“Mixed Messages”

Luke 10:25-42

July 18, 2004

Saint Paul United Methodist Church

Rev. John Fleming

Three out of four Sundays. Or, if there happens to be five Sundays in a given month four out of five Sundays, I pick two scripture lessons for us to read during our worship services. Because I am a lectionary preacher, most of the time, I usually have four choices. The compilers of the lectionary lay it out nicely for us preachers. There is always an Old Testament choice, a Psalm to read, a letter (usually one of the apostle Paul’s) to consider, and a gospel lesson. The gospel for this year is Luke, which just so happens to be my favorite of the four. So, in an effort to make worship meaningful, I choose the passage that I want to base our sermon on and then look at the other three choices in hopes that it will somehow and in someway connect to the one that I have chosen. To be honest, sometimes it connects, and sometimes it does not. So that is how it is usually done.

Hardly ever do we read two lessons from the same gospel, back to back. But that is what I wanted us to do this morning. These lessons come on successive Sundays, but when I saw that our guest preacher from last week was not going to preach the first lesson, I had to decide what I wanted to do. Both of these stories, what we have come to call the Parable of the Good Samaritan and the story of what happened when Jesus visited in the home of Martha and Mary, in Bethany, are too good to pass up. In fact, they almost preach themselves. I love both of these stories. I noticed something in them. I discovered that they seem to be sending mixed messages. The parable says, among other things, “Get up and do something.” And the story about Mary and Martha says, among other things, “Sit down and stop doing so much.” So which is it. Which one are we supposed to do?

Those are mixed messages, in stories that are back to back in Luke’s Gospel. Mixed messages are not uncommon in our world. Consider your last visit to see your doctor. Perhaps you were running late. The office’s instructions were to arrive well before your appointed time. So you rushed to get there. When you arrived, you signed in and then lingered in the waiting room. If that has ever been your experience, this thought may have crossed you mind: “Hurry up and wait.” That is a mixed message. Parents, I am sure, never give their children mixed messages. My own dad once talked to me about the habit of smoking. He told me that I should never pick up cigarettes, that they were bad for me. I followed his advice. But then, shortly after giving me his perspective, he went outside and smoked a cigarette. So which is it? The world is full of mixed messages. Sometimes the Bible has mixed messages in it, too.

Luke, the gospel writer, as you may know, was a physician. He tells his readers, from the get go, that what he is after is to give an orderly account of the life of Jesus and the beginning of the church. So Luke is a doctor, but he is also an editor. He took the stories of Jesus’ life, and gathered them from several sources. Two of these sources were the gospels of Matthew and Mark. Most commentators believe that he had another source, known only to him. Experts call this the “L” source. We can conclude that the source was known only to him because in his gospel, we find stories and parables found no where else. Two of those stories are the parable of the Good Samaritan and what happened in Mary and Martha’s home in Bethany.

Seeing these stories placed back to back in this gospel made me wonder, “Why would Luke do that? What did he have in mind?” What he had in mind, I think, is the church, particularly the church of his day. He wrote his gospel for the people of his day who were desperately trying to follow the teachings of Jesus in their lives. What was Luke’s church like? Well, it is probably like the situation in any church, then and now. First of all, there are people who come to worship, week after week, and think that religion is a matter of following the rules and whose aim it is to stay out of trouble. And, of course, there is nothing wrong with that. But I think that Luke gives us the parable of the Good Samaritan for us rule followers to help us see that there are things beyond the rules. The parable begins with a lawyer, an expert in the rules, who comes to Jesus and asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” In response to that, Jesus asks a question of his own. It is this one, “What do you read in the law?” The expert responds, “Well, that’s easy. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, strength, and soul, and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus says, “That is right. Now go out and do that.” In response to that, the lawyer asked, “And who is my neighbor?” Luke tells us that the expert was wanting to justify himself, that he wanted to make sure that he was doing what he was supposed to be doing and loving the ones that he was supposed to love. His question sets up the parable. Don’t you just know that his question was like music to Jesus’ ears? Don’t you know that there was a twinkle in his eye and that he was thrilled with he heard the question? Luke does not tell us that Jesus says this, but I am sure that he uttered these words, “I am glad that you asked me that. I have been waiting for someone to ask me that. I have a great story to tell that says something about who our neighbors really are.”

To get the full revolutionary impact of this parable, you will need to understand that the lawyer knew good and well who his neighbors were, just like we know who our neighbors are. In the English language, the word neighbor means the person who is nigh, the person who is near us. We know what it means. The lawyer, too, knew what it meant. After all, he was the expert. He knew that neighbors were those who were near us geographically and genetically. That is to say, those who are related to us by family or clan or tribe or race or nation. That is who are neighbors are. And, according to the law, you have an obligation and a duty to take care of the people who are like you. A good and moral person takes care of their own.

Now listen to the parable. A man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. He was from Jerusalem and so we can assume that he was Jewish. You will need to remember that detail; it is important. The man left for dead in the ditch near Jericho is Jewish. He left the safety of Jerusalem with it’s green pastures and lush meadows for Jericho. Just outside Jericho, just before you entered the city, there were large rocks that bandits and robbers and thieves often hid behind to attack unsuspecting travelers. Our traveler was unsuspecting and was attacked near those rocks. He was beaten by thieves, thrown into a ditch, and left there to die. Shortly after the attack, a priest came that way followed shortly thereafter by a Levite. The priest works in the church, of course. When my dad worked in the church, as a music minister, he used to jokingly say that he was a professional Christian. That is, his profession was church work. The priest, you might say, was a professional Christian. The Levite, too, worked in the church in some ministerial capacity. Both are Jewish and religious which means that they, above other people, knew the law. They knew that they were supposed to love the Lord with all their heart, soul, strength, might, and their neighbors as themselves. Now you need to hear this, the point of this passage is not to beat up these two men. If you focus on the fact that they did not stop, then you have missed the point of the parable. They did not stop because if they did, they would not be able to do religious things later in the day. The point of the parable is not them. This parable is aimed at us who know what the right thing to do is. It is aimed at us who see our neighbor in the ditch, one of our own. When you see them, you stop and help. That is all that there is to it. That is just what you do. So the parable says that to be a Christian means that you have to do more than religious things. To be a Christian means loving your neighbor and helping people who need help.

Now it would be fine for most of us if the parable stopped there. For many people it does. That is a good enough lesson. Let us take up the offering and go home. The problem is that the parable does not stop there. Luke tells us that a Samaritan comes along. Oh my! In a passage a chapter or so back in this gospel, Jesus sets his face to go to Jerusalem. Just after that, he and his disciples came near a Samaritan village, but that village would not receive Jesus because he was bound and determined to go to Jerusalem. Jews and Samaritans hate one another. They want nothing to do with one another. A friend of the Jews was no friend of the Samaritans. And so along comes a Samaritan. Oh my! If you were a Jew living in the first century, you would have expected the Samaritan to pass by the Jew because he was no neighbor. You could expect the worst. It would not be out of the realm of possibility for a detail in this story to be that the Samaritan saw the Jewish man lying there, went down into the ditch, reached for his wallet, took all of his money, cursed him, and then finished him off with great satisfaction. But Jesus says that when the Samaritan saw the man, “...he had compassion, and went to him and bound his wounds.” Friends, that is amazing. It is not amazing that someone stopped to help someone else. That is common. What makes it amazing is the one who stopped to help. After all, what kind of a world is it when we have compassion for our enemies? What kind of a world is it when we make peace with those that we hate and then take care of them? Jesus says to the lawyer who is standing there, dumbfounded, mouth wide open, jaw on the ground, “Thanks for the question. I appreciate it. Now I have one for you. Which of these was the neighbor?” Did you see what Jesus just did? He redefined who the neighbor was. A neighbor is not just someone who lives near you. A neighbor is not just someone who looks like you, drives the same kind of car you do. A neighbor, says Jesus is someone who does something. Are you a neighbor? A neighbor, says Jesus, is someone who does something out of compassion for someone in need, regardless of who they are. Go, says Jesus, and do likewise. That is about as clear as it can be. To be a Christian, this parable tells us, is to be up and doing the most radical kind of service in the world, not just to those that we know or those that we like, but those who are unlike us in every possible way. It is to do something good for those who do not like us and whose behavior is despicable to us. We are called to be their neighbors, to be compassionate to them. That is about as clear as any lesson can be.

But then comes the story of Mary and Martha and what happened when Jesus entered their home. I tell you, we are getting mixed messages here. To the lawyer who was very religious, extraordinarily moral, who went to church every time the doors were open, to him, Jesus said, “Get up, go out into the world and do something. Make a difference. And to Martha he says, “I think that you are trying to do too much. Sit down and relax.” So which is it? What is a preacher supposed to do with these back to back lessons that seem to contradict each other? Do you see what I have to work with here? I do not write these lessons, I just preach them. So what am I supposed to say?

Why are these stories here, back to back? Maybe they are here because Luke’s church is like any church that I have pastored. There are those of us who come to worship to be encouraged and fed and whose calling it is to go out into the world to help people. Then there are those of us who are always doing something and can never sit still long enough to hear what we need for our lives. You know these people; they are the backbone of any church. They are a preacher’s dream. They are the ones who volunteer without being volunteered. They serve on committees and do the work of the church. And sometimes they are so busy that they do not have time to be religious. Sometimes they are so busy feeding others, that they neglect to feed themselves. Jesus said to Martha, “You are distracted.” What he meant was that she was in danger of missing important things.

I am back in the pulpit this morning after two weeks away from it and almost two weeks out of the office. Someone asked me Thursday evening what the best part of my vacation was. I thought for a minute and then said, “Arriving in Gulf Shores with a whole week of relaxation in front of me.” I did not sit at the feet of Jesus down there, but I took a break and relaxed. There was another question that someone asked me a few days before I left. It was this one, “You are leading worship every week. When do you worship?” The question hit me like a ton of bricks. I had not thought of that before. Moving from one thing to another in the order of worship sometimes keeps you from worshiping.

Here is what I think. I think that these stories are here to say to us that we need balance in our lives. It is an old debate. What are Christians supposed to do? How are we supposed to live? In our day, we talk about a personal encounter with Jesus. That means sitting at the feet of Jesus. Have you done that? Are you doing that? Or are you out there in the world, following the teachings of Jesus? Balance. That is what Luke is calling for and he does it by putting these stories back to back. In the gospel of John, it’s done differently. There, Jesus says, “As I have done for you, so you now do for one another.” That is the right balance. Sitting at the feet of Jesus and then going out and telling others about it. We come to worship to be fed and we leave to be ministers. This is a lesson that I’m learning again. I hope you will learn it, too. Let us pray.