BethQuick

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Returns to Sermons Year C Return to Sermon Archive Return to Home Page Sermon 11/2/08 Risk-Taking Mission and Service: Samaritans - Luke 10:25-37 (view lectionary notes for this text) Last week, we started talking about Risk-Taking Mission and Service, and we focused on risky relationships. God calls us to be in relationship with one another – and that in itself is risky. Today, we ’re going to ask more questions about these relationships God calls us to be in. Who is it, exactly, that God is calling us to be in relationship with? With whom are we in mission? Who are we serving? Who are we doing this risking for? Or, to put it as the lawyer puts it in today ’s gospel lesson, “Who is my neighbor? ” To begin talking about that question, let me share with you a bit about one of my favorite movies. The 2004 film Hotel Rwanda chronicles the genocide that took place in Rwanda, Africa, in 1994. Three months of bloodshed in Rwanda resulted in over one million deaths in the very small country, a bit smaller than the state of Maryland, but the rest of the world hardly took notice. How did this happen? As I learned in the movie, part of the problem was that the international community was very careful not to use the word genocide when talking about what was going on in Rwanda. Genocide is murder of a whole population of people based on religion or race or ethnicity. And if genocide is occurring, the international community through international law has a legal responsibility to get involved. But why didn ’t people want to intervene in Rwanda? How could the world sit silently by as one million were killed? That ’s a hard question to answer. But world leaders definitely did not see Rwanda as their problem. They didn ’t want to get involved. And they sought ways to free them from their legal obligation to intervene, even if they could not avoid their moral and ethical obligation to act. When are we obligated to act? When must we get involved? That, to me, is the true question that comes up in our gospel lesson today, posed by the lawyer. When must we get involved? Jesus responds with what we call the parable of the Good Samaritan. This is a parable almost everyone knows. In response to questions from the lawyer who wants to test Jesus, Jesus tells the story of a man who was on the road to Jericho from Jerusalem. The man is attacked, robbed, and left for dead. A priest comes by, and crosses to the other side of the road to avoid the man – touching the injured man would have made the priest ritually unclean. The same happened with the Levite – he too crossed to the other side and avoided the man. But a Samaritan – a man from an ethnic group hated by the Jews, and vise versa, because of their differing religious beliefs – a Samaritan stops and is moved with pity – the same phrasing the scriptures so often use when Jesus reacts to the crowds in need or a person needing healing. He goes above and beyond obligation – he bandages the wounds, anointing them with oil and wine, he takes the man on his own animal to an inn, and pays the innkeeper to care for him and give him anything that is needed.

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