In some preacher's circles, the story of The Good Samaritan is known as the wet noodle of all parables with which Christians flagellate themselves into acts of mercy. Jesus takes the Deuteronomic love-law, confirms its goodness, and adds an unexpected twist. We must not only love God and our neighbors as ourselves- we must also love our enemies. Jesus' example of the Good Samaritan was scandalous in his lifetime for the degree of hatred and bitterness between Jews and Samaritans made the tension between Akinolians and progressive Episcopalians look like tame parking-lot gossip. And by using the Samaritan as the protagonist, Jesus ups the ante. Not only should the Samaritans be recipients of our mercy and charity, but they too can minister to us! Jesus has us wrestling with the bipolar camps of salvation...and a part of me thinks he likes it!

There are some of us who believe that God's unconditional love and mercy will take up all the slack for every immoral thought, deed, things done and left undone in our lives vs. those who wear the thorny stripes of works-righteousness down our backs of which we are only too proud to show one another. And someplace within the mystery of the Anglican both/and resides the truth, for the despised Samaritan has come to show us that about 60% of the ones who have published 50 books on how to pray have a prayer-life of straw. Study after study has been conducted and repeated such as the following one at Princeton Seminary where a couple of fiendish Princeton sociologists exposed the hypocrisy of the soon-to-be professionally religious.

Two sociology professors put a group of seminary students in a room, read them the Good Samaritan parable, then asked them to go one at a time, to a building next door, where half would give extemporaneous sermonettes on the parable and the other half would talk about ministry as a vocation. An actor was posed outside along the route to the other building-faking near-death-distress. The test was to see how many of these seminarians with heads full of this parable of compassion, would actually stop. Only 40 percent did.

We all harbor a Samaritan in our secret-lives, the one you go around the world and back to avoid-but Jesus commands us to include the one we abhor in our circle of love & forgiveness.
On the current U.S. world-stage, popular contestants for the Samaritan-role could be Cheney-Bush or Al Qaeda or perhaps the almost forgotten poster child scapegoat of the Defense Department, the female soldier who was left holding the end of the leash in the Abu Graib humiliation. And as hard it may be for some of us to grant spiritual immunity to any of these and others in the public spot-light of humiliation and disdain, the harder spiritual challenge of compassion for each of us is to bring to mind the one who had the most potential to hurt us and did! For in this story, Jesus would have each of us taking a turn lying on the ground, incapacitated by violence or illness...all the while knowing that THE one we least want to see, is going to stop and help us. And as much as you allow yourself to go there, let us now do so. Some of you will resist this exercise-maybe even 60%, I hope that most of you will not.