• Close your eyes and take several deep & slow breaths;
• You are lying alongside a walkway; aching with fever, no money- having been robbed and beaten...it's nearly morning and you've been there most of the night;
• Having spent the night in and out of consciousness, you know people have walked large circles around you, avoiding the stench of your despair;
• You thought you had used up the end of your voice asking for help and yet you muster up one more plea-a beg really...and someone stops, bends their knees to come close to your face, wipes the grime away from your forehead and with an audible gasp claims, "I did not recognize you";
• She calls for help; an ambulance arrives, loads you in, she sits inside and rides along;
•  You wake the next day...cleaned up, IV lines pulsing hope back into you. The room is clean and quiet and safe...and later when you are well enough to find your way home, the attending doctor stops in, tells you good-bye and that you were lucky to have been found and helped, just in time...and by the way, the non-insured charges have been taken care of and she hands you several hundred dollar bills, also left by your rescuer.

Luke is our physician gospel, the healer, the one passionate about wholeness and holiness with God in the middle of it all. Luke tells us again and again that when we encounter God, the best comes out in us...encountering God brings us to the wholeness of who we are, who we were created to be. Today, Luke is healing us with the letting go of fear, the emotion located in our gut and yet disguises our face with looks that kill and hearts that revel in revenge...for the fear/rejection we cling onto of our Samaritan is also fear of God...fear of being whole...fear of the accountability and responsibility of living like a whole and holy people.

The late Henri Nouwen wrote: "the final stage of the spiritual life is to so fully let go of all our fear of God that it becomes possible to become like him." As long as we keep God as a threatening and fearsome and trespassing on our personal politics kind of God, we will never encounter the living God who hovers close hungry for our embrace! God's love for us is limited by our fear of God's power and it makes us unrecognizable. As long as God remains distant, we realize that nothing we have yet learned about God has enabled us to let go of an authority beyond us who has power over us and would use it for good.