Mount Calvary is
Biblical, Confessional, Historic, Authentic
The 13th Sunday After Trinity
Grace to you and peace, from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ This is the Word of the Lord!
It’s been a tough week, and it is good to be in the house of the Lord. This week there have been a number of things that have caused anguish of heart, and it hasn’t been easy. But it is good to be with you, seeking the Lord’s face and asking for His benefits and receiving forgiveness together (Psalm 105:4). You are my people. I don’t deserve it. But here we are, and so, let us proceed to this God pleasing task where we would hear His Word, what He has to say to us, to challenge us and direct us, to speak to our hearts, and to heal us.
…I would guess that my enemies come in different categories. First of all, there is family. Now that might seem a little scandalous to put family in that category, but it is true that a lot of the hostilities in the ancient world came between brothers. Samaritans had Jewish roots, and, to the best of my understanding, were forced, because of historical reasons, to intermix with those around them. Sometimes family is the hardest to love. Distance from them, how we change over time, or ideologies can cause separation. A forced situation of care for a parent may produce the most intense challenges as siblings attempt to work with each other and disagree. How is it that such a good thing is turned into the very place where hostilities rise? When children were little, we could control them by force (generally, that is), but as people age, the only thing we have, speech, does not always seem to be so effective. The way they live or make decisions can be frustrating, downright wrong. It is easy instead to try to operate in underhanded ways to get people to our way of doing things, but it rarely works. Family may not be enemies in the greatest sense, but loving them may be the hardest. God put us together in a family bond and so we are forced to live and reckon with them and the histories of our past that we share. The story of the Gadarene demonic who was exorcised and converted… When Jesus told the demoniac to go back home and give witness to his family, he told him what was the hardest thing to do.
A second category of enemies are people that annoy us. Maybe it is that they sip their hot drinks too loudly (I said that for my wife as I am in that category of an annoyingly loud sipper). Maybe someone has an annoying laugh or behavior, not that you hate them, but you certainly don’t like them. You tolerate them and put up with them, but you don’t want to be besties, avoidance is best. Like the priest and Levite going by on the other side of the road, that is how you live your life with them. With some you fear that you can’t help them, you don’t know what to do in the situation, and so avoidance is easiest. “I don’t want to visit Fred in the hospital. I want to remember him how he was.” I hope people don’t say that when you are in your time of need. But it is scary, and we don’t have the tools. And we feel underqualified. How are we to talk to the lovely looking teenage girl trying to be a boy that we see at the funeral home? (Not a hypothetical for me this week.) We stand at a distance. Paralyzed in our uncomfortableness. So in this second category of people that we treat as enemies are situations we fear and people we are annoyed by. We may look at the thing rather than the person. We fail to see the human inside. We are scared of how they look or things they say. We also may treat as enemies those people we are avoiding because we failed them. We want to run the other direction because we have failed or have a guilty conscience.
There are those also who owe us something and haven’t paid. This may come in a monetary form, but often it comes in ways where they owe us kindness, love. It may be a family member who doesn’t come by. A parent who didn’t care as they ought. A pastor who visited someone else but not me. A parent who did the easy thing in their marriage and got divorced and I had to suffer. We are wounded by them. Our life was screwed up because they didn’t give us what they rightly owed us. We have been deeply hurt by them and our thoughts against that person go from feelings of pain, to why. “I can never love them for what they did.”
Maybe you can think of other enemies too, traditional hostilities like the Eagles and the Dallas Cowboys. Packers hate the Bears. In fact, we hate all people from Illinois. They take over our state. The Minnesota Vikings have a particular horn that they bellow, and my father in law, a die hard Wisconsinite, his blood boils anytime anyone mimics it. More seriously we have the democrats and the republicans. Sometimes hostilities drive people to hate, or even worse. That person has no right to live. You are like two ships passing in the night. You want their demise. How could anyone be a Democrat? How could anyone vote for Donald Trump? You have gotten past the point of seeing anything valuable in a person and written them off. In the Bible we see those hostilities between people groups like Pharisees and the common people. In the modern world we have the Russians and the Ukranians. There is the chant, “From the river to the sea,” which speaks of the Palestinians desire to exterminate Israel and Israels response to protect itself. This week we have had a shooting of a political figure. Charlie threatened people’s existence because he challenged their truth claims, he spoke the truth about gender and the human person. What he said to defend the unborn was profound. No one could argue better. I am not a Charlie expert, I had not watched a video before this week. I am not sure I agree about his immigration rhetoric. Balls and strikes folks. But one person called him a fascist and believed that there was only one response to Charlie’s rhetoric, a copper bullet to the neck.
Hostilities cause chasms. The pain runs deep enough where there is a gorge. Maybe with some it’s just a stream, like the Swarr Run by my house, or like the nearby Susquehanna where you have to wade through, long and wide, but with some it may be like the Grand Canyon, there is no bridging that gap. Maybe it’s hard. Like you say hello on church on Sunday and you cross that off your list for the week. Good. I smiled. I did it! I said. Hi!
God tends to break up our hostilities through mutual need. The need of another person sometimes breaks through for us to see our common humanity. It may be just a tear on their cheek they forgot to wipe away. We see it and suddenly we realize. They are a person too. It melts our ideas of that person. Sometimes people allow us to see that they are vulnerable and lower their walls. Sometimes we need help, and our need may bring us together.
It’s interesting to see who would or would not stop to help. In the last few years, I heard someone say that if you are on the side of the road with a flat tire, people from the Midwest will wave at you nicely, while they drive by, while someone from the Bronx will stop and help, all the while they yell at you while they change the tire and tell you that you are stupid. We have needs. And those needs break down walls. We need our families. We need others. And there is nothing like when we need to swallow our pride and accept help from someone. We don’t like charity. But God reminds us, humbles us through the situations in life, we may not like them, but we need them, and in the midst of the moment, they may not be so bad after all. Imagine for a moment what it would be like if someone with a person that did not agree with immigration, was helped at the side of the road by an illegal immigrant. We are human.
But also, another need helps us see something deeper and real. People need help. In the nursing home we are brought to our basic sense of dependence. Food, water, shelter. We are dying here. People who at once were heads of companies, now wear Depends and share a table with imbeciles.
Our Lord looked past these hostilities. While we were still in our sinning state he died for He saw people. People who had been wounded. He gave His help. I have a problem with kindness. I have a lack of love. When people come back with their half-baked excuses and lies am I so quick to forgive? Do I forgive the debts not even thinking about it? Or would my response be to highlight my pain and what they have done? We have opportunities in life to foster resentment, to put a log on anger, and to build the house of hatred.
But our Lord helps us put out those fires. Jesus stops by. He brings His donkey. He who was of high reputation, came down and touched the ground of this life. He staked His cross in the midst of Roman soldiers and Jewish politicians, lifetime criminals, and loved ones, and prayed to God that all be forgiven. Everyone walks aside in life. No one sees what I am going through. Jesus has eyes that see your need. He came to put on human eyeballs and make them see like they have never seen before. He didn’t think twice.
Why do we go to the sacrament? Luther wrote that it was so that we may learn to love God and our neighbor. That may seem a flippant response, but for a person who has had a hard time loving, it may be the honest truth. I can’t love Lord. I am having a terrible time. The only person I love is myself. I hate other people. You don’t see Lord these people are hard to love. They aren’t like me. They reject me. They have hurt me. How am I supposed to love them?
How do we learn this? We may learn in Church our common need. We may learn a little more of God’s kindness to us. We may get a dose that we aren’t as great as we think we are. Often in our lives hating others involves lying about who we are. We deceive ourselves. Here the lying ceases when we realize we are that family member others need to love, we have our annoyances as well, or maybe we are better, but God used His being better to benefit humanity. God has given us to be the savior.
Putting aside our differences we serve a common human lot. We are brought to the basics. We are dying here. We are all in a world where Satan has deceived us. Our common enemy is not each other, but the devil who has sowed weeds in the wheat. If people have participated in it, it is because they have been lied too. We have been deceived as well.
We are called to love our neighbor. And who is our neighbor? It might just be anyone in need of help. That widens our categories to the world. Our neighbor is as small as the husband who needs us to overlook his faults, to as large as the person who we would rather be dead. We are all in the human family.
But what do we do about truth? The truth about grievances. The truth about wounds. The truth about time to talk about things we need to talk about. I am not sure this parable is all about that. What Jews did to Samaritans was not right. Vice versa. I don’t think this parable is saying, just sweep it under the rug, our differences don’t matter.
That comes next. We aren’t called to just pretend there aren’t differences, but at least we can start with a common humanity of need. I don’t think helping someone is avoiding that I have a disagreement with them or don’t like them. It is putting first things first. It is playing triage. When a person comes in the hospital with a gun shot wound, we aren’t here to ask them why they were out at 3 AM in the first place. The conversation with the police comes next.
I think today about Doris Rittenhouse and Betty Schwebel, two women of our congregation, one now with the Lord. Their paths were different. They went to the same church, St Paul LCMS in Columbia. I get the impression that one of them was salt of the earth kind of person and the other more refined. They went to the same church as kids, about the same age, and they were not friends. Years later Doris came back to the LCMS after years of being gone and now they both became members here. Doris visited Betty in the nursing home, and these two people, one thin, one hefty, one lovely, the other I get the impression a little ordinary, maybe there were some jealousies and snobbery there, but at the end of their life, there in the nursing home, God brought two people together. Someone who could only stare at the ceiling, was visited by someone in life had it all. And God brought, friendship and great joy.
Jesus said. “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.”
Blessed are your eyes. For they have been opened. To see. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The peace of God which passes all human understanding, guard your hearts and minds through faith in Jesus Christ.
The service bulletin can be found here.
