Reception

Luke 10:25-37

     If you want to experience old-style snow you can still do it because Canadian TV stations have not converted to digital yet.  Tune to channel 5 in Toronto and see how much snow you can find.  That’s the channel I was watching the World Dup games on, usually with a bit of snow.  But, hey, it’s winter in South Africa right now, so maybe the snow was real, the kind that falls from the sky?.

     A year ago the way TV signals were transmitted changed abruptly from analog TV to digital TV.  If you have cable you wouldn’t know the difference, but if you get your TV over the air you had to get a new TV or a converter box to make your old TV able to receive digital signals.  There’s no snow anymore.  With digital TV either you get the perfect signal or nothing at all.  At our house you have to aim the antenna exactly at the transmitter in order to get the over the air digital signal.  I’m too cheap to get cable, so it means we spend a fair amount of time playing with the antenna rotor to get good reception.   

     Well, this isn’t Radio Shack, it’s a church, so I hope you won’t mind if I shift from technical to spiritual matters at this point.  What could good reception have to do with today’ story about the Good Samaritan?

     The story is very well-known.  A man is traveling down a road when he gets robbed and beaten up.  In New York City where I went to graduate school we referred to this as getting mugged.  It doesn’t matter what you call it the result was the same.  The man was badly hurt, left in a bloody heap at the side of the road, with all of his clothing and valuables taken.  Surely the next travelers down the road will stop and help him. 

     The first person comes by.  It’s a priest.  A Jewish priest, maybe on the way home from the Temple in Jerusalem.  He takes one look at the bloody victim, and crosses over to the other side of the road pretending not to see him.  The next person comes by, a Levite, and the same thing happens, cross over to the other side of the road, too.  A Levite, in case you didn’t know, was a member of a Jewish clan dedicated to the service of God.  He also must have been on his way home from the Temple. 

     Finally, a Samaritan comes by.  And I should tell you that Jews and Samaritans despised each other.  If Jews walked through a  Samaritan village, people would throw rocks, curse and spit to drive them away.  And if Samaritans walked through a Jewish village – the same thing.  What is especially interesting about this is that Jew and Samaritans were essentially identical, they believed in the Law of Moses, but what made them different was that Jews worshiped God on Mt Zion at Jerusalem and Samaritans worshiped God on Mt. Gerazim in Samaria.  If I had a Jew and a Samaritan from those days standing right in front o your you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart, but they would know the difference instantly.

     So it would have been likely that the Samaritan, upon seeing the Jewish man in a bloody heap at the side of the road, would have gone over and kicked him a few times and said a few curses, too.  But that’s not what happened.  The Samaritan went over and helped the man, bandaged him up and found a place for him to stay until he recovered, and paid the money to cover the cost. 

      People listening to Jesus would have been astounded by this story because it went against everything they knew about their enemies, the Samaritans.   In fact, they would have been more than astounded.  They would have been deeply offended.  They would not have seen this as a basic story about kindness, but as a story where the Samaritan had a hidden agenda to rape and pillage while pretending to be kind. 

     But Jesus is answering the question, “Who my neighbor?”  And way back in Sunday School I learned the simple answer to that question – be like the Samaritan, the one who unexpectedly offers mercy and kindness to someone in terrible need.  You, too, can be that unexpected person who steps across a rigid boundary to offer help and support to someone in need.  It might include befriending farm workers.  It might involve visiting people in jail.  It might be volunteering at an AIDS program. 

     But there is another lesson in all of this, and it has to do with that phrase I began with: “good reception”.  At Union Theological Seminary I spent a year studying the Parables of Jesus with Dr, Walter Wink.  Instead of doing a lot of lectures, he tried to get us into the story, so that we would experience the grace of God personally.  So one day, we acted out this story of the Good Samaritan, and each of us got to play the different roles, the victim, the muggers, the priest, the Levite and the Samaritan.  We found a dimension to this story that is often overlooked.  You see, the traditional question is “which one will you be in life, the priest, the Levite or the Samaritan?”  The second question that rarely gets asked is, “What did the victim experience in all of this?”  You see the traditional view fits in with our traditional view of Biblical faith, that we have to be incredibly generous givers, but the second dimension of the story has to do with good reception, to teach us something new about receiving things from others and even more from God.

     In this church we are very good at giving, but I think we need a lot more learning about receiving.  Too many times we turn down what is given, believing that we don’t really deserve it or that somebody other than ourselves is more deserving.  We have offering plates for your giving, we have a food box for you to give food, we give sermons and prayers and programs, but we don’ty do as much to demonstrate good reception, being able to receive from God.