Minimum Requirements

Sermon for Sunday, August 16 Luke 10:25-37

Have you ever wondered what the bare minimum is you need to do to get by? You go to work at a new job, and you wish someone would tell you, “what exactly is expected of me here?” We all want to avoid consequences and get rewards, but we don’t necessarily want to put ourselves out there. Employers, of course, have ways of getting their employees to work harder, from commissions and incentives, to bonuses, among other perks. So in professional settings, that’s what inspires us to move farther and work harder.

This seems to be a question a lot of people ask—and many think they have answered—in our time: “What do I need to do to be saved?” Or as the law expert in the gospel asks: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” A lot of folks will say, “Well I walked the aisle and said the prayer, so I’m good!” Ask them what their religious life now is, “Well, I go to church and I sit and listen.” Or they’ll look at you like they cheated the system: “basically, I don’t have to do anything, I trust Jesus to save me.” But what if I told you Jesus wants more from you than that? It probably wouldn’t surprise most of you here today. We know instinctively that the gospel makes demands on our lives. We know that Jesus said a lot of things about how we are supposed to love our enemies and take care of people, and so on our good days we try to do those things. The question we start to ask ourselves as we move to a more mature faith, is “what does Jesus expect of me?”

Jesus turns the question around on the law expert: “What does the Bible say?” The expert answers, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” That’s a pretty good answer, isn’t it? Jesus sure thinks so, so he says, “Do this and you will live.” But here’s the thing about law experts: they like to read the fine print. 

So he raises the question again, “But, like, which people are my neighbors?” Wouldn’t it be nice if you could sit down and pull out the phone book, your yearbook, church directory, or Facebook, and just have it marked there: you have to love Jimmy, Katherine, and Susie, but don’t worry about Darrel or Dwayne. Or maybe you could pull out a surveyors map and put a pin on your home address and draw a circle, and everyone inside it is your responsibility? On second thought I might try get around that one by trying to stay away from home as much as possible so I don’t have to see those people. “Who is my neighbor?” Is another way of asking “Who am I responsible for?” or more directly, “Who do I have to love?” Jesus shows remarkable patience with this man’s legal wrangling, and helps him find the answer by turning the question around again.

You can only ask “who do I  haveto help” if you actually have the means to help. A person in need asks instead, “Who will help me?” The only person in the story of the Good Samaritan who is there from start to finish is the wounded man. Going down from Jerusalem to Jericho is a difficult road: over 18 miles, travelers descend 3,300 feet. It was also a haunt of gangs and criminals, so it’s no surprise to Jesus’s audience when the man falls into the hands of a bunch or robbers, who strip him, beat him, and leave him half dead. This man needs help and soon. In the next few moments we can imagine his hopes rising and falling like the lines representing his vital signs, or like the Dow Jones industrial average.

The first potential helper is a priest. What luck!  Surely God’s representative will help the man who has fallen on hard times! But the priest saw the man and walked on by on the other side of the road. Maybe he had important service in the Temple, but for whatever reason he doesn’t feel responsible for this man. Next up is a Levite; it shouldn’t surprise us after the disappointment of our encounter with the priest that this man should follow the example of his leader; he also walks on by on the other side of the road.

Why don’t the priest and the Levite help the man? Because they don’t feel responsible for him. In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, early on in the story the wealthy Ebenezer Scrooge is approached by a man seeking charitable gifts to feed the poor. “Are there no prisons? No poor houses?” Scrooge asks. Their needs have already been seen to, you see— Scrooge sees no need to help any further. We reason our way out of the same thing the same way. When we see someone in need, we want them to go to their wealthy family members, to the existing food ministries, to the government programs we also think create the “nanny state.” We have to find a reason why they are our responsibility and so often we find a hundred reasons why they can’t be our responsibility.

You can only ask “who do I  haveto help” if you actually have the means to help. If we ever find ourself in need, the question, “Who will help me?” becomes desperate, urgent, and real. I can’t tell you the number of times I drive past folks on the side of the road, changing a tire, or looking under the hood, and I think, “I sure hope they have someone coming to help!” But when it’s me, I look with desperation into the eyes of each passing driver— will you help me? Will you take responsibility for me?

What does Jesus’s audience expect the outcome to be for the wounded man? He started out the story half dead, and we all know how quickly half dead can progress to mostly dead, and then onward to dead as a door nail. Perhaps they expect an ordinary citizen to happen by and help—then it’s another story about the worthlessness of the clergy. Maybe they think no one will come by, making it an indictment of the nation of Israel. Or it could be that God is going to step out of heaven and intervene. Instead, the unexpected happens. A Samaritan is coming by. Now we all know the Samaritans are hated by the Jews. It’s mutual, actually. The Samaritan isn’t just going to pass on the other side. He’s going to spit on the man, maybe step on his wounds, grind him further down into the dust. Only he doesn’t.

Just like the priest and the Levite, the Samaritan sees the man lying on the side of the road, but unlike them he decides to help. What leads to this surprising action? The Samaritan “was moved with pity.” He had compassion on the man who needed help. To have compassion is to share in someone else’s pain. The Samaritan’s compassion led him to do whatever was needed to help the man in his distress. And the man’s need is so great that he doesn’t even consider turning down the help of this hated Samaritan. In their mutual experience of need, enemies become neighbors.

At recent meetings, the executive director of the BGAV John Upton has shared stories of churches in Lebanon responding to the civil war in Syria. As you may know, Syria has an ongoing civil war that has resulted in a tremendous refugee crisis. A generation ago, Syrian forces occupied Lebanon for almost thirty years. There’s a Baptist church in Lebanon, though, that sees the million Syrian refugees in the country and does everything they can to help. They let the hated Syrians sleep in the church. They feed them. They tend to their wounds. In their mutual experience of need, enemies become neighbors.

In the book of Philippians, the apostle Paul tells us about a Messiah named Jesus, 

“who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:6-8). 

Jesus took responsibility for us when he didn’t have to. Jesus saw our need and took pity on us, left heaven for us, died for us. When he saw us waylaid by the devil and left in the ditch he didn’t pass by on the other side. The call to compassion is a call to Christlikeness, to be like Jesus. Jesus asks us to do what he did.

Concluding the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus asks: “Which of these three (the priest, the Levite, or the hated Samaritan) became a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” Can you hear Jesus cross examine the lawyer? If you want to know who you have to love, just think about if you were in need who would you want to show love to you? Now, my friends, let’s love our neighbors, as Christ loves us.