Luke 10:25-37
July 15, 2007
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
We have lived in Sausalito for almost 8 years. Our neighbors on our right are Philip and her name I don’t know run a Japanese furniture import business out of their house. I don’t know their last names either but when we first moved in, Philip doubted my landscape design skills. Our neighbors on our left are Judy and Herb who own a winery and only live in the house on the weekends. I don’t know their last names either. The tenants downstairs in that house are Andrew and Rhoda who actually own the seafood restaurant at the Condor adult entertainment place on Broadway. When they come home very late at night, I suspect they have run over my bushes. The guy across the street is Hal who walks his dog and runs a wine mail-order business. I don’t know his last name. And finally the couple below us is Babette and Bill, a retired couple who seems to always be working on their house. I thought at one time that the contractor was taking advantage of them.
Do you know your neighbors when you see them? A survey discovered that three out of ten Americans don’t know their neighbors’ first and last names. Six out of ten Americans who aren’t friendly with their neighbors say it’s because they’re just too busy to create meaningful relationships. And fewer than half of Americans have borrowed something, like a cup of sugar, from one of their neighbors. Many of us live in tight urban areas surrounded by people but we don’t even know our neighbors’ names.
When we are in Chinatown, most of our neighbors are Chinese people. But do we know them as our neighbors? I haven’t the faintest idea of who live in the apartments across the street from our church. A few weeks ago, I preached about our own street lady who comes by and takes our pork buns when we have a sidewalk tea. I told you that the next time I see her; I am going to ask her what is her name. She is Mrs. Wong who lives down the other side of Waverly Place. She told me about her family but I couldn’t understand much of what she said.
Like the lawyer who asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” we tend to see our neighbors as those who are like us, with an increasingly narrow window of who is “like us.” Although we are 99% Chinese, Mrs. Wong is not like us. Most of us don’t live on Waverly Place or for that matter in Chinatown. Most of us speak English better than we speak Chinese. Most of us are educated and have jobs and can afford to buy as many pork buns as we ever want.
Research over the years demonstrates that the more we think of someone else as different from ourselves, the less likely we are willing to show compassion to that person. In one set of experiments, volunteers were asked if they would be willing to get an electrical shock in place of someone else. The catch: they could not see the potential victim but simply heard the description of him or her. What they found was that the more unlike the victim is to them selves—the more unwilling they were to come to their rescue.
The Good Samaritan
The context of this familiar parable is a lawyer asked Jesus what it would take to inherit eternal life. Jesus answers by asking him what is written in the law? The lawyer rightfully answers that one needs to love God with all of one’s heart soul, strength and mind and to love your neighbor as you would love yourself. Jesus says to the lawyer, “That’s great! Do this and you will have eternal life.” But the lawyer must not have loved his neighbors as much as he loved himself and sought to justify himself by asking Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
Jesus tells this parable with no extra information. A man was going from Jerusalem to Jericho and he fell among the thieves who beat him and robbed him and left him half dead. Now by chance a priest was traveling that same way, looked up from his prayer book only long enough to see the man in the ditch and immediately crossed the road and went on his way. A Levite, too, a helper in the Temple, was following the priest. He too passed the unfortunate man by on the far side of the Jericho Road.
Now the lawyer and all those who were listening to Jesus’ parable would have expected both the priest and the Levite to show mercy, and when they failed, they would have expected the third figure to be an Israelite who would “do the right thing.” When the third figure turned out to be a Samaritan, however—the hated enemy of the Jews—they would have found themselves in a most uncomfortable position. They wanted to see themselves in the characters that would help the wounded man because they were the Jews. But when it became clear that it was the Samaritan who did the right thing, they could only see themselves now as the victim. To make matters worse, they are hearing from Jesus that the people whom they so dislike, who would be the last people they would see as their neighbors is now the one doing the neighborly thing. They are seeing that those whom they saw as their enemies can be their good neighbors.
The point of the parable is that the lawyer cannot say what is a contradiction in terms: Good + Samaritan. In our time, this would be like a Sunni helping a wounded Shiite in war-torn Baghdad, or an Israeli stopping to help a bleeding Palestinian in Gaza or the Left Bank. A Jew being helped by a Samaritan is a contradiction in terms.
The Jews saw the Samaritans as their enemies because they were from Samaria in the Northern Kingdom of Israel that split from Judah near the end of the 10th century. The Jews denounced the Samaritans for their intermarriage with Gentiles and their rejection of Jerusalem as the center of life and faith. In other words, they were seen as “half-breeds.” They were different and being seen as different, they were ridiculed, despised. And the Jews can be justified to not call them as their neighbors.
The parable does not really teach us that one should help the neighbor; if that were Jesus’ intention, he would have made the wounded man the Samaritan. Rather, Jesus is teaching us that when it comes to God’s plan, we are not to separate insiders from outsiders. We are to “Go and do likewise” to break down the barriers that separate us—the religious barriers, the ethnic barriers, the economic barriers, the language barriers, anything that would cause us to see others as “Them” and we as “Us.” Whenever Jesus is teaching us about God’s kingdom, he is disrupting the conventional patterns of thinking and behaving.
After telling the story, Jesus asks the lawyer, “Which of these three…was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” Jesus changes the lawyer’s question. The lawyer asked, “And who is my neighbor?” But Jesus changed it to “To whom am I a neighbor?” By answering Jesus’ question the lawyer has implicitly answered his own. If the hated Samaritan acted toward the Jew as a neighbor, then the whole question of where to draw the line between neighbor and alien breaks down. In Luke’s gospel, women, Samaritans, the poor, the outcasts, sinners, Mrs. Wong who live on Waverly Place—all are welcome into the fellowship that Jesus founds. For the lawyer, the Samaritan is his neighbor.
Seeing Our Neighbors
For me who work in my home office two to three days in the week and still go outside to do my own yard work, I see my neighbors regularly.
Buried within this parable is a phrase that is used with slight variation three times as it applies to the priest, the Levite and the Samaritan: “when he saw.” When the priest and the Levite saw the injured man on the side of the road, they passed him by. When the Samaritan saw the injured man, he felt compassion, stopped, dressed his wounds the best he could, and then made provision for the man’s full recovery. Three persons seeing the same wounded man in three different ways.
Almost all of us here today are not blind that we cannot see. But all of us are constantly filtering out what we see and only allowing certain things through to our conscious perception. This filtering system extends to how we see people. When we arrive on a Sunday morning for church, we will inevitably see a needy person. They may be sleeping at a doorway. They may be rummaging though the trashcans. Hundreds of people are seeing needy and homeless people without even turning their heads away. But what do we see? We see only shadows of people and not living human beings.
I pass them by, perhaps not so differently from the priest and Levite passed by the wounded man. What we need is a transformation in what we see. Loving God with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and loving our neighbor as ourselves involves surgery to remove our spiritual cataracts so that we might see people more nearly as God sees them. God sees people not as categories, but as unique and inestimable worth, not distracted by how they may appear on the outside.
I believe it’s providential that we have Barry Stenger from the St. Anthony Foundation for our summer series that meets immediately after worship this morning. Mr. Stenger will speak about feeding the hungry, providing housing for seniors, shelter for the homeless and meeting human needs. He will help us to see a little better who are our neighbors and to whom we need to be a neighbor.
We first need to see our neighbor’s misery in brotherly and sisterly love. Love always seizes the eyes first and then comes the hands. If I close my eyes, my hands remain unemployed. They are not doing anything. When I fall asleep, my neighbor disappears from my consciousness and my hands go limp. But when we open our eyes to see to whom we are neighbors, our hands follow to lend a healing hand. We would be fulfilling the second commandment to inherit eternal life.
Many Opportunities to Be Neighbors
There are countless opportunities for all of us to be a neighbor to someone in need. We can cross the ocean or cross the street to find these opportunities. You can be like Gil Quong who helps residents in Chinatown with their tax returns. You can be like Don Fong who volunteers weekly at St. Martin’s soup kitchen. You can be our Friday Night School teachers who teach new immigrants English and citizenship so that they can adapt to their new country. You can serve as a tutor for children in need because teachers are stretched too thin to give personal attention to all the students. You can cook a dinner on Fridays as a symbol of Christian welcome to our newcomers because it wasn’t very long ago when we were newcomers too. Time and time again, everyday life will provide us with opportunities to be a neighbor.
One day a man was headed into the Times Square subway station for work. This could easily be a BART station on Market Street too. As usual, there was a steady flood of people racing down the stairs toward the platforms. But as the man began to make his way down the stairs, he saw a shabby, shirtless fellow who was sprawled across the steps, lying motionless with his eyes closed. But as hundreds of people hurried by, no one seemed to pay any attention to him.
Shocked by the sight, the man stopped to see what was wrong. As soon as he stopped, others began to stop as well. One man went to a hot dog stand to get some food; a woman went to purchase a bottle of water; and another summoned a police officer who in turned radioed for an ambulance.
It turned out that the collapsed man spoke only Spanish, had no money, and had been wandering the streets of Manhattan, starving, until he fainted from hunger there on those subway steps. Quite possibly that man would have died if no one bothered to stop and get involved, others were then led to join with him to do what was needed to help a hurting person. It took only one person to see.
Do you know who Kitty Genovese is? I can still remember this incident when I was a youth. What happened to Kitty Genovese led to a great national discussion. Kitty Genovese was a young woman in New York who, on one summer evening, was raped, stabbed repeatedly, and left bleeding in a stairwell in New York City. That’s how horrible crimes occur. But this terrible crime was notable because it occurred within the full hearing of Kitty Genovese’s neighbors. Over a period of about 45 minutes, Ms. Genovese screamed, cried out for help, and pled for someone to intervene. In the investigation afterwards, it was revealed that at least a dozen of her neighbors actually heard her cries for help. And no one did anything.
Many of us know, instinctively, even without having to think about it, what we ought to do. But seeing and hearing about our neighbor’s needs requires us to act out of our compassion like the Samaritan did.
Being Neighbors Today
The question for us Christians today is “How can we stand idly by and let these things happen without trying to help?” Have we been so conditioned to rationalize inaction? We tell ourselves that it is easier to pretend that we don’t hear the life-threatening fist fight between the husband and wife upstairs than to risk being labeled a busybody.
We pretend that we don’t see the malnourished children in our classrooms or around our neighborhoods and say how anybody in America can go hungry today?
We ignore inappropriate business practices because of our fear of losing our jobs or to endure the ridicule of being labeled as a whistle-blower.
In some neighborhoods in the Bay Area, we reason that it’s safer to forget the identity of the shooter when shots are fired and some innocent bystander is killed.
We have little thoughts about the lack of adequate health care for many in our city especially with the threat of St. Luke’s Hospital shutting down as long as we have our own HMO.
We have even justified the priest and Levite’s passing by the wounded man perhaps neither wanted to risk ritual defilement. Now, when is using religious ritual as an excuse for failing to act compassionately ever acceptable? Jesus never did and neither should we.
I am far from being in the likeness of the Samaritan in this parable. I hate to say it but I am more like the priest and the Levite who have passed by the wounded man. I confess and seek God’s forgiveness when I was a priest and not the Samaritan, when I was the Levite and not the Samaritan. Like the lawyer, I may know God’s commandments but now with you, I want to love the Lord God with all of my heart, and with all of my soul, and with all of my strength, and with all of my mind; and I want to love my neighbor as I have been forgiven in the sight of God’s grace in Jesus Christ to love who I have become.
Let us pray.
Caring and Compassionate God, we confess that we allow our busyness to be an excuse for not giving our time to others as we should. We confess that our greed sometimes hold us back from sharing our money with those who have pressing needs. We confess that our desire for comfort and pleasure causes us to shield our eyes from the hurting people around us. Through your overflowing grace, pardon our sin and our lack of love. Reveal to us to whom we are neighbors so that we may have eternal life. In the name of Christ who taught the lawyer and us, we pray. Amen.