Welcome, friends! Luke 10:25-37 contains the familiar story of the Good Samaritan. It’s a parable of mercy, relationship, trust, and meeting a pressing need. It’s a story of God’s love for humanity. Click the videos below and let’s explore what it means to stop and help….
Pastor Tim Ehrhardt, Luke 10:25-37
The Maranatha Singers
God the Father, Creator of heaven and earth, Have mercy upon us.
God the Son, Redeemer of the world, Have mercy upon us.
God the Holy Spirit, Sanctifier of the faithful, Have mercy upon us.
Blessed Holy Trinity, the God whom we serve, Have mercy upon us, and grant us your peace. Amen.
At daybreak, Jesus went out to a solitary place. The people were looking for him and when they came to where he was, they tried to keep him from leaving them. But he said, “I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that is why I was sent.” And he kept on preaching in the synagogues of Judea. (New International Version)
A domesticated Jesus is nothing more than a fictional character, part of the panoply of old classic literature, and just another person in the Christian writings of the New Testament.
Many so called Christians want to control Jesus, to have him serve their purposes. Like some magical entertainer, they want to hold onto him, keep him around, trotting him out occasionally to impress friends and family.
Such persons have not yet come to terms with the spiritual reality that Jesus belongs to others, to everyone, not just me or people I like.
Whenever we grab hold of Jesus to keep him from going to others, we play the role of Mary Magdalene, who did not recognize her Lord when he was standing in front of her face. Then, when realizing who he was, did not want Jesus going anywhere. Yet, the Lord responded:
“Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” (John 20:17, NRSV)
Mosaic of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, Washington National Cathedral
Jesus did more than proclaim good news; he was the good news itself, embodied, for the life of the world – and not only for the life of a particular race or ethnicity or gender, or even religion. As the Lord of Life, there is enough Jesus for everyone.
Maybe the true mark of a Christian is not having bumper sticker messages or a bobblehead Christ or an impressive Bible on the living room coffee table or erudite theological ideas. Maybe its in telling others about Jesus from our own mouth, from a heart that overflows with the gospel of grace.
We must let God be God. Yes, there is a very important place for us to ask, seek, and knock on the door of heaven. And there is also an equal necessity for solitude, silence, and patience, in waiting for the Lord to say, “Come here to me.”
The wisdom to know when to practice solitude, and when to actively seek, arises by purposely engaging in both. We must have an action/reflection model in which we seek to do the will of God, then step back and reflect upon the experience and learn from it. And, at the same time, we are to practice a contemplation/response model that communes in solitude with God, then responds with active involvement of just and merciful acts toward others.
Our Gospel lesson today highlights the need for solitude as a Christian spiritual practice because our Lord practiced it. The solitude, however, is not to be unending. At some point, we must descend from the mountain peak and enter the valley, just as we ascended it from the activity below.
Good news needs proclamation. And for that to happen, it must be proclaimed from both the top of the mountain, as well as the lowest valley. The gospel cannot be chained so that it is tethered for only my group of cronies. No, Jesus is for all, and so, good news is meant to spread to every corner of the earth.
Perhaps we need to sit still long enough, without allowing our inner anxiety to rule the day, to let Jesus call to us and invite us to come. Then, maybe we will be able to hear the gracious words of the Lord:
“Come to me, all you who are struggling hard and carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest. Put on my yoke and learn from me. I’m gentle and humble. And you will find rest for yourselves. My yoke is easy to bear, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30, CEB)
Come Unto Me by Wayne Pascall
There’s no need to break down doors, trying to squeeze ourselves into the kingdom of God. We need only respond to the gracious invitation of Jesus and let him invite others. Truly receiving amazing grace changes us, and we then do not seek to keep Jesus from leaving.
“How amazing, amazing that the one who has help to bring is the one who says: Come here! What love! It is already loving, when one is able to help, to help the one who asks for help, but to offer the help oneself! And to offer it to all! Yes, and to the very ones who are unable to help in return! To offer it, no, to shout it out, as if the helper himself were the one who needed help, as if he who can and wants to help everyone were nevertheless in one respect himself a needy one, that he feels need, and thus needs to help, needs those who suffer in order to help them!”
Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity
Coming and going, silencing and proclaiming, holding and letting go. We allow Jesus to do it all. And we simply follow in his footsteps.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Son of Humanity, your presence here on earth never becomes a thing of the past – thus never becoming distant. Our faith and experience of you is very present and very much real in the here and now.
Might all people see you in your true form and in the way you walked this earth – not in an empty or meaningless way of mere thoughts or distortions. May all people see you as you are, a lowly man, yet the Savior and Redeemer of humanity – who out of love came to earth to seek the lost, to suffer and die, to call the straying soul, and to absorb the opposition of others without raising a hand in defense.
Would that we might see you in this way, and not be offended at you and your gracious gathering of all kinds of people into your glorious kingdom. Amen.
As Jesus approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.” (New International Version)
There are Christians who believe in withdrawing as much from the world as possible, this side of heaven. There are yet others who believe in accommodating to the world, its structures and society. And there are yet others who believe the world and the church are simply two distinct realms which Christians move back and forth within, like doffing one hat and donning another.
For the moment, let’s just leave all that aside. Instead, observe the pathos of Jesus. Christ came to Jerusalem, a city with deep roots in both religion and the world. He stopped and gazed affectionately at the ancient place with a heart full of longing for what she could be, as well as a heart profoundly sad for what she presently is.
And as Jesus stood and looked at the city in all of its religious piety, as well as its worldly pungencies, he wept.
This was not a quiet shedding of a tear. No, the word “wept” means that Jesus openly cried aloud over the city. This is the kind of crying which happens when a person is in the throes of grief and lament. Jesus was expressing great emotional heaves of loud weeping.
The reason Jesus was lamenting with so much feeling was that the city did not recognize they had a gracious visit from God. The Lord looked at the city and saw all the future disaster which was coming. He knew it could be different, and he was completely undone by the city’s inability to see God, right in front of their own face.
That Jesus wept over a city is more than a deep emotional response; it is also a profound theological statement of subversion against the present order of things. Tears and crying are ways of pronouncing that the status quo of human oppression and indifference is not okay – that there is an alternative path, The Way, which leads to peace and life.
Contrary to many contemporary forms of Christian spirituality, theology and tears are not antithetical nor foreign to one another. They are related, and when practiced well, they inform each other in a full-orbed Christianity that is both holistic and holy. We can no more separate the two anymore than we can divide the humanity and divinity of Christ into parts, as if Jesus were some weird schizophrenic God-Man.
A dispassionate follower of Jesus is really no follower, at all.
Now, let’s return to our view of the world and our involvement in it. Taking some cues from our Lord Jesus, the first and foremost posture we are to take toward the worldly city is not separation, accommodation, or dual citizenship – it is, rather, to weep, to grieve and lament, to sit with and feel the immense sadness of a society askew and awry of God.
The longing Jesus had in his heart was to see the city of Jerusalem annexed and incorporated into the kingdom of God. The way of peace, of shalom on this earth, is to bring all things and all the world under the benevolent reign of God. It’s as if there are Twin Cities, like Minneapolis and St. Paul, which exist side-by-side but have different municipal structures.
The kingdom of this world and the kingdom of God exist next to each other. Jesus wanted to bring the earthly kingdom into the peaceful and gracious realm of God’s kingdom. But the people would have nothing to do with it. Both the religious establishment and the secular authorities of the city wanted their own municipal conceptions of how things should go – and they both rejected the Christ who could bring everyone true harmony.
King Jesus is our rightful benevolent ruler. Yet, there are so many who do not, or will not, acknowledge that grace and mercy is among them if they would but only look and see.
Let us lament this world, which is chocked full of both religious and secular people who do not recognize the time of God’s visitation. May we journey with Jesus and follow him in his Passion for this world and all its inhabitants. May we sit at the feet of Jesus and imbibe his deep love for all who are estranged from God.
Blessed Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the holy Trinity whom I serve – the world and even sometimes the church is estranged from grace – they have not recognized your gracious coming and presence. I lament such a state of things, and ask you, blessed Spirit, to draw all people to the Savior, Jesus Christ, in whose name I pray. Amen.
We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. However, as it is written:
“What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived”— the things God has prepared for those who love him—
these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.
The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, for,
“Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?”
But we have the mind of Christ. (New International Version)
Knowledge can be a tricky thing. There is so much to the topic of knowing that we have an entire branch of philosophy, epistemology, which theorizes on how we know ourselves and our world.
The Enlightenment era (18th-century) focused on empirical data, that is, what can be known becomes knowable through the verification of our senses and a scientific process of systematic observation, measurement, and experimentation. In other words, knowledge has to do with the natural, not supernatural, because knowing involves our five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch.
The Enlightenment project, I believe, severely truncated our personhood. It left us as mere brains on a stick – valuing dispassionate empiricism to the point of devaluing the heart and the gut. For, when all is said and done, there is an immaterial way of knowing, a kind of sixth sense, which can discern truth and reality in a manner that sheer natural evidence cannot.
If we are unaware of this other sense, the spirit, then there is an entire dimension of ourselves and our world that we are unable to discern and know. Grounding our ideas and theories in evidence-based practices is quite important. We need rigorous processes of going beyond opinions and hypotheses to actual tangible evidence. Our world has benefited immensely from the scientific process. And yet, all this is insufficient.
Without a focus on the spiritual, we limit our knowledge and our perceptions of others and the world. And if we ignore our internal epistemic assumptions which are coming from other places than our brain, we can talk and act without knowing why we say and do some things. We can be unsure why we react in particular ways or cannot quite make sense of why we keep overeating or drinking too much or avoiding certain people and places.
In many ways, a major task our earthly life is to keep knowing ourselves better and better. There is a vast inner world that needs exploration, just as much as we need to explore the vastness of our earth and the immense space of the universe.
In science fiction, Star Trek has a way of knowing the seemingly unknowable within us. Vulcans (ironically the most empirical and dispassionate beings in the universe) have a unique ability to perform a “mind meld” which is a technique for the psychic fusion of two minds, permitting unrestricted communication or deep understanding. It is a way of accessing and sharing thoughts and feelings which are obscured or hidden. It is an epistemology that, in actuality, isn’t far from reality.
Nothing is as wonderful as knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. I have given up everything else and count it all as garbage. All I want is Christ and to know that I belong to him. I could not make myself acceptable to God by obeying the Law of Moses. God accepted me simply because of my faith in Christ. All I want is to know Christ and the power that raised him to life. I want to suffer and die as he did, so that somehow I also may be raised to life.
Philippians 3:8-11, CEV
That’s because the people of God, believers and followers of Jesus, have been given the Spirit of God. An unusual, unscientific, and mystical union has taken place in which God’s Spirit joins with our spirit and opens a whole new world to us.
There are some things which can only be known, understood, and verified by the spiritual. Incredibly, Christians are given the very mind of Christ. We enjoy an amazing melding, enabling us to become the people we were always meant to be – forgiving, loving, encouraging people who live and love just like Christ – who is in both our hearts and our heads. This supernatural epistemic way of knowing allows us to see beyond the five senses to a multiverse of senses within ourselves and others.
We can only know what God has freely given us if we have God’s Spirit within us and the mind of Jesus Christ testifying what is good, just, and true. This is a knowing beyond language and explanation. It is knowledge requiring a mind meld between the individual and Christ.
Rather than crucifying and putting to death things (and, God forbid, people) we don’t understand, there is a better way. Explore a different way of knowing. Discover the spirit within. Seek to understand the invisible God. Experience a fuller and richer way of life in Jesus Christ through the enlightening of the Holy Spirit.
Rev. Tim Ehrhardt 