Sermon | Mercy not Sacrifice

Today I officiated my first wedding for Kevin Colpitts and Mary Vafiadis, a couple who was visiting our church when my wife Cheryl and I preached a sermon on our egalitarian understanding of marriage and decided they wanted me to marry them. Kevin and Mary are very grounded, beautiful people who are exploring Christian spirituality. As part of their counseling process, we practiced praying together, which is the most important part of my marriage even though we don’t do it with as much discipline as we should. So here is my sermon with which I used the same text I use every year for our confirmation retreat: Ephesians 4:14-16. Continue reading →

Sermon for 7/11/2010
Text: Luke 10:25-37

If you want to be good, be a Samaritan first. Most people reading the Good Samaritan story put the focus on being “good”; I want to put the focus on being a Samaritan. We can do all the good in the world; we can stop and help every person with a flat tire on the beltway; but unless we have a Samaritan heart, the good that we do won’t do us any good at all.

It’s hard to get past a surface level reading of the Good Samaritan story since everybody knows it. Even people who don’t go to church know when they hear “Samaritan” in the news headlines, it’s a story about a nice and helpful person. So I could just say, “Y’all know the story; don’t be like those other Christians who walk past the bleeding man on the side of the road; be a good Methodist and put him on your donkey.”

The problem is that back in Jesus’ day, Samaritan didn’t mean nice person. Jews hated Samaritans, and it wasn’t just racism. They had several centuries of reasons.

Let me give you some background. After Solomon died, ancient Israel split into two kingdoms – the north and the south. The northern kingdom was a lot wealthier and more successful militarily than the south, but the south stuck closer to its spiritual roots in Yahweh, the God of Abraham, since the south had Yahweh’s great temple in Jerusalem. The northern kingdom was more religiously “cosmopolitan”; they prayed to Yahweh some of the time, and Baal and Asherah other times. Despite its early success, the north made some bad choices that led to its being conquered by the Assyrians, who renamed the whole region Samarita. The Israelites who resisted the Assyrians were deported and sold into slavery. But the ones who disguised themselves by selling out the God who had brought them out of Egypt for the new gods of their conquerors – they became Samaritans.

Meanwhile, the Judeans in the south kept their faith and held their holy city of Jerusalem even under Assyrian siege. When Judea finally fell to Babylon a century and a half later, the Judeans went into exile until the Persians took over and let them go back to rebuild their temple. When the Jews came back home from Babylon, they found this group of Samaritans claiming to be their distant cousins and claiming to have the same religion even though they had disfigured it beyond recognition.

Samaritans were not just a different race; their quarrel with the Jews was not just a misunderstanding; the reason that the Jews were so upset with the Samaritans was that while the Jews had suffered through exile and persecution due to their religious beliefs, their Samaritan cousins had sold out their God to save their own skin.

The reason I gave you all this historical background is so that you would understand how utterly bizarre it was for Jesus to make a Samaritan the hero of his story. What did this descendent of heretic sell-out traitors have in him that the pious, devout priest and Levite didn’t have? Something was in the Samaritan’s soul that caused him to be “moved with pity” when he saw a man bleeding on the side of the road.

About a year ago, I got myself in a bind that helped me understand this story. The kids in my youth group loved to eat at the flea market, which they called the “pulga” in Spanish. The problem with the pulga was that it had a gravel parking lot with some really sharp rocks. So when we went to the pulga in the church van one searing hot afternoon, we got a flat tire and didn’t have a lug wrench big enough to change it. Several cars away from us was a Hispanic man who was loading his little girls into their car seats. My teenagers ran over to him before I could stop them and asked for help

Now I would have been irritated if I had just buckled up my kids’ car seats, but he just got his AC running and came over to survey the problem. I explained that we needed an abnormally large lug wrench. He said to give him twenty minutes and he would take his girls home and bring back his whole socket wrench set. I tried to stop him but he told me he wasn’t working that day and had nowhere to be. So he went home, rushed back, and we found a socket big enough to turn the nuts. The nuts were so rusty that we had to put two tools together to get leverage. It worked to get the nuts off but in the process we broke his tool. I offered him $10 to help pay for the cost, but he wouldn’t accept it. He said that other people had helped him before and he was happy to do the same.

I wanted to make this incident into a teaching moment so I asked the youth to turn off their ipods and reflect on why this man did what he did. “That’s easy,” they said, “he’s Mexican!” (which makes a little more sense if I tell you that 90% of my youth were Mexican-American).

I was a little disappointed in their response, but as I was driving them home, my mind started turning over what they had said. Is there something about being an immigrant in America today that’s similar to being a Samaritan in Judea 2000 years ago? The analogy isn’t perfect, but I think there is one. Just like Jewish people had a reason to be mad at Samaritans, many people who look like me have a reason to be mad at immigrants, at least illegal ones. And just like the Samaritan in Jesus’ story probably had nothing to do with his ancestors’ betrayal of Judaism, the Hispanic man who helped us might not have been illegal, but because he spoke no English, my mind put him in a box just like Jesus’ Jewish audience put all Samaritans in the same box.

I’m not interested in getting into the politics of immigration any more than Jesus was interested in talking about the history behind the conflict between the Samaritans and Jews. What I will say is this: the priest and the Levite faced a similar disadvantage to the one I have. They had the privilege of being God’s chosen people in the same way that I have the privilege of being a citizen of the best country the world has to offer right now born into a stable middle-upper class Christian family. Why is this privilege a disadvantage? Because the world I have always lived in is a fair place where people who stay in school and work hard grow up to have successful, stable families of their own. Since I didn’t grow up in a neighborhood where people get beat up, and it doesn’t fit with my view of how the world’s supposed to be, I’d rather walk across the street and let someone who knows what they’re doing take care of the bleeding man.

Either that or I do stop, because I’m trying to prove how mission-minded I am. Maybe I’ve got latex gloves, blankets, and band-aids in my car just in case I see a bleeding man on the side of the road. But if we look closely at this story Jesus told, the point is not whether my church has an effective outreach ministry to people who get beat up by robbers and left for dead. What Jesus wants to know is whether there’s enough space in my soul for the Holy Spirit to move me with pity. Or have all my theories about the world and my need for it all to make sense closed me off to every attempt God makes to light a fire under me? Can I be “moved by pity” like the Good Samaritan was? Not unless I become a Samaritan.

I think that’s what Jesus is saying here. And the reason I think that is because Jesus became like a Samaritan in His own life and death. That’s why I included the Suffering Servant passage from Isaiah in today’s reading. “He was despised and rejected by men… Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.” The reason early Christians knew that Isaiah was talking about Jesus in this passage is because Jesus’ decision to become a hated outcast is central to how He saves us.

We think we understand Jesus’ cross. We put it on our diagrams and in our four spiritual laws, and think that’s all there is to it. It’s become for us like a giant credit card we swipe on our way into heaven. But what does it really mean that the Creator of the universe, “who was by nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing… and became obedient to death on a cross”? The cross was the ultimate shame in Roman culture, the form of death reserved for petty thieves and scoundrels deemed unfit for a Roman sword, in other words, the Samaritans of the Earth.

See, the cross is not just a payment for sin. Jesus is the ultimate Insider who knows every word that comes out of our mouths before we even think about saying them. But when the ultimate Insider becomes the ultimate Outsider by going through the most disgraceful thing a human being can possibly go through, it means that other outsiders can see that we’re not alone. We can tear off the masks we’ve put on for other people and wear our shame openly since our Creator wore the world’s shame openly on the cross. We can be Samaritans because our King let Himself be a Samaritan so we could take up our crosses and follow Him.

Most Christians are familiar with Jesus’ call to take up our crosses, but I suspect we misunderstand what it means. We think that taking up our crosses means committing to a certain number of hours a week of church work. We’ve reduced the cross to self-sacrifice. But carrying a cross wasn’t just a sacrifice; it was a “symbol of suffering and shame”; people spat and threw things at Jesus while He was carrying His cross.

When Jesus says, “Take up your cross and follow me,” what He’s saying is you don’t have to be afraid of your shame anymore. “I died for you to free you from all the things you’re so embarrassed that other people will find out about you, the things about you that might make other people treat you like a Samaritan. Now accept the freedom to stop trying to prove that you’re not a Samaritan when you know good and well that you are!”

Did something happen in your past that you’re not proud of? It’s okay; take up that cross and follow Jesus! Do you have to take pills every morning to keep from getting depressed? That’s fine; take up that cross and follow Jesus! Is your kid not meeting all of the learning milestones that the pediatrician says he’s supposed to? Take up that cross too and follow Jesus! Taking up your cross means giving up the lie that everything in your life is going just fine, making peace with the fact that you’re a sinner who Jesus died for, and taking the risk that other people might treat you like a Samaritan.

When we’re not willing to take that risk, we end being like cranky Hank from Pastor Ed’s sermon last week. The reason people like Hank are so cranky is because they’re scared to admit that they don’t have it all together. It’s my nervousness about my own flaws that makes me want to judge other people. But when I admit that I’m a hopeless sinners and I trust Jesus enough to take my shame to the foot of His cross, then I can be free like that Good Samaritan – liberated from caring what other people think so the Holy Spirit can have its way with me.