A sermon on Luke 10:25-37 from a few years back:

            I know I've said this before, and I believe I will say it again, because I see it all around me, I see it in myself, all the time. I see it especially in this familiar story of the Good Samaritan. What I see is that there are two ways to live in the world, two ways to look at life. We can look at life with the eyes of fear, or with the eyes of love.

I first heard Henri Nouwen say that back in seminary. I can see him standing in a room not unlike this one, a room with high stone walls, and beautiful gothic windows. I can see the sun streaming in those windows and I can see him dividing that seminary classroom into two separate camps with a wave of his hand. Two ways to see the world: through the eyes of fear or through the eyes of love. We stand, he said, either in the House of Fear or the House of Love.

The story of the Good Samaritan is a story about both ways of seeing. To discover these people, and to discover ourselves, and our own capacity for love--or for fear--we need to make our way into Luke's gospel story.

First, it is important to see that we have two stories here: a story within a story. The story begins with a question: 'what must I do to inherit eternal life'? The young lawyer wants to do the right thing, he wants to be justified, he wants to be saved, he wants to be, ultimately, at one with God. He wants to know the rules of the game.

And Jesus answers his question, in true Semitic rabbinic fashion, with a question: "You want life? What is written in the law? How do you read?"

And of course the young man knows the law. It is the cornerstone of the Jewish faith, the Shema Israel, the Summary of the Law: '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.'

But the lawyer wants more. He wants boundaries, borders, limits. He wants a formula, a recipe for good behavior. Just whom must I include within my circle of neighbors, and whom may I exclude? How far do I have to stretch my love? How long? What's my job description? What's the process?

Jesus, as ever, does not deal in recipes or formulas or theories or philosophies or rules or even, can you believe it, process. Jesus deals in real life. And so he tells a story.

Look at each player in Jesus' story in their context. First, the man making his way down that desert road from Jerusalem to Jericho. The road was dangerous, winding through a howling wilderness of barren cliffs, jagged rock. They called that road 'the path of blood' in those days--it was known to be the territory of bandits. All we know about the man is that he was robbed and stripped and beaten and abandoned.

And then a second traveler, a priest. Now, the priest was most likely riding, not walking down the road. The poor walked. But the priest was of the privileged class. He rode some beast of burden. And, being a priest of the temple, he knew the rules probably better than he knew his own name, his own heart: first he knew the writings of the temple scribe Ben Sirach (Ecclesiasticus)--he knew that he was NOT to help a stranger: "give to a good man, never help a sinner" "if you do a good deed, know to whom you are doing it, then you will have credit for your kindness". He knew the temple code. And he also knew that his role was to be pure for his temple duties. He could not touch a dead body (and that one in the ditch looked mostly dead.) If he were to touch a dead person and become ritually unclean, he would have to stay away from his temple duties for a full year. He could not fulfill his obligations as priest and help that bloodied stranger. He was a good, law-abiding person and he needed to keep his distance, so he passed by on the other side.

And so, too, the Levite. Lower on the official hierarchy than the priests, but still needing to keep ritually clean, even for lesser temple duties. And he would not question the priest's interpretation of the law--not argue that text from Ben Sirach against the words of Amos, say, or Joel or Jeremiah. That man in the ditch was not his neighbor and besides, he could not take the man anywhere, he was on foot himself. He was a practical man. So he passed by.

And then along comes a Samaritan, a man of means, riding a beast of burden of some sort. Now, no one hearing this story from Jesus would ever imagine that a Samaritan could do good. Good Samaritan was an oxymoron. Samaritans, every Jew knew, worshipped God in the wrong way, at the wrong place. But the Samaritan comes to where the wounded man was lying--he did not pass by on the other side. Jesus said he had compassion on that man in the ditch who was quite likely a Jew, no kin to that Samaritan. And the Samaritan cares for the man. He performs almost symbolic acts of healing, binding up the wounds, and anointing those wounds with the elements of sacrifice, oil and wine.

Two kinds of people in that story. Those who saw life with eyes of fear and the one who saw with eyes of love. Jesus made it very clear to the lawyer: there is really only one rule to the game: be a neighbor, be one who cares, be one who gets a little messy, be one who dares to love.

We can see the priest and the Levite and the Samaritan and the man in the ditch as players in a 2,000-year-old story. We can also see ourselves, today, as those players. Which person on that road would I be? Which role fits me? Which fits you? The priest?--so busy, so many responsibilities, in such a hurry, fearful that he wouldn't get it all done. The dutiful Levite?--doing the right thing, staying within the rules, fearing the consequences of the unexpected. Or the Samaritan? Or perhaps, today, you are the one in the ditch, needing someone to tend to your wounds. Which one are you? Which kind of eyes do you have?

Eyes of fear? Do we measure and quantify the world around us, keeping ourselves within narrow boundaries? Are we the bargainers, the judges, the calculators, the planners, the worriers, fearful lest we lose control? Is our stance adversarial, fearful that we will lose the game? Are we stuck in the same old way of doing things, stuck in the past, fearful of the future?

Or do we see with the eyes of love, and respond with readiness and openness to the challenges that meet us on the road. Are we the ones who trust? Who accept life as gift? Who know that grace is possible? Who know that God leads us into the places that are a little messy at times? The ones who dare to be a neighbor?

How can we see with the eyes of love, see the world in a different light? How can we live with that kind of vulnerability, and surrender? That kind of willingness to dare to be a neighbor? How can we live that way at least most of the time, and not slip back into what my seminary professor called "the house of fear"? How can we experience life as a gift from God. No matter what disappointments or surprises life offers?

Well, best I can tell, the ones who see with the eyes of love are people who believe something very simple. They believe in the one doctrine of our faith that may be the most difficult of all to accept. Not the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Ascension, the Trinity, the Incarnation--but the one doctrine, the one truth that we find hard to believe: we find it hard to believe God loves us. So many of us simply do not really feel that God loves us.

I can't tell you how many people I talk with who fear God as a punishing judge and feel they are just not good enough to deserve God's love. As one person told me recently "I just feel like I'm not quite enough."

We live in a culture that always asks more, we lived surrounded by a constant measuring and dissatisfaction: I need to work more, or accomplish more or get more exercise. Or we might look around and think to ourselves, well they should do more, they should be in church more, or they should help out more with the team. Or, my favorite,  they talk the talk but they don't walk the walk. We are always measuring whether or not somebody else walks the walk.  I hear this in the church all the time: we measure the commitment, the  contribution, the attitude. If only that person helped out more, if only more people attended that service, if only more, if only...

The eyes of fear create such ideals of perfection, ideals hard to measure up to our ideal of perfection, whether in our private opinions or our community standards. When we look with the eyes of fear, somebody or something is always lacking. There is never enough.

To see with the eyes of love simply means that measuring doesn't matter. To see with the eyes of love means we accept that God loves us. And God loves that other one too, whether they join us in our project or pursue something else. We accept each other's limitations and each other's gifts. We accept each other's differences. And that acceptance makes each of us larger, each of us enough. Just as God's acceptance of us, God's love for us, makes us enough. That acceptance makes us able to get our hands dirty.

To see with the eyes of love means that we can look at the story of the Good Samaritan and see the kind of life we are to live, where eternal life, the life lived with God, is a life that begins when we 'go and do likewise' along with that young lawyer. The life lived with God begins when we reach beyond what might be comfortable to touch our neighbor. In that reach, in that touch, in that acceptance, we meet God.

We meet the God of compassion that Jesus is talking about, the One who stops when we are in the ditch and binds us up and anoints us with wine and oil and carries us on. We can see with the eyes of love, not the eyes of fear because we know that is the way God sees us.

AMEN.