Amos: 7:7.8; Luke 10: 29-35

The truth about helping

Jesus tells the well known story of the Good Samaritan in response to the question from a lawyer:” who is my neighbor?” Today we ask a related question and that is:”whom and how should we help?” Jesus answered the lawyer-and us twenty-first century Christians-with a story of a man who was attacked and nearly killed by bandits. A priest and a Levite each passed by the man without stopping. But a third man, a Samaritan, was “moved with pity” (which is a visceral word in Greek) and stopped, bound up the man’s wounds and took him to an inn.  Which one of these three men was a neighbor to that bleeding man, Jesus asked.  Now this passage has often been interpreted as pointing to the arrogance of the Jewish priestly class.  People were saying that the priestly class was hypocritical and self-serving and that it did not care about the suffering of people.  They didn’t see that there was also the dimension of the purity laws. The passers by might be dealing with a dead body which was impure.  Benjamin Dueholm (the Christian Century) has an interesting take on this tried and true story of the Good Samaritan.  He says the Priest and the Levite were just following their instinct.  A potentially dead man was by the side of the road and the killer might be nearby.  He’s got a point.  Just think of how different our reaction would be between seeing a person wounded on the side of the road in the fanciest neighborhood in town and one in Del Paso Heights? Or compare seeing a person on the road in Marin County and seeing one in South Oakland. It’s very different. Self-preservation is a big part of who we are and we take it into account when we help others.  Throughout human history we have been taught that we must take care of our own, that we must help those who are most likely to return the favor.  So what the Samaritan did was on the one hand something natural : helping another, but at the same time against the rule: helping a stranger.  Dueholm says that the Samaritan “violated the norms of genetic selfishness.”  Not only that: he spent his own money. Margaret Thatcher once said about the Good Samaritan:”No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’s only had good intentions; he had money as well.” It’s a bit cynical but there might be some truth to it.  Martin Luther King thought about it differently:” The first question which the priest and Levite asked was:” If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But…the Good Samaritan reversed the question:”If I do not stop and help this man, what will happen to him?”  So, friends, this passage raises a question:”Why do I help my neighbor” which leads to another question: “which neighbor do I help?” Jesus challenges us –in the words of Dueholm- to think about whether the powerful bond of love and obligation might also tie us across ethnic lines, across family lines, and across lines of safety?”

This leads us to think of mission also.  It raises the question: “ Who do we help with our mission and where do we help?” In our day and age, helping our neighbor is often a drive-by experience.  There may also be such a thing as fly by mission. There are so many mission trips these days. Let me be clear these experiences are extremely valuable for those who are going on them. They learn to understand the world.  A growing body of research, however, suggests that these temporary missionaries may actually be doing more harm than good.  Some critics call them “religious tourism.:  and their participants “vacationaries.”  Which may not be all that different from vacationers who go on these popular tours now of poor neighborhoods in developing countries and some call that “poorism.”  It is easier to think this way when you hear some of the stories: a wall built on a children’s soccer field at an orphanage in Brazil that had to be torn down after the visitor’s left. , a church in Mexico painted six times by six different groups over the course of a summer.  I read (homiletics) that in the Bahamas, a nice vacation spot, receives 1 short term missionary for every 15 residents annually.  A Princeton university study revealed that in 2005, 1.6 million Americans participated in mission trips, with an average length being 8 days. Estimates of the money spent each year reach upwards of 2.4 billion each year.  But much of the money can go to waste. A 2006 study in Honduras found that short-term missions spent an average of $30,000 to construct one home to paint a church or build a house that takes $2,000 to construct.

Friend, all of this makes us think about whom we help, where we help, how we help and especially why we help.  We can even think about who we give a dollar to on the street and who we walk by? Is it the pitiful, is it the pleasant, is it the ornery and the persistent? The list goes on. The Good Samaritan breaks all this open.  He reaches out against traditional instinct, takes a risk, gives his time and his own money.   When Amos spoke about the plumb line chapter 7, he was talking about the truth about justice and how to know what’s straight and what is it; may we be driven to find the truth about helping. Friends, let’s reflect on our helping and let it be helping that truly matters. May God turn us into Good Samaritans. .