The Good Samaritan

It's kind of silly for me to preach on the gospel lesson this morning.  Everyone knows the story of the Good Samaritan.  It's one of the first Sunday school lessons we learned, and even people who have never entered a church in their lives are familiar with the story.  Being a Good Samaritan is a cliche in our language.  But I can't just get up, tell everybody to think about the story for a while, and then sit down, no matter how much you wish I would.  That's against the rules.  I have to preach.  So, hopefully, if I ruminate enough on this well-known story this morning, we can find something new in it.

A scribe, one of those experts and interpreters of the Law of Moses upon which Jewish society depended, came to Jesus to check him out.  "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" he asked.  In response, Jesus asked him a question, "What does it say in the Law?"  You already know the answer, Jesus told him.

Indeed, he did.  The scribe responded, "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 you shall love your neighbor as yourself."  It was one of the tenets of Judaism that these passages from Deuteronomy and Leviticus be kept in small boxes and tied onto a devout Jew's arm when he prayed. But then the scribe, to make sure he understood the full implication of the passage asked Jesus, "and who is my neighbor?"  In response, Jesus tells this well-known story.

A man was on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho when he was jumped by a band of robbers, beaten, and left for dead.  This was not a surprising happenstance.  The road from Jerusalem to Jericho was about 20 miles long, but it dropped over 3,000 feet in altitude as it approached the Dead Sea, so it was a winding, torturous path, full of blind curves which lent themselves to ambushes.  As late as the 1930s, it was known to be inhabited by brigands and bandits.  So if you were traveling with goods or valuables you traveled the road in large, protected caravans.  If you traveled by yourself, you were literally asking for what you got.

In Jesus' parable, the first two people who come upon the scene of the robbery are a priest and a Levite.  Both of them see the body of the traveler at the side of the road, and both of them rush on about their business.  Why?  How can they ignore the plight of this man, and leave him lying at the side of the road? 

For the priest, ironically, it was because he was a religious person.  Under Jewish temple law, if he had stopped and touched the victim, and the victim was already dead, the priest would be ritually defiled for seven days, and would be unable to serve in the temple.  In a bizarre twist of the meaning of religion, the priest's devotion to God prohibited him from helping a person in danger of losing his life.

The Levite was also a religious figure, although a layperson.  Being a Levite, he was a descendent of Aaron, and by birth had inherited certain religious responsibilities.  You could think of Levites as lay readers, if you need a modern equivalent.  But according to one commentary I read, the motivation for the Levite to pass by on the other side was not religious.  William Barclay cites the habit of bandits to use decoys.  One of them would pretend to be injured, and when an unsuspecting traveler stopped to render aid, the others would rush upon him.  Barclay contends that it was fear, concern for his own welfare that caused the Levite to pass by on the other side.

So there are three reasons this story identifies to justify passing by on the other side.  Religious beliefs, fear for ourselves, and something that I just briefly mentioned, the certainty that the traveler brought his plight upon himself.  He was in a place he shouldn't have been, doing what he shouldn't do.  He got himself into this situation; he deserved what happened to him.

At this point, how many of you have caught on that I'm going to talk about AIDS this morning?

This last month, UNAIDS, the organization established by the United Nations' to help combat the AIDS pandemic, marked the twentieth anniversary of the first reported cases with a warning that the AIDS pandemic was just in its early stages.  Just in its early stages after having infected 58 million people worldwide with HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, and after killing 22 million of them with full blown AIDS.

The pandemic is particularly devastating in Africa, with over 25 million sufferers.  In our companion diocese of Swaziland, over twenty-five percent of the adult population is HIV positive, and forty percent of expectant mothers are going to pass HIV on to their newborns.

The one thing that kept coming back into my mind as I read and meditated on the Gospel lesson this week was the plight of those in our world who are HIV positive, and those suffering from full blown AIDS, and the church's response or lack of response to their plight.  There are all kinds of applications to today's gospel, the plight of the poor and our willingness to respond, the victims of crime and our willingness to get involved, even the plight of those suffering from diseases that don't get as much attention as AIDS.  Yet AIDS kept coming back to my mind, because it is still so divisive, after all this time of living with it.

The Church, and that means you and I for we are the church, has been quite ready to ignore AIDS victims and pass by on the other side, because like the priest in the story of the Good Samaritan, our religious beliefs have inhibited our response to the victims. 

Our church has been torn by the issue of the ordination of gay men and women.  Many feel homosexuality is morally wrong, and in the beginning most AIDS victims were homosexuals.  Even worse, some religious leaders proclaimed that AIDS was the wrath of God descending on gay society as it had on Sodom and Gomorrah.

Perhaps even stronger than our religious beliefs, fear for ourselves has inhibited our response to AIDS, and, like the Levite in the story, justified our passing by on the other side of the road.  AIDS has become to our society what leprosy was to the society of Jesus.  AIDS victims are shunned and driven out of our lives for fear of somehow contracting the contagion.  Even within the Church there have been discussions about the wisdom of everyone drinking from the same chalice, and people have deprived themselves of the Blood of Christ from fear of contracting something from their neighbor.

Finally, some of us feel that AIDS victims deserve what they get.  We all feel compassion for the "innocent" victims of AIDS, the babies who contract it from their mothers, and those who contracted it from blood transfusions.  But what about the homosexuals?  What about heterosexuals, who contracted the HIV through casual, unprotected sex.  What about the drug addicts who contracted HIV from contaminated needles?  Are those who contracted the disease through their own actions any less the victims of the disease?

"And who is my neighbor?" the scribe asked Jesus.

Jesus' answer was a shocking one.  "But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity."  Jesus makes the good guy of the story a Samaritan.  Samaritans were the inhabitants of the old northern kingdom of Israel, who, unlike the inhabitants of the kingdom of Judah, did not keep to the Hebrew faith uncorrupted.  They intermingled with the gentiles around them, and became quasi-pagans.  Indeed, by Jesus' time, the word Samaritan was being used to describe Jews who were heretics and breakers of the ceremonial laws.  At one point Jesus himself was called a Samaritan by his critics.  One commentator said a modern storyteller, wishing to elicit the same response from an Episcopal congregation, would make the good guy of this story a Jehovah's Witness!

Then Jesus asks the scribe, "Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?"  Even then, the scribe could not bring himself to say the Samaritan, he responds, "The one who showed him mercy."

Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

And he says the same thing to us. "Go and do likewise."  Our compassion as Christians, our love of our neighbor, is not to be limited to those who conform to our religious beliefs.  Our compassion is not to be constrained by concerns for our own welfare.  And our compassion is not to be limited to the innocent victims, but to all victims.

Every other month, a number of you serve at the community meal site sponsored by Churches United, feeding those who come to eat there.  As they go through the line the same amount of food is ladled onto each plate.  They aren't asked how they came to be there, whether it was bad luck or laziness on their part.  No attempt is made to determine who is more needy than who, or even if those coming through the line are needy at all.  Everyone is there for a meal, and everyone is fed.  That is our model of Christian compassion, the model of Christ himself. 

Earlier I said that HIV/AIDS was the modern leprosy.  Jesus gave us the model for how to deal with this disease, as he gave the model for everything we do.  Jesus hated leprosy, but he loved lepers.  He loved them so much, he healed every one that came to him.  And he tells us go and do likewise.

Finally, I cannot but realize that this is probably the last time I will talk to you from this pulpit.  At the vestry meeting last week, Lynne invited me to share my perceptions of the parish and my advice to it.  That invitation resulted in a convoluted monologue the meant little and satisfied few.  If I were given the opportunity of doing it again, I would just quote from today's gospel lesson.  My advice you all is "to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and to love your neighbor as yourself."

Amen.