OUTLINE
OPENING ILLUSTRATION – MR. ROGERS
THE PARABLE OF THE GOOD SAMARITAN (LUKE 10:25-37)
IMPLICATIONS FOR US:
Being a good Samaritan in contemporary times means:
Be willing to be inconvenienced
Be willing to take a risk
Be willing to bear some cost
Don’t ask “Who is my neighbor,” rather am ask: "I being neighborly to the person who God has placed in my path?"
Good morning neighbors. I wanted to wear a cardigan sweater, but I couldn’t locate one. Glad to have you all here. If you have your Bibles, you will want to open up to Luke 10:25. How many of you know Mister Rogers or have heard of Mister Rogers? Well, you should because Mister Rogers is kind of a cultural icon here in Pittsburgh. In fact, there is a huge statue of Mister Rogers down there at the waterfront. What you may or may not know is that Mister Rogers is a native of Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of Latrobe High School. Also, I learned recently that Fred Rogers was actually a war hero. He was involved in some sort of a rescue in the war. You may or may not know that Mister Rogers also was an ordained minister with the Presbyterian Church. He attended Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, so he was a minister. But I think what Mister Rogers is most known for is his television show “Mister Rogers Neighborhood”. I guess that show lasted over 30 years from 1968-2001 and over 800 episodes. The thing about Mister Rogers neighborhood, as you know by the song, is that it was always a beautiful day in the neighborhood. No matter how your day was going, Mister Rogers would come in with that big smile, and he would request that you would be his neighbor. The thing that Mister Rogers was trying to teach children in the 20th century was the exact same thing that Jesus Christ was trying to teach his disciples in the very 1st century; it was how to be a good neighbor. So we are going to read through this Good Samaritan passage starting with Luke 10:25 and reading all the way down through verse 37. (Scripture read here.)
The story of the Good Samaritan is actually a parable. It is considered a kingdom parable. The parable is something we know as simply an earthly story with some sort of a heavenly meaning, heavenly implications. This story is considered a kingdom parable because really it speaks of life in the kingdom. When Jesus came, he came to inaugurate the coming Kingdom of God. I don’t have time to get into the background of what it means to be living in the kingdom of God, but one thing we do know is that when Jesus spoke of the kingdom, he was introducing a radical message to the people. He was introducing a radical way of thinking, a radical way of behaving, and a radical way of acting, and a radical way of doing religion, of doing spirituality. That is the situation that we have here today in this particular passage. What we have is we have Jesus sitting around doing what he does best, sitting around teaching people. What happened and what so often happened was that somebody would come up and try to challenge the words that Jesus was saying. In this case, it was an expert of the law. When we are talking about the law, we are talking about what we would know as the first five books of the Bible. An expert being someone that knows that portion inside and out, every single verse, and can also interpret, translate, and can apply that particular law to the various cases that would happen around the Jewish community. In this situation, he comes up to him and asks Jesus just a simple question what must I do to inherit eternal life? He simply replies what is written in the law? How do you read it? In other words, you are the expert in law. Don’t ask me. Why don’t you tell me how you see it? Then he goes on and the expert in the law starts by quoting a section from the Old Testament, the Book of Deuteronomy, and he says what you need to do is love the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind. Just to show that he knows what he is talking about, he then adds another tag on to it. A verse in Leviticus, another book of the Old Testament, and he says and you need to love your neighbor as yourself. At that point, Jesus is saying you did a very good job and go and do likewise. Go and practice this. But the man didn’t leave well enough alone. When Jesus gives you his time and he responds to a question, oftentimes what he wants to do is when he is feeling like he is being tested or he is being set up, he wants to go back and kind of give it to the guy. The guy didn’t leave well enough alone, and he basically said to Jesus, he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus who is my neighbor. Who is my neighbor? This is where it is subject to our interpretation. What is believed is happening here is that the teacher of the law was feeling pretty good about his knowledge, feeling pretty good about the fact that he was being an expert, and also probably feeling like he really knew how to apply the law to his life. When he says who is my neighbor, what he is hoping he is going to get from Jesus is maybe a short laundry list of the things that he should be doing. Taking care of the poor, taking care of the widows, taking care of the orphans, taking care of the people in the Jewish community.
Instead of doing that, what does Jesus do? Jesus gives the man a story. As I said before, it is a parable, so it is not 100% true. It is not a true story. Although there are true elements in the story. The reality is that this road from Jerusalem down to the town of Jericho was about 17 miles long and it would be traveled quite a bit back and forth by various people. It was a rugged road. It was a rough road. It was unpaved roads. It was very risk to travel that at night. In fact, there would be robbers and bandits that would hang out in caves or around corners or whatever that would come out and attack people and rob them. That is the situation that is happening in this particular story. This gentleman is walking back from Jerusalem down to Jericho and suddenly a band of robbers comes upon that person, robs him, strips him of his clothes, and leaves him there half dead.
As the story goes on to say then you had a priest come by and see him and decided to walk on by. Then subsequently a Levite would come by and instead of stopping to help, he too walked on by. A little bit of background on this idea of a priest and Levite. You have to remember that this huge temple in Jerusalem was basically manned by the priest and the Levites. The priests were the ones that were in charge of basically making the sacrifices at the altar. In many ways we get the term priest that we still use today from that imagery back then. Not only were there priests, there were Levites. Levites were really more the administrators of the temple. They were making sure everything was running properly. Making sure the supplies were there. Making sure that things are cleaned up and that sort of thing. They were the Levites. The bottom line is both of those people were supposed to be holy. They were supposed to be pure. Most importantly, they were the ones that were in many ways the dispensers of God’s grace. They were the ones that were given the awesome responsibility to take the law that God gave to Moses and be able to interpret that law to give life to people. To help people grow in their relationship with God. But we know that they abused their responsibility. They became so focused on the letter of the law that they missed the meaning behind it. They were very good about living in a legalistic way. Living in a way that kept them inside the temple. They were very cautious about making sure that they followed certain laws. One of the laws that they followed was a law of ritual purity. It was a ritual of cleanliness which means that they were not supposed to touch anything that might defile them. That would include people that were sick, diseased, and it particularly would include people that had died. In fact, it was believed that if a priest was walking along and the priests shadow was to go over a corpse that would make the priest richly unclean. They were very particular about following these laws of purity.
So when you think about the story, getting back to the story, these guys were walking by and it makes sense actually that they were going to walk by. They didn’t want anything to do with this man. They didn’t know if he was diseased. They didn’t know if he was sick. They didn’t even know if he was dead. At about that point, the expert of the law is listening to this story and he too is part of this religious elite because he is the one that interprets the law, and I think he is beginning to get the sense that Jesus is about to bring the hammer down. Jesus is about to make an example of these guys. Instead of doing that, he decides he is going to introduce a new character into the situation. A guy that they would normally consider bad, which is a Samaritan. So the Samaritan comes into the picture and, unlike the priest and the Levite who pass him by, the Samaritan actually stops. This would just be unheard of in that day because the Samaritans were thought to be an unclean and impure race. They were not thought highly of at all by the Jewish people because they were considered kind of a half-breed. The Jewish people had been taken away into Assyria and they had come back, and they had repopulated the area of Samaria and also had relationships with the foreigners so they created kind of this inbreed, half Jewish and half pagan. Not only that, they decided to set up their own competing temple system in the area known as Mount Gerizim. They set up their own competing temple. So the Jewish people couldn’t stand the Samaritans. They would walk on by. They would always do everything they can to avoid their country. For Jesus to introduce this person and make him look good compared to the priest and the Levite, well, that would be unheard of. Because in the Jewish mind there is no such thing as a Good Samaritan. In modern day language it would be like coupling the words good terrorist together. Or a good Browns fan or something like that. It just doesn’t happen. I repent of that because I will hear it tonight! They were thought not very highly of. They were not liked. It was very odd that yes the priest and the Levite passed by but this no good Samaritan stops by and he helps. Not only does he help. He goes the extra mile. He takes the person up. He bandages his wounds. He puts wine and oil on the wounds. I guess the wine with the alcohol content would disinfect it and the oil would promote some healing. He bandaged him up and takes him off to this inn and gets to the inn and spends the night there with him, caring for him. The next day, he gets up and offers the innkeeper some money. He says when I come back, if you still have any more expenses, I am going to cover it for you. I am going to take it out of my own pocket. You charge it to my account. It is about this time the expert in the law is probably standing there with his mouth open saying he can’t believe what is going on here. What Jesus ends up doing is posing the question back to this man. He says “Which of these three do you think was the neighbor to the man who fell to the hands of the robbers? The expert in the law replied ‘The one who had mercy on him.’ Jesus told him ‘Go and do likewise’.” It is ironic that this guy can’t even mention the name Samaritan. He just says the one who showed mercy. He can’t even let it come out of his mouth. Really what is kind of interesting about this whole section here is, if you look back, I think it is verse 29, the expert of the law asked the question who is my neighbor. Jesus didn’t answer the question who is my neighbor. He just said be neighborly like this person. Don’t be like the priests and the Levites who have kept their religion confined to the temple who have everything down to a science but yet have failed to take the religion to the street. Instead, be like the Samaritan even though the Samaritan is impure in your mind, be like him because he was willing to take his religion out to the street.
As an interesting side note when you think about this idea of oil and wine, oil and wine were the basic staples of the temple system. They were symbolic of life. They were symbolic of purity. They were symbolic in many ways of the Holy Spirit. By Jesus inserting these two little elements into the story, those priests and Levites and the teacher of the law, they would know what he is talking about. He is saying what this man has done is he has taken the religion that was confined to the temple with all the sacraments, with all the ritualistic things, and has taken it out to the street. He is demonstrating it by the fact that he stopped and showed God’s love and grace to this person on the side of the road. That is pretty profound. I guarantee that they understood what he was talking about.
As we think about it today, what are the implications for us today? For Christians here in the 21st century what are the implications for us? The first is that to really be neighborly as a Christian is neighborly, we have to be willing to be inconvenienced. If we truly want to be neighborly as a Christian is neighborly, we have to learn how to be inconvenienced. I was trying to think of an illustration and this came to me. About ten years ago, I was living in Johnson City, TN with my two children, and we were coming to an intersection. There was a homeless man there asking for money, and I was in one of those moods where I was in a hurry to get somewhere and the light turned green, so I just go. I don’t bother to give the guy money. I just look straight ahead. We get almost all the way through the intersection, and my daughter Natalie says daddy we’ve got some loose change in the ashtray, why don’t we just give it to the man? By that time, I am a good distance away from the man but yet I’m feeling okay if my daughter wants to be a neighbor, who am I to deny that. So sure enough, I had to drive about a quarter mile and find a place where I could turn around. I turned around and came back and by the time I got back the guy had walked and moved his position to another street. But I just felt I had to find this guy. About ten minutes later, I find him to give him the $1.50 out of the ashtray. It goes back to the idea that sometimes to be neighborly you have to be inconvenienced. It is part of it.
Not only do we have to learn to be inconvenienced, we have to learn that we have to be willing to take a risk. You see, this man who stopped and got off his donkey, he was taking a risk because in that particular situation it could have been a set up. That the man was going to rob the Samaritan. That he was just lying there pretending he was dead and he really wasn’t dead. He was laying there waiting for him to come and then was going to turn around and rob him. The reality is in today’s world that is a risk for us. If we go out of our way to be kind to a stranger, that stranger may turn around and possibly assault us or possibly even kill us. So we are cautious about that. It may not even be something as drastic as that as physical violence. It could be the fear that this person is going to scam us. Nowadays, everybody is trying to scam people out of their money so Christians are hesitant to be neighborly out there. I was thinking about another illustration and what came to mind was the whole turkey giveaway we are going to do today. Some of you know we are going to give away 250 frozen turkeys at 4 o’clock over at the YMCA community center. We have done this now for six years or so. That is a good thing but the first couple years when we gave those turkeys away, we had to stop and think about some things. What we realized was some people were kind of taking advantage of the situation. Some people were going through the lines more than once. Some people that might have five people in their family were making sure that all five were in line and would get five turkeys even though they really only needed one. Some people were going through the line and getting the turkey so they could take it back to Kuhn’s and get the $10 so they could go out and buy cigarettes or whatever. So we began to ask ourselves is this something we need to be concerned about, and the answer was really no. It’s not our responsibility to sit there and try and figure out who is going to scam us and who is not. Our responsibility is to simply be a neighbor to the people that are out there. That is all we have to do. That person has to account to God. Our job is just to be neighborly to the people in our environment. We have to learn that to be a good Christian neighbor we have to take risk out there.
Another thing we have to remember is that sometimes to be a neighbor it can be very expensive. As I have implied, a neighbor is not isolated to your next-door neighbor. Yes, you should start there, but really neighbors could be locally, regionally, even globally. It can be very expensive to travel overseas and to help out the neighbors over in a third world country. Many of you know Graham and Marilyn Johnstone. They are the most humble and loyal servants of God that you have ever known. Some of you don’t even know that Dr. Graham Johnstone is probably one of the most well-known and respected orthopaedic surgeons in Pittsburgh. He doesn’t even expect you to call him doctor. He is a very humble man. Every year they go over to Africa under their own expense and spend a month doing surgeries, about 200 surgeries, to the people over there who would have no other means of getting it done. It’s expensive. I guarantee they are shelling out some money. I guarantee it is costing them some money. So we not only need to be inconvenienced and take risks, but sometimes we have to have a financial cost or a time cost.
Really, I think the most important thing to remember about this story is in order to truly be a Christian neighbor, we have to quit asking the question who is my neighbor. That is what got the expert of the law in trouble. Once we ask the question who is my neighbor, then we are asking another question who is not my neighbor. We are setting up categories. That is a very difficult thing because what we are saying is this person is deserving and that person is not. To be honest, we are not in a place to where we can make those kinds of decisions. We are not. Our minds and our emotions are clouded by all sorts of things that may influence whether or not we think someone is deserving. I will give you a couple examples. The businessman in New Jersey who has lost power in his business and he employs five people but can’t get the lights back on so he is going to lay off five people. Is he more deserving than the single mom who can’t pay her electric bill because her ex has not sent the support check? Which one is more deserving? It depends on who you ask to be honest. Think about another one. Is the guy down there on the Roberto Clemente Bridge that has the cup with the change, is he more deserving than a corporate executive that got laid off at his job a year ago and cannot afford his $2,000 a month mortgage? Which one is more deserving? Is the child who is dying of AIDS in Africa more deserving than the man who is dying of AIDS in Pittsburgh? Is the schizophrenic out there in the community who cannot afford to go to the doctor more deserving than the high school girl who can’t afford to buy the prom dress for the prom? Which one is more deserving? It really depends on who you ask because, like I said, we are distorted in our view. We cannot be objective about it because we are filtering it through lenses that include all sorts of stuff. The most common filter is the filter of politics. If this person is this way or this person is this way. We are making all sorts of judgment calls depending on what side of politics we sit on. It has to do with fears. What are we afraid of? What are the past experiences we have had with certain people? Maybe things we have experienced ourselves those are all influencing whether or not we think this person is or is not deserving. The problem with that is when we do that we cut off the big flow valve of God’s grace that wants to come down and be poured out to his entire creation. Do you get that? So the question that we ask is not who is my neighbor. The question we ask is am I, meaning all of us, are we being neighborly to the people that have been placed in our path? I say all that knowing that it is very difficult in this world. I also know that there are limited resources. We have to make decisions. We have to get together. We have to pray individually. We have to pray collectively before we start handing out money and that sort of thing. We have to have wisdom, we have to have the sermon, but the most important thing is that we are willing to take off our prejudices and take off our glasses and begin to see people as all part of God’s creation and every single one of them deserving of God’s grace no matter what economic strata, no matter what political strata he comes from.
It really goes back to the idea, thinking back to the story, of a question of spirituality or religion or whatever. I would make the case, and I think Jesus is making the case, that if you don’t occasionally as a Christian or as a church allow yourself to be inconvenienced in order to be neighborly, if you as a church or an individual don’t allow yourself to take a risk for your neighbor, if you as a church don’t allow yourself to maybe shell out some money as an individual or as a church to help a neighbor in need, then really you have to begin to question which side of the fence you are on. Are you more like the priest and the Levite? Or are you more like the Samaritan? I will even take it to a different level. In modern times, think about it as if we limit our neighborliness to the body of Christ between the four walls and we never take it out into the world, we are less Christian or less religious than some of the people that we despise. I will even really hit it a little bit harder home. If you are a Republican and you never roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty and go down and help somewhere, help the homeless, help the oppressed, you are less of a Christian than the Democrats who do. Now if you are a Democrat and you have this attitude where you will never help anybody above a certain level of income because they are part of the 1%, then you are less of a Christian than the Republicans that do. If you are a member of this Christian church and you have an attitude that you are not going to go out there and help local missions or global missions because you just don’t feel like it, then you are less of a Christian than the Baptists and the Lutherans and even the Catholics that do because they are out there doing it. Those are very strong words. Before you start sending me the emails and filling out the blue cards, I am not advocating a work-based salvation. But I am advocating a salvation that works. Do you understand what I am saying? We don’t work to gain our salvation. We work because we have our salvation. We work because we understand that the grace of God through Jesus Christ has been poured out from above and that everybody in this room that has received Christ as Lord has been a recipient of that grace. Ephesians 2:8 “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith-“ It goes on to say we are God’s workmanship created to do good works because that is what we are called to do. It doesn’t say just to certain people. We have the awesome privilege and responsibility to take that grace, take that valve of grace that is coming down and pour it out and allow it to keep flowing out to the world regardless of who it is. That is not our task to figure out. We are just supposed to do it.
In closing, when I think about Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, it was a pretty amazing show. I was thinking about it. What made that show successful? I think what made it successful was that Mister Rogers was sincere. Every kid that watched that show knew when he looked right through that camera into the TV into the living room of some kid out there and he said won’t you be my neighbor, he meant it. He really, really meant it. I suspect that if he were alive today, he would tell us that when he looked through that camera, he did not see the color of the kid’s skin. He didn’t care if it was black, white, pink, green, or whatever. He wasn’t concerned about that. He didn’t care whether you lived in the ghettos of Los Angeles or Harlem or if you lived in a mansion on the hill in Beverly Hills or in Sewickley. He didn’t give it a thought. He didn’t care whether the kid’s parents were Republican, Democrat, or Tea Party or whatever. He was not considering that. All he wanted to be was a neighbor, a good neighbor. He wanted to demonstrate that. So the kids over time began to trust him because Mister Rogers was a good neighbor. He understood that every single kid was pretty much alike. It didn’t matter where they grew up. They all had the same problems. His desire was to help to minister like the Good Samaritan to any kid in need, so he would tell the stories so a kid could trust him. When a kid is having a problem because he can’t sleep at night and has nightmares, he turns on the tube and Mister Rogers is teaching him about how you don’t have to be afraid of the dark. How when a kid is struggling with grief, the loss of a parent or a fish or whatever, he comes to that TV and he knows Mister Rogers is going to be there. He is going to be the neighbor for him. He is going to minister and he is going to teach them. He knows that if a kid is being bullied at school, he knows they can come to the TV and he can gain comfort from Mister Rogers. That is what I think made Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood such a long-lasting show because the kids love Mister Rogers. They trusted Mister Rogers. As we think about the story of the Good Samaritan again, when we come to helping out our neighbors, the question we do not ask is who is my neighbor, but really how am I being neighborly to the people that have passed my way today? Let us pray.
