by The Rev. Daniel MacDonald
All Saints Parish, Brookline, MA
July 11, 2010
Amos 7:7-17
Psalm 82
Colossians 1:1-14
Luke 10:25-37
One of my earliest memories of Sunday School here at All Saints - I was eleven or twelve - involved a puppet show of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. There was a small, portable stage with two green curtain; adults or older kids used puppets to act out the parable for a large crowd of younger children, myself included.
As I reflect on it now, the Good Samaritan is a perfect story for Sunday School because children can see where they should locate themselves in the parable. To the question, who is my neighbor? I think most children know immediately that the injured man is our neighbor; that Jesus wants us to be like the Samaritan, and help those in need, because they are our neighbors; that ignoring those in need, like the priest and Levite choose to do, is the wrong choice.
And this is all true; like children hearing the parable, we can commit to following the way of the Samaritan. But as an adult, I find that there is more substance to the parable than simply trying to follow the way of the Samaritan.
Let's return to the puppet show, because the dynamics of the stage illustrate an important point. Someone's puppet played the Samaritan; but someone else's puppet played the Levite; and yet another child's puppet played the man who had been robbed. Like the different children playing different roles in the parable, so too we in our lives, from time to time, play each of the various characters. Sometimes we act as the compassionate Samaritan; sometime we act as indifferent Priest.
And sometime, if not all the time, are we not also playing the beaten man, the one who is helpless on the side of the road??? The condition of the man’s helplessness is significant because we too face helplessness and unjust suffering by the very fact of our existence. In regard to one particular challenge or personal struggle, or a whole host of them, we can acknowledge ourselves to be the ones lying helpless on the side of that road to Jericho of which Jesus speaks.
But in addition to the difficulty of helplessness, we also fail to have compassion by denying the existence of injustice, by apathy in the face of evil, by misleading others by our silence. Yes, we put on the puppet of indifference, too.
So to summarize: we try to be the Samaritan, but sometimes we end up as the Levite and Priest, and when we acknowledge our daily struggles, we know ourselves to be the helpless man.
And if we do in fact play the helpless man, are we, like the man in the parable, permitted to hope for a Samaritan to come along? I believe we are permitted to hope for this Savior, because our help has, in fact, already come. Just as the Samaritan chooses mercy and saves the beaten man, so too God has chosen mercy for us.
And we celebrate today the extension of that mercy in sacramental form. This sacrament is Baptism; and it is in Baptism that God takes us from the side of the road, injured and helpless, and makes us whole again by water and the Sprit, bringing us into an indissoluble relationship with God, by sealing us in a community where we will work to heal one another, precisely because God has healed us first.
The parable of the Good Samaritan, therefore, is a strikingly clear illumination of what it means to enter into the community of the baptized. The Good Samaritan throws Baptism in such sharp relief because the mercy that the Samaritan extends to the injured man corresponds to the mercy God extends to us in the sacrament of Baptism.
God, like the Samaritan, has refused to insist that we remain helpless, and God has refused to condemn us to a life of indifference to those who suffer. God has definitively refuted both our helplessness and the puppet of indifference, and offered us a better way.
This better way is the way of Jesus, the way of God's mercy. Because God, in God's mercy, has chosen to establish a community who gathers in the name of God's own beloved, Jesus Christ, a community that has been forgiven of its silence, and healed of its wounds, a community of new life, and abiding hope, and living spirit.
This community is the church, and the sacrament of baptism makes and shapes Christian community. Whatever expressions of Christianity we value and appreciate - Sunday school, children's choir, prison outreach ministries, the altar and flower guilds, mission trips, social hour, the beauty of the liturgy - these are not accidental or incidental flowerings of human ingenuity, but they are wholly intrinsic to the community God calls us to be through the gift of Baptism.
So today, as we celebrate a Baptism, let us remember that as much as we try to be the compassionate Samaritan, it is God who acts as a merciful Samaritan first. God has seen us on the side of the road. God has chosen not to look away or pretend there in no pain. God has chosen to act and to heal, and it is God who has brought us to a place we could not bring ourselves.
God has acted in God's mercy to take us from the side of the road, and in every baptism, God extends that mercy, that relationship, that community, to another man, another woman, another child.