were visiting his mother out on Route 20 just south of the 20/57 split. There was a noise and a crash and they discovered that a motorcyclist and passenger had hit a deer and sailed over the hedge to hit the house. One rider was dead, the other rider was severely injured and was life-flighted out. Meanwhile, a woman traveling on another motorcycle simply broke down in tears. Terri Jo, who you may not know because she is so quiet and unassuming, stepped up, laid her hands upon the woman and prayed with her right then and there, giving her the help that the woman needed for her hurts and wounds. Terri even said that it was not her speaking, but God was speaking through her. Terri was simply open to giving help to another soul who was hurting.

A few months ago on a Sunday morning, Saundra called me because there was a homeless man at one of her churches who had asked to speak to a man, and there were no men at her church. I spoke to Gary Auvil briefly and Gary drove over and took care of the guy, taking him where he needed to go and even getting him some shoes.

Going back a little farther, Fred Waldron helped out his neighbor repeatedly. Eventually, that neighbor stopped his keystone bad habit and began attending church.

Do you listen to the call of Jesus to show mercy to others?

It is often difficult. The most difficult thing is to transition from our behavior as parents to showing mercy and grace to other adults. You see, we teach our children to stand on their own two feet, to take care of themselves, to be responsible, to be strong enough, work hard enough, and have a sound enough character that they don’t need to ask for help from anyone.

And then, when we find someone who needs help, our natural tendency is to scold them, to point out that if they had done things differently, they wouldn’t need help, this comes from not working hard enough to have a job with good health insurance, you shouldn’t walk along the highway by yourself, etc, etc. But that is not what the Samaritan did. He bandaged the guy’s wounds, he loaded him up on his donkey, and he took care of him, never expected a cent in return – or even thanks. He did it because it is showing love for your neighbor and that is the right thing to do.

But another way to look at the question of the Samaritan is this: Who is it that you think are evil, nasty people? Jesus did not pick the Samaritan out of the air as the hero of this story – the Samaritans were the despised, people whom God had punished because they worshipped the wrong god, the people Amos had chastised, the people God had taken away from the homes and villages centuries before, the people who had struggled and finally returned home, and who still refused to worship God at Jerusalem. Who, in your mind is your modern Samaritan?

Is it a man with Arabic ancestors? Is it a woman with a heroin addiction?

Is your personal Samaritan a Mexican, a Chinese, an inner city black? Do you despise those who are on welfare, do you dislike those who wear tattoos, or do you simply hate all politicians?

Some people can’t stand Republicans, some people can’t stand Democrats, some people dislike coal miners and some are angry at water truck drivers. Still others have a real problem with those who wear black makeup, some get upset with loud teenagers with spiky rainbow-colored hair and some simply don’t like anyone on the face of the planet.

But Jesus was very clear on this point and the Apostle Paul went back to it over and over again in his writings: God loves everyone, but everyone has sinned. Think about the one person you’d least like to eat supper with. Our command to love our neighbor includes everyone, each person, even especially the person you just thought about, and the biggest reason most churches don’t grow is because we don’t really love everybody, just those people who are like us, and we let the other people know that in the way we don’t really enjoy talking to them.

And yet, those other people have been injured on the highway of life just as you have, those other people have been beaten by other people, perhaps you helped with your words of scorn, and those other people have lain there in their pools of tears because of the damage that’s been done to them by the robbers of the world – the men and women who deep down believe that they have the right to take and use the garments of respect we wore on the highway.

Perhaps you’ve been a Samaritan. Perhaps you’ve seen travelers on the road beaten. Perhaps you’ve remembered when you were beaten on your life’s highway, and your heart went out to all who lie in the roadway because you have lain there yourself. Perhaps you went to bend down and bandage those wounds, to pour disinfecting wine and soothing, healing oil on those wounds, perhaps you went to lift up these folk and put them on your donkey, carrying them to a nice, clean, safe room at an inn.

Or perhaps you have been the robbers, the men or women who attacked and beat and robbed and stripped others of their self-respect, their life force and left them for dead. Perhaps you left others lying in the road, there to die in the hot sun. Who have you left behind in the world?

So who were you in this story?

Were you the priest, busy with important business of the church, perhaps struggling to decide whether or not you have time or money or even should help a particular person? Or were you a Levite, busy with important issues, thinking that there are other people whose job is handle these robberies. Were you the Samaritan, the good guy who bandaged the wounds? Or the Samaritan, the man or woman who has been kicked and beaten himself so many times you truly feel pity for anyone lying along the road. Or were you one of the robbers, beating up people and leaving them for dead, taking from them and demanding from them what they can’t give?

There is one more person in the story. There is the innkeeper.

Think about it. One day, this Samaritan – whom you can’t stand because, after all, he is a Samaritan,- he brings into your inn a naked, bleeding man who is at death’s door and demands a room. Then next morning, he gives you a few days pre-payment on the room and some food, and leaves the beaten man behind, promises to pay you any expenses, and leaves.

Innkeeper, what will you do?

Will you trust an unbelieving Samaritan? Will you follow the orders of a traveling Samaritan? Will you also take care of this man, whom the robbers have beaten, or will you turn him out onto the highway? After all, the robbers might have specially targeted this man, and they might destroy your inn if they find you are taking care of him.

Yet there is one thing which may guide your actions, one thought which goes through your head, one particular idea which goes to the heart of why you own an inn in the first place and why it is such an excellent inn. It is something another man said to you months ago, a man who was traveling from Jericho up to Jerusalem, a rabbi, a teacher, and what He taught: “Love God completely, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

A couple of months later, some travelers brought you the news. That rabbi had died on a cross. And you wondered if that rabbi’s death might somehow be related to the rabbi’s teaching:

“Love God completely, and love your neighbor as yourself”

Go and do likewise, oh Samaritan! For many lie like you beaten upon the highway of life.