There’s something we say every time we find ourselves repeating an unpleasant experience. Whenever you see yourself about to get into the same trouble you’ve already been in, you say, “I don’t want to go down that road again.” For example:
Some fellow comes to your door and says, “We’ve been paving driveways in the neighborhood, and we have just enough asphalt left for one more. I notice yours needs it. I can give you a bargain price if you’ll agree to do this right now.” You look at the cracks and crevices and you agree; you fork over your money, he promises to be right back, and you never see him again. The next time someone solicits you for business and wants money up front, what do you say? “I don’t want to go down that road again.”
Your son asks you for the car for Friday night, and you agree. On Saturday morning you go out to use it and you discover that it has been driven a hundred miles, there isn’t any gasoline in it, and along the entire right side there is a long, deep scratch. That night, your daughter wraps her soft arms around your neck and coos in your ear, “Daddy, can I use the car tonight?” You know what happened Friday night was not her fault; you also know that you can very seldom resist her winning ways; but because of what you have just been through, can you guess what you are going to end up saying? “I don’t want to go down that road again.”
Every time we have an unpleasant experience, we get skittish and we want to avoid it at all costs. We just don’t want to go down that road again.
I
Some of us feel that very same thing when it comes to talking about race and the life of the church. We’ve come such a long way; we’ve settled so many things; we’re doing so well. Why get into that again? And in the past, when we’ve done so, it seems like we have mixed up an explosive batch of stuff. When anybody has preached about or talked about race, it seemed as though the recipe included a cup of hostility, a handful of suspicion, a pinch of self-hatred, and a smidgen of guilt. Why stir that boiling pot again? Many of us will quickly say, “I don’t want to go down that road again.”
I can sympathize with that. I agree. There are lots of dead-end roads I don’t want to travel any more.
a
I don’t want to travel the road of separation, where we assume that black folks and white folks and whatever other folks will go their own ways. I think we’ve settled that one in this church. I think we’ve learned to value differences. “I don’t want to go down that road again.” That road leads to the old city of segregation. No, no, no.
I don’t want to travel the road of repression, where one person or one group thinks they have the right way, and the others don’t. I don’t want us to go back to the place where one style, one spirituality, one set of preferences, so dominate the situation that others are not cherished. I think we are working on that one in our church. We may not have it settled, but we are working on it, and “I don’t want to go down that road again.” That road leads to the tired old city of snobbery. No, and no again.
b
But there is a road down which we need to travel on this Martin Luther King Sunday. There is a path we need to travel one more time. It’s the Jericho Road, the road where people get hurt and where others are called to respond to their hurt. The Jericho Road, where there is pain, where you and I need to walk again.
In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, this nation was caught up in the struggle for human dignity. We know it as the civil rights struggle, and its standard-bearer was a peerless preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King won the respect of a vast number of people of all races as he led that fight.
But in the middle 1960’s he saw something else; he expanded his message. It did not sit well with a lot of people. Dr. King saw that it wasn’t just incivility that hurt people. It was social structures. It was economic realities. Dr. King recognized that if you desegregated the schools and you opened up lunch counters and you allowed people to live in neighborhoods of their own choosing, but you did nothing else, they would still be hurting. They would hurt because they didn’t have good jobs. They didn’t have enough educational resources. Dr. King saw that people, white and black and brown and yellow, whoever they were, people were being bled by many things. So he turned against the Vietnam War. He began to speak out against the War because it was taking resources away from people.. Do you remember that, those who go back that far? I was a young adult who considered myself liberal and committed to civil rights, but I didn’t understand why he made that shift. I didn’t understand why he went on to another agenda. I didn’t see what he saw: that people were hurting out there, and that something needed to be done to heal those hurts and to help them stand on their own feet. I didn’t see then, as he did, that racism was not just a matter of the heart alone; it is also in the system. It is in the way our society was organized. I didn’t see, as he did, that it’s one thing to say, “Let’s be nice to everybody.”, but another thing altogether to agree that we need to spend something to help others move on. I didn’t see, as he saw, that we have to walk down the Jericho Road, where people hurt, and do some things out there.
II
It may be this morning that you and I feel like saying, “I don’t want to go down that road again.” And there are some dead ends we don’t need to travel. But, I tell you, we do have to go down the Jericho Road again in 1998. We do have to go out there where people get hurt. Let’s think about that together.
a
We need to go down that Jericho Road again, and this time we need to acknowledge that every human hurt is both a spiritual one and a physical one. We need to go down the Jericho Road, where people get hurt, and this time we need to help the whole person.
If you look at the religious people in this parable, the priest and the Levite, they hurried on and passed by on the other side of the road. They could not stop their religious thing long enough to look at a real person and provide whatever was needed. Now I’m sure that when they got to their spiritual appointment, they included the victim in their prayers. But our problem is that we seem to want to deal only with a part of the human condition and not all of it.
Some religious people are all into the warm fuzzy thing. They want to pray for others and share an evangelistic witness, but as for getting involved with lives or helping them find work or digging around for clothes and shelter, they don’t want to do that. That’s allegedly not spiritual. Other people let the pendulum swing all the way over the other way, and leave out the spiritual side. Other people want to feed and clothe and house and do all the physical things, but then fail to share a witness, fail to point to God’s redeeming love. Next time we go down the Jericho Road to where people hurt, let’s deal with the whole person.
Not long ago I visited a woman who was very ill. She had been dealing with her illness for a long time. She was at last getting the medical help she needed, but I suspected that there was more than that. And sure enough, as I talked with her and probed, I found out that her need had to do not only with a medical condition, but also a family relationship, a spiritual void. She needed to be helped as a whole person.
Just this week I visited a man who needed some material help. I found what he needed and I took it to him. But when I got there I discovered that he wanted more. He wanted to talk about his relationship to the Lord. He wanted me to pray with him. He wanted to be helped as a whole person.
The Good Samaritan bound up the victim’s wounds and followed through with compassion. I do want to go down the Jericho Road again, but this time I want to see us give people all they need. I do want to go down the Jericho Road, where people hurt, but I want us to help heal their bodies and salve their spirits. The whole person.
b
Second, we need to go down that Jericho Road again, and this time we need to acknowledge that people who hurt, are our people, not somebody else’s people. They are our neighbors, our brothers and our sisters, not strangers. When people hurt, down that Jericho Road, we’ll be way off the mark if we just figure that somebody else, like they are, will help. Christ calls us to be neighbors, brothers and sisters, not just to the black race or the white race, but to the human race. We need to go down that Jericho Road and see everyone as our neighbor.
I know that it has become fashionable to count up the number of young black men in trouble and to cry out for black male role models. And yes, I too want to see that. But none of us can get off the hook just because we don’t fit into that category. What if the Samaritan had said, “Let the Jew do it?” How long before the politically correct person would have come along? I know that it is even more fashionable to deny parents who want to adopt children access to children of other racial backgrounds. One of my friends even calls that cultural genocide. Well, I’m sorry, but out there on that Jericho Road, where people lie wounded and bleeding and ready to die, I don’t know that we can afford the luxury of waiting for just the right set of circumstances. If you or I have something a child needs, then let’s provide it. Let’s be there! I thought the best news story of the week, in one sense, was the story of the little girl with the chicken-pox, who was snatched, over in Virginia. Did you catch the outcome? A little Hispanic girl was rescued by a Korean restaurant cook! Now what if he had said, “not my kind of people, let them look out for themselves!”
No, the Samaritan saw a need and he met it. Didn’t matter who needed it. I do want to go back down that Jericho Road, where people hurt, and this time I want to realize that anybody’s problem is my problem.
c
Once again, we need to go down that Jericho Road, and this time we need to devote some real, substantial resources to human beings and their need. We need to go down that Jericho Road, free from encumbrances, so that we can give thorough attention and spend the resources it takes to help people.
Notice the inconveniences to the Samaritan. He dropped his plans, he scrubbed his itinerary, he stopped in his tracks to attend to the victim, then put him on his own beast and took him to an inn, stayed with the thing until the other fellow was on track. He spent time. If we spend all our time on this side of the road, in the church building, we’ll never devote time to the Jericho Road where people hurt. Mr. Victim, you climb out of the ditch, clean yourself up, come on over here, and we’ll put you on a church committee! No, we have to commit some real time, out there where they are.
Then the text tells us the Samaritan spent some money. His own money. Not government welfare money, but his own money. About two days’ pay in those days. Not just a dime in the tin cup, but some real money. If we spend all our money to keep up our church building and pay staff workers, we won’t have any left to use for the bandages and the first aid kits that Jericho Road people need. We really need to work on our financial priorities. We have to commit some real money to the needs of people.
And there’s more. The Samaritan even did some networking. There’s a Washington-type idea, if I ever heard one. He went out and found somebody else to help, he enlisted the innkeeper in his cause. The Samaritan knew that he needed some help. If church is nothing more than a mutual admiration society, telling each other how much love there is in this place, well, that’s nice. But love isn’t love until it reaches out to the Jericho Road. And love isn’t effective until it brings others in to help.
Folks, we’ve done a lot of things around our church, half-way. We’ve started programs, got them off to a rip-roaring beginning, but let them fall into a half-hearted routine. That won’t do. That won’t do. Not for hurting people, not for the Lord. We have to do better. We have to do more. As one of you said to me this week, it’s time we did some real ministry. It’s time we took the gospel to the streets, time we healed some hurts! It’s time to go down that Jericho Road again. I personally am absolutely committed to spending my time and my energy that way. I feel so strongly God’s call in that direction.
Once I was asked to speak to a youth group at a church in Kent Village, off of Landover Road. I’m not too familiar with that area, but I got out the map and found my road and drove right to it. The trouble was that there didn’t seem to be any church building; in fact the street number I had been given didn’t seem to exist. I had to be on the right road.. The name was right up on the post. So I went down that road again. Still no church building, still no group waiting for me. I drove around and looked at the signs one more time. Seemed to be correct. No question about it. Let me drive down this road again. Still no church building, still no group. So I drove out to the main road and asked somebody. He pointed back right to the place I had just been. I said, but I’ve been there, done that. You know the refrain: “I don’t want to go down that road again.” He said, “What’s the number of the place you want?” I gave it to him and mentioned the name of the church. Oh, he said, that part of the road is over there, on the other side of the recreation center. Go around the rec center and you’ll find it.
I did. On the other side of R and R, I found a bunch of folks needing to hear God’s word. On the other side. I’m glad I decided to go down that road one more time.
