Sermon for July 14, 2019 - Proper 10C - The Rev'd Elise A. Feyerherm

Luke 10:25-37

Like all of the other parables of Jesus, the parable of the Good Samaritan is deceptively simple. It’s so simple, on the surface, that we end up blind to the real challenge of this story. Those of you who have been part of the scripture group here at St. Paul’s know what I’m talking about! This past year the scripture group has been reading Amy-Jill Levine’s book, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi, in which the author helps modern day folk appreciate Jesus’ parables as anything but simple, nice morality tales. If you haven’t read this book, I highly recommend it – AJ’s chapter on the Good Samaritan has informed much of what I’m talking about in this sermon.

This parable has been used by many Christians to slam what they perceive as a Judaism that is hyper-focused on ritual purity and legal correctness at the expense of compassion and care. In this interpretation, the priest and the Levite leave the injured traveler to die because they are so worried about becoming ritually unclean by touching what might be a dead body. AJ Levine makes it clear, by citing ancient Jewish tradition as well as Jewish scripture, that there actually is no issue of ritual impurity involved in this scenario, and this priest and this Levite are in fact violating the Jewish law of loving neighbor. This parable is not about the deficiencies of Judaism, and it never was. It’s about human beings, plain and simple.

Something jumped out at me as I read AJ Levine’s translation of this parable. The priest and the Levite and the Samaritan are described as each seeing the wounded man. Before they respond, they see him. What happens when we hear this parable is being, in part, about seeing? It is not so much about what we see but how we see. Each of them sees the same thing, the same person, the same situation, the same need. But their actions are not the same.

How we see has an effect on what we do, how we respond, how we act. I’m not an artist, but I have heard it said that learning to draw or paint is first of all about learning how to see what you are depicting. Those of you who paint or draw can tell me if this is true. If you ask an average someone to draw a tree, chances are they’ll pick up the brown crayon for the trunk and then one shade of green for the leaves.

But if you look, really look, at a tree, you’ll see so much more than one shade of brown and one shade of green. You’ll see light and depth, greys and greens and browns and blacks and everything in between. The more we practice seeing, the more shades and shadows and lines and textures and dimensions we are able to discern. Without the deep practice of seeing, the hands cannot put onto paper or canvas the image that is before the eyes. The better a person is at seeing, really seeing, the better artist they can be.

The three people who encounter the injured man on the road to Jericho all see him – his image reaches their retinas and they perceive an object by the side of the road. They all perceive his position, his wounds. But do they all really see him in the same way? Their seeing does not lead to the same action. For the first two men, their seeing leads them to pass by on the other side. For the third man, seeing moves him to pity, and he responds.

So this leads me to wonder, how do we see the world? How do we see the people in our lives, those closest to us as well as those whom we pass on the street? Do we see in simple, monochromatic colors? Do we see cardboard cutouts, caricatures? Do we see them as obstacles in our path, disruptions to our daily routines, potential threats to our safety? Or do we see real human beings, with complex histories and emotions? Do we see people who are created in the image of God?

In her book on the parables that I mentioned earlier, AJ Levine cites Martin Luther King Jr.’s reflection on the Good Samaritan: “It’s possible,” he says, “that these men were afraid… And so the first question that the priest [and] the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’… But then the Good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’”

This insight from Dr. King reinforces my conviction that how we see is at the heart of things. How we see affects our emotions and the questions we ask. When we see the world as a threat to us, then our questions have to do with our own safety and comfort. When we see, really see the humanity of others, our questions turn toward what will happen to them. The questions we ask, then, affect how we respond. Seeing – asking – responding. They’re all connected.

How we see the world is a function, in part, of our basic orientation, our core perspective. So how do we learn to see well, see clearly as followers of Jesus? Our capacity to see as followers of Jesus is formed by many things, but the wisdom of our tradition tells us that it is formed first by prayer. The practice of prayer looks different for different people, but essentially it is how we turn toward God on a daily basis, being in continual dialogue with God.

Our seeing of the world around us is shaped by our practice of intentionally looking for God. This is the basic insight behind the “Way of Love” that is being put forward by our presiding bishop Michael Curry. The Way of Love is a pattern of practices that keep us anchored and that we are going to use at St. Paul’s next year to guide our life together. Prayer is one of the seven core practices for following Jesus; to pray is “to dwell intentionally with God each day.”

Prayer has everything to do with how we see. How we see the world is shaped by our basic attention to the source of our being, the One who created the world and every human being in the divine image, the One who has throughout time and eternity shown compassion and mercy. Prayer is not the opposite of responding with compassion – prayer is the ground and source of our response. The more we practice seeing God, the one who is above all compassionate and merciful, the more our seeing will become compassionate and our response will become more merciful.

We often think of contemplation and action as being two separate things – there are those who pray, and those who act. It is my experience that prayer and compassion, contemplation and action, go hand in hand. To mix my metaphors, prayer sinks our roots deep into the living water of God’s mercy, without which our acts of mercy and justice wither away.

Learning how to see, and how to respond to the world’s pain, takes a lifetime of practice. But we will also learn, by God’s grace, to see, truly see, our neighbor, to see the world with compassion and mercy, and not pass by on the other side. This is truly the work of prayer, and it is the way of love.