Oh Who Are the People

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

07.14.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 10:25-37

It’s funny, how something can stick in your head forever.  Like a story.  Or a song.

Songs do it to me all the time.  By “forever,” I mean a little snippet of music can be around for decades, bopping around in your brain until you suddenly find yourself humming it for no reason other than that something out there triggered it.  Sometimes, you can’t turn it off, which for things like the entire second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh symphony is just fine.  Other times, it’s not so good.

Like, say, if you’re sitting there on the Fourth of July waiting for the fireworks, and in the back of your head is a stanza of that Katie Perry song from a couple of years back, repeating over and over and over again.   “Something Something FIIII-ER-Works, Blah blah blah blah FIIII-ER-Works.”   That’s pretty much all I can remember of that song, which doesn’t stop it, God help me.

But there are other earworms out there, older ones, and a couple of them came whistling out as I was reading through that classic and familiar passage in today’s reading from Luke’s Gospel.  I’ve known about the parable of the Good Samaritan since I was a little kid, so perhaps it’s not surprising that the music that my mind sings when I read it comes from my childhood.

I hear Mr. Rogers and his soft staccato Ned Flanders voice, offering up that invitation, “Won’t. You. Be. Myneighbor.”

But I mostly heard a song from Sesame Street, back when that place was a place of life and silliness and wonder, and less obviously run by a committee of experts on early childhood behavior.  “Who are the people in your neighborhood,” it went, “in your neighborhood, in your neighborhood.”  I remember it seeming like such a simple song, and such a simple question, but it seems it’s a question that we have a harder and harder time answering these days.

Knowing neighbors is increasingly something Americans don’t do well.  In our scurrying scattered busyness, we often just don’t know one another.  Those essential bonds of community seem, in many places, to be fundamentally diminished.  A recent study by the Pew Research Center found that forty three percent of American adults know most or all of their neighbors.  But most of us now don’t.  Of the fifty-seven percent who don’t, twenty-eight percent of Americans don’t know a single one of the people who live around them.

And in that growing absence, that mutual isolation, we’re just don’t know one another.  In a culture in which profit-driven media stoke our fears to draw our attention, and in which a majority of us live surrounded not by neighbors but by strangers, our responses to those around us are increasingly governed by fear.  We just don’t know those around us.  And if we do, our reactions are ruled by what we have been taught.

That’s not quite the question being asked by the man in conversation with Jesus this morning as we hear the parable of the Good Samaritan.  This story is one of those earworm Jesus stories that sticks around in in your brain once you’ve heard it, and if we were raised in and around the church, we likely heard it waaay back when we were children.  It’s one of those parts of Christian storytelling that’s become such a part of Western Culture that we all take “Good Samaritan” as almost one word.  A Good Samaritan is someone who stops and gets you out of that snow bank.  Or one who stops and sits with you until the ambulance arrives.  It’s just become shorthand for helper.

The man asking the question of Jesus wants more than just a quick lookup in the neighborhood directory.  

When he says, “Who is my neighbor,” he’s not clueless about the folks who come and go as shadows in the cars around him.  Back in first century Judah, social isolation wasn’t the issue for most human beings.  Everyone in first century Judah knew their place, knew where they were expected to be in the social hierarchy.  He’s asking another question, a harder one.

His question, which stirs Jesus to tell the story of the Good Samaritan, only occurs in Luke’s Gospel.  Each of of the three synoptic Gospels contains the opening portion, in which someone confronts Jesus with a question about what’s the most important thing we can be doing.   In Matthew 22 and Mark 12, a scribe or a lawyer rises.  This isn’t someone specializing in corporate law, or what we’d think of as a lawyer today.  It’s someone who studies and is an expert in the Torah.  This religious scholar asks Jesus about the most important commandment.  In each case, Jesus replies with some variant on what we heard in verse 27:  “You shall 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 your neighbor as yourself.”

In Luke’s version of the story, the question and answer session is flipped.  Though the scholar brings the first question, it is Jesus who asks the question about what is written in the law, and the lawyer who answers, and Jesus who answers him correctly.

But that’s not enough.  This is a debate, and in a debate, there’s always going to be reluctance on the part of the individual who’s just been schooled to actually back off and admit it.

Jesus has just successfully turned this man’s attempt to take him down into an affirmation, and so the religious scholar makes one additional effort.  “Love your neighbor as yourself,” sure.  Jesus has given him three words to parse out.  He could ask what Jesus means by love, but that one’s too big. But the neighbor question?  That has promise as a line of attack.

That’s not a trivial question.  In a culture where each and every individual had their place in the pecking order, answering that question wasn’t as easy as just listing off the names of those who lived right around you.

The now-familiar story Jesus spins out follows a traditional pattern.  There’s a man, traveling the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, a notoriously steep and winding road that was known as dangerous.  He’s set upon and left for dead by bandits, and then we get three passersby.  There’s a priest, then a Levite, then...finally...the incongruous Samaritan, who stops and provides not just help, but significant time and support.

The Samaritan, of course, was the one that every Judean had been trained to carefully hate their whole lives long.  They were the enemy, the ignorant and faithless folk to the North. They talked funny and didn’t worship at the temple in Jerusalem the way they should.  The dislike of Samaritans was a deeply ingrained bias, one that ran back to the time the Northern Kingdom of Israel...which became the area known as Samaria...separated from the Southern Kingdom of Judah.  That happened in the year 930 BCE, meaning it went back nearly a thousand years.

But as Jesus tells this story, it is that person, that complete stranger, that one who is thought of as an enemy, who becomes the one who acts in accordance with the requirement for eternal life. 

There are a hundred ways to play out this story, and echo it across our culture.   The one that seems most pointed this morning is our connectedness to one another, and our tendency to allow our fears to govern us.

From Deland, Florida, there came the story this week of a woman who had been sexually assaulted, who arrived at a doorstep seeking help.  The couple that owned the home were terrified that it might be a setup, and that they might be attacked if they opened the door.  They did call 911, but left the woman on the doorstep and kept the door firmly closed.

Their response was totally comprehensible, and local police acknowledged that they had acted in a way that made sense.  “Fear dictates our response” now, said a police spokesman.

Just as it did in that other newsmess from Florida, tragic media-circus case that’s been dominating the news this last week.  However you responded to the difficult verdict in the Zimmerman trial last night, there is no question that what happened was tragic, unnecessary, and driven by fear.  When the stranger who is different can only be seen through the eyes of fear and bias, tragedy is inescapable.

In this peculiar time, when we can instantly know about anything and everything and yet not even know those around us, what Jesus challenges us to consider is that to inherit the life he promised, we have to be able to step beyond our fear of the other, and our biases about the other, and to see ourselves as able to act in love with boldness.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN